Category: Timelines

The Kindle e-book is available now, both for purchase and KU.

I am pondering a paperback release. I think the book is too large for KDP POD. But we’ll see; though I doubt it would be ready in time for LibertyCon, in any case.  (It looks like it would be over 600 pages, after I did some fiddling last night.)

The e-book is $4.99 (sorry; it’s half again the length of the longest novel I’ve written previously) or read for free on Kindle Unlimited.

She is a character in a “related novel” in the Timelines Universe.  If you’re following me on MeWe you’ve seen some of this…but, in the meantime, “shall we dance?”

I did not land here intending to be a warrior, but a warrior I so soon became . . .

One moment, Dr. Yukiko Yamaguchi was in her high-tech singularity research lab in California, busily adjusting an electronically-leaky fitting playing hell with her instrument readings.

The next moment, she was falling through space, and landing hard in a wilderness area she would quickly discover was her family’s ancient stomping grounds in Japan – but with an apocalyptic twist.

A hundred years later, there would be legends of a great yōkai, a demon, whom some called a kamaitachi – a sort-of whirlwind, weasel-like creature with blades for claws, which catches up unwary humans and slices their skin.  But this kamaitachi is no ordinary yōkai – rather, she is

The Cross-Time Kamaitachi

Still work to be done on this figure, but I like how it’s going.

I’ve published a couple of updates to The Lion in Paradise — mostly they were typos or MLIs (Momentary Lapses of Intelligence) and don’t really affect the story per se.  Calling Delaney a Major when she was a Colonel at that point was probably inexcusable, though.  And I know it’s 5.56 NATO, my fingers just didn’t type that; they typed .556 NATO.  The latter, if it were real, would probably be a much better calibre, anyway.  But it’s not real, so oh well.

And if you knew how much time I spent proofreading the damn thing and still missed those errors, well…it just is what it is.  We’re trying to move, there’s an HR crisis at work, and I’m just.  Fucking.  Tired.

So anyway…how’s life in the clean world?

Another BTW, and it’s a bit of a spoiler, so you’ll have to highlight it to read it:  If you read the first half, you know Ariela has an adopted daughter in addition to the two of her own.  If you’ve read the second half, you may be scratching your head at the adopted daughter’s absence.  There is a reason for that, and it’s as simple as the adopted daughter is on al-Saḥra’ pulling duty with the SFM at that time. Don’t worry, though; she shows up again in the Epilogue.

And that’s all I have at the moment.  Book’s live, go buy it or read it on KU.  Thanks 🙂

Actually it was released last night, per my previous post, but there were a couple of extremely minor typos and I refreshed the manuscript this morning.

All Col. Dr. Ariela Rivers Wolff, M.D., Ph.D., USSFM – the Lion of God – wanted was a little piece of paradise to call her own.

Being stuck on a desert world – even if she was the CO of the premiere battalion of the 1st U.S. Space Force Marines that was based there – was not getting her any beach time. Mostly because, without an ocean, there’s really no beach at all.

But she’s got a fix for that problem.

Now, if only the academics studying the problem of terraforming the exile world of al-Saḥra’ would get out of her way . . .

. . . and if only the religious fanatics who want their planet left as a desert, despite all the water from the planet’s former oceans being accessible only a few miles down, will leave the terraforming project alone long enough to see the good it will bring them . . .

. . . then, the Lion would truly be in Paradise.

But even in paradise, black clouds – and black ships – can herald danger . . .

The planet Sanddoom (er, sorry, its inhabitants insist on the name al-Saḥra’, these days) will figure pretty largely in the first half of The Lion in Paradise, so I thought I might provide a teaser map.  (Click to enlarge.)

The map was generated with the planet generator found here.  “Sea level” (if a completely dry desert planet can be said to have a “sea level”) is located at the black outlines.  The lighter the color, the greater the elevation.

A couple of notes about the place names:  Kanz al-Sultan (كنز السلطان, “The Sultan’s Treasure”) is the location of the great mine which has already been described in The Lion and The Lizard.

The city al-Madinat al-Jadida (المدينة الجديدة, “The New City”) is the name finally tagged to the Nameless City which was the original dumping ground, er, relocation target, er, place which was built rather rapidly for all the forced migrants back in the 2030’s and was never given a formal name.  When the USMC intervened on Sanddoom (sorry, al-Saḥra’) in 2047 (as described in The Lion and The Lizard), they found the ruling Islamic Council had refused to name the city because they had never accepted being exiled in the first place.  So the Marines, being Marines, simply called it, “The Nameless City.”  Of course this was taken up by Space Force and the Space Force Marines, as well as by the new Governor they had imposed on the planet, and was used incessantly and officially until the Islamic Council finally broke down and gave the city a name — which was meant to evoke the city of Medina back home in Saudi Arabia, but since “Medina” just means “City”, calling the place “The New City” was just as much of an asshole move as calling the planet, “The Desert” (which is what al-Saḥra’ means).  For what it’s worth, the inhabitants mostly call the city “Jadida” for short.

“First Water” and “The Great Rift” will be explained in the book.

The book, by the way, is about half done.  Or half baked.  Whatever.

Oh.  Wanna see what the planet looks like, terraformed?  Of course, that’s much later.

This book is kicking my ass, but it’s going to be fun when it’s done.