FINISHED at 2318 13 MAY 2020
CLOCKING IN AT 95,599 WORDS
THE LION OF GOD IS DONE IN FIRST DRAFT.
Now the real work starts.
Released: Saving The Spring, A Short Fantasy
Only $0.99 to buy, or read with Kindle Unlimited.
Short fantasy: Saving the Spring
Still working on The Lion of God, but I wrote a short — ca. 10K words — fantasy story over the last week that I called “Saving the Spring”. I decided “what the hell” and am getting ready to put it up on Amazon as my first published work of fiction.
Jack Randall knew immediately something was off when he pulled up to the old roadhouse.
Little did he know that crossing paths that night with the establishment’s beautiful bartender and her handsomely-rugged boyfriend/cook would lead to him recalling his former life as a god – or fighting a rematch with the god who had stolen his memories.
Now, look…fantasy is not my métier, by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve never spent a lot of time reading it, and certainly never entertained any notion of writing it. I’m usually too hard-headed to enjoy stories about magic. There are exceptions, but not many.
This story was a dream I had about a week and a half ago. It was fairly detailed and stayed with me after I woke up, which is rare, so I decided I needed to write it down. I have no idea if it’s good, bad, or indifferent; but it will be up on Amazon (Kindle only) for 99 cents and available for Kindle Unlimited in a few days (and may be free for a couple of weeks, if I can figure out how to do that). I’m not quite ready to punch “publish”, but when I am, I will post a link here.
My wife, who when I told her it was not science-fiction, decided she would read it, said “I didn’t hate it” when she finished. Well, we don’t have the same taste in books (her taste normally runs either to romance “fluff” that she can read and fall asleep to, or mystery authors like James Patterson and so forth that keep her up all night). So I’ll take “I didn’t hate it” as a win.
EDITS: I changed this because I decided to put the story in KDP Select, which allows Kindle Unlimited users to download it “free” as a KU book. “Free” because a) you pay the monthly fee to Amazon and b) you can only have 10 KU books checked out at a time, so at some point you will probably return the book and get something else. KU is, obviously, not purchasing the book to keep it. If you do want to keep it, you pay $0.99 and it’s yours forever, notwithstanding Amazon unilaterally changing their terms, but that’s between readers and Amazon. As far as “free” goes, KDP Select does have the free promotion option, so at some point it may well be “on sale” for a few days for free.
Last night when I wrote the above edits, I was under the mistaken impression that KDP Select required you to be in the 70% royalty tier which bottoms out at the $2.99 price point. I really didn’t want to sell the thing for $2.99. It’s not long enough, and quite possibly not good enough. So I did some checking around with the KDP setup tools and discovered that you could do KDP Select with a book at less than $2.99. Since KDP Select includes all the goodies like KU and free promotions, I really didn’t want to miss out on that. So unless something else rears its ugly head and it turns out I am STILL wrong, the story will be 99 cents when I finally hit “publish”.
Sorry
I have taken all but the first installment of Time Will Tell private, as I intend to publish at some point in the relatively near future. If you are a close personal friend of mine (or one of Hoyt’s Huns, or both) I will be happy to give you access.
The Lion of God will have an edited version of Time Will Tell as its prologue
So Time Will Tell will not be released separately…and will not read exactly like what’s on this website.
That being said, I have a cover. You may have noticed the revised main page header. Alrighty then.
Not bad for a guy who’d never touched anything like DAZ before about six months ago. I’m sure I have at least one friend who would snort and say, “LET ME FIX THAT FOR YOU. PLEASE.” 🙂
So enough playing with the website, I need to get back to writing.
(Minor tweakage to the cover image on 2019/11/14.)
[Revised significantly, 5/5/2020, as was the main page image. This is closer to what I want, but obviously still needs work. And my friend still hasn’t touched it yet.]
The next story is called The Lion of God
and it will be serialized here at some point (probably when it’s done, it’s only 8700 words at this point. But I posted a couple of snippets on Facebook yesterday and today so it’s only proper that I post them here, too, in case anyone is actually looking at this site.
So here we go.
Snippet #1:
“You talk about the time stream as if it’s alive,” objected Ariela.
Wolff chuckled. “Oh, that’s because we’re pretty sure it is,” he said. Von Barronov nodded agreement, and Wolff continued, “It’s not sentient, it doesn’t think – or at least, we don’t think it does. But it has certain properties that make us think of it as a living entity. If you poke it hard enough, well, poke it in a metaphysical sense, I suppose, it certainly reacts. It has a sense of self-preservation that is pretty well developed, again, so far as we can tell. And that’s what seems to kick in when we try to approach a significant nexus, like the Kennedy assassination, or 9/11, or the Long Beach nuke and the subsequent Transfenestration of Qom, and so forth.”
“Transfenestration?” Ariela looked puzzled.
“The insurgents didn’t bother to open the windows, first.”
“Ah.”
Snippet #2:
“We’re going on a reconnaisance mission,” explained von Barronov. “Buford wants us to sneak up on one of those ships, board it, and see what’s what.”
“And he’s lending us five Marines to do most of the seeing and whating,” added Wolff.
“Armed Marines, one assumes.”
“Yep.”
“Hunky armed Marines?”
“Honey, they eat crayons.”
“So?” asked Ariela. “I ate paste when I was a kid.”
Hang in there. I’m slow.
Snippets from “The Lion of God” are copyright © 2019 by Nathan Brindle. All Rights Reserved. Don’t fuck with my copyright.
Edit, 5/5/2020: I won’t be serializing The Lion of God as it’s turned into a 75,000 word novel, and will be on Amazon if I ever manage to finish it.
Snippet
I don’t know where I’m going with this, but:
[S]ome years after he did convince Sarah to marry me, a giant furball of an intertemporal war started, as a far-future band of renegades posing as a Time Patrol came back to steal my – his – oh hell, OUR time machine, because it had a significant feature theirs lacked – namely, his version was actually a hyperdrive, and theirs wasn’t. Neither was their machine capable of traveling “sidetime” – it was strictly an uptime/downtime device.
Which is why they came to our time looking for him, and smashed hell out of things in our time-line instead of his in the process. Luckily, our daughter figured out how to slip between timelines, found him, and to make a long story short, he came with his time-line’s US Space Marines and several US Space Force dreadnoughts, kicked their asses back where they came from, and finally the whole crew went uptime to fuck them up so badly they’ll never be able to build a spacecraft again, let alone build another time machine. I’ve seen the combat videos. Make some popcorn, they’re riveting.
This is not the next story (“The Lion of God”), but is sort of related to it as you can probably already tell.
Hello world!
My name is Nathan Brindle. I used to be a spy. No, that’s not right. I work at a desk. Some of us have met. Some of us have only met virtually.
Some of us…well, don’t know what you’re doing here, but if you’re here because you heard I do some writing in my spare time, that’s cool. Anyway — Welcome to my author site. Since I’m still working on my first publishable story, yeah, there’s not much here. Eventually I will make a real page and there will be real content. This page is just a placeholder. (Yeah, I really do know how to code HTML. Thanks for asking. But this is WordPress now, so yeah, if you’re one of those clowns who wants to tell me how to build a better site, fuck off.)
And if you are a SEO jerk or someone trying to sell me web services, or how to make me #1 Google rank, also FUCK OFF! I probably know more about how to do that than you do.
The potted plants and the rest of the stuff on the front page are just there because they were the default. They have nothing to do with my fiction.
Or do they?