2/7/2012

Proud to present FOREVER MAN coming July 2, 2012.

My first book is being released July 2, 2012 and I am crazy busy preparing! (and teaching all day...)


Excerpt:

As I reached the woman she looked up at me with stark pleading in her eyes. “I didn’t see him! Please, I need help!”

Crouching down beside them, I carefully laid my hands on the whimpering dog. It looked like a husky, probably a sled dog. He or she was still breathing, but it was labored and loud. I could also see blood on its soft white fur.  My heart instantly melted and reached out to the poor creature with its pain-filled, whisky-brown eyes that seemed to beg me to do something. Despite the gut-wrenching plea, I felt helpless, sheer happenstance had brought this poor animal to this end and I had no power to save it from its fate.

Hesitantly, I reached my hands out and laid them on the poor dog’s head and its eyes seemed to tell me that it knew its fate. Tears flowed and the image of the dog blurred. I felt its pain as my own as I closed my eyes in sheer anguish.

Please, I prayed, as tears dripped on its blood smeared fur, let this beautiful creature be okay. Suddenly, something came alive inside me like a dam bursting its banks, and a great tidal wave of energy flowed through me from my very core. It was so strong it made me shake and my legs, cramping in the crouch, almost gave way.

A surge of pure power seemed to drive through my hands into the dog as I concentrated my thoughts on it and then all I could see and feel was hot, white light surrounding me for a few brief incredibly thrilling seconds. The light blinded me, its power as strong as the noonday sun. I was electrified with a sense of pure aliveness. Like I was at the pinnacle of my strength and I could arise up and fill the world with goodness and healing. Then, just as suddenly, the floodgates in my mind closed and the white hot energy retreated back into my hands that began to shake violently with the excess energy.

The sensation left as abruptly as it had come and I fell back exhausted from the effort. The dog whimpered, shook itself and sat up. It looked at the two of us as if nothing had happened, its brown eyes shining and its tail wagging as if it didn’t even remember the last few minutes of its life.

The woman looked at me with such wonder that her eyes were huge in her round face. “How could this be? One minute I thought it was dying, then you came along and now it’s up and fine? It doesn’t make any sense.” The woman shook her head, unwilling to believe her own eyes.

I knew exactly what she meant. Under the sense of complete exhaustion I was now aware of was the feeling that the world had slid sideways and then realigned itself in a new configuration.

Standing up, I felt immediately light-headed and woozy and stumbled forward from severe vertigo, catching myself from falling just in time.

“I don’t know—I guess it wasn’t—as hurt as you thought—it must have just been stunned.” I tried to put a sensible spin on recent events, my tongue feeling wooden and clumsy in my mouth. My slurred words made me sound drunk or slow I realized from a muddled distance, my voice echoing in my head.

“But didn’t you see the bright light just before the dog got up?” The woman was not to be deterred from her new sense of wonder.

I knew I had to get away, but an overwhelming sense of fatigue was slowing down my reaction time and was it was like being forced to move in deep, heavy water.

“Who are you?” The woman asked, her tone blunted by suspicion now

*Please check out this new release from Champagne Books!www.ChampagneBooks.com

Communiviewer

PLANET stands at >18,000 words this morning.

My newest invention (#15 to be exact) is the communiviewer. In place of the old-fashioned cell phone, it allows people to see a 3-D image of the sender on their peripheral vision. No Skype feed necessary!

Of course, because only the people connected by the device can see and talk to each other, it will look rather odd to others to see you speaking and gesturing as if to yourself!

Thinking that when they get to New Earth it is already inhabited by a rudimentary society.

Joshua was racking his brain for information he was certain was stored in his memory bank about the journey to the exoplanet that was be their new home. Just over twenty light years away, they would be there in twenty point five years traveling at the speed of light. New Earth, first discovered in the twenty-first century, had twice the gravity of Earth and with its similar temperatures and large reserves of water was ideal. He thought it was a leap of faith to expect this planet in the “Goldilocks Zone” to be free of extraterrestrial life, but he had been assured by scientists that it had been vacant before the probes had “seeded”. Though how they could be so certain, was a little above his pay-grade. 

Something else niggled at him, something one of the scientists had been saying about hoping that if the planet was inhabited, than the seeding process would be necessarily be reductionist in the result. Did this mean that there could be prior inhabitants on New Earth?

Runatrons

Sliding his feet into the silver toned one-size-fits-all magnetic Runatrons that rode just above the ground’s surface, much like a hovercraft but more flexible and easier to maneuver as they felt just like an extension of your own feet, Joshua dutifully followed George’s example. He didn’t have much use for the Runatrons in the city though they were available on just about every street corner, mainly using his Flash-8 Rover to get around, but he knew how to use them properly so that he didn’t fall face first on the ground and look like an idiot in front of Serena Joy’s father.

Leaving Normal

With the Titan fast approaching, down to 27 days till E-Day or Exodus with 15,000 words written, people’s true natures are being unleashed. There will not be time for the United World Government to build enough Space Arks to house the World’s population of just over one billion. (I know, we are well down from a high of seven billion in our century, but the Ebola virus outbreak created by terrorists decimated the population many generations ago, and like Japan who had the “one child policy” to prevent future problems, so has the government adopted a similar program.)

Human Factors and Guardian Angels?

What if our cyber anatomically-correct replica, Serena Joy (the heroine of PLANET), who doesn’t know she is one and will not be included in the plans for Exodus, has a voice in her head that she thinks is her Guardian Angel, but is really the voice of her creator? Now that opens up a new avenue for this writer…

*Further to the Human Factor:

If you only had a few weeks till you had to leave our planet forever, what would you chose to do? Would you want to keep things as unchanged as possible for your family and children, or would you want to live each day as if it were your last? So hard to project when it’s not really happening to you, eh!

I think this will depend so much on our inborn personality and capacity for coping. Some people will panic, some will become stoic and wiser, others altruistic in their approach. Can you say in your heart of hearts how you would be? I’d love to hear from you.

Replicator-animators and Energy

Time to consider who goes and who will be left behind for the mass exodus as the comet Titan continues its unvarying path to World destruction.

Cyber anatomically-correct replicas had made their way into the marketplace for the more mundane and dangerous jobs. They will not be included in the Exodus due to space constraints. This also falls under ethical issues. The World Government is busy passing legislation that will exclude not only this group but also anyone not deemed loyal to them. It’s easy now with all the medical advances, this knowing who will be loyal and who won’t be to all the new laws enacted.

Been thinking a lot about energy needed to power all the innovations on Earth. A force field powered by solar power seems feasible for controlling weather patterns, one of the main-stays of a civilization reaching an improved status, but need to consider plausible suggestions for energy hogging  inventions like powered Space Arks…

The human factor: Wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, teenagers and babies. The coming complete disruption to their lives with affect the generations differently, as all huge events do. Though this event has no real president on Earth, the threat of annihilation has always played to the human experience. Think about how you would handle it?!