More books, please!

 

Sunrise over Puget Sound from my window.

Whenever I’m asked “What’s new?” I start the conversation with the single word, “Books!” There’s always something new in my world. Take today, for instance. I’m announcing the release of my newest Devon Layne novel, The Assassin.

The Assassin is a character-driven science fiction story. It’s part of Thinking Horndog’s Swarm Cycle universe and looks at what happens to the slave society started by the Confederacy to fight their enemy, the Sa’arm.

Niall Cho hates the Confederacy, which has become so pacifistic the races cannot even rise to defend themselves from annihilation. So, they recruit humans to do the deed for them, subtly making sure the humans cannot pose a threat to the Confederacy in the future.

A test is established that humans rush to take to determine if they are of suitable Capacity, Aptitude, and Potential (CAP) to join the Confederacy Armed Forces and immigrate to a new world. Each immigrant can take at least two people who did not score high enough to volunteer along with their dependents. The two “concubines” are, in reality, slaves to the sponsor and females are required to breed on a regular basis to establish the human race on a hundred different planets and provide the next generation of soldiers for the war.

Niall is caught in a pickup with his mother and two sisters and taken from Earth to the agricultural planet Tara where their sponsor works the family like slaves on his farm. Niall starts working on a list of people he wants to kill for destroying his family and taking him away from his father. Upon reaching his majority at age fourteen, Niall leaves the farm and joins the militia, an alternate way of becoming a free citizen. Then he plans to hunt the perpetrators of this crime against humanity and kill them all.

Along the way, Niall makes friends, rises through the militia ranks, establishes an alternate society of free slaves, gets his own concubines, and develops a friendship with his Tuull AI. But when, after fifty years, the opportunity comes for Niall to start getting rid of the villains, neither his target nor his methods are at all like he anticipated. Nor is the apparent reward!

Available at most eBook retailers. Check The Assassin homepage at http://www.devonlayne.com/assassin.html.

We’re all still attempting to recover from the pandemic. I’m due for my second installment of the vaccine in two weeks. But one of my writer groups posed the question “What did you accomplish in 2020?” My first reaction was “What a waste.” Then I started looking back at my files.

I discovered that I published eight Devon Layne books and three Nathan Everett books in 2020! Not bad for a year I considered a waste. Some of these were older books with a new market release, but still…

     See links for all Devon Layne books at http://www.devonlayne.com, including copies for free online reading!

See links for all Nathan Everett books at http://nathaneverett.com, including copies for free online reading!

So now I’m sitting back resting on my laurels. Not.

I’ve released seven “new editions” or completely new books so far in 2021, including The Assassin (listed above). Somehow, these other six books had never made it out into the public or onto my free reading website.

See links for all Devon Layne books at http://www.devonlayne.com, including copies for free online reading!

What does that make now? According to Amazon, I have 38 Devon Layne books and 11 Nathan Everett books in the market. My website shows 45 Devon Layne and 13 Nathan Everett books, because I didn’t release everything on Amazon.

So, go ahead and ask me what’s new! Thank you. Currently, I have two new books under development and I’m making good progress again after having an ablation on February 18. They restarted my heart in correct rhythm and I’ve begun to recover my energy and focus. I’m very thankful for my cardiologist, Dr. Christopher Fellows at Virginia Mason.

The first new book I’m working on is Nathan Everett’s A Place Among Peers. This is a sequel to December’s release, A Place at the Table. The series takes place in an alternate world America where there is an established formal class system and everyone is assigned to a class by age eighteen. In the first book, Liam and Meredith struggle to figure out their relationship while Liam tries to fit into his class as a Leader. In the sequel, Liam establishes a cohort of other Leaders attending his University and discovers what it means to become a leader of Leaders. All this, of course, while still exploring his relationship with Meredith and with others who would latch onto his leadership for their own purposes.

I’m working on a sequel to the Devon Layne novel, Drawing on the Dark Side of the Brain. In the first volume, we are introduced to Jett Blackburn, an artist in his first year in college along with five of his closest girlfriends. Jett is a Digital Native, sometimes referred to as Gen Z. He has never known a time without a personal computer, a cell phone, or social media. He has, however, pursued his art in a very traditional way until he accidentally paints one of his girlfriends and discovers new ways of integrating a model into the art. But there is a dark side to Jett’s painting. People who view it—even the models and Jett themselves—are profoundly changed by the art. Sometimes fatally.

Volume 2 finds our hero caught up in financial difficulties as he struggles to pay for college, loses his job, and is stalked by a jealous classmate. And yes, like the rest of those who had to live through the past year, to deal with the pandemic.

My patrons of either  Nathan Everett http://www.patreon.com/nathaneverett or Devon Layne http://www.patreon.com/aroslav have access to the works of both authors, including free eBooks and (at the $10 tier) my developing works as I write them. You are cordially invited to join them!