Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!

Did you get a new Kindle, Nook, iPad, Fintoozler, or other device?  Fill it up with my books.

My Lords of Kobol books are always FREE.  Download them in a host of different file formats for your device's needs HERE.

Displaced is a scifi, time travel action piece.  A Baltimore cop wakes up on a farm in Georgia ... along with cavemen, dinosaurs, a robot, and more.  Sounds crazy, but it's fun.

Get it for 99¢ at Smashwords here.  Also available at B&N, Kobo, iTunes, and Amazon.

Diary of a Second Life is a post-post-apocalyptic zombie story.  It's not like any zombie thing you've seen.  This is set centuries after the end of the world we know and it follows one teen as he breaks out of his insular community to try and understand himself and the world.  Crassly, I call it a "teen zombie road trip novel," but it's deeper than that.

Get it for just 99¢ at Smashwords here.  Also available at Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.

Whereas Diary takes place after the end of the world, 8 Days takes place in a world that almost ended.  Imagine what it would be like to discover that an asteroid was only a week away from destroying all life on the planet?  What would you do with your remaining time?  Now ... imagine that the asteroid missed.  How do you feel about what you've done?  Those are the basic questions posed to all humanity in 8 Days, my "near apocalypse" novel.

Get it for just 99¢ at Smashwords here.  Also available at Amazon, B&N, and iTunes.

The Art of Death is a horror action novel that follows an evil old man, an art museum director.  He's designed a new museum, found a Babylonian artifact, and gathered monsters from the world's folklore for one purpose: to kill a lot of people so he can live forever.  Vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters, zombies, and a whole lot more populate this supernatural Die Hard of a story.

Get it for just 99¢ at Smashwords here.  Also available at Amazon, B&N, and iTunes.



Maybe you want something more ADULT?  Yes, I've written some erotica, too.

Sexcalation is a semi-autobiographical story about a married couple who end up having "fun" (shall we say) with another couple next door.  It started off as a sex-filled romance novel with little-to-no romance, but it ended up as a bit more than that.

If you get Sexcalation HERE at Smashwords, use coupon code BP27Z to get it for just $2.99.

The Red Kick is written like a comic book series.  The action (both in the bedroom and not) is written with POW, BANG, BIFF punch-ups.  It follows the titular character, a stripper who uses her seedy nightlife for intel on the criminal underbelly of her city.  When her time on the pole is done, she puts on her mask and becomes a vigilante who prowls the streets and puts a stop to nefarious deeds.  In this series, she uncovers a plot that could destroy her city and kill thousands.

You can download the first "issue" HERE for FREE in multiple formats.

If you like that and want all five "issues," you can get it HERE at Smashwords for just $2.99 if you use the coupon code NT23S.

Thank you very much and Happy New Year!

"Colonies of Kobol" First Drafts Giveaway

EDIT: We have winners!  Chris, Josh, and Mark ... congrats!

These are the first two out of sixteen books I've finished in the Colonies of Kobol trilogy (Confused? Read this.)

Why did I do these to start with?  Because they follow the Final Five.  Book One is about the Five on Earth and their escape; in Book Fourteen, they reach the Colonies during the Cylon War, put an end to it, help create organic Cylons, etc.  (Largely, the latter book is about the rise of Cavil.)

What may change?  A lot.  Anything.  I'll likely be inserting additional chapters, changing word choices, altering dialogue, ...  These are first drafts, after all.  (The first draft of Lords of Kobol - Book One would be nigh unrecognizable to you guys.)

Answer me these questions three.

1. What was the name of the ship Kara was given to aid in her quest to find Earth?  (BSG, "Six of One" - "The Road Less Traveled")
2. What was the name of the Tauron businessman whose company created a critical component used to complete Graystone Industries' U-87 Cylon prototype?  (Caprica, "Pilot")
3. Which Lord of Kobol did a Messenger of The One True God impersonate as it guided Aurora in her mission to aid the Thirteenth Tribe's flight from Kobol?  (Lords of Kobol - Book One: Apotheosis)

Answers: 1. Demetrius; 2. Tomas Vergis; 3. Hades

EDIT: We have winners!  Chris, Josh, and Mark ... congrats!

Writing Colonies, Part IV: Merging "Galactica" and "Caprica"

Since I'm currently writing Book Fourteen: The Colony, I have to work with the Final Five and their efforts to stop the Cylon War, as well as the rise of Cavil and the Cylon society we know from the show.  Part of this involves Caprica and what would have happened in a second season.

Thanks to interviews, we know that there was a plan involving Zoe and the Graystones' attempt to make a new body for their daughter.  We glimpsed that new body in the series finale (a mechanical body covered with life-like skin emerging from a Cylon-like bath).  In interviews, the showrunner said the key to this body would be given to the Graystones thanks to a V-World link with the Final Five, who were nearing the end of their journey to the Colonies.

"OK, cool," you're thinking.  Well ... there are several problems.  Among them is the fact that the Five were in a severe time dilation thanks to their relativistic speeds.  They were still light years away, when we saw no such form of FTL communication in the shows.  And then there's language.  Surely, planets separated by thousands of years would have differing tongues.

I came up with a solution while preserving the intent of the producers in blending these two shows.  You can read it after the JUMP.

Star Trek Original Series Set Tour

I made a trip to Ticonderoga, NY and got to see the amazing work that went into recreating the sets from the original Star Trek series.  Check out my nearly 200 photos here or here:

Star Trek Tour

Writing Colonies, Part III: Mapping the Galaxy

You know me.  I love making making maps.

This time around, I felt it necessary to provide a depiction of the fleet's journey to Earth II (aka "New Earth," "our Earth").

There are three astronomical tidbits we know to be true, by virtue of science and of the show.

1. Earth II is 4,100 light-years from the Lagoon Nebula (astronomy)
2. Earth I is just under 2,000 light years from the Colonies (due to the Final Five's sublight but relativistic journey)
3. The Colonies, Kobol, Earth I, and Earth II are very closely aligned in the same direction with the Lagoon Nebula (we know this thanks to the Tomb of Athena and the star alignment viewed by Gaeta in "Revelations")

These things make it pretty easy to arrange stuff along a line-of-sight that stretches through Earth II and the Lagoon Nebula.  Thanks to the similar appearance of constellations Gaeta verifies in orbit of Earth I, we know that Earth I is in the same line with Earth II and, basically, in the same "neighborhood."

In the show, it is said that the Ionian Nebula is 13,000 light-years away from the algae planet (what I've called Oasis).  Since that figure is way, way beyond any other distance in the show (and would actually put it near the galactic center), I'm forced to say they misspoke and that it should actually be 1,300 light-years.  I also put it beyond Earth I and Earth II, because of the distance and because "WE'RE GOING THE WRONG WAY."  It's fairly obvious that the fleet was lost for several episodes after Starbuck's return and the signal from her Viper on Earth I led them back in the right direction.

Given the stops the fleet makes along the way post-New Caprica, that's where I placed the Lion's Head Nebula and the Magadon Star Cluster (with Oasis).  Slightly off the line-of-sight with Lagoon, but close enough to make sense.

Does it seem small?  It shouldn't.  That's nearly three thousand light-years.  That's a ridiculously vast amount of space.  Plus, there's a fact about our galaxy that can't be adequately conveyed in this map: space is three dimensional.  More than that, our galaxy is about 1,000 light-years thick, so that makes the volume of space to be explored for Earth (I & II) even more mind-boggingly huge.

Here's another map to give you some perspective on how big a percentage of the galaxy the fleet traversed:

Crazy, huh?


More to come ...

Writing Colonies, Part II: The Final Five and The Colony

If you follow me on Facebook, you saw me post the image for Book Fourteen: The Colony.  (If you don't follow me on Facebook, you should.)

This is the part of the book(s) I'm currently writing.  Why?  Well, I just finished Book One: Earth which featured the Final Five.  In this book, the Five finally reach the Twelve Colonies.  It made sense for me to go ahead and keep writing with the same characters while they were fresh in my head.

As mentioned on the show, this happened in the twelfth year of the First Cylon War and they convinced the Cylons to end the conflict in exchange for the Five giving them resurrection technology.

For a long while, this book was going to be subtitled The Enemy only because I thought Colonies of Kobol - Book Fourteen: The Colony was kinda redundant.  But that would conflict with the naming convention I established with every other book in the series.  So The Colony it is.

Minor spoilers next, though you'll likely forget about it by the time I'm ready to release the damn things.

Book Thirteen is Caprica.  It will pick up after the end of that series and show the revolution that led to the war, as well as the first parts of the war.  Fourteen will have more of the war, then the Five arrive and the book will become more about them helping the Cylons create the "skinjobs."

Before that, though, I wrote some chapters about the Five's journey to the Colonies and a big problem I didn't know I had.  You can read about it after the JUMP:

Writing Colonies, Part I: The Basics and a Bit of Inspiration

Colonies of Kobol is underway and I'm 1/16 finished.

Yay.

Before I get too deep, I wanted to tell everyone what's up, where my thinking is, etc., when it comes to the story of CoK and how it will be presented.

As I've stated before, there will be sixteen separate books contained in three different volumes.  Volume One is about establishing this part of the universe (Cylon Earth and the founding of the Twelve Colonies).  Volume Two is primarily about the Virgon Empire, an unmentioned part of Colonial history that plays a huge, thousand-year role in the Colonies becoming what they are.  Volume Three is about the revolutions that lead to the Cylon War and then the Fall of the Colonies.

Obviously, this trilogy is a sequel to Lords of Kobol and, largely, a prequel to both Battlestar Galactica and Caprica.  Basically, I'm filling in the blanks of the history of the "Kobolverse" or "BSGverse."

Since the books span multiple thousands of years, I needed a common thread.  In Lords of Kobol, it was easy because I had the Olympians themselves.  They were immortal.  But I had a realization a while back ... the primary characters throughout the Kobolverse are the Messengers of The One True God.  Those two "angels" are there on Larsa, through Kobol, on Earth I, in the Colonies, in the Fleet, and on Earth II.  Their mission is the survival of humanity and preservation of life (including Cylons).  They embody the themes of the show and the books.  Making them the central characters was an easy choice.  But despite their centrality, they're also background figures.

Let me diverge for a second and talk about fan fiction.  Yes, my books are fan fiction by definition.  Official channels passed on them, yet I published them anyway.  A common trap in fan fiction is the use of known characters (from a film or TV show), as well as the insertion of the author into the work.  Also, it's common for the fan fiction to get "cute" when it comes to inserting certain characters in unlikely events or introducing someone's grandaddy when it's not necessary.  Throughout Lords of Kobol, I believe I avoided these traps.

In Colonies, as I get closer to the "current" era of the TV shows, I have to involve the characters we already know.  I intend to do so sparingly and with reverence to how they're portrayed on screen.  (The Final Five, for example, are the central figures in Book One: Earth so I didn't have much of a choice in avoiding them.)  There will be no author insertion.  There will be no "cuteness," if I can help it.

There are, however, elements of the story I want to tell that don't fall into the normal frame of the larger tale.  Meaning, there are subplots in the series that don't have to do with the survival of mankind, but I'd still like to talk about them.  Plus, there are certain characters from the show that I'd like to revisit.  I'd like to talk to Baltar or Zarek or any number of others.  I want to get their perspectives on all that happened.

I had an epiphany about that.

Read more after the JUMP.

Win the First Draft of "Book One - Earth"

(EDIT: We have a winner!  Scroll down or click the JUMP to see!)

I've finished the first draft of Book One - Earth.

I like it a great deal, but I will have to go back and do some editing and rewriting, of course.  Regardless of what may come, the winner will get to see what I've got so far.

Since we're talking about Earth, here are some of the covers I made for Book One, some of which draw on the flag style for the Twelve Colonies.

Those were OK, I guess, but I gave it another stab and came up with this one:

This is the one I've gone with for the book.

(What's the symbol at the bottom?  It's my interpretation of the Colonial version of the thirteenth zodiac sign, Ophiuchus the serpent bearer.  Of course, serpents and snakes played a part in the Thirteenth Tribe in Lords of Kobol - Book One.)

Ready to play?  It's after the JUMP ...

Colonies of Kobol - Book One ... A Few Chapters from Earth

I'm nearing the end of the #BSG #TotalReWatch and I'm already about a third of the way through the first section of Colonies of Kobol, the sequel to Lords of Kobol designed to fill in the blanks between, during, and after that book series and all of the Battlestar Galactica TV series.

What do you need to know?  You should have read the Lords of Kobol trilogy and Prelude.  If you haven't read that free series yet, here's the link.  (Naturally, I'm expecting that you've seen all of the Battlestar Galactica TV series.  Duh.)

Even though I wrote most of what follows a couple of months ago, it's oddly timely.  Also, there's likely to be changes regarding the timelines, word choices, etc.  This is largely a first draft.

All of that being said, read on after the JUMP.

Mapping "Colonies of Kobol"

If you're at all familiar with me, you know I love to map things.

Lords of Kobol, scifi, horror ... whatever I'm writing, I like to have a map handy.  More often than not, it will end up in the finished product.  Colonies of Kobol will be no different.

I don't plan on including a map for Earth, but I have made up a sketch that I'll be using for the writing. (Maybe I'll include a smaller version in the book.)

Most of the action, however, takes place in the Cyrannus Star System, which is a part of the Cimtar Star Cluster (which I noted in LoK - Book Three).  Here's what we know:

In the original show bible for the new series, there were twelve planets within a single solar system and that's what they used when they made the miniseries.  Science adviser Kevin Grazier came on before the first season was to be filmed and he changed things up a bit.  Instead of a dozen habitable worlds around a single star (which would be mathematically ridiculous), he opted for something that's fairly common in the galaxy: a double-binary star system.  Meaning, two binary systems that orbit each other; four suns, altogether.

Since we didn't spend much time in the Colonies after the first few episodes, it didn't matter much.  But then they made the prequel series, Caprica.  Since they would be doing nothing but living in the Twelve Colonies, they firmed up details in that show's bible.  Two bits of merch came out of that.

First, there's a nice little book called Beyond Caprica: A Visitor's Pocket Guide to the Twelve Colonies.

Written by actual real-world travel writer Bob Harris, it's a cool read.  Lots of production art from the show and trivia about the other Colonies we didn't see much of.  Not much in the way of maps, however.

And then there's the big wall map, created by Kevin Grazier and writer Jane Espenson, and released by QMX:

Obviously, that has lots of details and was a big influence on how I decided to make my own maps.  (And also the structure of the books I'll be writing.)

I wanted to make my maps of the systems simple.  Since they will primarily be seen on phones, Kindles, Nooks, etc., they needn't be crazy-large or overly detailed.  I just need to convey where the planets are in relation to each other and give a fact about each one.

Pretty self-explanatory.  Shows that Helios Alpha & Beta orbit each other, that Gamma & Delta orbit each other, and that both pairs orbit each other.  Thanks to the zoomed out look, I was able to put Ragnar in there, too.

For the following individual system maps, I set them up like a great conjunction.  Again, I'm not going for accuracy as much as I'm going for visual simplicity and explanation.

(Yes, Aquarion is sometimes called "Aquaria" in the show and related materials.  Might as well use both.)

And that's pretty much that for maps.  Again, I may decide to make maps of each colony as I write and if I do, I might include them.  We'll just have to wait and see.

Yes, I am writing a little bit at the moment.  I'm still in the middle of the "#BSG #TotalReWatch," and writing will begin in earnest when that's over.  But I've had some ideas that I needed to get written down.

More to come, of course!