Books Section

This section is dedicated to my attempts to become a published science fiction novelist. No success so far and I have no intention of giving up my day job.

In 1989, I wrote a complete novel, Awakening, set in my future history, in 2702CE. I tried for a while to get it published and get an agent, but then I got on with life and got a real job. Someday, I'll convert the text to html and post it here, but for now, it's dumped in this directory as a single Microsoft Word document. It comes in at 724kb and 113,000 words.

I wrote a second novel, Kali, in 1991, but I was never 100% happy with it. In October 2005, I participated in the National Novel Writing Month and I took the plot, together with new or reworked characters and completely rewrote the story as The Needle and the Skull. I'm still working on the second draft (honestly, I think it needs a complete re-write; again), but I did manage to make myself a prospective cover.

Next, inspired by the military science fiction series of David Weber, David Drake, Jack Campbell, and Mike Resnick, among others I sat down and wrote First Command in 2008. If you want a realistic view of interplanetary combat in the twenty-sixth century, then this is the book for you. But so far, even after an encouraging report from the Baen slush reader, it wasn't a book for Baen, though it took them nineteen months to reach that conclusion. Hopefully other publishers will decide faster. Here are a couple (One, Two) of prospective covers for First Command. A sequel, Sunward Bound, is in the early stages of a first draft.