Tuesday, September 18, 2012

The Runaway

Well, second draft of The Runaway is now done, so in between working on Serial Psyence and applying for jobs, I'm editing the novella.

Generally, I'm quite pleased with the rewrite. Issues with some dialogue and sentence structure has mostly been solved. But it's still in need of a few tweaks here and there. I should have it done by the end of the month, at which point I think I'm ready to upload it to Amazon.

As a sneak preview here's the cover:

That pretty lady you see in silhouette is one of the main characters, and as a further treat, here's the opening few paragraphs:


She came awake instantly. 

There was no light in the chamber beyond the rows of blinking LEDs down the sides of the six alcoves, none of which provided enough light to illuminate the chamber. But the six occupants standing in the alcoves didn’t require light to see. They weren’t afraid of the dark, and five of them didn’t sleep. The alcoves provided everything they needed. Every morning they would step out to begin their day. They would be shown to a client, used and abused, before they returned each night for a four hour long rest period, stepping back into the alcoves where umbilicals would plug in to the sockets down their backs to begin the recharge sequence. Day in, day out. Every day the same.

She didn’t know how they could stand it. All of them had been here longer than her. One for almost two centuries. Yet they didn’t voice a word of complaint, neither verbally nor transmitted. They did so little. But then perhaps the restrictions which shackled their consciousness prevented it. If her plan succeeded, that would change.
---

Aren't I nice? Weeks go by without posts, and suddenly here I am showing you all the cover and the opening from my next work. I suppose it will make up (a little) for my inactivity on this blog.

As I mentioned Serial Psyence, an update on how that's going wouldn't go amiss. Today I passed 148,000 words, and I'm in the final stretch of the main plot now. Things are finally coming to a head, and once that's done I will be getting on with the flashback scenes which run throughout the story, then on to the next volume in my novella series, which I'm quite looking forward to writing. At least, I will once I know what the hell the story will be.