The Ghost Cargo, a Daphne Blazefire Short Story
I finally completed the free short story titled The Ghost Cargo.
Book Blurb:
Daphne accepts a well-paying delivery that seems too good to be true: a sealed crate with no manifest. Mid-flight, strange noises echo in the cargo bay. RUSTY insists sensors detect “life,” but Daphne sees nothing. As paranoia mounts, she must decide whether to jettison the mysterious cargo—or discover who (or what) has been hitching a ride.
This short story is only about 4,000 words long, so it’s a quick read, but a fun story. It’s free if you sign up for the Newsletter. If you’re already signed up, check your email because I sent a notification to all subscribers with download links inside.
The covers for my short stories don’t match the series (The Neutron Star and The Ghost Cargo). I threw those together from royalty-free clip art. When I commission covers for novels, I have a book cover creator (aka artist) who does them for me. He charges $200 per cover, so I have to roll that into my book costs. I’ve shopped around for cheaper covers, but there is a yawning gap between the covers I get from Warren Design and others. I’ve done the free trial covers from what looks to be a large company, and I was not impressed. In the past, I’ve done some of my own covers, and I can sometimes pull it off (The Traveler Trilogy books use my covers, Desperate Action, Survival, and Dead End). I ended up replacing the covers for The Abyss series with professional covers. All the Daphne covers were done by Warren Design, and all future covers will be done by him (barring any unforeseen circumstances).
I managed to conjure up a few more story ideas for Daphne Blazefire to round out my total to 20 books. Those will end up in two different sets (eventually). Dust Bargain is still in the plans and should be published in time for Christmas.
As you can see from the work-in-progress widget, as of this writing, I’m 75% complete on the rough draft of Frozen Logic. The progress for this book is still on schedule, and I expect it to be published before the end of September.
What comes after Dust Bargain?
I’m not going to commit to any book yet, but I know that there are more Daphne books in the future. Which one will come after that is anybody’s guess at this point. I might do them in the order that I listed them (my secret list… LOL), or I might grab one that I think will fit better in the sequence and rearrange the ordering. Dust Bargain was pulled earlier than I had originally planned. I wish I could write them all on a weekend, but it takes me almost two months per novel to write those. That would be about two more years’ worth of work.
The Chronicles of the Robot Whisperers could become a series that will have a book written in between Daphne books. Then there is a possibility that I might slip in a Cozy Mystery under my pen name, Elliot Droit. Those only take me a month each (they’re shorter books).
In case you can’t remember the blurb for Dust Bargain:
When space hauler Daphne Blazefire answers a too-good-to-be-true shipping ad, she figures she can risk a little fuel for a big payday. The reviews on the job listing all gush about massive payouts and zero risk. But the moment she lands on Reckon’s End, she’s offered a payout that doesn’t even cover her cargo’s cost.
Worse, the sheriff, an old-world lawman with too much authority and too few morals, reminds her that the contract she signed says she has to take it… or spend time in the local lockup.
But Daphne’s not one to back down, especially when the whole town is in on the con. In a place where everyone keeps their head down, one stranger offers to talk. What Daphne learns could bring down “The Company,” or get her killed trying.