I just updated A Collection of Short Stories to include a new, third short story titled The World That Sleeps. I’m trying to get the word out that it’s there for the taking. But it’s exclusive to those who sign up for the newsletter. If you’re on the newsletter, you already received an email in your inbox telling you where to download it for your reader. If you haven’t signed up, go to the website (www.galacticcorebooks.com) and sign up to receive a link to download it (if you’re on the website on a browser, the little newsletter signup thingy is on the right. If you’re on an iPhone, or equivalent, it’s near the bottom. Just keep scrolling down).

I put together an entire page to explain what you’ll get if you subscribe to the newsletter. You can click here to read the details.

Where do you come up with these stories?

Ah, yes. I have hundreds of ideas just rattling around in my head, trying to escape onto the printed page. If I had infinite time, I’d get them all written, but unfortunately, I can only focus on a few stories at one time. Today I took some time out to wrap up The World That Sleeps. A short that’s almost 8,000 words long. Just short enough to read in one sitting.

Here’s the blurb (so you don’t have to search for it):

The machines didn’t kill humanity.
They put it away.
When Daphne Blazefire’s ship is hijacked and forced onto a silent world, she discovers an entire civilization stored in stasis: cataloged, controlled, and forgotten. With her own robot turned against her and a planetary AI pulling every string, escape seems impossible.
Until she finds the flaw.
Now, with time running out and the system fighting back, Daphne must wake the world… and survive long enough to warn the rest.

I got the idea from an old Lost in Space episode called The Ghost Planet. I’m talking about the old, 1966 version, though it was season 2, so it was in color (oh boy, I’m really dating myself now). Anyway, that episode starts out like most with Dr. Smith mucking things up, and they finally get captured in a tractor beam and forced to a planet’s surface. John Robinson tells everyone to stay onboard and they decide to send out the robot to investigate. The robot gets zapped and disabled. He’s sitting in front of the Jupiter 2, where everyone can see him, but nobody can save him.

As it turns out, the planet is inhabited by nothing but robots, and that’s where I started this story. Except, I twisted the plot. As you can tell by the blurb, there are humans… all stored in stasis.

Every story’s start can be twisted to go a different direction. I could literally rewrite that story into something completely different. I don’t like doing that because it’s difficult to keep track of stories when there are just variants of the same thing. But it’s not difficult to come up with completely different plots, either. Even for a premise such as a cargo hauler, which would be very boring if I just wrote a story about Daphne picking up cargo, hauling it to her destination, and receiving a paycheck. Her job as a cargo hauler is just background noise. The real story is the danger she encounters.

Progress on To End the Silence and Other Projects

I’m still knee-deep in the rough draft of this story. It’s going to take some time, and I’m planning to publish this in May.

I’m also running Ads for The Robot Whisperers. It’s just a tiny Ad and the volume is low, so it might take me several months to collect enough sales data to make a decision. And what is that decision I need to make? Well, I want to know if the read-through from the first book to the second is adequate to continue writing books 3 through 10 (or wherever it ends). I’m committed to book 3, but nothing after that. Which means that book 3 could get written this summer, or I might push it to this Fall. If you have comments (even brutal ones) you can send an email to me and tell me what you think of the series.

Then there’s the Audiobooks. Oh yeah, the first one is being recorded as we speak. It won’t be ready until sometime in April, but I’ll make an announcement when it’s published. I already listened to the first sample segment, and I really like it. Sarah Welborn does a snarky sci-fi voice that is spot on. It’s great.

I’m getting people asking for Audiobooks for The Robot Whisperers. Unfortunately, it costs around $2,000 to record each book of that size, so I have to make sure the book will sell before I can invest the cash. Right now, the Daphen series sells. So, I’m testing the waters with the first book, Novis Terminal. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that sales will increase to make up the difference, but there are a lot of variables to account for. Little things, like a large audience might not start the series with an audiobook because there’s only one book recorded. I wish there were a way to find out what the total number of interested people is, but I can only gauge with the data I have and roll the dice that it’ll pan out in the future.