To continue the overview…
…this will be long…
By 2012, I had fully committed to self-publish. I
had published With Eyes Open… and
found the process easy…mostly. So I decided the next project would be a
collection of stories, almost all of my remaining completed stories. By this
time, I had fourteen completed stories, and had plans for some. (“With Eyes
Open…” and “A Voice in the Darkness” were in With Eyes Open…, “Wanderer” is an integral part of a longer work,
as is “A God to Dance With” and “The Arc of Heaven”. “Brianna and the Three” is
a very special case. While I liked the plot, the story seemed to fall short in
execution. So I’m currently working on the third draft of the story.)
That left eight stories, which were combined into
the anthology Campfire Stories.
Each of the stories deal with self-discovery,
exploration and duty…and the consequences of each. Some of the consequences are
rather low-key, some are very dire.
The stories are arranged in the order they occur in
my fictional universe, not in the order they were written. My stories all take
place in the same universe, with one consistent timeline that runs from 13.8 billion
years plus one day in the past through to the year 7869.
The first story, “The End of Seconds” is the
furthest into the past I’ve ever ventured. All the way back to before the
beginning. I would always describe this story as being about the end of one
universe and the start of the next universe. It would also address an annoying
question I have never gotten a satisfactory answer to: Where did God come from?
(I have no problem accepting an all powerful being that can create all of
existence with the snap of his fingers. But all beings, even all powerful ones,
had to come from somewhere.)
So I speculated that in the universe prior to this
one, a group of researchers had mastered time travel. The system required them
to download their consciousness into actual apparatus (the Cube) and travel
back through time as energy. As the story starts, they are preparing for the
longest trip into the past ever taken, all the way back to the start of their
universe. The warnings of the chief scientist and an enigmatic stranger are
dutifully ignored.
“Games of Life and Cold” had originally been planned
as part of a much larger project that would’ve covered three novels and an
untold number of stories. Sadly, I may never get back to the larger project.
The main characters are part of an artificially
created race known as T’zentarna (translation: the Sentinels). The look almost
human, except for their three fingers and opposable thumb. They were originally
created as a science experiment. After their creation, they’re used as advanced
scouts, explorers and (in the original project) soldiers. They would be
confronted by another race, the Sqediqians, who thinks they’re the supreme
beings in the Universe and consider all other beings nothing more than
resources to be exploited.
I was trying for more of a horror story in this one,
contrasting the peaceful ways of the Sentinels with the more barbaric ways of
the Sqediqians.
With “If You Listen Softly…” I was trying to evoke
the feel of a Twilight Zone episode.
(The fact that I referenced The Twilight
Zone in the story had nothing to do with it.) This is also the first story
that hinted there are forces of nature watching over the world. Even though I
don’t go into too much description of it, the house the story takes place in is
pretty much the house I grew up in.
Ever wake up with the feeling something was wrong
but you don’t know what? Happens to me all the time. What if the world had changed
but you were the only one who didn’t know it? My main character had to deal
with this situation; after being alone for years after the death of his wife, a
man wakes up to find some new in his life, someone he doesn’t recognize but
other people do.
Like “If You Listen Softly…”, “All My Yesterdays,
Remembered” is a fantasy piece, even a little bit autobiographic. (The main
character’s background is similar to my own, with a few changes here and
there.) The story came about after thinking about someone going to their high
school reunion, first at ten years, then twenty, and seeing someone who doesn’t
seem to be aging. Tweaking the idea a bit led me to tell the story from the
point of view of a guy whose childhood friend doesn’t look like she’s aged a
day in decades.
“Symmetry” is the last fantasy piece (until the
current novel project). It’s also another story that hints at the existence of
forces beyond our reckoning. It also hints at resurrection, that souls move
from one body to another at the time of death. I had started thinking about
someone waking up and not knowing where she was or how she got there. The
location became a subway car, the only other passenger being a conductor, who
knows more about the main character than he says.
“Signpost” is set in the early twenty-second century,
the early days of space exploration. Humanity has started spreading out into
the galaxy, contacting one alien race, the Gregorians, and finding evidence of another
older race, the Mengharans. The Mengharans left a series of markers behind but
no one could figure out why or how it was done. Some questions are answered,
new questions are posed.
The interesting thing about “Signpost” is that it
was inspired by a Neil Diamond song. On the Beautiful
Noise album is a song titled “Signs”, which includes these lyrics: “Signs like moments hung suspended/Echoes
just beneath the heart/Speak in voices half remembered/And half remembered play
their part”. That led to a line a Mengharan says, “We speak every thousand
years but there is never anyone here to listen to us.”
Evolution can be a bitch if there’s no else around.
“Last Light” is a hostage story, chronologically the
first of the stories centered on EarthGov Security. Set in 2189, it’s centered on
two of my favorite characters, Special Agents Caralynn (Carly) Adrasteia and
Alexandra (Alexa) Sinclair. It’s a hostage story, as Carly and Alexa get drawn
into a robbery and its aftermath. Interesting thing about Alexa…when I created
her, I had no idea she was a lesbian and had a crush on Carly. (More on that
when we get to On A Cold Wind.) “Last
Light” was originally part of On A Cold
Wind but it had nothing to do with the rest of the novella.
The same thing happened with the last story in Campfire Stories, “The Shape of the
Truth”. When I wrote it, I had planned on using it to introduce Dari Loq and
Maia, the main characters, their race, the Children of Li’jha, and their shape-shifting
abilities. (In their natural form, the Children look like a sphere of Vaseline about
a yard across. Their genetic structure is more of a jumble than an organized
spiral like human DNA. They developed the ability to reorganize the genetic
structure and perfectly mimic other life forms.)
Unfortunately, the novel it was supposed to be part
of was put aside. I was making no progress on it, so I was going to let it sit
for a little while. Knowing this was a complete story, I pulled it out, pulled
out some foreshadowing that had been done and included it in Campfire Stories.
Overall, I’m happy with the stories and how they all
turned out. They all do what I wanted them to do, that is to simply entertain.
Campfire
Stories is available on Smashwords, Kindle, iTunes and
NOOK. Find the links on my website, Wordboy’s Words –
http://wordboy1.wix.com/wordboyswords#!books/cnec
