📚 There are many subscription options available in the reading/publishing world. Here, I’m going to briefly talk about two of them… Kindle Unlimited, and Kobo Plus.
The most well-known one is probably Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited (KU). A huge selection of books for $12.00. If you’re on a budget and don’t have access to a large local library selection (or want niche books that are harder to get through libraries), then Kindle Unlimited can seem like a pretty good deal.
However, for authors, it comes with a catch.
The biggest one is that any ebooks in KU (at least for independent publishers) must be exclusive to KU during the 90 day period that they’re enrolled (or longer, if the author chooses to extend the contract).
That said, very recently, Amazon has moved to allow KU books to be made available for public libraries, which is a huge win for both authors and readers. (Previously, you most likely wanted your books in Kobo’s Overdrive if you wanted library reach).
I’ve used Kindle Unlimited before, both for Glitch and for Huntress, but I ultimately chose to pull our books from KU because I’m really not a fan of exclusivity, or of the issue of “having all my eggs in one basket.”
While I haven’t, as a reader, used it for myself, Isaac did use the monthly Kobo audiobook credit subscription for a while, which was quite nice.
Now, as a writer I like Kobo Plus, because it offers an inexpensive way for readers to access my books ($7.99 a month) without requiring me to be exclusive with Kobo.
Woot!
So, if you read a lot of books and want to try a subscription service, have a look at Kobo Plus. 😁
When I was a kid, I was introduced to computer games early on because my dad does a lot of computer-related stuff. Somewhere there’s an old 4×6 photo of me sitting in a small pink chair on top of a regular adult chair so I could reach the computer. (Age of dial-up internet… ah… fun times).
It started with games like Wacky Wheels and Commander Keen, acquired on a small floppy disk (you know… the save icon?) Another fun note: the galactic alphabet used in Commander Keen is seen again when you’re enchanting items in Minecraft. I had an absolutely fun moment of going wait… I recognize those symbols!
Anyhow, once I got a little older, one of the games I absolutely loved was Outpost, a 1990s Windows 3.1 game.
Goal of the game?
Colonize a distant planet after Earth gets destroyed by an asteroid, and rebuild civilization to the point where you can launch back out into space.
The game was near impossible to beat. 😅
Part of that, I think, was because I was a kid, who didn’t realize until later that there was a helpful manual that told you what each building did. (Or why all those buildings underground kept turning into Red Light Districts when morale was low. Agh! I needed that laboratory!
(I didn’t realize until much later what a red light district was).
The other part, as it turns out, was that the game was actually released incomplete, and certain rather important functions for building up to a spacefaring age had been left out. If I recall, some editions of the game actually did have just enough to complete the game later on.
Since I think I beat the game once (and only once), I’m guessing I might have been playing the incomplete version. (I beat it on a DOSBox version with wonky colors and no sound because it wasn’t the most compatible with Windows XP but I was determined to play it again).
But everything had to be lined up just right in order to get that ending.
I usually died long before I ran into the issue of reaching the space technologies.
And from this game, I memorized two specific lines from the AI. “Don’t panic,” and “The people hate you, Commander.”
*Annoyed glare at computer.*
Rarely did I get the third line, “The people love you, Commander.”
Eventually, I moved on to other games, though the craving to play Outpost pops up every once in a while. Building tunnels and redundant oxygen systems. Dying within a few turns of starting the game because of choosing the wrong star systems. Old-school music that was catchy but not the best quality…
Imagine my surprise when, a few years ago I went to a local concert playing music from The Planets, and suddenly heard, in full symphonic glory, the primary background song of Outpost.
What?!?! 🥹
Apparently “Mars” was the song they chose for the game, and I’d had it ingrained in my head. I knew I was supposed to be looking for sections pulled for the Star Wars movies from the concert, but Outpost?
I was a happy camper.
You can find a few play-throughs on Youtube if you’re curious about what it sounded like in Outpost. In the meantime… I don’t think I’m quite ready to fight with DOSBox to get the game back up and running.
But the urge to go build a space colony may yet again return…
* * *
None of my space stories are published yet, so no links to point to this time. (But there’s a couple waiting for revisions!)
In both the Glitch saga and Distant Horizon series, we see the mention of “time stones,” strange artifacts protected by a mythological guardian. While they’re only researched in Glitch, (and used as bait to lure the rebels into a trap), Jenna and the Coalition of Freedom, a ragtag team of rebels, are a bit more adventurous with these things in Distant Horizon. They have a hands-on experience with a time stone in the first book, and continue to deal with these stones in Fractured Skies.
Here’s a peek at their introduction to one of the guardians in Fractured Skies:
(SPOILER WARNING! – There are two characters present here who aren’t introduced until the beginning of Fractured Skies, so if you don’t want to know who is involved in this scene from later in the book, you may want to skip the quote block).
I grabbed the radio from my pocket. “Inese? Where are—”
A portal appeared in front of us with Inese, Dad, and Lance tumbling through. The portal closed and Inese—with the stone—skidded to a halt, staring at the statues. “Here, too?” Her eyes widened. She clutched the stone to the black body armor of her chest with one hand, her pistol in the other.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Lance,” Inese snapped, “portal to the car, now!”
“Sure thing.” Lance wiped perspiration from his forehead as another portal swirled in front of us. “Let’s go before that mummy comes back.”
“Mummy?” Lily yipped. “The mummies are alive, too?”
“They’re not exactly living,” Lance muttered.
“They’re spirits,” Dad clarified, breathing hard. Dark purple rings colored the underside of his eyes. Inese disappeared through the portal. The rest of us followed them to the museum roof. Dust swirled around us, revealing the location of the car in faint, shifting sand. I yanked the edge of my turtleneck shirt over my nose. Inese slammed the driver’s door shut behind her and the car went visible. I hopped in. Lily dived in behind me and yanked the door shut. Outside, trees bent against the wind, leaves whipping across the roof as the sky turned a deep, rouge red. Dark yellow dust clouds rolled in the sky, crackling with electricity.
“Inese…” Dad pointed into the distance. “That’s not a statue.”
Bright, white light traced the outline of a giant lion with the face of a man. It stepped through the cityscape, purple lightning wrapping around it and flaring in bright streaks. Lily’s jaw dropped. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Lance shook his head. “After the mummies, nope. Not kidding.”
A deep, resounding voice pounded through my head, overriding my thoughts.
Return the stone.
I froze, my hands clenched on the edge of the seat. The voice of the guardian echoed in my head. A thick blanket of dark sand blasted the windows, obscuring the sphinx.
As seen here, one of the guardians has the appearance of a sphinx. Each one references a different mythology, and each one has a different set of powers:
Guatemala – Jaguar shapeshifter with power stealing
Japan – Asian dragon with water powers
Egypt – Sphinx with radiation and electricity powers
Peru – A puma earth elemental with radiation powers
India – A representation of Durga with healing powers, riding a lion mount
They all tend to be protective of their stones. They’re also extremely powerful spirits… making them difficult to steal from.
Not impossible, but not without cost.
And then trying to keep those stones is another story entirely…
* * *
See the interaction of the team with some of these guardians in the Distant Horizon series!
In the world of Distant Horizon, telepathy is one of the strongest and most dangerous powers a person can have. While it’s generally used to read minds and emotions, telepathy can also be used to implant ideas in a person’s thoughts and, at its most powerful, possess them.
(Tim is very much not a fan of this when he starts dealing with the second Legion Spore in Spirits of a Glitch, and he first gets an idea of how the implanted memories work in Ghost of a Memory).
Lots of fun for me as the author, not so much fun for my characters.
However, a few telepaths, including Lady Winters (the insidious “Brainmaster,” but don’t let her catch you calling her that), know how to plant so-called “memory seeds.” Rather than having to be present when they attack, a telepath leaves a set of (usually) false memories inside their victim’s mind that are set to activate under certain conditions.
In Jenna’s case, Lady Winters inserts memories of Jenna being transformed into a sub-human beast, though she’s never actually been in a beastie tank.
Here’s a look at a scene in Fractured Skies where she’s attempting to confront the seed with Gwen, one of the rebel telepaths:
Are you ready?
I swallowed hard… or imagined I did… and nodded. Let’s get this over with.
She raised her hands to the black ceiling above us. The blackness grew lighter, shifting into green. Gwen faded into the darkness. Green liquid crashed over my head.
I was trapped in the glass tube of a beastie tank.
Thick bubbles shimmered around me as I flailed, screaming. The burning liquid, the deadened sensation of my hands and feet—I shook my head and begged to get out, but my words were lost in the breathing mask strapped over my mouth.
Look around you. This isn’t real. Wasn’t real? What wasn’t real? I pounded my fists against the glass. “Let me out!”
Look beyond the glass. What should you see?
I took a gasping breath. Beyond the glass I couldn’t see anything…
That was the problem. I should have been able to see something. A shadow of movement, the smooth structures of other tubes. Those images slowly formed in front of me… but not because my eyes had adjusted.
Recognizing that your surroundings aren’t what they are supposed to be allows you to take the first step in controlling your situation.
That voice… Gwen!
Over time the memories get worse, with the idea that the next time Jenna confronts her, Lady Winters could easily use the memory seeds to disable her in a fight.
This happens and, in a later confrontation, Lady Winters adds the memory of the Legion Spore’s transformation. With the latter seed, simply hearing the Legion Spore’s telepathic voices can trigger the memory, but crowded spaces (claustrophobia from being inside the transforming Legion Spore) can also cause the seeds to strike.
Ideally, another telepath would be able to remove them, which is what Gwen tries to do at first. But when you’re dealing with someone as strong as Lady Winters, removing the seeds can be a challenge, especially when traps have been laid to keep them from being removed.
Memory seeds aren’t the only trick telepaths can use to manipulate others, and once we get to Fractured Skies, Jenna learns that the seeds in her head may be a bit more complex than the average seed.
And once we get to Starless Night, well, the enemy she’s fighting might be herself…
* * *
Who can Jenna trust when she can’t trust her own mind and memories?
Hi there! Today I’m going to be talking about tackling two points of view of the same scene in different books. But there are going to be some spoilers regarding the Distant Horizon Universe. They’ll be minor, but if you’re trying to avoid spoilers, go read the books first, then come back after!
While the Glitch Saga (Glitch #1-3) follows Tim’s point of view within the Camaraderie, the Distant Horizon series follows Jenna’s point of view with the Coalition rebels.
At times, these scenes directly overlap.
For example, in Ghost of a Memory (Glitch #2), there’s a scene where Tim first takes the Legion Spore to attack the OA training base in Japan:
Master Zaytsev, we are required to alert you to a small, unidentified vessel leaving the area.
“Insignificant,” I murmur. We need to fix this glitch, not apprehend ships.
Master Zaytsev… The voices are curious. She has our memories.
I frown and bring the revolving set of images onto the main screen. Mechs. Helicopters… There’s a small firefight in the distant region, but most of the people on the ground now are Special Forces.
We are legion, it calls mentally, and I almost swear it’s happy. Then I see the fast fleeing vessel.
“Zoom in.” Nothing happens. I bite my cheek. “Legion Spore?”
No response.
I type the command, and one of the Legion Spore’s eyes shift and focus until they reveal a small, black car flying into the distance. My chest tightens as I manually scan the ground for signs of the rebels. I don’t see anyone, so maybe they escaped. “What were the memories?”
Not her own. Disappointment. Stolen memories, used to cause pain. Are we a device for pain, Master Zaytsev?
Long story short, there’s some behind-the-scenes information that Tim doesn’t have in regards to those memories the Legion Spore saw. During an earlier mission, Jenna fell victim to a telepathic attack that left “memory seeds” in her head, seeds which attempt to weaken the victim’s mind.
Jenna is all too familiar with the problem these seeds can cause, and the memories—painful images of being transformed into a beast and the Legion Spore—tend to attack at the worst times. Such as right in the middle of a mission.
In Fractured Skies, she’s at the same base when Tim brings the Legion Spore there to attack, and her view of what’s happening is a little bit different:
We are legion. Telepathic voices, overlapping but discordant, boomed in my head, overshadowing every other thought. I clapped my hands over my ears, trying to plug out the sound, but that didn’t stop the wave of pain rolling through my skull. So many voices, so much pain…
I gasped, my eyes watering. Pain. I knew exactly what this was. The numerous voices and the sense of being one unit… “The Legion Spore,” I whispered. Chills ran down my spine. My body shook, all of my muscles feeling loose and scattered, as if there was nothing else around me but so many creatures, beastie and human, their bones knitting with metal. Their skin stretching to form a hull. A loss of sight, our vision was black, and all there could be was a terrible, hot, burning pain. We gritted our teeth, strained against our binds. The noise… that beating, beating pulse of hearts merging with clicking gears and digital clocks. Winding, binding, whimpering, crying…
“Jenna!”
We struggled against the metal grid. It held us tight. The bindings, the wires were part of our bone, part of our new skeleton, and radiation… terrible radiation unified us, our new sight—our powers, together, a legion of souls—
“Jenna! Listen to me!”
Listening. Commands… commands… Her senses, same as us. Her memories are ours… She is part of us. Meant to be part of us. She could complete us. Join us; we are legion…
“Jenna! Damn it, I need her to see me!” A firm hand gripped my chin and forced me to look into brown eyes—
Brown eyes… Lance’s eyes were green. Whose were these?
“She’s responding,” the face said. Slowly it came into focus, and I finally saw Quin, not the horrible visions. Cold sweat covered my aching body.
“Can we go invisible yet? I think we’re out of range, but still—” A fuzzy-looking Inese turned in the driver’s seat, looking back.
“Not yet. Let’s be sure we have her.” Quin held my chin tight so I couldn’t look away. “Can you hear me?”
I swallowed hard. My throat burned as if it was raw. “Yeah,” I whispered.
“Do you remember anything?”
“Yes.” I stared at his face. I should have been able to escape the memories. But how could I use Gwen’s teachings if I didn’t know it was a memory? It felt real, like only part of it was a memory, but part of it was new.
“What happened?” Quin released my chin and I looked around me. The base was out of sight and, thank the Community, so was the horrible vessel.
“A memory seed,” I said. “The creation of the Legion Spore. One of Lady Winters’ attacks.”
Quin frowned, his eyebrows quirked with worry. “You were saying ‘We are legion.’ ”
So there you have it!
A look at what was going on in Jenna’s mind when the Legion Spore spots the fleeing rebels.
This scene was fairly easy to match up, because we really don’t see a whole lot of overlap.
I think this might be the easiest way to work with multiple perspectives, because, while the larger event is the same, there’s not a whole lot of interaction.
In one of my other projects, I’m working on an alternate perspective for The Wind Mage and the Wolf, and there’s an entire scene of dialogue and action that overlap.
That one has been proving trickier, since I need to make sure that everything still happens the same, in the same order, and makes logical sense without contradicting the other.
For that one, I wrote the majority of the story, and left the overlapping scene for last. My current method for trying to bring them together is to strip out the fluff from the original scene, making note of what the POV character in the new story would see, and then rewriting the rest of the details from his point of view.
It’s tricky, but neat to play with different perspectives.
Too bad reprogramming a haunted airship doesn’t come with an instruction manual.
Halloween is almost here, and now, Whispers in the Code is back! And it’s free. 😀
As a way to try introducing more readers to the Glitch series I’ve made the first book perma-free (free for the forseeable future).
It’s available on most major retailers, too. That was one of the big things I’d been wanting to do for a while… pull it out of Kindle Unlimited and offer it wide again.
(The current exception to the wide retailer list is BN.com, where it hasn’t reuploaded yet, but I think they might still be dealing with the hacking that messed up their system. Unfortunately, that one’s out of my hands.)
(If it’s not showing up free in your region, please let me know)
The next two books are also available at the same retailers for $2.99 (and hopefully equivalent prices in other currencies) each.
That said, if you read Whispers in the Code and like it, the price on the complete collection is only $4.99, meaning you can get the complete story for less than if you buy the last two books separately. 😉
And, in case you’re not as familiar with the Glitch saga…
Here’s the blurb for the first book!
Too bad reprogramming a haunted airship doesn’t come with an instruction manual.
Blinded by love, Tim helps his girlfriend steal a valuable artifact from the rebellion—an artifact used by its rightful owners to create a monstrous, living airship that will end the war and restore world order.
Thanks to his ability to mentally control computers, his new allies bring him into their highest ranks…
With a catch.
They need his powers to complete what they started. The airship should have been devastating—a marvel of technology enhanced with super-human powers from the memory-wiped people they hooked into the vessel’s computer.
Instead, it has glitches.
Fragments of human memories wreak havoc in the airship’s internal code. Their tormented whispers invade Tim’s thoughts.
His superiors need him to figure out why.
To impress them, and thus secure his place at his girlfriend’s side, Tim needs to remove those “ghosts…”
Before one of the airship’s glitches traps his mind as just another whisper in the code.
Descend into the madness…
If this sounds like your kind of read, go grab a copy! It’s free. 😀
Stephanie Flint - Author and Artist 