Free Book Promotion! RED SANDS (TSR, 1988) 5 Days Only, June 1 thru 5, 2025.

 Free Book Promotion! RED SANDS, an early original TSR novel by Tonya Carter Cook and I will be available as a free Kindle ebook download starting Sunday, June 1, 2025, 12:00 AM PDT. The free period ends Thursday, June 5, 2025, 11:59 PM PDT. Enjoy!

Click here for Kindle's page.

Lomographs

"Lomography is a photographic style which involves taking spontaneous photographs with minimal attention to technical details. Lomographic images often exploit the unpredictable, non-standard optical traits of toy cameras (such as light leaks and irregular lens alignment), and non-standard film processing techniques for aesthetic effect. Lomography is named after the Soviet-era cameras produced by the Leningradskoye Optiko-Mekhanicheskoye Obyedinenie (LOMO)." [wikipedia.org]

Recent images made with a genuine LOMO "Smena" camera. 35 mm color Fuji film, ISO 100.

1. Ducks versus the outer darkness

2. Smoke? Clouds?

3. Davis Library, University of North Carolina

4. Iron smelter

5. University Methodist Church,

Chapel Hill NC

6. McCorkle Place, 

University of North Carolina

7. Liminal space: a hotel hallway in

Fairfax, VA

8. Storms. Wrightsville Beach, NC

9. Iron Pour, Durham NC

10. Horizon

11. Iron Smelter at full blast

12. It's only a model.

FIANCHETTO Now Available as a Kindle e-Book!

After some years and many revisions, I've finally opted to put FIANCHETTO out as an original e-book for Amazon Kindle. I first started the story in 2017, basing it on an idea I had as far back as high school in the 1970s. As the early drafts grew longer and longer, I realized for practical reasons FIANCHETTO would end up as two longish novels, each about 130,000 words long. The new e-book is Book 1, and covers Victor Leventon's contest with the #2 chess playing AI in the world at that time, ARAKHNA. Book 2, which is 80% written, deals with Victor's ultimate contest with the chess champion machine, FORT. If Book 1 does well, Book 2 will follow.

The long gestation period brought with it some unusual problems. Terminology, for one thing; in 2017, "AI" had a more remote, science-fictional flavor than it does now. By 2025, the term is so ubiquitous as to be meaningless for story purposes. Calling the sentient machines ARAKHNA and FORT AI doesn't convey the breadth of their intellect, and equates them with current chat bots and graphics synthesizers.

I needed a new, more advanced term and came up with énamyalic (from the Greek ένα μυαλό, “one mind,”) to describe devices which achieve actual sentience. Maybe the term will catch on. I also had to reset the timeline of the novel further into the future. Early drafts set FIANCHETTO in the year 2055, with flashbacks in the 2020s. That didn't seem enough of a time gap between now and then, so I bumped it forward 10 years to 2065. The excerpts from the novel I've posted on my blog reflect the former chronology.

2065 may seem too far, but I consciously tried to make it feel both familiar and different. We'll see if I succeeded. Futurism in fiction is hard; that's why SF stories from the recent past date so quickly. All fiction, regardless of time and setting, is about the era it was written in. What happens between 2025 and 2065 I cannot guess, but I've tried to make the novel coherent and believable.

One caveat: though some of the flashbacks involve children, this is not a YA novel. It has adult themes and activities. If it were a movie it would at least be PG-13, and in some places, R. Sexual activity, violence, language, etc. etc. 

Here's the eBook link: FIANCHETTO.

The Print-on-Demand trade paperback: POD FIANCHETTO.

Postscript: Someone called "Paul B Thompson" has several horror story collections on Amazon. These are not my work.