2012 Lunar Contact

2012-Lunar Contact

What happens when an alien civilization arrives in our solar system?
What happens when they are so advanced that they don't have time to waste on a primitive back water planet like Earth?
What happens when their activities and interests threaten our civilization?
Is this the 2012 apocalypse the Mayans predicted?
Seven brave crew members in a highly modified space shuttle set off to make contact and stop the aliens. Their brief mission turns into a life and death struggle none of them bargained for, but the fate of Earth could depend on their success.

2012-Lunar Contact

Available in Kindle eBook edition

April 2012

Check out the new Short Stories page as well

 If anyone finds a typo in my latest book, 2012 Lunar Contact, and is the first person to email me with details of the typo, I will refund their money and more. I will send them a $5 gift card from Amazon. The book sells for $2.99 online. I don’t claim to be perfect, but I promise my readers that I will always proof my books personally and with the aid of at least two other proof readers. 
I challenge other authors to match my offer. 

The email address is at the end of the book.

Inspiration for Sci-Fi

Inspiration for 2012 Lunar Contact

The other day, while slurping up spaghetti in Southlake, my brother asked me where I got my inspiration for all the weird creatures and exotic space ships that I put in my science fiction stories. It's a good question. Some are obviously from my biology and aviation  backgrounds and some just appear out of thin air, usually while in the shower or trying to get to sleep. They often just pop into my head, like the creature described in 2012 Lunar Contact, as part of the warrior race. The creature was an amalgamation of many Earthly animals. A round mouth surrounded by teeth is reminiscent of a starfish's mouth. The bony head ornamentation is like that found on many dinosaur skeletons and the antlers of many mammals. The only truly unique feature of the warrior alien is his set of four eyes. One pair set close together in the front for focusing on prey and the other set widely spaced to provide good peripheral vision in defense from other predators.

 

Other times I get stuck and have to search for ideas and inspiration. I often turn to old sci-fi movies, but more and more often I fuel my imagination with postings from CGHUB. On CGHUB professional artists post their work in search of clients. The above black and white image is from  a creature modeled by DellTree. I was amazed at how closely it resembled the creature in my imagination. The color painting of the space ship above is The Drag by Sparth. When I saw it I immediately began to wonder about the large circular portions of the ship. The torus, doughnut, would be needed if a ship used a large particle accelerator. My imagination jumped to the possibilities of using charged particles from the accelerator as weapons, particle beams to assault other space ships. Charged particle beams would be very effective against a robotic army's electronics. 

I had already described my hero as designing his own simple graphene armor with double colt .45s stuck in his belt, when I stumbled across this image from adonihs titled Gabriel. It helped me fill in the details in my own mind of how everything would look and function. It also inspired me to have the hero design heavier armor for more protection. Half the fun in writing is day dreaming and even the frustrating days, when nothing seems to come to you or you get stuck on a character, can turn out fine if you look at other artists and their work. Even if nothing clicks, its great to enjoy the art of others. 

I hope you will take the time to read my new book and let your imagination wander in a new world filled with possibilities. Possibilities that don't violate physics, but might seem like magic.

2012 Lunar Contact available on Kindle

 Amazon

ZOMBIES

What is it about zombies that we love so much? Is it the simple life style? Bash a zombie, stay alive-get bit and die the death of the undead.
Is it the horror that is not so scary and actually a little tongue in cheek? After all, how hard is it to escape from a monster that moves at a slow shuffle and constantly groans and moans to let everyone know he is near?

Or is it the opportunity to vent our primitive violent impulses on someone that is not actually a person anymore? Beat 'em, stab 'em, shoot 'em or decapitate them, it's all OK. There is no moral dilemma in abusing a zombie.

Or perhaps it is the basic special effects that gross us out. Blood spurting, dripping out of horrid mouths, guts spilling out, green and slimy on the floor, these are all gross, but act like an eyeball magnet. We still look.

We jump, we laugh, we get grossed out, we hold our breaths in anticipation of what the actors don't see coming. Maybe it is all the emotions that zombies bring out in us. Maybe we just like feeling the rush and feeling alive. Few 9-5 jobs make us feel as alive as zombies do.

Typos

Typos, Typos, Typos
I Hate Typos

As books become electronic bits on portable devices, it seems that typos are becoming more prevalent. It used to be expected from the smaller publishing houses that cranked out quick cheap paperbacks and it used to consist mainly of misspellings. However, with the advent of computers and spell checkers, now the typographical errors are bigger and it seems more numerous. Not just misspellings, but whole words that don't belong. They seem to infest not only the small publishers, but the major publishing houses and top selling authors, as well.

Popular books like Breaking Dawn of the Twilight series, the Harry Potter series and others, even have websites dedicated to listing the typos with comments from their fans like, "It's making me CRAZY." Why are typos so annoying? They disrupt the flow of the experience and often confuse the reader with a sentence that does not make sense or is ambiguous. It can also completely change the meaning of a sentence, like the classic Bible printing error in which the commandment dealing with adultery stated, "Thou shalt commit adultery." Oops, that typo earned the entire printing the nickname of the "Wicked Bible."

Typos are nothing new, they used to be called the "copyist's mistake" or "scribal error" before the printing press. More recently the terms "fat finger syndrome" and "thumbo" have become synonyms of typo as people type on tiny onscreen keyboards. But, they are becoming so common in the form of duplication, omission and substitution, it makes me wonder if there are any "real person" proof readers anymore or do publishers just rely on text editing software. A computer cannot distinguish between the appropriateness of "the whirl pool at Niagara Falls," and  "the world pool at Niagara Falls" or between "people evacuating in the middle of the street," and "people ejaculating in the middle of the street." Both were typos found in major news stories. Do writers even read what they write? I recently read a book with a great story and excellent characters, but the typos were so numerous I put it down and never finished it. Needless to say I won't be buying the sequel. That is why I am making the following offer:

If anyone finds a typo in my latest book, 2012 Lunar Contact, and is the first person to email me with details of the typo, I will refund their money and more. I will send them a $5 gift card from Amazon. The book sells for $2.99 online. I don’t claim to be perfect, but I promise my readers that I will always proof my books personally and with the aid of at least two other proof readers. I challenge other authors to match my offer.