Doc Harrison and the Apocalypse

I don't know if you knew this, but moving into a new house takes a long time. I thought I was moved in two weeks ago, but no. I had not yet even begun to move.

Anyway, I'm more or less settled in now, so it's back to the blog for me! Coming up next:

Monday: News about paperbacks / T-shirts / my nega-self who keeps slipping into this dimension, whispering secrets into my ear, and stealing my garden gnomes.

Wednesday: News about Cradle and OKAK!

Friday: News about short stories, audiobooks, and the plague of frogs that has so frustrated us all.

I noticed some blog comments saying that I had abandoned the blog and moved over to Reddit; that's not true! I've been exactly the same level of MIA over there too. But I'm back now and ready to respond to all your emails, comments, posts, letters, calls, texts, telegrams, dream tablets, psychic pulses, whispersongs, thought-worms, coded runic transmissions, frantic scratches on cave walls, and bottled messages in a more-or-less timely fashion. Just as before!

From the ashes I have risen, and now (instead of discussing all those other things I've listed above) I'd like to start by recommending a book: Doc Harrison and the Apocalypse, by Peter Telep.

If you follow my Facebook page, you may have seen me mention this before. Peter Telep was one of my writing professors in college; he's been a professional writer since the world was young, he's written more than fifty novels, and he's largely the reason I didn't abandon creative writing and start trying to break into advertising.

No joke. I would have hated it.

He used to write a bunch of the Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell, and Ghost Recon novels, if you read any of those, and he wrote some books for Tom Clancy before Tom Clancy's death. He's the real deal.

Now he's branching from military fiction (back) into sci-fi, and he's doing it as an independent author! Much like me, but with way more skill and experience!

Doc Harrison and the Apocalypse is a YA sci-fi that reminded me of Maximum Ride or I Am Number Four more than anything else: a kid finds out that humans inhabit more planets than just Earth, one of those planets has been destroyed, and he has to go on a high-speed adventure across multiple planets to prevent Earth from suffering the same fate.

It reads as much like fantasy as it does like science fiction; a lot of the technology the "aliens" use is based on an organ they have that humans don't (called a "wreath") that allows them to project themselves into a shared consciousness. Kind of like a magical space-Internet made of dreams.

All that said, it is sci-fi. I know you all like action-oriented fantasy with cool new worlds and high-octane plot, or you wouldn't be reading this blog right now. What about something adjacent to that, but set in modern Earth and also space?

I don't know, because I don't know you. However, if that sounds cool, check it out! I want every indie SFF author to do well, because the more good indie sci-fi and fantasy there is on Kindle, the more readers we can all draw in...

...to our webs. Where we will devour them.

-Will

P.S. I'm also wide open to questions once again. I actually spent a lot of time since Blackflame doing world-building on both Cradle and Elder Empire...with some Traveler's Gate thrown in there as well. Because I can make up new world concepts while moving boxes. I can answer questions now that I couldn't before! What fun!

P.P.S. Which questions can I answer now, you ask? Not that one!