Old Forests and Older Things Within

 

    It was supposed to have been a slow, relaxing, two-month holiday in Peru. Victor Martinez-Silva and his wife, Amy, had retired early, both in their fifties, and had decided to take a long trip to the country Victor's family had left when he was just a baby. Victor's work as a library historian had always left him itching to visit the ancient places of the world, and this was a first step into the unknown for them. When they left, their three kids, now grown, had wished them a fun vacation when they dropped them off at the airport.

Novella First Draft Complete!

 Just finished the first draft of a new novella with some of the same characters from The Hyacinth Rescue.  It comes out at a little under 22,000 words.  I tried to sneak in a little world-building as well as some fun twists and turns.  Now comes the part where I go through it a few times and add details, reduce fluff, and clean things up!

Edit: Missed Contact is out now! Preview it on Amazon!

Mendala, a short story (about 2200 words)

    I am a chronocourier. I find, procure, and deliver rare items for customers, but not by looking through antique shops or digging where X marks the spot on a map. I travel through time. Of course it isn't that simple. The first time mankind succeeded in time travel, we discovered that not only was it possible to travel from one time to another in the past or future, but that we could also jump from one timeline to another. In fact, it proved to be nearly impossible to do one without doing the other.

Progress?

 Ten thousand words into a new novella.  Probably a novella.  I probably won't keep going on it until it's novel length, based how far along I am on my plot outline.

It's interesting.  Getting back into longer pieces takes a lot more focus.  The first few thousand words of a new story flow enthusiastically, but after that, it takes a little more drive.

The new piece is a new adventure of the three main characters from my first novella, The Hyacinth Rescue.  It's still available on Smashwords and I think on Amazon too, and it still has my crappy hand-drawn cover.  Smashwords is the better deal, because you can pay whatever you want for it (even $0).

The thing about these is that I have a reasonably detailed world built behind them but I don't want to just write worldbuilding exposition, so I had to find a way to sneak some in.  So, in this new story, I've got a new character who has a few things to say about the world and its history.

My goal is to finish the novella in the next few weeks, hopefully in early December.

Edit: Missed Contact is available now!

Diffusion of Effect in Storytelling

 

A friend and I made a video a while back where we discussed Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. In addition to a great deal of criticism, which it deserves, we talked a bit about transmitting emotion through storytelling, brought on by the very different effects on the audience of two events in the movies. We contrasted the closeness and individual relatability of the reaction of Alan Grant to seeing his first dinosaur with the diffuse, amorphous reaction of a large crowd in the first Jurassic World movie.

For Sale As-Is, Clean Title (flash fiction)

 

“Hey, nice to meet you. Thanks for coming out. Yep, it's a vintage 1969 Camaro, though not a whole lot on it is original, as you can see... but it's not tricked out, either. Well, it does make it a lot more reliable this way. Yeah, the paint is fairly new. Thanks, we... uh... I thought it was a nice color, not something you see every day. The dark blue is nice, but the metallic highlights and the white stripe really make it pop, especially on a sunny day.

Too Quiet, a short story

 

My favorite way to spend an evening is with a good book, in my plush easy chair, by the French windows at the front of my house. The windows overlook my front yard, which has some bushes, a lush lawn, and a beautiful oak tree. I love to sit down, turn on my soft, warm reading lamp, and recline with a good story. Tonight was no different. My wife Sheila and I had gotten the kids, Tim and Emily, to sleep, and Sheila had turned in early. She had had an unusually long day at work and I had shooed her off to bed while I took care of the dinner dishes.

Getting (Back?) into the Swing

 Of course, it's been nine years or so since my little burst of writing at the lowest point of grad school, and that means I'm fairly well out of practice.  So I'm trying to aim for about one short story (3000 words or less) per week while I start working on another novella.

So far, I've done fairly well.  In a little over two weeks of actual working time, I've completed a short story of about 1700 words and another of about 1300 words.  Both will be posted here in the coming days.

As for the novella, I'm about 3400 words in and pushing forward!

I've discovered that actually remembering to put things up is actually more difficult than I thought it would be.

Welcome to the Horne

 

A short story I wrote after a very strange experience at a hotel in 2021.  Some of the events in this story actually happened, though obviously not the more supernatural bits.  I'm going for a Lovecraftian feel here, more the "dreamlike" Lovecraft than the "looming horror" Lovecraft, in this piece.  Without further ado:

Welcome to the Horne

by R. N. Kohn

I find myself in a crisis of perception. From a young age, I made myself a serious student of the natural world, and my belief that everything could be explained through careful observation and rigorous application of the scientific method led me to reject not only all mysticism, but also many of the harmless flights of fancy that my friends in youth deceived themselves with--much to my own dismay, at times. Yet now, after years of work in the natural sciences and a decent record of publication, I discover that I have experienced something I find impossible to describe through rational means. The vivid memories would be relatively simple to dismiss by themselves, as a particularly memorable dream perhaps, but the scars carved into my hands turn that vividness into an irresistible urge to believe that those memories are real, although I cannot find a suitable explanation for them as they stand in my mind.

I Guess I'm Back!

 My last post here was back in 2014, and I guess I'll just give a little background.  Around then, I was finishing up my Ph. D. in physics, or at least trying to, and things were bleak.  So I had spent some time writing to help deal with the bleakness.

By the end of 2014, it became clear that yes, I was actually going to graduate, and so I threw myself into writing my dissertation and didn't really have time to do fiction works anymore.  I finished my Ph. D. in the spring of 2015 and got a job in the fall as a real, no-kidding professional scientist.

This brings us to today.  If you look at my Blogger name (or whatever it's called), "Liberty's Advocate," you might guess I'm a freedom-loving guy.  So working as a professional scientist was fun, but it was also working (essentially) for the government (technically I was a contractor), and I didn't want to do that forever.

Then 2020 happened and it became clear that the government would do horrible things to us, seemingly for kicks and giggles.  I spent 2020 and 2021 becoming even more certain that I needed to get away from serving the government.  By the end of 2021, it looked like they were going to demand I give up my medical privacy to keep my job, and I declared my intentions to leave before that became mandatory.

It turned out that it didn't become mandatory.  The drop-dead date got pushed back a couple of times, then disappeared.  But I was already moving along this path.

So, as of the start of October 2022, they found a replacement for me and, after helping to train him on the experiment I was working on, I'm out and I'm going to be working on writing up a bunch of projects I've been building up and sitting on while I had a full-time job.  So anyone who might happen to read this blog can expect to see new pieces start appearing.

Sorry for the lengthy re-introduction, but it looks like I'm back in the fiction-writing game!  I'll be doing some non-fiction too, but I'm not sure what exactly I'm going to do with it.