MOON climbs the rankings
MOON, the first book in the Gemini Series has climbed further in Amazon’s rankings and reached number 4 in the Action and Adventure Short Stories section.
More details about the series on the books page.
Ranked by Amazon
A few days after releasing MOON it’s showed up as number 23 in Amazons ranking for free books in
Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Action & Adventure > Short Stories
That’s a great start for a few days out in the wild.
The fourth book.
It exists! But only as notes and scribbles in a pad of paper at the moment.
A few things seem certain,
- it’ll involve pyramids
- we’re still in Egypt
- there’s aliens – will we see them?
It’s next on the list to pick up again as soon as the website is sorted.
And book 5? It won’t be in Egypt. I think I know where but that’s for another day.
ANCIENT – the third book
How can you not end up in Egypt at some point? It has everything. Mysterious beginnings, buildings that defy any modern construction techniques, stories of mummies and tombs and curses.
ANCIENT takes us there. It starts out as a routine dig. The sort of thing that happens each year for university lecturers and their students. Most are happy if they find a two inch high statue of the cat god Bast. Not Peter Merchant. He’s put up with that for years knowing there was more until his brush uncovers … I’ll have to stop there or it’ll give away the story.
I personally think ancient Egypt was up to its neck with aliens. You only have to look at the paintings. Their artists were skilled. They knew what they were doing when they painted someone with blue or green skin or a birds head. Ahh, it’s symbolic say the experts. Or, they’re wearing ceremonial masks or makeup. Really? How do they know, where they there? Is it any more of a stretch to consider they weren’t native to earth? One thing is for sure, there are lots more questions than answers.
STORMS – the second book
MOON was originally planned to be a standalone short story. As the writing progressed it felt wrong to just end it. It was a complete story and would work as such. I hate cliff-hangers that steamroll you into buying the next book, but there was more to explore in MOON.
I can’t spoil it, but the ending raised big questions of ‘what next?’. And so I developed it into the next part STORMS. The story jumps a few years and takes place on the earth, in and around Los Angeles, but has connections back to MOON. I don’t specify an exact year but it’s the early to mid 1980’s and I had to do frequent trips to Google to check computers and equipment I have in the book were available at the time. It’s easy to forget that the cell phone in our pockets had its origins in briefcase sized radio telephones.
It’s set in the scientific world of astronomy (you don’t need a degree to follow the book though). Are they all highbrow academics? No. They have to try and climb up the greasy pole of promotion like any other occupation. Especially so if you are a woman like Dr Carla Richards.
It was great fun to write and I hope you enjoy it too. You can read more on the books page.
MOON – the first book
It all started from a ‘what if?’ question. What if an Apollo lunar mission got stranded? That then led onto working out why they were stranded. What had happened? What would they do?
From that came the kernel of the idea that grew into the MOON book. I’ll be the first to admit it’s not 100% accurate to every design feature on a Lunar Module but it’s close enough I hope not to spoil the enjoyment. After all it is fiction 🙂
I remember watching to first moon landings live on a black and white television in a primary school classroom. It had fold out shields around the screen to try and keep out some of the sunlight – couldn’t have been very bright screens back then. I was probably a bit too young to really get the significance but I do remember building a Saturn V rocket from a cardboard cut-out type of kit. I was very proud of it when I’d finished.
You can read more about the book and the others in the series on the books page.