I'm a writer! Honest, Officer!

Still Falling on Audible, iTunes and Amazon

The Audible edition of Still Falling is doing very well on Audible.com. It has far exceeded my expectations. As I write this post it has 112 reviews with an average rating of 4.2 Stars out of 5.

I mention this now because the second book in the Solstice 31 Saga: The Broken Cage will be out in a couple weeks!

There are also five FREE short stories in the Solstice 31 Saga.

As always, if you want a signed copy of either or both, made out of actual dead trees, email me at info@baytirus.com!

--Andrew Tell is an awesome narrator! Check it out!

Fast Friday Indie Interviews: Louis Lamoureux

Tell me about you, Lou.

Louis Lamoureux

When I was a child, I devoured books at the library. Our local library had a great collection of Middle Grade books. I remember rows and rows of Hardy Boys mysteries, but my favorite were the Tom Swift books: Boy inventor creates devices to solve a problem and stop bad guys. Sprinkle in some Star Trek reruns and you have the recipe for a boy who grows up to get an engineering degree.

While getting that degree, I took a semester long course on Sci-Fi that forever changed my life. I was introduced to William Gibson's Neuromancer. This was the first time I noticed how the construction of a novel affected the story (Years later, I'd read Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and realize that the language also affected the story). To get through some personal issues, I wrote a book while in college. I knew it wasn't good, but didn't know why or how to improve it.

My kidneys failed in 2000. I was one of the lucky ones, my mom stepped up and donated a kidney for me. I was sick for a couple of years before the transplant and biked to alleviate the symptoms, but the surgery fixed me right up. I had so much energy, I felt like Superman. High on painkillers and a normal red blood cell count, I signed up for a bike trip across the country. I was an ultracyclist, spending hours in the saddle enjoying nature until my disease came back and destroyed my transplant in 2008. I was forced onto Dialysis, which I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. It's cruel and barbaric, meant to keep a patient just barely alive. I was forced to sit in a chair for hours on end. I found a story I wrote for that Sci-Fi class in college and crawled inside to escape the hell around me.

My sister donated a kidney for me in 2010. I was back to feeling like Superman and I had a 100,000 word novel completed. I joined a writer's group to figure out how to make it better and released it several years later as Recalled To Duty.

Tell me about your current Book:

When a terrorist blows up bridges across the Mississippi, Joshua Kaine must rebuild them and capture the terrorist, before America's economy grinds to a halt and more people die.

Synthetic Salvation: One man's quest for redemption.

Joshua Kaine, a genetically engineered supervillain, undergoes surgical rehabilitation and is placed in the care of overzealous FBI agent Iris Halstrom. Iris would rather put a bullet in his head than see him go free on a technicality, and Joshua thinks that's pretty much what he deserves.

Joshua can't atone for his sins while chained to a desk job. He buys a bicycle, ditches Iris, and sets off to find salvation. Along the way, he's judged by the color of his skin, harassed by police, and assaulted by racists.
When a terrorist blows up bridges over the Mississippi, jeopardizing America's fragile recovery, Joshua agrees to spearhead the reconstruction effort and vows to catch the saboteur. Can he do both before the villain strikes again? And when he catches the terrorist, can he convince her to change sides or will she kill him instead?

A sequel to the novel Recalled to Duty.

What are you working on now? 

A fantasy trilogy.  When a portal opens, letting giant wolves through to our world, Beauregard Kingfisher gains magical powers that are unleashed when he sleepwalks. He must defeat the wolves and recover the amulet holding open the portal or his world will be overrun with wolves and demons.
What is your favorite beverage while you write? As a transplant recipient, I rarely drink alcohol and as an athlete, I tend to avoid soda. Nine point nine times out of ten, I have a very tall glass of ice water on my desk as I write.

What is your favorite Website?

My favorite website/App is Zwift.com. Riding indoors is inherently boring and mentally harder than riding on the road. I can plug my trainer into Zwift and it creates a virtual world on the screen for me to pedal through. I can do a workout, compete against people from across the globe, or just ride along. I've been able to do some pretty impressive distances that would have seemed unthinkable before Zwift came along. As an aside, ultradistance cycling is good mental training for writing a novel. They both require stamina, dedication, and an iron will to finish.

Links:

Email: Lou@TransplantAthlete.com
Amazon: Synthetic Salvation and  Recalled to Duty
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/U94llamoure/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/u94_llamoure

The Oatmeal!

The Oatmeal is a great comic. This one shows why I never wait for inspiration. I plan, outline and never wait for the fickle muse to help me out.

Quotes of the week

I think it’s important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.
—Annie Proulx

When you're a writer sometimes you have to spend time poking at part of yourself...
—Vikram Chandra

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
—Umberto Eco

Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.
—Kim Addonizio

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
—G K Chesterton

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.
—Leo Tolstoy

It ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.
—Jack Kerouac

Never judge a book by its movie.
—J.W. Eagan

Good artists borrow, great artists steal
—Pablo Picasso

An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.
—Salinger

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
—Arthur Miller

Art that Inspires

--This is the kind of image that inspired me as a kid. It would draw me to Scifi.

Read this week: Split Second

This week I read Split Second by Douglas Richards.

Description from Amazon.

What if you found a way to send something back in time? But not millions of years back, to the age of the dinosaur. Not even a minute back. What if you could only send something back a fraction of a second? Would this be of any use? You wouldn't have nearly enough time to right a wrong, change an event, or win a lottery.

Nathan Wexler is a brilliant physicist who thinks he's found a way to send matter a split second back into the past. But before he can even confirm his findings, he and his wife-to-be, Jenna Morrison, find themselves in a battle for their very lives. Because while time travel to an instant earlier seems useless, Jenna comes to learn that no capability in history has ever been more profound or far-reaching.

Now, as Jenna fights to defeat the powerful forces arrayed against her, nothing less than the fate of humanity hangs in the balance. . .

I really enjoyed his book AMPED and was not disappointed with Split Second. It is a new twist that addresses a small time travel paradox in physics and the motion in the universe.

It's fast paced and doesn't have too much handwavium or boring exposition.

--I liked it.