It’s time for a new book, everyone! Between is available wherever books are sold. For the first week or so it’ll be $0.99, so if you want it cheap, get it early! After that, the price will go back up to $3.99.
Here’s the blurb:
Between is a new sci-fi/fantasy adventure from the mind behind The Book of Deacon, Free-Wrench, and Big Sigma.
Philo Middleton wasn’t having a very good day. It began with him waking up strapped to a chair inside a strange, high-tech chamber. His mind was wiped clean, even his own name unfamiliar to him. And yet somehow things went sharply downhill from there.
After being collected by Rill, a three-headed sea serpent with a curious set of dispositions, he learned he had somehow found his way to a place known by its many displaced residents as The Between. It wasn’t so much a location as a lack of location. Time did not exist there. The concepts of direction, distance, and gravity were subjective at best. Worst of all, with laws of physics dictated largely by whim, science and technology were nearly worthless. Those with a mind for magic held all the power, and those unfortunate ‘science-types?’ They did what they were told.
Philo was quickly joined by a cast of characters unified only in their desires to survive and one day return to their homes. Along with Rill, he soon found himself either aligned or at odds with creatures like Trixie the mechanically-inclined demon, Mr. Stubbs the scheming hobgoblin, and the vampiric Duke. They worked as the all-purpose henchmen known as ‘fetchers’ for the adorably nefarious Overseer.
If he wanted to survive, Philo would have to find a way to make himself useful, and if he wanted to escape, he would have to find people he could trust. Too bad the only thing rarer than a useful science-type was a trustworthy fetcher.
—
This was a fun one. Not what I’d call a major release, because let’s face it, Book of Deacon and Big Sigma are where my bread is buttered, but fun nonetheless. If you’ve not been following closely, then you should know that an unedited version of the first 2/3rds of this story was released on a weekly basis on Wattpad a while back, but when it failed to get traction over there I sidelined it, then finally decided to finish it this year.
As I’ve said before, this was the way I put “The Bad Idea Exercise” to work for me. If I got a bad idea lodged in my head, I would write it down just to clear my brain so I could move on. Often I would just throw that idea way. (Call it preemptive editing.) But sometimes I felt there was the kernel of quality buried somewhere in there, so I’d hang onto it. Eventually I had tens of thousands of words mounded up in that document, so I decided to see if it could be made into something resembling a cohesive plot. And it turns out, yes! I could!
I hope you like the story. And while you’re reading, why not play one of these little games?
Crossover Watch: This story has two subtle-to-not-so-subtle elements that are explicitly crossovers from the Big Sigma and Book of Deacon Universes. You might even spot a Free-Wrench reference.
Origin Hunting: Most of the characters/events in the story and several whole lines were originally rejected ideas from other stories. As you read, maybe try to figure out where a given character came from!
I hope you pick up Between and enjoy it. If you do, let me know. Better yet, let everyone else know with a nice review!