I’m done writing about other people’s books and commenting on live in covid time. For now, I’m writing about my books, my work, and not my day job work writing gamized learning for a major cloud computing company.
First, I submitted two “legacy” book to the Eric Hoffman Book Awards: “The Crystal Fishbowl” and “Megabyte Rush.”
Second, I’m doing a final pass on “The Separation,” the first book in a four-part series. I’m weaving in these words:
- The slides: the wilies, the creeps, a feeling of crawling
- Ministry of Public Security (military/police force)
- Clinker
- Enforcer
- Enforcement Officer
- Quench: depression medication, dep-meds
- Dian-nao: computer in Mandarin
The Separation (synopsis)
Almost three hundred years since the Dark Times of 2056, when five greedy families precipitated a worldwide stock market collapse causing mass starvation, the Project for Progeny (Pro-Prog) in the Shanghai Sphere has proved ineffective. Pro-Prog, a desperate response to the population decline, is where humans are born, raised, and mated to strengthen the diminishing gene pool. Yet few people choose to stay at eighteen to bear and raise children. Everyone else must leave. Grieving family and home, the exiled succumb to dep-med induced cancer by late middle-age.
The Separation is the tale of Frances Murphy, a forensic scientist and shaman who’s exiled from the Shanghai Sphere upon her youngest child eighteenth birthday. Her dismay turns to anger when she becomes addicted to dep-meds. Post-addiction, she searches for the answer she already knows: The Separation must end. Betrayed by her uncle, the High Council President, she sacrifices all to become the voice of the Resistance.