Just a quick update. I have to conserve my phone battery.
My family is safe so far. But all of New Orleans is without power. Catastrophic flooding north of Lake Pontchartrain.
Don’t expect to see me online much for a while.
Month: August 2021
Hurricane Comin’
Hurricane Ida, right on the anniversary of Katrina. I hate how that happens. The end of August is cursed.
I live in New Orleans and went through Katrina, if you didn’t know. (It affected the drafting of The Pono Way, but that’s another story.)
That is going to affect my rather desultory book launch. As I will shortly run out of power, and possibly have to evacuate. Thank goodness for cloud computing.
I’ll do what I can before the power goes out. We think we can hunker down and ride it out. Where could we go, anyway? Every relative we could go to is in the storm track, some worse than us.
I’f you’re of a spiritual bent, prayers to Our Lady of Prompt Succor, the divine protectress of New Orleans, are welcome.
Otherwise, happy thoughts.
I’ll check in tomorrow. The storm is predicted to make landfall Sunday night.
It’s ALIVE!
My new book is live in paper on Amazon! Check it out!
Still working on the ebook.
If you want to help me with it, the best thing you can do now is buy a copy. Or, if you’ve already read it, write a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Even just a couple lines greatly improves the book’s rep in the eyes of the almighty Algorithm. Especially now that it is new and fresh.
Incredible feeling. The one thing I actually wanted to accomplish this year is publish this book. And now I have!
Cover Reveal!
Today’s the day! I said I would do it and I am. So happy to be able to reveal the cover for my next novel, THE PONO WAY!
I’m very happy with this cover. I got it pre-made from The Book Cover Zone, with a couple tweaks. Both of my covers so far are pre-made, and I’m very happy with both of them.
For an indie author, a cover needs to signify your genre/subgenre of fiction clearly in a small thumbnail, and I think this cover does that well. If you Google “solarpunk” in Image Search, you quickly understand the aesthetic — futuristic white cities with lots of greenery tumbling everywhere. I think his cover captures that very well.
The PONO WAY should be live early next week! Publishing this book was the one thing I actually wanted to accomplish this year. So I feel PRETTY DAMN PLEASED with myself right now.
Have a great weekend, everybody!
Inching Closer
Still a couple fiddly layout bits to fix with my manuscript, and then it will be ready to publish! I’m so stoked! Publishing THE PONO WAY was the one thing I actually wanted to accomplish this year.
This picture is much what I imagine my island-state, Pono, to look like, although this is a coastal city and my Pono is in the deep ocean. This is an architectural concept of a floating city called Oceanix. It’s synchronistic how it popped up in the news as I was drafting my novel.
Tomorrow I will share the cover reveal! Meanwhile, here is the blurb for Amazon. What do you think?
A refugee crisis tests a utopian island community to its limits.
In 2050, the United States of America finally crumbled. Jake Weintraub’s family fled the burned-out ruins of Chicago for the safety of the artificial island steading of Pono. Now grown, Jake works as an independent journalist, but the horrors of the Chicago River Riots still haunt him.
As Pono watches, safe in the Pacific Ocean, the successor West Coast state of Cascadia collapses under a further series of catastrophes. Thousands of desperate refugees arrive on Pono’s shores – homeless, stateless, and hungry.
Jake throws himself into covering their story, even as their plight evokes memories of his own trauma and flight. Can Pono, a carefully constructed island society, accept this influx of strangers? Or will this crisis tear Ponoan society apart?
THE PONO WAY is a solarpunk science fiction novel in the vein of Kim Stanley Robinson’s THREE CALIFORNIAS or THE FIFTH SACRED THING by Starhawk. Find out what happens by buying your copy today!
Solarpunk Links
Here, as promised, are some links where you can learn more about solarpunk, as a sci-fi genre and as a social movement.
Read this Notes toward a Solarpunk Manifesto from Project Hieroglyph for a better sense of the genre, and the art and politics that arise from it.
Here’s the Wikipedia entry.
A introductory article on Ozy.com.
A reading list on Goodreads.com. (And here’s me on Goodreads while I’m at it, wink wink.)
An image gallery from Deviant Art
And finally I have a Solarpunk Pinterest board you can check out here.
Atlantis Fallen 