I’m just about halfway through (actually, a bit further) the first draft of my latest book, In Her Name: First Contact. While there’s obviously a lot of work left to do, both to finish the initial draft and then begin the oh-so-fun editing process, I wanted to give interested readers a sneak peek or two at what’s coming.
Below is a snippet of the first draft, followed by a link to a PDF file for the remainder of the chapter. Please keep in mind as you’re reading that this is the very first draft! So it may be a bit rough around the edges. Enjoy!
Commander Owen McClaren was extremely tense, although a casual observer would never have thought so. The captain of the survey vessel TNS Aurora was one of the best in the fleet, and to his crew he had never appeared anything but calm and cool. Even when one of the ship’s newly refitted reactors had suffered a breach during their last run into drydock, McClaren’s deep voice had never wavered, his fatherly face had never betrayed a hint of fear or apprehension as he personally directed the engineering watch to contain the breach. A man of unusual physical and moral courage, he was the perfect captain for the exploratory missions the Aurora and her sister ships mounted into deep space in search of new homes for humanity.
For McClaren, though, jumps were different. He had made thousands of jumps in his twenty-year career, but every single one was like the very first: as the transpace sequence countdown wound down to zero, his heart began to pound. It wasn’t fear that made him tense, although there were certainly enough things that could go wrong with a jump to make fear a natural enough reaction.
No, what made the forty-three-year-old former middleweight boxing champion of the Terran Naval Academy tightly grip the arms of his command chair wasn’t fear. It was anticipation. To Aurora’s captain, every jump, particularly out here in deep space, was a winning lottery ticket, the discovery of a lifetime. No matter where the Aurora wound up, as long as she arrived safely, there was bound to be a wealth of astrogational information to help human starships navigate ever further from the epicenter of Man’s origins: Earth. And on rare occasions, precious jewels – habitable planets – were to be found. McClaren was currently the survey fleet’s leading “ace,” with twelve habitable planets to his credit in return for nearly fifteen years of ship-time, sailing through uncharted space…
Read the rest of chapter one >>
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#1 by Jack W. Regan on June 21st, 2009 - 1:48 pm
I like this! Obviously rough, as it’s the draft, but I dig your writing style. Easy to read. Good work.
#2 by Michael R. Hicks on June 21st, 2009 - 1:52 pm
Thanks, Jack! Appreciate the comment!