Yay! In Her Name: First Contact is now available in print on Amazon! It took about a week from being cleared by the printer to showing up in the catalog, but it’s there and available for purchase. If you haven’t already, please be sure to check out the free sample chapters.

Enjoy!

The first proof copy for In Her Name: First Contact is on its way from Lightning Source, Inc. – yay! I’m not sure when it will get here, but hopefully soon. Once I review it and it gets approved, it should be available for purchase on Amazon, B&N, and a bunch of other sites, although it will probably take a week or two to percolate through the retailer databases.

It’s also available on Amazon Kindle and Mobipocket in ebook format!

After hamming through over 156,000 words in fifteen weeks, I’d like to announce that the first draft of In Her Name: First Contact is finished!

I was very happy with the way the draft went, and it certainly came along quickly enough. I was originally planning to take a full year to have the initial draft done, and writing that much in odd hours here and there (with a few marathon weekend sessions) came as a complete, but pleasant, surprise.

There’s still obviously a lot of work left to go in revisions and editing, but at this point I’m hoping that I can make my goal of having it out on the street no later than early September (of 2009!).

So, stay tuned!

Here’s the rough draft of chapter four!

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“Lord of All,” McClaren breathed as the alien gently shoved his naked body through the perfectly circular hole, about three meters across, that they’d cut in the side of his ship. He had thought at first that they were going to push him into hard vacuum through some sort of invisible barrier, for there was nothing visible between the Aurora’s hull and that of the enemy vessel that now stood very close alongside. But he had seen that there were warriors at a few spots along the invisible gangway that somehow linked the ships, and that had held his fear in check. Barely.

But my God, the view, he thought as he crossed over the threshold from the metal deck into the void, suddenly leaving the ship’s artificial gravity behind, his stomach momentarily dropping away into weightlessness. He could see down the Aurora’s flank, noting grimly where the enemy warriors had boarded his ship. And then there was the enemy ship – huge! – that didn’t look a thing like any spacecraft ever made by humankind. The smooth metal (he assumed it was metal) of the hull gleamed a deep but brilliant green, with contoured dark gunmetal-colored ports and blisters where he assumed some sort of hatches or weapons were mounted. Unlike a human ship, which was a patchwork of plates, the surface of the alien ship’s hull was as smooth as a still pond: he couldn’t see any joints or welds, rivets, screws or other fastenings as he got closer. It was as if the hull was one gigantic sheet of…whatever it was made of. The craft was all graceful curves, as if it were designed to fly in an atmosphere, with none of the boxy fittings and other angular projections typical of human ships. Looking forward, he saw that giant runes were inscribed along its raked prow, perhaps proclaiming the ship’s name, whatever it might be.

And all around him: the stars. As if his hand had a will of its own, he reached out to touch them. He knew they were billions of miles away, but they seemed so close. The alien sun burned brightly mere millions of miles away, and a star far brighter than the other stars proclaimed itself the planet the four warships had come from. He had been on plenty of spacewalks, but this wasn’t the same. Maybe it was the emotional exhaustion of the last hour or so since the alien ships had been spotted. So little time on the scale of his life, but an eternity for those who had lived through it.

Read the rest of Chapter 4 >>

The usual caveat: it’s a very rough draft! Enjoy!

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“Sir? Captain, are you all right?”

McClaren heard the voice as if from far away, through a dull ringing in his ears. He tried to open his eyes, and was rewarded with a thousand hot needles lancing into his optic nerve. He hissed with the pain.

“It’ll pass in a minute, captain,” the voice said again, closer this time. Chief Harkness. “You must’ve gotten a big jolt,” she went on quietly, her hand on his shoulder. Her touch felt very warm. “Fucking alien bitches,” she suddenly spat.

He smiled grimly. Whatever had happened to the ship, he was glad Harkness had made it. This far, at least.

“How many,” he asked her, squinting up into her worried face. “Do you know how many of the crew…are okay?”

For a moment she didn’t answer, but looked up at someone else. His eyes followed her and found Amundsen, kneeling at his other side.

“Twenty-three survivors, sir,” he said quietly. “Including yourself.”

McClaren couldn’t hide his shock. “Twenty-three? Out of a crew of two hundred eight?” They helped him sit up. The aliens had gathered the human survivors in Aurora’s main galley.

Amundsen was only grateful that it hadn’t been the lower galley where he had been forced to abandon Raj Kumar. The ship’s XO was not among the survivors, and Amundsen had seen enough in the rest of the ship to know what must have happened to him. “Yes, sir,” he said. “That’s all. Everyone else is…” He shook his head slowly.

Read the rest of Chapter 3 >>