Random Thoughts: Choose

This weekend’s promotional campaign, offering the three Kindle books free, is going very well.

A huge THANK YOU to everyone who is downloading the books! Getting Choose into as many hands as possible increases the chance of finding readers who will enjoy the 6-part series this June.

I have said, and this is the honest truth, I am enjoying writing this series so much that it is worth it to me, for the fun of the writing. The original book Echo’s Voice now seems like a rough draft. When completed, the 6-part series will be about twice the length of the original work. The characters and the settings are much better defined. Six books, each about 40,000 words, makes for reasonably-sized installments for summer reading. Each would be about right for airport/flight reading, or for an afternoon at the beach or pool.

This past week I was working on a wild scene in Episode III involving Apple McMorris, one of the characters completely new in this series. She evades pursuers by attempting an outrageous escape through areas of city buildings known only to the janitorial robots. I hope readers will enjoy it as much as I am enjoying writing, because I was really having some fun.

The seven characters who carry the story forward, Echo, Rick, Lorenzo, Favor, Jeff, Selinda and Apple supply endless fun for this writer whenever they interact. Honestly, that is what I love most about this project. Somebody asked me if this could be considered a ‘young adult’ series. In Choose, when we first meet these characters, they are all between the ages of 17 and 22. Episode VI takes place about five years later (although, in all fairness I must warn readers that not all seven characters survive Episode VI). I would say this series is for anyone who enjoys a fast-paced story that takes jabs at current trends in our society, relentlessly.

Somebody else asked me about the role of religion in the story. In this future world, ‘confessing superstitious beliefs’ is not legal. A person can lose citizenship if faith is expressed, or at the very least lose any hope of advancement.

In this world it is also illegal to be gay, or to even be suspected of “gender disloyalty.”

Of course there is plenty of hypocrisy in these rules. Hypocrisy, greed, selfishness are all part of the human condition, and must be confronted. I have little patience with books that describe a utopian future where everyone shares everything and no one seeks power or control. Sorry, but that is not a world of thinking human beings. Human beings are not always nice and sharing. They want, and when they want, they sometimes fight to get what they want. If this simple fact is not understood, humanity is not understood. So the world I describe is pretty much like the world of every age, in that people will sometimes do very terrible things to gain a little power. Agendas often conflict. People make bad choices. Heroism comes in many forms, but it generally begins by saying NO to selfishness and greed.