This is a placeholder profile while I decide what I want you to read here. So far I think I want you to read that I have some stories coming here soonish. There's more but I don't know what it is yet.
Okay, now I know what goes here. Everybody says "I suck at summaries" but the problem is, the summary space is just long enough you think it could be helpful but not long enough to actually be helpful. Stories should stand on their own but really they need a little ground to stand on, especially if they're out of their rightful context.
So, a little ground for my stories to stand on:
"Not at all like Paco" and "The Man of His Dreams" are science fiction romance sorts of things. They both take place in the same universe -- more or less. The good people of Heimisch terraformed the planet of Abundance: they made a hunk of rock into a living, breathing planet ecosystem, and then opened it up for colonization.
Terraforming is a ridiculous endeavor. The amount of resources and time that must go into such a project stagger the imagination. It's certainly not an answer to "dwindling resources and overpopulation." Not in this world, anyway. Abundance was terraformed because the people of Heimisch could, that's why. It was a gigantic public art project, if you want to think about it that way.
When the planet became ready for human colonization, the public art mentality continued to prevail. Including the grants application aspect. Groups of people defined themselves as communities and made proposals. The Biomes Authority, the only overall entity anything like a government on the new world, allowed some of these communities to settle in certain areas, though none were allowed to think they owned the land they lived on and none were allowed to get the illusion they were building a nation.
One of the communities that won the right to create their own little project on Abundance was Hallow. This was a religious group. They wished to establish a community focussed on worship, with as little effort spent on the mundane aspects of living as possible (or as allowed by the Biomes Authority, which required a certain amount of focus on such things as waste processing and land use). They brought along with them the Associate Families, their "worldly partners," skilled workers and intellectuals, engineers and administrators . . . and, as they gradually discovered, slaves to the Hallows. In a wildly illegal and immoral plan, daring and devious and impressively successful in the early years, the Hallows intervened genetically and medically to distort the minds of the Associate Families, to create a willing and loyal caste of serfs: so willing and loyal that they did most of the design work on the plan themselves. Later, they brought in a lower class, the Gates, to do the heavy lifting (metaphorically: these are people who can terraform planets and genetically engineer each other, you don't suppose they do any actual hand labor?). The Gates they never interfered with in this way, because it simply didn't matter what they thoguht about things. They could always be bullied into submission if necessary.
Centuries later, the crimes have been revealed, the system supposedly abolished, and everybody's supposed to be equal. Belan Beren is a descendant of the Associate Families. He doesn't care about the past: nobody ever did anything to him, he thinks. He has a calling. He is passionate about water engineering and water policy. He has a place at the University he wasn't expecting. He has a brand-new embedded connection to the University's network. And he has a hostile TA named Graff Fuentes de Fuerte (an old, old and revered name among the Hallows) who keeps showing up in his dreams -- claiming him as his very own something. What he doesn't know is that he is in Graff's dreams too, and that Graff's seeming hostility is something quite different, and that the fate of his entire people may depend on how he confronts this challenge.
July 2008: I've begun adding Prospect Road, which is another Abundance novel, this one taking place rather earlier than The Man of His Dreams. In this story we have Mickey, a boy from Gate, who would dearly love to get out of Gate and do something more than crew work. He loves birds and math. He finds himself -- as do many boys in Gate -- on his way to jail because of a perceived criminal potential: and then he finds himself with a way out, and a way further out -- far enough out that he comes smack up against culture clash and challenges his sense if himself and the world around him. Oh, and he may in fact be able to save the birds, and in the process, the world. This is, like The Man of His Dreams, slashish, kind of.
"I'm with the band. No, really" is inspired by something I saw happening around the edges of an Orchestra Baobab concert. Expect briefness, and also culture clash, smoldering looks, smartass children, and way too many hotel rooms.
You should go listen to Orchestra Baobab. Also, Gogol Bordello. I could go on like that, but I'm done now.
Late September 2008: I've begun adding A Suitable Lover, which like I'm With the Band . . . is not science fiction, is humor, and is slash, but unlike that story is a full length novel with long chapters and is mostly already finished. Art geeks, librarians, scientists, and bratty children. Also: a fictitious West Coast city. You can tell it's West Coast because the kids have sunburns in midwinter.
November 2008: dog help me, I've started another: Sissy and Buddy and the Whole Nine Yards. It will be shortish, and it does not mean the others will not be finished.
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