‘Good, because I think I need it.’ – Excerpt from NaNoWriMo ’11, Epsilon: Redeemer

A little bit of a teaser from the rough draft of Epsilon: Redeemer, second book of the Epsilon series.  I’m writing the first draft of the book for NaNoWriMo 2011, and now I’ve got a bit that I’m okay with sharing.

            ‘Quintilian was captured by the Imperium.  He must have been, since we swept the area where he was and found signs of a fight, but no body.  Still trying to figure it out; word would be appreciated.’

I rubbed my temple.  It wasn’t good news.  Quintilian was another regional lead, two sectors over in the Borderworlds, but closer to the edge of Imperium territory than my area of influence.  He’d been a friend of Korea’s from school and one of my closest allies in the upper echelons of the Resistance, especially when it came to trying to find her.

I closed my eyes, leaning back.  I was with Renegade again, taking my turn on the watch.  I’d been switching off with Sam and Conrad, but Kallyn had come to take a watch or two, a signal to me that she was getting ready to get more deeply involved in Resistance affairs.

I wasn’t sure whether that’d be a good thing or a bad thing.

A groan from the bed dragged me out of the quagmire of reports.  Renegade had been drifting in and out of consciousness for the past few days, eyes dull with fever and barely responsive when we spoke to her.  It hadn’t surprised me.  I wasn’t quite sure what point the process had been interrupted at, but I knew that this was as close to normal as these things got.  Her system was in a state of shock.  Nothing was going to happen until that fever broke, and I knew it.

Part of me was silently thankful that Wil wasn’t around.  I’d been able to taste his worry when he’d first brought me in on this, and it was disconcerting to say the least.  Better he wasn’t here to keep right on worrying and distracting everyone around him.

The fever had finally broken the night before, but she hadn’t been awake since then.

Setting aside the palmtop where I’d been reading the reports, I leaned toward her, watching as Renegade lifted a hand to rub her eyes and groaned again, starting to roll and curl on her side.  She noticed me a few seconds later, blinking blearily.

“Where am I?” she murmured, voice hoarse and heavy with confusion.

“Caldin,” I told her.  I touched her shoulder as she started to sit up.  “Careful, you’ve been mostly horizontal for a couple weeks except to get some food into you.  Don’t sit up too fast.  I don’t want you keeling over on me.”

She laughed weakly and let me help her sit up.  She hunched over a little, staring at her hands, thin and pale against the gray coverlet.  The engagement ring Wil had left on her finger sparkled in the room’s dim light and her gaze fastened on it for a moment.  Her breath caught.

“I don’t know where that is,” she whispered.  “I don’t know who I am.  Who’re you?”

“Call me Luc,” I said.  “I’m a doctor, and a friend.  I’m here to help you.”

Her gaze slid sidelong to me, hazel eyes pinning me in place.  She had one of those stares, one that could paralyze a man with a glance, a certain sort of intensity that could instill comfort or unease at her leisure.  “Promise?”

“I promise.”

One of her hands closed around mine and squeezed with a strength that surprised me.  “Good,” she said in a ragged whisper.  “Because I think I need it.”

Copyright 2011, Erin M. Klitzke

Like what you see?  See what comes before in Epsilon: Broken Stars, available where ebooks are sold.


You can find Erin on GoodReads these days @ http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5211226.Erin_Klitzke
And on Smashwords @ http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/EMBKlitzke 

Fragments of background (Epsilon universe)

What follows here is spoiler-riffic, so if you’re not into that kind of thing, don’t read below the break.  I’m in the midst of working on Epsilon: Redeemer for NaNoWriMo, and in doing so have ended up looking back at some scenes I scribbled out a long time back, when I was tooling around with a project called Resistance, which was a story mostly about Korea Cooper and Lucas Ross.  I have a .doc file full of scenes that were a mix of background scenes and sequences that might end up in later works in the Epsilon universe.

More ramblings (and one of those scenes) below the break.

Continue reading “Fragments of background (Epsilon universe)”

Nanowrimo: The final countdown to November

It’s T-minus two days to Nanowrimo.  For the first time in several years, I won’t be able to stay up until midnight Halloween night to get my first thousand words in before 2am on November 1.  I blame my new position at the store for these things, but I suppose a night’s rest and eight hours at the store won’t kill my creative process before I have a chance to get started.

This year’s project is something entirely new in an old setting.  It’s the sequel to Epsilon: Broken Stars (which was released on Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon yesterday), called Epsilon: Redeemer.  It’s a change of PoV from Aaron Taylor, a trip into the head of Lucas Ross.

All those things he could never say to Aaron?  Now readers are going to know what some of them were.

My plotting process this year is proving to be much, much different than it has been in past years.  All of my other Nanowrimo projects over the years (When All’s Said and Done, When Angels Cry, Fate and Second Chances, an untitled fantasy piece, Awakenings, The Last Colony, and Ashes to Ashes) have been in new universes or universes created the year before (When All’s Said and Done and When Angels Cry are both in the Lost Angels universe, Fate and Second Chances and the untitled fantasy piece are in the same universe, and The Last Colony and Ashes to Ashes are both in the same universe).  Never have I worked with a universe like my Epsilon universe, where I’ve lived with it and developed it over the course of more than a decade.  Furthermore, the story of Epsilon: Redeemer will fit neatly into a three year gap between Epsilon: Broken Stars and an untitled project based on notes and concepts that originally appeared in drafts 1-3 of Epsilon (back when the project was one big–or two big–books).  In essence, I’ve stepped into somewhat uncharted territory in a universe where I know what’s gone before and what will happen after, but not the specifics of what’s happened in between.

I’m also doing it with a new character, one that didn’t exist before the draft of what became Epsilon: Broken Stars.

That’s right, Lucas Ross didn’t exist before Aaron’s story came to Caldin.  I actually came up with the idea for him as part of a short-lived Epsilon universe science fiction game (born as a “what if characterX had a brother and he joined the Resistance?”) and his importance completely snowballed from there.

And now he’s going to have his own book.

I started plotting in earnest this morning, mostly because I didn’t want to be tempted to start actually writing him before November 1.  He’s one of those characters that curls up in the back of your brain and lurks, waiting to be let out.  He’s a bit lower key than either Aaron Taylor or Caren Flannery and much less bitter than the former.  He’s got secrets, and it’ll be tricky to figure out when to reveal them–and how.

There’s a lot of stuff that he knows that he couldn’t tell Aaron.

The truth is, Lucas Ross is part of my attempt to make Aaron’s father, Daniel, a more sympathetic character in the long term, rather than just the monster Aaron thinks he is.  We’ll see how well I succeed in that when the time comes.

Now, however, I have to get back to my notecard outlining.


You can find Erin on GoodReads these days @ http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5211226.Erin_Klitzke
And on Smashwords @ http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/EMBKlitzke