Category: Epsilon

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A love theme?

A great deal of my work centers around relationships–both friendships and romantic entanglements.  Today, while working on the rough draft of Epsilon: Redeemer, I found myself listening to Josh Groban’s “Awake,” which struck a chord–it’s a beautiful, almost haunting song about loving someone but knowing that perhaps you’ll lose them someday.

“Awake”

A beautiful and blinding morning
The world outside begins to breathe
See clouds arriving without warning
I need you here to shelter me

And I know that only time will tell us how
To carry on without each other

So keep me awake to memorize you
Give me more time to feel this way
We can’t stay like this forever
But I can have you next to me today

If I could make these moments endless
If I could stop the winds of change
If we just keep our eyes wide open
Then everything would stay the same

And I know that only time will tell me how
We’ll carry on without each other

So keep me awake for every moment
Give us more time to be this way
We can’t stay like this forever
But I can have you next to me today

We’ll let tomorrow wait, you’re here, right now, with me
All my fears just fall away, when you are all I see

We can’t stay like this forever
But I have you here today

And I will remember
Oh I will remember
Remember all the love we shared today

It’s a perfect love theme for that whole universe, I think, since it touches on a lot of the emotions and themes embedded in the romantic relationships in the Epsilon series.

Of course, anyone who’s read my work can feel free to object–but at least listen to the song before you do!

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 

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‘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 

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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)”

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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 

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New release ramblings

Good news!  What Angels Fear, a Lost Angel Chronicle, is now available on Smashwords, Amazon (UK, DE, FR), and Barnes and Noble.  It is the first installment of the Lost Angel Chronicles, a universe that includes my once-touted When All’s Said and Done.  I had anticipated releasing it after Epsilon: Broken Stars, but that’s tied up in editing this week (the people I tapped couldn’t look at it until this week).  The editing on What Angels Fear was faster–thanks again, Krinny!–and so I was able to start publication on Monday.

The end result was it being fully available on the three front-line venues as of this morning.  It will hopefully be distributed to Kobo Books, the iBookstore, Diesel, and other ebook retailers soon (through Smashwords wonderful Premium catalog, which Falling Stars is already available through).  It’s also already on GoodReads, where I appreciate reviews and shelf-adds.

So what does this mean?  Simply that I’ve gotten a third “world” of my writing established in digital ink.  Anyone who’s read back on this blog a little bit knows exactly how many things I’ve developed over the years and either abandoned or simply shelved for later.  There have been two women in my life (incredibly supportive best friend type women, one mostly during my teenage years and one during my adult life) who have urged me to go back to certain projects over the years, or not to completely abandon something, and occasionally told me to focus down on one thing, finish it, and only move on after that’s done.  As a general approach, that only occasionally works for me.

Of course, sometimes it does work.  This was one of those times.

I finished off What Angels Fear after I wiped out the final of Broken Stars.  I didn’t dare touch it while I was in the final push, largely because the scenes I was working on for Broken Stars were so difficult and because Julia Kinsey and Ridley Thys are very, very different characters from Aaron Taylor, Sam Cooper, Mac Desantis, and Lucas Ross.  Their worlds are also very different.  I’ll admit that at one point I’d considered making it all the same universe, but my conclusion was (and still is) that it just wouldn’t work, due to the number of supernatural elements extant in the Lost Angel universe, elements that don’t exist in the Epsilon universe (or any of my science fiction universes as of this writing).  Turning back to Julia and Ridley’s world, and by extension Ky Monroe, Matthew Thatcher, and Hadrian Bridger’s world, was a welcome shift.  Of course, it was helped by the sudden desire to write something with vampires that seized me.

No, What Angels Fear doesn’t involve vampires.  But they’re in the world, right along with secret agents and people fighting the good fight.  More of that will come up in When All’s Said and Done, which features Angel Kyle Anne Monroe as its narrator.  I anticipate turning to that project in the near future.

Unfortunately, Nanowrimo is looming, and while When All’s Said and Done was my inaugural Nanowrimo project back in 2004 (coincidentally, also my first win), I can’t exactly turn around and redraft it for my project this year.  Instead, I’ll be working on the second book of the Epsilon series, Epsilon: Redeemer.

My retail job looks like it might keep me from traveling this November, so I might just have a shot at getting something done.

Wish me luck.

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 

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Broken Stars is now complete, heading into final reads and revisions.

[progpress title=”Epsilon: Broken Stars” goal=”70000″ current=”79949″ label=”words”]

A novel roughly thirteen years in the making is finally complete and should hopefully be released by the end of the month.  I’ve shot it off to a few test readers for their commentary (one of whom I’m certain is a bit annoyed with me thanks to the wall of text spam he was getting all day yesterday).  I’ll be doing edits and tweaks based on their readings/proofs.

Epsilon: Broken Stars came in at a higher word count than I anticipated, and will shrink/grow with the forthcoming edits.  I finished writing at around 2am last night, emailed it off, then crashed for five and a half hours (up by 8–yup, there’s something wrong with me).  I need to let it set for a few days before I go back to start any edits of my own I might decide to do, but as of this writing, it’s complete but for proofreading and minor edits.

That is to say I don’t think I’m going to be adding any more chapters, fight scenes, or any other such thing.  I might do some Epilogue tweaking, but that’s for another day, after I let it sit and rest.

Of course, I still need to write the dedication and the acknowledgements, as well as format copies for several different e-publication venues.  That’s a task for another day.

Between yesterday and early this morning, I wrote more than 7000 words.  That was a huge day for me (I also managed to somehow buy tickets to the Red Wings game in there, go figure).

Writing yesterday was mostly action sequences, which I have a great deal of difficulty writing.  Erik says it’s because I’ve never actually been in a fight before, and he’s probably right about that.

Here’s a sample of what I came up with, though, for two action-packed chapters.

            Desantis only hesitated a second before he triggered the detonator.  A series of quiet pops echoed off the buildings, followed by the larger, explosive roars of the charges going up in a secondary blast and taking the back end of the lander with it.  The craft’s pilot was knocked sprawling into the light of one of the streetlamps.

He scrambled to his feet a few stunned seconds later, yelling.  I grasped Sam with one hand and Desantis with the other.

“Time to go,” I hissed, then ducked down the alleyway, trusting them to follow.

Sam looked positively gleeful by the time we got back to the car.

“We did it!  We actually did it.”

“Celebrate later,” I said, giving her a stern look as I jerked the passenger side door open.  “It’s not over yet.”

She sobered as she caught sight of my expression and went quiet, nodding.  She ducked into the car without another word.

Desantis looked at me across the roof and I just shook my head.  He shrugged and got in, and I joined them a second later.

“Biesterfield and Twelfth,” he said as Sam got the vehicle moving.

She nodded.  “Thanks.”

We wended our way up a few side streets before we turned onto one of the north-south streets a couple over from Biesterfield and headed north toward city center.  I was doing math on the way and realized something.

“Mac, how many did you say were landing here?”

He blinked at me.  “Six, Cap.”

“And five on the other continent.”  Maybe I heard him wrong.  Maybe he said six and I misheard him.

“Right.”

Damn.  “Compliment on a cruiser like the Tallahassee is twelve.”  So where’s that last lander?

The car swerved a little as Sam caught up to my line of thinking.  “Five and six is eleven.  Where’s the last lander?”

“That’s what I want to know,” I said grimly as Desantis scrambled for his palmtop.  Three klicks out from the Scarlet meant there was significant lag between sensors and the palmtop, and Desantis cursed his way through trying to figure out where that last lander was coming down.

Sam whipped the car around a corner, headed toward Biesterfield on one of the east-west streets, then whipped around another corner onto our target street.

She plowed right into a roadblock and a subsequent hail of weaponsfire.

 

— Epsilon: Broken Stars by Erin M. Klitzke

Turned out pretty decent, I’d say.  That’s actually toward the beginning of the action, believe it or not!

Only time and readers, however, will tell me exactly how well I’ve done.  We shall see!

Look for Epsilon: Broken Stars in your favorite ebook store coming soon.

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Broken Stars nearing completion; new tale soon in the offing…

[progpress title=”Epsilon: Broken Stars” goal=”70000″ current=”68374″ label=”words”]

[progpress title=”What Angels Fear” goal=”21000″ current=”18738″ label=”words”]

 

So, I know that I tweeted that I’d announce the actual name for SEKRET PROJEKT this weekend, and it was mostly that I didn’t get around to making a blog post to that effect–it was on the business cards I was handing out this past weekend at the Grand Valley Renaissance Festival, promoting my writing as much as I was selling other things (jewelry and sewing things).

The true name to SEKRET PROJEKT is What Angels Fear, and it’s the story that I talked about in this post last summer.  It’s a short work in the same universe as When All’s Said and Done, my first Nanowrimo project.  I hope to release What Angels Fear shortly after the release of the forthcoming Epsilon: Broken Stars, which is nearing completion.

Rather than a true science fiction piece, What Angels Fear is a paranormal yarn in which normal chick Julia Kinsey meets a boy named Darien who seems a little…off.  A chance encounter in the creepy little town of Andover Commonwealth sends her down a rabbit’s hole into a mystery that could put her life in jeopardy.  It is almost a direct prequel to the story in When All’s Said and Done (in fact, as the current draft of When All’s Said and Done stands, events that take place at the end of What Angels Fear take place during the first few chapters of When All’s Said and Done).

Here’s a little taste of Julia’s story:

            A flicker of movement caught my attention and I tore my eyes away from the building, peering through the gap in the inner wall.  The angle made it hard, but I thought I’d seen…

There!  A gaunt figure stared at me from just within my line of sight.  It was a man, dark-haired and scrawny, dressed in what looked like sweats.  Though I couldn’t see his eyes, or really make out the features of his face, I had the feeling he was looking right at me.

Something about him reminded me strongly of Darien, though I couldn’t say what.  I tried to beckon him over.

He just shook his head and looked down.

What’s going on in there?

Something jerked the figure back and out of sight.  The massive gate in that inner wall ground shut with the sound of metal against stone.  No iron bars there, just solid sheets of metal.

Whatever it is, they don’t want people to know.  My pulse quickened and I stepped back from the main gate.

A hand grasped my arm.  I jerked, reeling away from the touch.  The hand snapped open and I went down on my butt in the grass.

“Who the hell are you?”  I demanded before I’d actually seen who’d grabbed me.

A woman about my age stood over me.  She had bristle-short red hair and was dressed in a black jumpsuit that made her look like some sort of extra from The Matrix.  She stared at me for a moment, then said softly, “You need to get out of here before someone else finds you.”

Someone else?  I was a little worried about anyone finding me.

She offered me a hand up.  I stared at it for a moment as if it were a snake about to strike.

“Who are you?”  I asked again.

She shook her head slightly, stone-faced.  “You don’t want to know.”

Her expression reminded me of someone else.  Oh, shit.  Darien.  That’s who it reminds me of.  It was the same blank mask of an expression that he wore most of the time, though this girl seemed much, much more functional than he did.

I took her hand slowly and let her pull me to my feet.

“You should get back to town,” she said quietly as she released my hand.  “You’re missing the show.”  She turned back toward the wall and walked toward it, looking back at me for just a moment.  With that last long, measuring look, she walked through the wall and vanished.

— What Angels Fear, © Erin Klitzke 2011

 

I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t think I’d want Julia’s life.

What Angels Fear should hopefully be out by the end of the year.  And speaking of release dates…

I still don’t have a solid one for Epsilon: Broken Stars, but I hit the 68k mark this morning, which means there’s less than 2k words left to write before I meet my 70k goal.  The tale will go a bit longer than that, however (I have at least two chapters yet to write, one in the section I’m working on now and one at the end of the book).  Price point will be $2.99 when it releases, and I’ll keep things updated here when it comes to release dates and the like.  I’m hoping for mid-month, but that’s going to depend on two factors: inspiration, and how fast I can get editorial turnaround from my volunteers.

This year’s nanowrimo project, however, will be the sequel to Broken Stars that focuses on Lucas Ross, leader of the Resistance and friend of Broken Stars narrator, Aaron Taylor.  There’s a few thoughts for that already bouncing around in the back of my brain.  Hopefully, that will take less time to materialize than Broken Stars has!