Snippet Sunday – UNSETIC Files: The Measure of Dreams (WIP)

The snip below is from the UNSETIC File The Measure of Dreams–the tale of Alisa McConaway and Kate Berkshire and their hunt for the two men they love.

The Measure of DreamsWhat would you do if someone offered to give you the most important men in your life back after you’d lost them?

AJ McConaway lost her brother and her fiancée during Operation: Iraqi Freedom on the same day within hours of each other.  Ten months later, she learns everything she thought she knew about their disappearance was wrong.

Kate Berkshire knew that something strange had happened back in June of ’07 when her lover and his best friend vanished from the cockpits of their planes.  She knows because she found one of the downed craft with no trace of its pilot, ejected or otherwise.  When an old friend offers her the opportunity to bring them home again, she jumps at the chance without realizing the magnitude of her choice.

Now, both women have to decide if they’re willing to brave the pathways between worlds.  Someone–or something–that walks those pathways has taken Mat O’Brien and Tim McConaway from them.  How far are they willing to go to bring them home again?

Is it worth the world?

Snippet below the break.

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Snippet Sunday – UNSETIC Files: Between Fang and Claw

This week’s snip is from one of the UNSETIC Files novellas currently available as ebooks.

UNSETIC Between Fang and ClawIt all starts with a secret–-one that former Ambassador Richard McCullough refuses to reveal to his eldest son.  Sometimes, even secrets kept for the best of reasons lead to unintended consequences…

James McCullough returns to England for the first time since joining the FBI, a last-minute speaker added to the roll for a conference at King’s College.  When he runs into old flame Bryn Knight outside of Heathrow, plans for a quiet, low-key trip are quickly dashed.  Lunch at a local pub leads to his recruitment into a shadow organization dedicated to protecting the world from all the things humanity isn’t quite equipped to understand yet, from vampires and psychics to ghosts and aliens and everything in between.

There’s a war brewing in London. Bryn and her parents are on the front lines and James is right there with them–-but is it a fight he can hope to survive?

Snippet below the break.

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Snippet Sunday: When All’s Said and Done (work in progress)

This week’s snippet is from the sequel to What Angels Fear, a work in progress entitled When All’s Said and Done.  The story is told from the point of view of Ky Monroe, who escaped the Institute when she was fifteen years old and eventually found her way to Matthew Thatcher, who’s got his own bone to pick with the Institute.

The story of When All’s Said and Done picks up almost precisely where What Angels Fear left off–with an expanded cast and a shift in narrator.

Folks who have read Between Fang and Claw will also notice another familiar face in this snippet below the break.

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Snippet Sunday: What Angels Fear

Apologies for having missed last week’s Snippet Sunday–I had intended to post something while on my flight back from Phoenix, but the Wi-Fi on my plane was sadly malfunctioning.

What Angels Fear print coverThis week’s snippet is from What Angels Fear, the first story of The Lost Angel Chronicles.

From the outside, Andover Commonwealth looks like a normal town, but when Julia Kinsey takes over her late uncle’s shop, she discovers that the tiny Michigan community has a far darker side than she ever imagined.

Julia used to spend summers with her aunt and uncle in Andover and she’s no stranger to its more run-of-the-mill oddities, including the local preacher who’s always given her the creeps.  From the moment she first sees the Reverend’s ward, Darien, her life is turned upside down as she’s driven to dig deeper into the community’s darkest secrets.

And Darien might just be the key to it all.

It’s all connected to the place outside of town, the Institute, the focus of most of the town’s activities–religious and otherwise–and Darien knows something about that place, something he can’t or won’t talk about.  All Julia really knows is that she needs to get him out of town before it’s too late.

Snippet below the break.

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UNSETIC: My personal experiment in episodic fiction

The idea for the UNSETIC Files has been rattling around in my brain for a very, very long time–nearly as long as I’ve been writing.  Part of what stopped me from writing stories about the organization and the men and women in it was largely the fact that I didn’t think that most of their stories would rate book-length (80,000+ words) manuscripts.  I felt that many of the tales would be done a disservice by adding additional “fluff” to inflate the word counts.  The advent of e-publishing and the rise in popularity and acceptability of novella-length fiction (short novels and long short stories, defined by a recent issue of The Writer as works of 15,000-80,000 words [see “Ask the Writer” in the February 2013 issue]) have given me more freedom to explore the characters, their stories, and their world.

The world of the UNSETIC Files is a braided universe, and by that I mean that there are common threads (characters and occasionally organizations) that bind the universe together.  It overlaps with the Lost Angels universe (especially in the person of James McCullough initially and later characters like Ridley Thys and a few others), but within its own fabric has several characters that tie the stories together.  As more stories are added to the universe, this will become increasingly clear.

As of this writing, I’m not sure how successful my little experiment will be–Bering Songs and Silence and Between Fang and Claw have only been out for about a month or so and there have been no reviews thus far, so it’s hard to say how well things are going or how clear the connections are.  I’m looking forward to the day when people begin to see the connections and talk about them–but that day’s not here yet.

Someday, though, I hope they will.  In the meantime, I’m going to continue this little experiment in episodic fiction and hope that the gamble pays off in the long run.

Preview: UNSETIC Files: Bering Songs and Silence

UNSETIC Bering Songs and SilenceI’m thrilled to announce that Bering Songs and Silence is now available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords as an ebook!

Here’s a taste of what’s in store when you step into Naval officer Brigid O’Connell’s head and hear her story about her first mission with UNSETIC…

Click below the cut to catch a preview from the first chapter of Bering Songs and Silence, the story of Brigid O’Connell and Timothy McConaway’s first mission together…

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And with 50K, NaNoWriMo…hasn’t ended for me?

For probably the fifth or sixth time, the story hasn’t ended just because I cracked 50K–or, in the case of this year, the stories.  This year’s project, In The Beginning, is a collection of how key members of UNSETIC got their start in the United Nations Supernatural and Extraterrestrial Investigative Corps, including James McCullough and Bryn Knight, Timothy McConaway and Brigid O’Connell, AJ McConaway, Antony Bridger (brother of Lost Angel Chronicles character Hadrian Bridger and his wife, Ky), “Angel” Ridley Thys, and details the addition of the Portal Corps to UNSETIC’s banner.  The first story in the collection, Between Fang and Claw, is the story of how James McCullough got sucked in–and his first adventure with UNSETIC–and has clocked in at 35k itself and it’s not quite done (still have a chapter or two left to right, including a couple of climatic fight scenes).

Each story in the collection will be released on its own as an ebook once it is ready for sale.  They will later be collected into the In The Beginning collection for both e-sale and print sale.  I’m really excited about this collection, and while it’s not the direct sequel to What Angels Fear that some may have been waiting for, it is in the same universe and if you pay attention, you’ll see quite a few of the characters showing up–and end up with a deeper understanding of what’s going on with the Institute as well as what happens to some characters (such as Ridley Thys) in the future.

From the opening of Between Fang and Claw:

                “I don’t think I ever thanked you for coming down to help us out on that case.”  I watched as the Federal agent across from me dunked his sandwich in a little plastic cup of au jus.  “Not sure we could have cleared it without your expertise.”

                Agent Thatcher shrugged with one shoulder as he cradled the already soaking chunk of bread and meat in both hands.  “Worth it almost for the Italian beef.  You can’t get this up north.”

                “So I’m told,” I said, smiling humorlessly.  I leaned back, idly tapping a fork I wasn’t going to use against the edge of the table.  The sense of agitation I could feel coming off of him belied his calm exterior.  I shook my head slightly, trying to suppress a frown.  “Whatever you’re trying not to say you might as well let loose, Thatcher.  I know you’ve got something trapped behind your teeth.”

                He looked up from his plate, a brow quirking upward.  “How’s that?”

                I shrugged slightly.  “I just know.”

                Thatcher shook his head, glancing at the restaurant’s populace before relaxing a fraction.  “I’m beginning to see why you’re a rising star in the Bureau.  You’ve got a gift for reading people.”

                I didn’t say anything, just waited.  More was coming.

                He thinks it’s a dangerous gift.  Not dangerous to himself, though, or to anyone else.  Dangerous to me.

                I was hoping he was going to tell me why.

                Thatcher continued to stare at me for a moment longer before he shook his head slowly.  His voice was quiet.  “Body or mind?”

                I just smiled vaguely and he shook his head again.

                “They’d want you,” he murmured, almost to himself. “But with that article in the Tribune, they won’t be able to make you disappear.”

                My eyebrow arched of its own accord.  He smiled.

                “Your brother,” I said.  “Whatever we’re talking about now, it’s got something to do with your brother.”

                “Do you remember when Senator Monroe died?” he asked.

                “Why does someone from Detroit care about Illinois politics?” I countered, trying to hide how unsettling the question was.  What does that have to do with his brother?

                Thatcher nodded slowly.  “Then you remember.”

                “I was twelve and it was all over the news.  Big deal, state senator moving up to federal, then killed?  Every newspaper, every station carried the story.”  I’d have known without all that, though.  The senator’s wife had been a school friend of my mother.  It’d been nine years since the senator and his wife had been killed, though.  A car accident on I-80 killed them both.  Not everyone would remember.  I frowned.  “You know, they had a daughter.”

                “Seen her since then?”

                “No,” I said.  Not since the funeral, anyway.  What did end up happening to her?  Damn, that was a long time ago.  I could remember playing soccer in the yard with the senator’s dark-haired girl, but the memories of that were old, faint and fading.  She and Jade had been better friends anyway.

                I wonder if she knows.

                Thatcher nodded.  “Think about that.  She was like you.”

                “Like me,” I repeated.

                “Like you.  Gifted.  Special.”  Thatcher’s jaw tightened.  “Like my brother.”

                So that’s what this is about.  I caught a fleeting sense of anger and pain coming off of him.  “You think your parents were murdered.”

                “I know my parents were murdered,” Thatcher said.  “I think Senator Monroe and his wife were murdered.”  He met my gaze, eyes like a pair of flints, cold and hard.  “And I think the same people who did all that killing stole my brother and stole Kyle Anne Monroe, too.  I just can’t prove it.”

                “Not yet,” I said softly.  The bare trace of relief that flitted across his face told me I was right in my assertion.

                He nodded slowly.  “Not yet.  Someday.  Could be that I could use some help.  Think about that.”

                I nodded, not quite certain what he was really asking for, or what it all really meant.  “Yeah, sure,” I said.  “I’ll do that.”

                He smiled briefly and went back to his sandwich.  I stared at my hot dog.

                Stolen.

                Does Dad know anything about this?

                I frowned to myself and realized that whatever appetite I’d had when we sat down, it’d evaporated when I pried Thatcher’s secret loose.  Not for the last time, I regretted talking it out him.  It was for the best, though.

                Now at least someone else knows the truth.  Something.  My gaze flicked back toward Thatcher.

                If they’d killed a senator, his wife, and two FBI agents to get to their children, what lengths would they go to in trying to silence anyone who even suspected the truth.

                I smiled grimly to myself.  He’s got to know something.  I’m just going to have to find out what it is.

Spot a What Angels Fear character in there?  Fantastic.  Figure out why McCullough is familiar yet?

Stay tuned for more updates!