Green Comet Cover
Description
As Elgin wakes from a centuries-long sleep, it’s to the memory of danger and loss. Even in the confusion of re-animation, he wonders if this time she’ll be there. But then he remembers the mysterious Visitor and the perilous mission that took Frances from him, and darkness closes in again. Even so, there’s always the hope that this time will be different, that they will have found a way. It was always like this. Hope would always rise again, no matter how often it was struck down.
Green Comet and its sequels are released under a Creative Commons Attribution and Share-Alike license (CC-BY-SA.) They’re available in various formats, including audio, on the Downloads Page. For Kindle, use the Unglue.it links in the sidebar, or download the MOBIs.
rjb
Samples:
How it happened
Green Comet began in 1994. It also began before then and after then. I’m sure most books are the same. They’re impossible to pin down to a specific date, depending on what you use for criteria. But let’s use 1994, since that’s the year the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet smacked into Jupiter. At that time I was active in the Science conference, one of the Usenet newsgroups. Another member posted, asking for ideas he could use for a disaster story. I suggested some non-ecliptic comets on a dangerous orbit. I wonder if it was a coincidence that the movies Armageddon and Deep Impact appeared in 1998 … Probably.-)
The idea began simmering in my mind, and I even wrote a couple of short stories to explore the concept of living on comets, but it was mostly conceptual until about 2004. I decided then to think about it seriously. Since I had a menial job at the time I could spend the whole day thinking about it, and jot down notes after work. I knew I had a story when Elgin and Frances showed up. In 2009 I finished with that job and that’s when I put pen to paper with the aim of getting the story written. Three years later it was ready to publish. Three more years for the sequel, Parasite Puppeteers, and two more for The Francesians, to complete the Green Comet trilogy.
Publishing meant learning how to convert the story to ebook formats, making sure that they were presentable, and creating and adding covers. Then there was the matter of recording, editing and packaging the audio book. A whole new set of skills. Finally I had to learn how to create and manage a website, so Green Comet would have a place to live on the Internet. Fortunately I enjoy learning.
I hope you have as much fun reading Green Comet as I had writing it.
rjb
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I read “Green Comet” in November, 2013 and enjoyed it very much. Just in the last few weeks, I found out that books 2 and 3 have been published. So I re-read “Green Comet” and am now one-third done of the “Parasite Puppeteers”. Although I am sure I have not read book 2 or book 3, the first few chapters of “Parasite Puppeteers” seemed familiar. So I checked my archive and found that, in addition to “Green Comet”, I had downloaded and read three “Extensions” to “Green Comet”, entitled “The Lesser Evacuation”, “Cloud City” and “The Ball”. I guess you published these as short extensions to “Green Comet” and they became the first three chapters of “Parasite Puppeteers”. I’m into the new, unfamiliar (to me) sections of “Parasite Puppeteers” now.
Are the three “Extensions” exactly the same as the first part of “Parasite Puppeteers”, or did you change them somewhat when they became part of book 2?
Moe The Cat
Thank you, moe. I’m glad you enjoyed Green Comet enough to keep going. How did you discover that PP and TF were out?
With the second and third books I released them in segments that I called extensions, eight with PP and four with TF. Other than final proofing and editing once they were finished, the novels are the same as the extensions. I didn’t know at first that I was writing a sequel, and a trilogy as it turned out, when I started writing the extensions. I just knew that I had to expand the Green Comet universe some more.
Enjoy Parasite Puppeteers and The Francesians, and please come back and let me know how you liked them.
rjb
I was on unglue.it to download fresh copies of another author (Richard Herley). He recently updated and reproofed all his novels and posted them to unglue.it. I saw “Green Comet” there and was surprised to see the two extra books.
Good old unglue.it. My favorite distributor. Now I have to go check out Richard Herley.-)
rjb