Trouble Magnet: Free Ebook

It's here.  (Also, all my (free) ebooks are linked here.)

Cowboys!  Flying saucers!  Gangsters!  A weird space creature!

Rustlers!  Outlaws!  Dames in trouble!  The mob!  Space Amazons!  Space gladiators!

And one man is the key to it all…

How can this be?

Trouble Magnet – A rare condition wherein the afflicted individual attracts frequent trouble of a serious nature.  This has manifested most recently in the form of a starship captain whose five-year mission was plagued on a weekly basis with every imaginable complication.  Earlier cases include ranches that were rustled, attacked by outlaws, and worse, also weekly, as well as a number of private detectives hired, once again every week, for murders, kidnappings, and other felonies rather than the usual missing persons and divorce cases.

Most often a Trouble Magnet merely draws in drama and danger.  But in the most extreme case ever recorded…
- Unusual Conditions in Space and Time, Mark Ayrata, ed., Proxima University Press, 2263, p. 1186

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Back in 2006, I was thinking about the concept of a "chick magnet," someone who is supposed to be so attractive to women that they are continually attracted.

Creativity for me often takes the form of putting two concepts together that might not seem to fit, and coming up with something interesting, imaginative…or sometimes just loony.

Because I'd had idle thoughts before about what the lower ranks on Star Trek (especially the Original Series) must have thought.  "Hey, I just got a subspace from my buddy on the USS Whatever, and she says they mostly just have to dodge a meteor once in a while, or bicker with Klingons.  Nothing like what we have here!"

I mean, if every vessel in Starfleet faced ship-destroying, sun-eating, cosmos-wrecking threats every Thursday night at 8 pm, there wouldn't be a galaxy.

Then it struck me that real private detectives mostly gather evidence of infidelity or search for missing persons.  They don't get blackmail attempts, murders, and kidnappings to solve every week.  Doesn't happen.

For that matter, all those westerns that ran for years, where the same ranch has every imaginable disaster, crime and calamity hit on a weekly basis…well, a place like that wouldn't last long.

So in 2006, I thought how unique it would be if each of the above wasn't a coincidence, but a common condition.

And then this year I put that together with the idea of a good-hearted but just a little dim cowboy, who has all of those things happen to him, and how I could play it for laughs…

That's the genesis of Trouble Magnet.  I had a ball writing it.  Hope you have even half the fun reading it.

Souls Between Worlds (Free Ebook)

A parallel world where some of the Anglo-Saxon tribes traveled north into Scandinavia, and later the Viking colony of Vinland expanded, and left a legacy of an Anglo-Saxon tongue being spoken in North America, among a people who were very largely of indigenous ancestry.

But those cultures are not the focus, individuals are.

A professor who isn't totally tightly wrapped in Scandinavia develops portals: matter transmission, or teleportation.  One frightful accident later, and a man from Vinland and a woman from Scandinavia find that they can travel to parallel worlds.  Or rather their spirits can.

Trolls.  Skookums.  Jotunn.  Kigatlik.

They find frightening creatures from legend, or who long ago inspired legend, learn their own natures, and build something bigger than they are.

A full-size novel and free ebook, available here.  Join their journey, and enjoy.

See my entry Ebooks Update for a full list of my free novels, novellas and collections.

* * *

Behind the scenes for a moment, does this novel have a history of its own!

All the way back in 1988, I came up with the "souls between worlds" travel featured in this novel.  But I didn't go forward with it.

I wrote Rivers Between Worlds in 2019, and got the kernel of an idea for this one at that time.  But I'd already written the opening scene for this one in 2016, putting it aside till later.

In July 2019, I put the two together, and did a bit more, then settled down in September to write the novel.  Six months and 60,000 words later, I realized I'd taken the wrong tack.  I know I can get too focused on ideas and theme, and so work hard to ensure I have quality characterizations.  But I'd overcompensated, and produced something a little too light on ideas and too close to soap opera.

I put the novel aside again.

I eventually figured out how to fix it all, and started all over in July of 2022, and finished in August.  A full novel in three months is really fast for me, but I had the advantage of salvaging several chapters from the previous effort.

So here it is, an idea from thirty-four years ago, a first stab six years ago, and finally done and ready for you now.