Making It Home - Latest Free Ebook

Surrounded by geysers and fumaroles, Aelwin Seer is not just trapped in an inhospitable environment, but an unfriendly one: Seers are dismissed as useless.  He cannot leave, since all mages must live where Archmage Domina can keep her eye on them.  And yet, can he continue to live there, or even to live, once Domina discovers he has no loyalty to her at all?

Taken from his family at the age of twelve, Aelwin hasn't been aware of how much he misses having a home.  But when he escapes from Domina and the Council, he knows he cannot rest until he finds somewhere that will somehow be safe from the most powerful mage in the world.

Can he find such a place of safety?  And make it home?

 Free novel, available now here.  See my entry Ebooks Update for a full list, or go to https://self.gutenberg.org/Authors/KevinWadeJohnson.

Traveling the Transdimensional Highway (New Free Ebook)

Traveling the Transdimensional Highway, my latest novel (and free ebook), is now available here.  (For a list of all of mine, kept up to date, see this entry, or go to https://self.gutenberg.org/Authors/KevinWadeJohnson.)  I'm really pleased with it, needless to say; the pace and suspense in the last half I kept credibly compelling.

* * *

Robert Serviss is a mysterious man, in some ways.  He doesn't look like anyone else, not on this Earth, anyway.  All anyone in the town knows of him is that he's just arrived in a Ground Rover that needs some urgent repairs.

A mystery to them, not so much to himself, though he'd like to be.  He doesn't even like to think about his past, or origins.

* * *

He's not from the town he starts out in, not even the world.  He's from a parallel world, from an organization with a lot of reach and resources.  The journey he's on will take him far, farther in most ways than he's ever been.

Farther than he'd ever thought life would take him.

Traveling the Transdimensional Highway: A journey of excitement and imagination.

Trouble Magnet: Free Ebook

It's here.  (Also, all my (free) ebooks are linked here, or at https://self.gutenberg.org/Authors/KevinWadeJohnson.)

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

* * *

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.