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Sample Chapter: Girl Gone Nova

Image Credit Vitaliy Raskalov/Vadim Mahorov/Marat Dupri. Check out their daring and illegal climb atop the pyramid.

Sample Chapter

Guillermo rubbed his temples. Hard.
“You can’t just take ‘a pyramid.’”
Kyveli scoffed. “Why not? You have three of them.”
Guillermo breathed in deep. It was surprisingly chilly for being in a desert. “Because… It is an ancient monument to a Pharaoh, a tomb, actually. It has stood there for about three thousand years.”
The Teddy Bear held up a ridiculously tall parasol that only covered her from the sun, leaving him out to get a tan.
Kyveli tilted her head. “A Pharaoh?”
“Yes. Royalty. Like you, actually. You wouldn’t want someone to show up after eons and just pick up your tomb as if it was a vacation souvenir now, would you?”
She opened her pretty mouth to speak.
“Yes,” he interrupted. “I know, there won’t be a tomb left. There won’t even be a solar system left. But you know what I mean.”
Kyveli turned back to the magnificent view from atop the pyramid. Her eyes glinted as they darted around. Translucent images appeared in her field of view, and Guillermo was shocked to realise that she was actually looking up information on the Pharaohs. The ship’s Mind digested the volumes of data and gave her the highlights that it knew she’d like.
He let her take it all in.
He stood in silence, watching her. How would the Ancient Egyptians react to a visit from her? He had no doubt in his mind that she’d fit in nicely right next to Nefertiti and Cleopatra. Delicate features, thin fingers, red skin like velvet. Throw in one of those characteristic Egyptian crowns that frame the entire head and she’s a Queen now.
Worshipped by trillions.
The mind doesn’t just boggle, it shuts down completely. Guillermo tried to imagine what that actually meant. And he was no novice either, he had stood next to kings as they addressed crowds beneath them.
He spun around to watch the desert. Trillions of souls. What had they called them? Panhuman species, variations on the same theme and archetype of two hands, two feet, standing upright, across the stars. Like grains of sand.
Grains of sand at her feet.
Yes, that was the only analogy Guillermo’s brain could come up with to make the comparison.
He snorted at his thoughts. He was under the mistaken impression that the humans of today seemed somehow more advanced than the Egyptians were. But the difference of two thousand years of science was negligible next to the Ekrignontes. He squinted up at the shiny orb in the sky that called itself a silly name and had a silly Teddy Bear avatar and had the power to slice Jupiter up like an orange.
Humans were just playing with rocks, stacking them pretty.
Kyveli gestured and dismissed the AR data.
He smiled back at her.
“So I can’t take one? Not even the little one?” She pointed hesitantly at the smaller pyramid of the three and gave him the puppy eyes.
To force himself away from the urge to please her was like scratching a sunburn.
“No.”

Check out Girl Gone Nova

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Teaser Chapter: Slow Up

Teaser Chapter: Moirai – Brains operating @ 12 times normal human speed

Two weeks ago:

It was a secure white room, in a nondescript basement owned by Moiragetis Holdings. The three women were perched upon their marble pedestals, mumbling and threading the flow of information.
The women, dressed in white, seemed aged beyond their years. Their thin hair barely flowed, their frail hands moving, twitching, as if working the air with purpose.

The Fates by Toradh

Bundles of flashing and glowing optic fibres were feeding into their backs, directly into their spine. They connected them to the server at the room below, an unlisted supercomputer with a singular purpose.

Their eyes were glazed white, for they could not see in the conventional sense. Their optic nerves had been claimed by the stream of data. In front of their eyes, it was as if the internet was the Earth’s seas and rivers, and you had struck a blow in the rockface and made a marvellous shower erupt, the rays of the sun making rainbows in the mist. It was like that, each second of each day, for the three Moirai.

Klotho, to weave the thread of data.
Lachesis, to measure the thread and assign it to its proper owner,
And Atropos, to cut the thread at its proper place.

For data was fate and fate was data. For if one person or three could see the twists and turns of fate, they could see the immediate future and seeing the future meant seizing it. Snatching it out of the infinite possibilities and probabilities in the quantum foam of the universe and forcing it to gel into existence, an Observer making electrons decide on molecular trajectories by the mere push of his gaze.

There was one misunderstanding, though.

Fate was not tailored to a person, as it was commonly believed. No. Fate was a given constant, only the person it was assigned to was the thing to be decided.

Take the Twelve Labors of Hercules, for example. One might think that Fate came with the life of the person itself, the demigod, despised by Hera and forced to endure endless tragedies. In truth, the Fate of Hercules was a constant, and it happened to befall upon the poor man. Like a story looking for its protagonist.

“Sister?” Klotho wheezed.
“Yes, my dear?” Lachesis replied in the same rasping whisper.
“Take note of this particular thread of Fate,” Klotho said and passed the data on to her left.
“Oh, my, what a nasty one this is!” Lachesis rasped and measured the thread of data.
Klotho turned her cataract eyes to her sister, watching with interest as she worked the thread. “To whom shall we assign this, Sister?”
“Give it to me,” snapped Atropos, the nastiest and oldest sister, as she snatched the thread from them. “Yes,” she said with delight as she cut the thread. “Yes, yes, yes.” She picked up another thread of data from the folds of her white dress, it seemed as if she was saving it for a special occasion. She spun and weaved the smaller thread to the original one, matching twists and making ends disappear. It was an expert’s work.

The younger sisters turned to her side, dreading to interfere. A woman’s face showed up in the shower of Augmented Reality they saw, along with every bit of data about her. Every keystroke she ever pushed, every step she ever took, every frame of video she ever watched and was in. Her life, digitised. They gasped. “Can she endure it?” the two sisters said in unison.

Atropos, finally done with her work, smiled.

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Cover Reveal: Antigravel

Here is the cover for our new spacefaring series Antigravel:

Tiny but deadly.

Upwards and onwards

What did you think was the roadstop for man to explore the empty reaches of space? Faster than light travel? Interstellar navigation? Time dilation?
Puh. We beat all that by sheer force of will.
No.
It was micrometeoroids.
Rocks.
Fucking space rocks.

The beginning of a new series

This book marks the entry novel for a new series, separate from the god complex universe. Hopefully it will tease all you readers enough to spark off a whole new set of books.

Click HERE to Get Informed As Soon As It Comes Out!
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Cover Reveal: Sons Of Ares

Here is an upcoming novella, its cover revealed:

sons of ares draft 9
Tags are cool

Sons of Ares

When a group of teenage gamers get shaken down by some local thugs, they decide to test their team skills on the real world. But will they manage to turn their neighbourhood back into a safe place again, when the local gang has kidnapped their friend, when their own inexperience is a threat to their lives, and when their involvement brings in more unwanted attention?

Meet the boys (and a girl)

Detroll is the chief. His hobbies include gaming, strategising and confronting trolls on the internet. Hellbovine is a PVP addict. A second-generation player-vs-player gamer that has taken up his father’s legacy and wants to climb the gaming charts.  Ambassador is a sweet kid who works at his father’s gyro place. Zodovolo is pretty much their mascot. And Crazy Iva is the girl they never expected having on their guild (hence the sons naming). But no-one dares call her girl to her face, lest they get their nose bitten off.

Click HERE to Get Informed As Soon As It Comes Out!
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The Heartbreaking 1st Chapter Of Loveless Ada

Nobody Loves Ada

 

Nobody loves me.

Boys don’t like me.

OK, it’s not that they don’t like me, it’s rather like they don’t hit on me.
Ever. Never ever.

I mean, I don’t get what I’m doing wrong. I have my relationship status set to single and everything. My height doesn’t help either. I’m five percent short of two meters. But that’s not the worst part. The absolute frickin worst is my nickname.

Loveless Ada.
My name is Adelaide, so it was bound to get mocked at school.
Hard.
My parents shortened it to Ada at an early age.
Then they went up and died.
That reduced the total number of people who love me on planet earth, to zero.
Okay, one.
My yiayia, that’s my grandmother, is the only person left who still loves me.
Just a bit.
Technically.
Out of need.

She is like ninety eight years old and part-Robocop. Whatever empathy she might have had is gone over the decades. She is like a squeezed version of a human, where you take out the squishy feely stuff and leave a bag of bones behind, lubricated by spit and bile.

I know you’d think that my yiayia loves me deep down, and that she is just like all other lovin’ and carin’ cookie-making machines in the world.

Well, she does not. She calls me by my nickname, which I hate.

So, back to my nickname. It was at school, thirteen years old. I was bullied all day long by this boy Chris. Chris was obnoxious, smelly, and hit all kids at school. He liked me better, which is to say he hit me the most. I was an expert at avoiding him at all times, but in some cases he remembered all about me and eventually he would find me and torture me.

He’d steal my lunch. He’d throw dirt on my hair. He’d make fun of me, pointing his greasy finger at me and the rest of the bully-posse would laugh at me.
Chris was the bane of my existence during my childhood.

It didn’t help that I was beginning to grow much taller than him.
If Chris was nasty before, then after my growth spurt he acted as if it was his legal obligation to bully me. The mere heights of my adolescence were threatening his street-cred, even though I had done nothing to provoke him. I crouched to lessen my frame, I avoided him, I made sure never to look down on him.

It didn’t matter. Chris hated my guts. My tall, leaning over him guts.
I had discovered Ada Lovelace at that time. She was my hero. A countess from a century long forgotten, the very first computer programmer. I wanted to be her, I simply adored her.
The teacher asked for our role models, what kind of work we wanted to do when we’d grown up. That ill-fated moment, I raised my hand and said, “I want to be a computer programmer, like Ada Lovelace.”

Chris misheard the name and mocked, “Loveless? You wanna be Ada Loveless for the rest of your life? Hahaha!” And they laughed. Even the teacher cracked up a bit before she demanded silence.
Boom. It stuck.
Since then I’m loveless.
Ada Loveless.

Do you want to know what’s next for the virgin computer nerd? Do you wanna meet the nasty Yiayia?

Join the Mythographers and be the first to learn all about Ada!

Yes, I Want To Become A Mythographer!
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#Erinyes is now following you. Forever.

Imagine this entity following you for ever:

Furies Erinyes (Mythical Creature) - Art Picture by vee209
Furies Erinyes (Mythical Creature) – Art Picture by vee209

Erinyes (known as Furies in Roman Latin) are three goddess avengers of the crimes of murder, unfilial conduct, impiety and perjury. They recently discovered selfies as well.

Yes, mythical creatures now have their own Twitter profiles. Feel free to follow her, if you dare.

In the story Erinyes, Mahi is a self-adoring teenager who, just like most teenagers these days, only cares about the amount of likes and retweets that she gets on her (admittedly hot) selfie pics.

Mahimahi
Mahi notices something strange in her latest selfies.

The entity she notices on her selfies is becoming more and more solid, until it actually starts chasing her non-stop. That entity is Erinyes, and she chases her victims precisely every 109 minutes for one frantic minute of intense manhunt. Along with her friend, Deppy, a remarkably tech-savvy girl in her cutesy personality, and the enigmatic Prodromos, a conspiracy-theorist rebel hacker, Mahi has to find out the truth behind an insane corporate conspiracy while Erinyes is following her. Possibly forever.

The story comes out in a young adult novella and a short movie tie-in, which you can get a glimpse of in the teaser here.

She Wanted Thousands of Followers. Now There Is One She Can Never Shake Off.
She Wanted Thousands of Followers. Now There Is One She Can Never Shake Off.

Do you want to know what’s next for the inexperienced self-adoring Mahi? Do you wanna meet the Erinyes?

Download the Erinyes Novella on Amazon!

Do you want to get notified as soon as there’s something new and cool going on? Enter the email list to stay informed!

I Want to Be a Mythographer

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Crying Over Spilt Light Chapter Zero is on Wattpad and Ready to Tease You

We are always open to trying out new communities. Go on Wattpad.com and read the newly released teaser chapter Zero.

Watt do you mean?
Watt do you mean it’s not American?

It offers a chilling perspective that I believe was the core of my main idea for this book. Having it right at the start sets the tone for the rest of the path.

Don’t forget that Crying Over Spilt Light is available for download on Amazon:

If you want more of these tidbits, get on our mailing list to be the first to know.

I Want to Be a Mythographer