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Book Cover for 'The Leftover Girl'
The Dome (detail)
Alphane life (detail) , dome in distance
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Book Cover for 'A Children's Crusade'

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Category: US National Park Service

Blog entry supplemental five: …for that interesting year ahead!

Blog entry supplemental five: …for that interesting year ahead!

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This year promises to be ‘interesting’ on a personal, as well as a political level…
Coincidentally, I’m going to be visiting America again in this time of change. Last time I went it was to volunteer for the US National Park Service in 2013 as part of my MA; this time it’s going to be a musical odyssey (Chicago to New Orleans) to mark entering my seventh decade.It will be interesting to take the pulse of America at the start of the Trump presidency, and see how people’s attitudes have changed from 2010 and 2013…
Back on the somewhat firmer ground of my literary plans, a big year lies ahead. My big project will be to publish A Children’s Crusade via an ebook platform and also print some hard copies which I can sell personally. This means that the book will disappear of this website at some point during this year, but I plan to replace it with the pilot screenplay Lights in the sky which also acts as an introduction to the trilogy.
The launch of the ebook will require me to be rather more proactive in promoting my writing than I have been up to now! Marketing tools to be deployed include YouTube readings, press kits, more submissions, more blogs, links to more forums etc etc.
You will also see changes to this website, likely to include a news bulletin to be added to the home page…
Away from promotion and marketing, the writing continues. I’m now more than a hundred pages into my fifth novel, provisionally entitled The leftover girl. The book is effectively a prequel to Lights in the sky, taking place on Earth in the run-up to, and the early years of, the Alpha Mission. It’s framed as mainstream SF novel (with magical realist elements), and for this reason I’ve decided (for the moment, at least!) to publish it under my mainstream pseudonym, Stephen Clare. But this decision may be reviewed (it would require another website for one thing!).
All the best

The Lessons of History

The Lessons of History

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Hi,

I am about to post chapter four of A Children’s Crusade on to the site. Apologies for late posting this month, my plan remains to post a new chapter roughly every two weeks, and as there are twenty two in this book, you should have the whole thing by the end of 2016.

The chapter is called ‘History Lesson’, after the central conceit, which takes a lesson given to the Children about Earth’s recent history (from our standpoint, future history), and uses it as a metaphor for life lessons learned (specifically by Marta), during the action. We also learn something more about the dominant indigenous species, as our heroine, following up on her suspicion that the pseudo-crustaceans are smarter than they look, decides to conduct behavioural research on one of them!

My speculations on a possible future history of the United States act as a way into the action. Despite any appearance to the contrary, I’m not in any way anti-American. I’m a fairly frequent visitor, and a great admirer of the American Constitution and the ideals it embodies. Readers should see the political aspects of this chapter as an outsider’s contribution to (and comment upon), the ongoing cultural debate within America.

As a sidebar to this, I’d also like to point out that I’m also an admirer of another great American institution, the US National Park Service, which I volunteered for during the summer of 2013.

Happy Reading