Here, have a slightly spoilerey map for the Rubberman series! The books tell of the biggest events to happen to this post-apocalypse multi-generational bomb shelter. A hope-from-the-dark scifi series on kindle paperback or hardcover

https://amazon.com/dp/B079VR3MY5?binding=kindle_edition

Book 1: Rubberman's Cage

Subject Lenth discovers there's more than 4 people in the world when he escapes his Unit, explores the facility, meets other sub-cultures in the facility, meets a SECOND GENDER (fascinating!) encounters a room with a wall that opens and put him in another area, (elevator?? what??) doorknobs, papaya. and faces a Subject with a very different outlook, who discovers how to murder.

Book 2: Rubberman's Citizens

Leena is a Citizen, and KNOWS her quarantined section is better than any other. All the Citizens agree. Given the regimented abuse Citizns suffer under whoever the current leader of Citizenry is, those other areas must be horrifying, right? What? Citizens are locker in for the safety of everyone else?? Looks like Leena and her friends will have to take some initiative... 

Book 3: Rubberman's Exodus

Tara and Sasha and the 2 chiefs in Engineering, and maintain the generator. Routine stuff until the uranium unexpectedly runs out. The lives of everyone in the facility are turned upside down, when a call for a little extra help from outside the facility brings devastating truths.

RUBBERMAN'S EXODUS IS OUT!!!

At the time of this writing, just the paperback, but hardcover and kindle are being processed by team Bezos at we speak. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981396054/

This is readable on its own, but nicely caps off the Rubberman Series. It's a biggie, at nearly 300 pages.

I recently was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, (yeah, on top of my 20-years-plus of paraplegia, yaaay!) so my concentration is kind of a mess these days. Thankfully, Exodus was in late editing when the MS hit hard. It's nice to finish off the series the way I wanted, but it does likely mean it's my last novel. I have plans to eventually redesign all my covers, and maybe do new editions of my older stuff with a bit of re-writing. But that's later.

133 years. Time is up.

Lead Engineer Tara and her partner Sasha face the coming end of the facility generator. For generations It has served thousands of people who have been hiding underground from the ravages of the war, and the lingering Enemy above.

Up and down the Grand Elevator, though the entire facility, every resident's life will be shaken when the generator sparks its last amp. The Great Actual, the anarchistic Citizens, and all of the regressed sub-societies in between will have to face the unknowns of the surface.

Old fears will pale against new circumstances beyond their imagination, and new attention brings judgment upon all.

So the initial intent was for Tara and Sasha (sweeties 4 ever!) to be the main focus of the book for most of it, but the events were so big that other parties had to have focus for notable chunks, most notably Messenger, who's the fella in charge of running the Grand Elevator that connects the different sections of the 40-story deep bomb shelter.

Other characters get their moment in the sun, from Lenth of Rubberman's Cage, and Leena of Rubberman's Citizens. This story affects every resident of the facility. Other per-established characters play important roles too, many of which (and some new ones) are named after real-life (and/or FB) friends. I gave them every chance to object to how I was having them behave!

It's launch day, and many things are nuts... but I'll get some nice excerpts posted here soon...

Eeeeheeheee... so many new things brought up that I think will surprise my long-time readers...

Rubberman that hill

I was listening to "Master of Puppets" in the background (not my typical kind of editing music) as I was editing Rubberman's Exodus, but by the end of the following section, I was required by law to switch to "Running up that hill". Sasha recently discovered that she was very agoraphobic.... and yet...
-------

Tara had little time to absorb the idea before Sasha's grip on her hand tightened. “Us?” Sasha asked meekly, “going into that? And going out into all that to get there?” Her eyes were locked on the outside, wide, and darting around all that 'empty' out there.

Messenger cast a sympathetic eye on Sasha. “I suppose just Tara would be - ”

Sasha made a sharp whimpering noise. “N-no...” A mix of not having Tara with her, or worrying about Tara out there alone was terrible enough. But there was one final factor that she could address with less embarrassment. “I can do it. I'm going to do what needs to be done. I can do it.”

Tara took Sasha's hands in hers. “Are you sure?”

Sasha blinked with a nod, and did her best to reset herself. “I can. It's just right over there. I can see it, I'll be back inside in no time.”

“That's right,” Tara said, looking closely into Sasha's eyes.

“If you're ready...” Messenger said quietly. He turned to one of the nearby Providers. “I don't know how long this will take. Maybe an hour? I'll call if it looks like it will go longer.”

“We can do this together.” Tara said, holding Sasha as if it were a dance. They began slowly towards the void, but Sasha's breathing wasn't calming down.

They got ever closer to that looming void, and Sasha's confidence crumbled. “I appreciate what you're trying to do hon, but it's not.. it's not...” Sasha's steps broke any rhythm of dance, becoming smaller and less frequent.

Tara leaned in with a kiss, and turned the dance more intimate. She held Tara and did most of the work of moving into the light. “We can.” she whispered into Tara's ear, “We're together.”

Tears came from Sasha with a gasp that turned into a gentle sob. “And you're in just as much danger out here as I am. We have to go back.” Sasha gently, but forcibly moved against Tara's body, to try to push them back inside.

Surprised at the strength Sasha was using, Tara couldn't bring herself to fight with enough force to correct their course. Instead, she simply stopped, and grabbed Sasha tight. “It... it's okay. I... you win.” Holding her so close, Sasha's trembling breath seemed to overtake them both.

Messenger quietly stepped closer, and held out the comm device Tavish had given him. “Hang onto this,” he said softly to Tara, “I can probably get the Colonel to call you on it if we need to talk.” After Tara took it, Messenger began walking back to the AirLimb.

“Neil,” Tara called to him, with apologetic eyes.

“I understand.” Messenger replied before continuing on, leaving Tara holding Sasha.

Sasha began to buckle, but caught herself. “I'm failing at my duty.”

“Hush.”

“And I'm causing you to fail because you need to take care of my weak ass.”

“Hush.”

“No hush, Tara,” Sasha said, pulling away. Before Tara could react, Sasha bolted out into the void towards the AirLimb, head low, as fast as she could. 

Coffee with Golconda review

E.A. Bass treated me to their eclectic sci-fi novella that's a blend "between comedy, drama, psychedelia and mystery."

It has a general feel of a collection of short stories that seem only tenuously connected at first, until the strings begin to draw it all together.

Before I get into the review, let's drop a link to its amazon page here.

Coffee with Golconda will tell you what you want to know when it is good and ready, and you will mind your manners until it does. You will flow between unique locales, imagery and thought-teasing metaphors that bring vastly differing settings vividly to life.

There were many moments when I felt strong Terry Pratchett influences, quirky yet meticulous, though that could just by my perspective- then in the next moment, things might turn surreal, or gently philosophical from the unique perspectives of Golconda and those that encounter him- only to shift to back quirky on a dime, then back again.

The world-building is gradual, doling out dollops of information casually, sometimes paying intense attention to a tiny detail, or referencing the bigger picture almost dismissively, or casually informing you that some of your assumptions were silly. (You should have known better, and Golconda will set you straight. When it's time.)

Once Coffee with Golconda has told you what it has to say, you might want to go back and read it again to see what you could not see before.

. -oO*Oo- .

Update from me about Rubberman's Exodus, quick status update as long as I'm making a rare blog post (I KNOW I should do more here, sue me!) I am past 60% in my second editing read of the 'final' book, after which it goes to my betas, and an editor, then one last editing read from me. The cover is basically decided, but as a fair warning to my longtime readers who have paperbacks of the rest of the Rubberman series... I WILL be launching with covers in the same style to match a full set, but I DO have general plans to address ALL of my covers. I've been vain (doing them all myself) and/or lazy with my covers so far... they're not laughably bad, but they're not great... the day to fix that is coming.

Oh, by the way, Rubberman's Exodus IS bigger than Cage or Citizens, and very very nearly rivals my biggest book to date, Echoes of Erebus. 

.... Erebus' daughter might have something to say about that in the future...

And they held each other. Fresh excerpt from WIP Rubberman's Exodus

Fresh scene, barely edited, so proceed with caution. Tara and Sasha are among hundreds of others in what equates to an internment camp built out of a repurposed fish processing facility. They recently had a very bad time in a bombed-out ruin, which was not helped by Sasha's agoraphobia.

Book progress is at 92k words. The ending is in sight, but it's got a fair chunk to go yet! Oh, and here's the current cover I have. The final will probably look a lot like this.

----------------------
“How ya doin'?” Tara said, putting an arm around Sasha's shoulders for a squeeze.

“Oh. You know. Spectacularly.” She grabbed Tara's hand and gave is a squeeze. “Same as the rest of us. Grateful to our kind hostess, and looking forward to trying to sleep in a room with a couple hundred other people again. With this stink. Oh, and there's that little wet spot outside looking at me.”

“Wet spot?” Tara glanced out towards the direction of the ocean. “Uh, yeah. That's... that's something all right. Hey. We gonna talk about what we saw in those ruins?”

Sasha's gaze shifted into a distant nowhere. “Can... can we not?”

“Okay.”

Sasha wrapped herself into Tara, burying her face into her shoulder, and squeezing at tight as she could. “Tell me that's not the world,” she mumbled into Tara weakly.

“Well... yes, we're told that place is like one in two places like that, and the vast majority of the world isn't... that.”

“No good,” Sasha said, squeezing desperately, even tighter. “Tell me that didn't exist.”

Tara nuzzled into the hair near Sasha's ear. “I don't know what you're talking about, Sash. We're home. We're in our room on our own bed. The generator's doing fine, and we even have the day off. I'm going to keep you in bed all day, and not let go.”

“Never let go,” Sasha whispered.

“Of course not. You're my Sash.” Tara gave an extra bit of squeeze, unsure if it could even be felt against how hard Sasha was squeezing.

“You won't let go because I'm weak?”

“You're my Sash.”

A few moments passed as they held each other, doing their best to ignore their surroundings.

“I hate being weak. I hate that it makes you have to … to deal with me.”

Tara moved back enough to look Sasha in the eye with a stern expression. “You. Are. My. Sash. I know how big it is out there. I know how that's making you feel. I have trouble logically understanding that hugeness out there. You can't help how much it affects you, but you push through. I've never been prouder of how you handled that run to the AirLimb back at home, or how you followed me into those ruins. I've never been so ashamed of myself for bringing you there.”

“Tara, no...”

Tara grabbed Sasha close again, almost forcefully. Hints of sobs struggled to push their way through Tara's voice. “Y-you are my Sash. You're so strong, hon. You're my...”

And they held each other. And others held each other. Some needed comforting, others chose to explore cautiously. Others stared at the sea.

And night eventually came.

And they held each other.

Rubberman's Exodus new sneak peek- Kevin gets memey.

Rubberman's Exodus at 75% first draft completion- here's a snippet written today. Minimal editing on it at this point. This graphic shows a bit of the as-of-yet unreleased map to the facility the Rubberman series is set in.

    At Engineering level, the remaining thirty soldiers moved into the loading bay. A row of empty clothing hooks lined the left wall. Ahead, a barricade of taupe, slightly-damp, steel barrels greeted them, as well as Kevin's face peeking out from a gap near the top.

    “Nice outfits,” Kevin said. “Are you fellas here to tell us when Tara and Sasha are getting back? It's been a lot longer than we were expecting. We were told you might be coming, though.”
The lead soldier answered back, “We're here to ensure that facility operations are secure, in interests of public safety. Please remove the barricade.”

    Kevin looked to the side, to someone unseen behind the barricade, and said quietly. “He's here for safety. Yup. Kinda how I saw it.” Kevin turned back to the soldiers with a smile. “Yeah, no thank you, we've been maintaining this facility for a long time, and things are secure here. I'm guessing it was one of your friends that cut our connection to the Grand Elevator. That's not safe. Also, I don't feel like moving these barrels again, they're heavy cuz they're filled with water. Water from the cooling pool. The one where we keep the depleted uranium, so, you know, handle at your own risk. I'm a professional.”
    Kevin flipped down his Rubberman suit's mask, completing his hazard suit. “So, you can leave, see ya!” Kevin's now-masked face disappeared from the gap, immediately replaced with a box to seal the gap.

    The soldiers didn't need to know that the vast majority of the water it the cooling pool was entirely harmless. The pool was now a bit lower than it technically should be, but the risk was low, especially for what was hoped to be a short duration.
    “Yeah, okay, now what?” Kevin said to a nearby Engineer, suited up as he was, as were the nearest twenty Engineers.

    At that moment, a 'foomp' sound came from the other side of the barricade, and a canister barged through the box in the gap. The canister rested on the middle of the room and started belching out smoke.
    Kevin looked at the smoke canister, and said “Son of a crap-sniffer!” He taped the filter on his mask, and pointed vigorously at the gap in the barricade, and yelled, “Am I a joke to you?!”

59.78260869565217% Exodus

April 10th, I declared the Rubberman's Exodus to be 30% done. That's first draft, but I edit as I go, so my first drafts tend to bear a striking resemblance to my final draft, minus typos.

Today, I compared wordcount or Exodus compared to the previous book, Rubberman's Citizens, and by that metric, Exodus) is 59.78260869565217% finished. So I'm pretty pleased with this pace. I know I'd had stints where I had been getting multiple pages per day, and I'm not doing THAT right now, but it's been a slow and steady thing.

This isn't the final cover, but the final might be similar.

In other news, I've decided on a name for the next series. I've leaked an experiment for a cover for the first book of it in closed groups, and is purdy. I miiiight do a cover reveal on that when I've polished it up a bit. I'm not too happy with the rubberman series covers. I had a theme, I wanted a cohesive look, but they don't draw you in much.

Anyway, the next series will follow a character or two that my readers already know. It's an idea I've pondered for quite a while, but the concept has crystalized a lot lately. Unlike my other two series, where they take place in the same world with other main characters taking centre stage, this series will decidedly star one central character. In that way, it will be a bit of a step towards serialization.

And yes, it's a she.

Sort of.

-- Also, the house can get pretty loud with multiple students doing some classes on zoom, and my wife working from home often using zoom.

Here, I memed.

Rubberman's Exodus is at 30%... and what's with my series' consistency?

I've been fortunate enough that the majority of reviews for my books (as few as they have been compared to many books) have been positive. By one means or another, (and/or an updated cover) my first book remains my most popular.

Among the handful of reviews that are not-so-positive, pops up a notion now and then that "It started out good, and then..."

Yeah, I get that, I can see why that can happen. Lifehack was born from a set of four not-so-short stories. In the first one, our hero is mostly alone, doing a typical survival v zombies thing.

After the first quarter of the book, (passing from story 1 to story 2) she is basically rescued, much less alone, no longer living in that oppressive claustrophobic threat that seems to be a mainstay of typical zombie fare.

Around here, there's a bit of a shift into ROMCOM territory. And people looking for a ZOMBIE BOOK... are prone to get turned off. The other side of the coin is that people not really into general zombie stuff have really enjoyed it.

I warn people as such... "If you're a big zombie book fan, this isn't it." I don't dwell on gore nearly as much. It's there, it impacts our hero, but I don't feel the need to run the readers' faces in it.

The tonal shift from the first quarter to the rest of the book comes down to the book not being grounded in one consistent theme in some ways. First-book-itis, maybe.

This inconsistent tone is also reflected in the Lifehack series as a whole. The following book, Watching Yute, is drastically different. There are some zombies in it, but they barely muster a side-story, with the nanotech aspect being the bigger threat.... and in much more subtle/tangential ways. The book is also a huge downer, on purpose. I love it, it wrecks me. But it's a HARD turn from the hijinks of LIfehck

Then the series caps off with Echeos of Erebus. The hijinks get ramped back up a bit, the depressing bits get toned down, and we end up with a sort of balance of action/drama between former 2 books, Then glaze it with extra nanites.


As a series, my first 3 books weren't planned very well. I still like the books, and the world they formed, but it didn't help foster a readership that could justifiably be off-put by the drastically shifting tone from one book to the next.

AS SUCH- the Rubberman series was planned and laid out from the start with a skeletal framework that could host several stories that felt more consistently .... related to each other. As I write book 3 of Rubberman, (Rubberman's Exodus) there is going to be a dramatic shift- but it was planned all along. I've just passed what will probably be the 1/3 mark in the book, and I'm writing the beginning of that shift.

10 years down the road, will I be seeing reviews saying "Huh, Exodus started OK, but..."? Well, too bad. Can't please everyone. And there HAS to be some shifts in tone. Consistency for consistency's sake would be dull. Rubberman's Citizens is a little bit of an outlier from the bulk of the series, with a handful more action, and taking place mainly in one section of the series' 'geography'.

There's a balance to be had. Will the balance I settle on please everyone?

Absolutely not.

Will my next series have a balance that pleases everyone?

 Absolutely not.

Am I going to let that keep me up at night?

Guess.

.

Contact in the dark. Rubberman's Exodus WIP fresh section

Fresh section, checking in on a couple of side-characters during the blackout. This isn't edited much, and could likely change by the final book.

---------------

“Contact?” Gabe called into Contact's dark office, “Are you here?”

“Gabe is that you?” Sounds of Contact fumbling to stand accompanied that of a cup falling to the ground, then rolling away. “Get these lights on!”

“I... I'm sure Messenger is working on it, Contact.”

“Have we asked him? Properly?”

“I'm not sure where he is. What... what do you mean by asking him properly?”

Contact scoffed. “In recent years, I've seen people addressing the Messenger with less reverence than is proper for the servant of the Great Actual. This is all a warning! A punishment! We must throw ourselves before Messenger and beg for forgiveness!”

“I'm not sure-”

“I blame that Lenth! A mere Subject, and-”

“Contact, the Messenger seems to favour Lenth well enough, if Lenth were to blame-”

“Whatever! It's not right! He's a problematic sort!”

Gabe sighed. “Contact, the reason I'm here is just to make you aware that several Subjects are out of their Units. It seems that in light of this unexpected blackout, some Managers have decided-”

“They're loose!? Subjects running around loose!?” Staggered footsteps could be heard in Contact's direction, going nowhere very quickly.

“None of them are above Manager level right now, and they're peaceful. It's only a dozen or two. It's not like Citizenry's spilled out.”

Contact let out a horrified gasp, and then a moment of silence.

“Contact? Are you a-”

“Has anyone checked that Citizenry is secure?!”

“From the Grand Elevator shaft, things seem quiet,” Gabe said.

“This is all unacceptable! Find Messenger! Politely! Now!”

Gabe sighed. Again. “All right. Stay safe here, okay, Contact? I'll... make sure I post a Provider near your door to keep problematic sorts away from you.”

“Post two!”

“Sure.”

“Four?”

“Sure.”

“And do we know where those shock-sticks are?”

“Four guards with shock-sticks. I'll see what I can do.”

“Good, good. You're a good man, Gabe.”

“Sure.”