Hail fellow adventurers! As a member of Thinking Ink Press, I'm proud to announce the release of David Colby's new novel, SHATTERED SKY, featuring a cover painted by my wife, Sandi Billingsley!
This has been a great team effort between David the writer, Sandi the artist, and the team at Thinking Ink - Betsy, Liza and Keiko. I was the editor for this project - making SHATTERED SKY the first novel that I edited. Neat!
Personally, I'd describe the series as THE HUNGER GAMES meets GRAVITY for the LGBTQ set, but from our announcement: "The second book in the Lunar Cycle trilogy, SHATTERED SKY is the sequel to DEBRIS DREAMS. In DEBRIS DREAMS, lunar separatists attack the space elevator above the Earth, forcing offworlder Drusilla Zhao into wartime military service.
In SHATTERED SKY, Dru is honored as a hero and joins her girlfriend Sara on Earth. As Dru begins her new life, she struggles to adapt to a different culture while suffering from PTSD. When Sara’s home is threatened, and the military demand that Dru return to service, she must fight to defend the Alliance while battling enemies inside her own head.
Author David Colby combines hard science details with page-turning action and a diverse cast of characters for a unique science fiction experience that you won’t soon forget."
Get SHATTERED SKY wherever fine books are sold!
-The Centaur
Oh hey! I almost forgot! 
So at Dragon Con I had a reading this year. Yeah, looks like this is the last year I get to bring all my books - too many, to heavy! I read the two flash fiction pieces in 
But that wasn't recorded, so, oh dang, you'll have to either go to 
Boosting the signal ... I'll be joining my friend David Colby's panel APPLIED PLOTONIUM at 10am on Sunday at 
In addition to David and me, we've also shanghaied, er, convinced two of our mutual friends to join in: writer and chemist 
Wow. I guess a lot of books are going to be waiting for me when I get home tonight ... either the shipment of 
One more 
Q: Yak? Giant Chicken? Trebuchet? What gives?
DW: It started with a dare in our email planning with the authors for Thirty Days Later. One author found a picture of a clockwork yak and threw down the gauntlet: “Bet you can’t fit a yak in.” Challenge accepted. Rumor has it that there are multiple yak sightings (bonus points if you can find them all). Since that was deemed “Way too easy,” the chieftess of shenanigans, Sparky McTrowell, raised the yak ante for Some Time Later with a trebuchet, and somehow a chicken was thrown in, possibly due to an excess of caffeine and chocolate. And Yes. I fit them all in.
BJS: Absolutely. As chief cat wrangler for all three of the Later anthologies, I had to coordinate deadlines and revisions for not just the fifteen or so authors, but also our publisher’s staff. Why do I do it? The power, obviously. But in all seriousness, it’s the satisfaction of being an integral part of a fantastic collection of stories.
Q: What was your favorite story to edit/write for the anthologies?
BJS: That’s a tough one. There are so many great stories and they vary so much in theme, style, and content. I had a great time writing my own stories, especially the first one in Some Time Later, “The Descent.” That one allowed me to get my mycological geek on. I’m partial to Lillian Csernica’s Japanese mythology-inspired stories because they are unique but still feel steampunk.
Q: What excited you about Twelve Hours Later and the other anthologies in which you’ve participated?
SEC: Short fiction is an art form in and of itself. Expressing a full story in a little bit of space, means distilling the true essence of your message in a way that someone can read on their lunch hour and still feel like they got a complete picture. Having the opportunity to challenge myself within the framework of the anthologies’ themes made me work hard to present fully developed characters and concepts within those constraints, and it was a lot of fun! That the anthologies benefited literacy programs was the icing on the cake.
Q: Tell us about your latest book.
KW: Pressed to Death is a cozy mystery set in a wine country paranormal museum. It’s the second book in my Perfectly Proper Paranormal Museum series...
Wow. After nearly 21 years, my first published short story, “Sibling Rivalry”, is returning to print. Originally an experiment to try out an idea I wanted to use for a longer novel, ALGORITHMIC MURDER, I quickly found that I’d caught a live wire with “Sibling Rivalry”, which was my first sale to The Leading Edge magazine back in 1995.
“Sibling Rivalry” was borne of frustrations I had as a graduate student in artificial intelligence (AI) watching shows like Star Trek which Captain Kirk talks a computer to death. No-one talks anyone to death outside of a Hannibal Lecter movie or a bad comic book, much less in real life, and there’s no reason to believe feeding a paradox to an AI will make it explode.
But there are ways to beat one, depending on how they’re constructed - and the more you know about them, the more potential routes there are for attack. That doesn’t mean you’ll win, of course, but … if you want to know, you’ll have to wait for the story to come out.
“Sibling Rivalry” will be the second book in Thinking Ink Press's Snapbook line, with another awesome cover by my wife Sandi Billingsley, interior design by Betsy Miller and comments by my friends Jim Davies and Kenny Moorman, the latter of whom uses “Sibling Rivalry” to teach AI in his college courses. Wow! I’m honored.
Our preview release will be at the 
