Michael R. Hicks's Blog, page 9

March Madness Giveaway: The Winners

Okay, okay, I’m late in getting this off to the presses – don’t skewer me! I’ve at least got a good excuse, having been hard at work on Mistress Of The Ages (and no, before you ask, I don’t have a firm release date yet). But the contest winners are in for the March Madness Giveaway/First Contact fantasy casting call!

Before we get to the winners, let me first say thank you to everyone who participated. It was a lot of fun reading through the responses, and interesting to see the differences in how people perceive the characters. If the casting was to be by the number of mentions,  from The Walking Dead would have won by a landslide for the role of Ichiro Sato, with a close second for . Interestingly enough, got a lot of picks to play Tesh-Dar (having just watched Maleficent, I can see that). Did you hear that, Angelina?

That brings us to the fun part – the winners!

Oh, and by the way: I was hoping to just post some pics of the actors/actresses, but my laptop decided to go into rebellion. So I posted links to the various profiles on IMDb.com.

Runner Up #2: Eduardo C.

Crew of Aurora

Captain Owen McClaren:
Ichiro Sato:
Yao ming:
Jens Amundsen:
Raisa Marisova:
Anna Zalenski:
Brenda Harkness:
Gene Kilmer:

Leading Kreelan Characters

Tesh-Dar:
Li’ara Zhurah:

Others cast as Kreelan warriors

Additional Human Characters

Stephanie Guillaume:
President McKenna:
Admiral Lefevre:
Admiral Tiernan:
Ambasador Laurent Navarre:
Patty Coyle:
Emanuelle Sabourin:
Col. James Sparks:
Col. Grishin:
Roland Mills:
Amelia Cartwright:

Runner Up #1: Rob

Rob sent me a big PDF file with his picks for actors to fill the roles, their photos, and even pics he found as ideas for what some of the vehicles and ships looked like!

Ichiro Sato:
Stephanie Guillaume:
Tesh-Dar:
Colonel James Sparks:
Colonel Lev Grishin:
Captain Owen McClaren:
Master Chief Brenda Harkness:
Admiral Patrick Tiernan:
President Natalie McKenna:
Secretary of State Hamilton Barca:
Minister of Defense Joshua Sabine:
Staff Sergeant Patty Coyle:
Cpl Manfred Holman:
Sgt Yuri Kirov:
Roland Mills:
Emmanuelle Sabourin:
General Jaswant Singh:
General Sharine Metz:
Ambassador Laurent Navarre:
Admiral Lefevre:
Li’ara-Zhurah:
Gunny Pablo Ruiz:

1st Prize: Wayde F.

I think Wayde must have gone through and picked out every character in the book. I had to go back and look some up just to make sure they were really in there! And not only did he choose a given actor/actress for each role (with only a few exceptions), he also chose alternates for some of them, which I’ve included in parentheses. Note, however, that I didn’t link to the alternates in IMDb – I have to get some writing done yet today. I particularly enjoyed one of his choices for Ichiro Sato: Wayde’s son!

So, congrats to Wayde, who walks away with the $50 prize. His picks are listed below. I pulled out some of the major characters and put them at the top. Now let the filming begin…

Midshipman Ichiro Sato:
Tesh-Dar:
Li’ara-Zhurah:
Stephanie Guillaume:
Admiral Patrick Tiernan:
Emmanuelle Sabourin :
Colonel James Sparks:
Staff Sgt Patty Coyle:
1st Sgt Roland Mills.
Gunnery Sgt Pablo Ruiz:
Capt Owen McClaren:
President McKenna:

Lt Raisa Marisova:
Lt Jensen Amundsen:
Lt Cdr Raj Kumar:
Ensign John Waverly:
Chief of Engineering Aubrey Hannan:
Master Chief Brenda Harkness:
Midshipman Anna Zalenski:
Petty Officer Yao Ming:
Seaman 1st Class Gene Kilmer: (Dan Bilzerian)

Commander Pavel Sidorov: Sergei Bodrov

Captain Rhonda Burke:
Admiral Schiller:
Vladimir Penkovsky:
Defense Minister Joshua Sabine:
Secretary of State Hamilton Barca: Duane Johnson [I’m assuming he meant
General Jaswant Singh:
General Sharine Metz:
Ambassador Faisul bin Sultan:
Dr Anton Novikov:
Captain Leona Bennett:
Dr Larsen:
Vice-Admiral Mary “Bunny” Richards:
Ambassador Laurent Navarre:

Commander Scott Morrison:
Lt Commander Vedette Pergolesi:
Ensign Kayla Watanabe:
Ensign Natalya Bogdanova:
Petty Officer 3rd Class Stephen Jaworsky:
Commodore Rafael Santiago:
Rai Tomonaga: (Ken Watanabe, Masachi Odate)

Sgt Hadley:
Cpl Manfred Holman:

Know Anybody In Hollywood?

Hey, if you’d like to see these books turned into movies (or a television series like Game of Thrones), let your favorite actors, directors, or producers know! Many voices are more effective than just one, as mine hasn’t gotten us anywhere. But maybe yours will…

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Sign Up For The March Madness Free Giveaway

It’s been ages since I’ve held a free giveaway, so it’s past time to do another one and have a little fun! The prizes this time will be a $50 gift card to the book retailer of your choice (e.g., Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.) for first prize, and two $20 gift cards for the runners-up.

The only catch is that I won’t be posting the rules here on my site – I’m going to send them out this coming Saturday (7 March) to my mailing list subscribers, so if you’re not on the list already, sign up now so you can participate!

Just as a hint, you’ll need to have read First Contact, which is free as an ebook. If you haven’t read it yet, you can grab a copy from one of the retail sites, or if you join the mailing list now you’ll get a copy delivered right to your inbox about an hour after you sign up.

I plan on announcing the winners on 21 March. One of them could be you!

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Farewell To Leonard Nimoy

Live long and prosper…

Like so many others, I must sadly bid farewell to Leonard Nimoy, who passed away yesterday at the age of 83. His portrayal of Spock in the original Star Trek series left an indelible impression on me during my formative years. As one of my elementary school friends recently recalled, my main interests back in those early days were things military and Star Trek, and she was not far wrong. The timing of his death was something of an irony for me, as I had just started to go back through the original series only a week or so ago after not having watched them for many years.

As a boy, my head was filled with the universe of Star Trek and its characters, along with the historical events of the Apollo program and, later, the Space Shuttle. Sometimes I probably forgot which was which. When you’re a child gifted with an active imagination, it doesn’t really matter, I suppose. But back in those days, were I granted a single wish, it very likely would have been to be a member of the crew of the Enterprise. Had I been able to step through the barrier separating reality from imagination, I would not have hesitated.

Of all the characters, I identified most with Spock. While I wished that I was more like Kirk, the truth is that I was a hopeless nerd (something that hasn’t changed much). If you think about it, Leonard Nimoy’s Spock was a nerd, too. But he showed that nerds could be strong, compassionate, caring, and just. Spock was the perfect TV role model for kids like me, and Leonard Nimoy brought it off flawlessly. Now, I’m not going to say that I’m anything like Spock, or Leonard Nimoy for that matter. But he represented something worthy and noble to which kids like me might aspire.

Nimoy, of course, had talents that went far beyond his portrayal of Spock. I have to confess, however, that I didn’t really follow his career outside the narrow confines of Star Trek, and I suppose that his intensely strong typecasting as Spock might not have done his acting career any favors. Be that as it may, I’ve certainly enjoyed seeing him in other roles (notably as William Bell in the wonderful sci-fi series Fringe), and no one can deny that he was an immensely talented actor and creative mind.

But to me, the boy who sat glued to the tube every night waiting for Star Trek to come on, the boy who would later cast aside a secure government career to write science fiction stories, he has always been, and always shall be, Spock.

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The Mars One Mission: Should We Go?

The other day some of my Twitter friends commented on how badly they were feeling about the people competing for acceptance by the Mars One Mission, which is a private venture that hopes to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars. The first launch is planned for 2024, and the venture announced that the 200,000-plus applicants had at last been whittled down to the final 100 selectees, who face a very rigorous process to identify the teams who will actually fly the missions. The kicker is that these missions will be one-way, and some (perhaps most) critics believe the crews will have a tragically short life-span once they reach their new home. Some seem to feel like this is a needless and hideously expensive tragedy in the making, while others — the applicants among them, of course — look at it as the opportunity of a lifetime. What say you?

My own take on it is that if I were about 25 years younger and unattached, I would have applied myself. I believe that Homo Sapiens is, at heart, an explorer, and the stars have beckoned us from day one. That’s not to say that there isn’t more to explore here on Mother Earth, but outer space has limitless possibilities if we can work our way through the technological challenges. We have proven we have the ability to get to the Moon, and I personally believe that we’ve had the technology to reach even farther for some years.

Unfortunately, once the Space Race was over, the world’s governments largely lost interest in manned space exploration. But with the emergence of (hopefully) viable commercial ventures like Mars One and others, we may very well be entering a Golden Age of space flight. But the exploration of space has its risks, as it always has. The Mars One crews may perish soon after landing, or they might not make it at all. But if we never pushed outward, never accepted risk, our ancient ancestors never would have left Africa to colonize the rest of the planet, to mention nothing of the many exploratory missions recorded in our more modern history.

But there’s another reason I believe that we need to leave our planetary cradle, one that’s far more imperative: the long-term survival of our species.  You can pick your doomsday scenario, or maybe we simply run out of resources on Earth, but the bottom line is that all of our eggs are in one planetary basket. It doesn’t matter if we screw up the Earth or something else does it: if our biosphere is badly damaged, we’re screwed. We need to start building a new nest, and I think the time is upon us.

Getting back to the Mars One adventurers, I’m very curious about how you view their circumstances. Are they to be pitied and mourned in advance? Are they heroic explorers? Or something else entirely. Let me know what you think!

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A Little Snippet From MISTRESS OF THE AGES

I guess it’s time to start getting folks in the mood for MISTRESS OF THE AGES, the rough draft of which is roughly 2/3 done. And remember, the usual rules apply – the tidbits I’ll be posting are, as yet, raw and unedited…and chosen more or less at random.

Enjoy!

“You presume too much, Syr-Nagath.”

She favored Ulan-Sulir, the high priest of the Nyur-A’il with a contemptuous look. She knew that he could easily kill her with the power of his mind, choking the life from her body with an act of whim. But he had dishonored himself when the Desh-Ka had arrived to rescue Keel-Tath. He should have challenged Ayan-Dar, but had backed down from the one-eyed priest in scarcely concealed fear. That he had remained here, rather than returning to his temple to consult with the elders of the order, told her that he was afraid to face them. Syr-Nagath knew the measure of Ulan-Sulir now, and found him lacking. He was perfect for her needs.

“You dislike my attire, Ulan-Sulir?” She said, turning in a full circle with the grace of a dancer. She still wore gleaming black ceremonial armor, just as would any warrior in garrison. But her breast plate now bore a cyan rune that had not been seen for millennia: that of the Ka’i-Nur priesthood, which had fallen from grace near the end of the Second Age. Her Collar of Honor bore an oval of living metal inscribed with the same rune, and a black robe with silver piping rippled from her back while she turned.

“You are no priestess!” Ulan-Sulir spat.

Syr-Nagath came to him, her mouth twisted in sudden rage. “Do you, high priest of the Nyur-Ai’l, for one moment doubt that I would be high priestess of the Ka’i-Nur if our Crystal of Souls had not been taken from us?”

Ulan-Sulir’s eyes narrowed. “It was never taken from you.”

“Do not bandy words with me, priest,” she snarled. “If what is yours is placed by another’s hands forever beyond your reach, it has been taken. I wear these adornments by right, and by right I should have the powers of the crystal of the Ka’i-Nur.”

“But you do not,” Ulan-Sulir said, his face twitching up into a thin smile, “and never will.”

“Do not be so sure,” she told him, her opinion of him falling even more. One such as Ayan-Dar would have had my head for speaking in such a fashion, she thought. She knew through Ka’i-Lohr that the old priest was dead, and the thought saddened her. She would have liked to watch him burn alive, turning on a spit over an open fire…

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Update on MISTRESS OF THE AGES

And no, this isn’t the final cover…

Since I’ve gotten so many questions on this lately, I figured I should probably give a “here’s what’s going on” report on the next book of the IN HER NAME series, MISTRESS OF THE AGES.

The manuscript now stands at 35,000 words, and there’s a LOT of story left to cover! That brings me to the bad news is that it’s going to be a while yet before it’s ready. How long? I have no idea. All I can tell you is that I’ve been working on it consistently and am trying to keep life’s interruptions at bay as much as possible.

The good news is that I’m really liking how the story is coming along, and I’m hoping that you’ll find this not only to be a fitting conclusion to the First Empress saga, but I think it also may very well wind up being the best book of the trilogy.

So, that’s the scoop for now!

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The Black Gate Is On The Street!

It’s official: The Black Gate has been published! While it hasn’t reached all the retail outlets yet and the print version will be a few weeks off, it’s on the street and ready for you to grab a copy!

It is early 1945 and Nazi Germany, reeling under the relentless onslaught of the Allied armies, looks to futuristic superweapons like jet fighters, V-1 buzz bombs, and V-2 rockets for its salvation.

But Peter Miller, an analyst at the headquarters of the Office of Strategic Services in Washington D.C., learns of a secret Nazi weapons project that may pose a far greater threat: the Black Gate.

Sent alone on a perilous mission into the heart of Germany in the guise of an SS officer, Peter discovers that Nazi scientists have recreated an ancient machine that opens a portal to another universe, a gate they believe literally leads to Hell.

With the help of Mina Hass, a beautiful woman who is also the lover and confidant of the madman leading the project, Peter must find a way to close the gate forever before the Nazis unwittingly unleash Armageddon…

Use the drop-down list below to pop over to your fave ebook retailer…and please do me a huge favor and let your friends know! Word of mouth from happy readers is always the best advertising!

Choose Retailer...Amazon KindleB&N NookiTunes eBookGoogle Play eBookKobo

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The Black Gate – Now Ready For Beta Readers!

Okay, The Black Gate is just about done. I’ll be working on the final editorial revisions today (Sunday, 21 September) and then picking a handful of victims, er, beta readers to see how they like it and polish it up a bit before it gets released.

So, if you’re interested in the job, just post a comment here on why you’d like to do it and why I should pick you! Here’s what I’m looking for:

Anything that jars you out of the story, doesn’t seem to fit, etc. Basically, anything that detracts from the reading experience.
While you certainly do NOT have to feel compelled to edit the text, pointing out any bloopers you find is always welcome.
Please consider posting a review of the book wherever you would normally purchase it. Don’t ask me if your review is okay or for me to screen it, etc. – all I ask is that it would be like you’d write if you’d just picked up the book to read it.
The one major condition is that I will need your feedback not later than noon on Friday, 26 September so I can incorporate any changes in the final draft and upload the files to the distribution sites in hopes of getting the book on the street the following Monday or Tuesday ( depending on publisher lag time). As always, ebook versions will be available first, followed by print in a few weeks.
Oh, and the most important thing is to tell all your friends so they can buy a copy when it comes out to keep me and my family from starving!

As always, thank you so much in advance for volunteering your time and red ink to improve my writing skills!

P.S. For my friends on Facebook and Twitter who have already expressed interest, you don’t have to double up with a comment here if you don’t want to, but it wouldn’t hurt to remind me again of your interest, LOL!

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A Whole Freakin’ Year???

I came to a shocking realization yesterday: it’s been almost a YEAR since I published my last book, Reaping The Harvest. I knew it had been a while, that I’d gotten caught up in our  laid back Jimmy Buffet-esque Florida lifestyle, but I hadn’t realized it had been that long. Okay, sure, The Black Gate is almost ready to go out the door, but while I think you’ll enjoy it, it wasn’t a monumental project that should have taken that long.

So, my apologies, dear readers, for being such a slacker. I promise you here and now – and this is from me, personally, not as “an author” – that I won’t do that again. I’ll also toss out what I hope is some good news: the rough draft of the first chapter of Mistress Of The Ages is done! And I’ve also decided that, no matter how long the rest of Keel-Tath’s story turns out to be (there’s easily enough plot for more than one book), I’m not going to stop working on it until it’s finished. If it winds up being horrendously long, I may (or may not) decide to divide it up into more than one book, but I’m not going to take any more breaks to work on other stuff until it’s finished.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy The Black Gate – it should be out in another couple weeks after I get the final editorial revisions back and then send it off to the beta readers!

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Out On The Road, Expanding My Comfort Zone

My wife and I have been out on our annual summer RV vacation since early June, which is the main reason I’ve been fairly quiet of late (and no, I haven’t forgotten that I have books to write, believe me!). This year we’ve been touring through New England, and have seen and done a lot of amazing things and visited some magical places. We’ve also been through the usual assortment of hair-raising situations that might make saner folk question just what the heck they were doing out on the road in the first place!

As Bilbo Baggins once told Frodo, “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door. You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no telling where you might be swept off to.” I think Bilbo must have had a lot of experience with RV travel, and I’m tempted to have that quote painted on the side of our rig.

There was more than one occasion during this summer’s trip (well, and most of the trips we’ve taken before) when I thought to myself, “Just what the HELL am I doing out here?” This thought would usually run through my mind in such joyful situations as driving through a straight (or, even better, turning) construction zone with barrels, cones, and/or Jersey barriers positioned no more than a foot away from either side of the rig, although at the time it seemed like only inches. Or grinding up (or, worse, zooming down) steep, twisting country roads with blind turns. At night. In pouring rain. With hail. And meteors. Or trying to squeeze the rig through narrow streets of quaint little towns that would be a tight fit for my bicycle, because the GPS said that was THE best route to get to our destination. The infernal device, which I call Gertrude, forgot to mention that we needed vaseline to get through. Or our destination was intentionally located by its proprietors in such a difficult to access area that guests would never want to brave the hellish roads to leave and would stay forever (cue up Hotel California by the Eagles). The RV park where we’re staying right now has its own graveyard. I kid you not.

So why do my wife and I go through this self-inflicted hell on wheels, rather than just staying at home in Sarasota, floating in the pool with tropical drinks with little umbrellas in hand?

Because, to us, the rewards have justified the madness. It doesn’t matter so much that we’re in an RV, as opposed to driving a car or flying and staying in a hotel (although we prefer RV travel because it’s our own place with our own stuff, and we can take the cats). What matters is that we’re out experiencing the world, warts and all. We’ve seen so many places and done so many things that so many people never get around to. And every time we go somewhere, we come away with the thought, “Wow! There’s so much more to see and do here!” And while driving The Beast can be a challenge, I can also look back and say, “Hey, I did that – and survived!” It’s a confidence builder, and certainly has given us lots of great fodder for stories to tell over a good meal with friends.

Beyond that, it’s the mental attitude, which takes you far beyond traveling the highways and byways in an RV. The words of John F. Kennedy’s “We chose to go to the moon speech” come to mind:

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win…

I thought about Kennedy’s words a great deal when my books took off back in 2011 and I was faced with the opportunity to leave my career government job and begin a new career as a full-time author. But that meant leaving all the security and benefits – a stable and pretty much guaranteed income, excellent health care, and good retirement benefits – of my government job behind. By contrast, working as an author has no guarantees. I have no idea what my income may be next month or the month after that, and I have no idea how well any given book will do when it’s published. I have no retirement plan beyond what I choose to make for myself. Our health benefits are far more expensive than as a Federal employee. I do everything for the business, from writing the books to doing the taxes, and sometimes – like driving the RV – it drives me nuts. And everything is uncertain; there is no safety net. In short, it meant that I, and my family with me, made the decision to step out onto Bilbo’s fabled Road in a big way.

It would have been very easy not to. I could have stayed comfortably in my Hobbit hole, just as it would be comfortably easy to stay in our house and not venture out in our RV. But had I done that, I would never – at least until I retired in another dozen or so years (with the understanding that tomorrow is guaranteed to no one, and those days may never have come) – have been able to do the things we’ve done these past few years.

Far too many people let life pass them by because they’re afraid to test the boundaries of their comfort zone, and I’m not just talking about travel. It’s about making the most that you can of life. It’s about doing the things that you want or need to do, but that mean taking some measure of risk. You’re afraid you won’t succeed, or in some cases you’re afraid you will and aren’t sure if you can handle it. I can’t tell you if you’ll make it or not, and you should never let anyone else tell you that, either. But I can tell you this: if you never try, if you never open the door to your Hobbit hole and set foot upon the Road or look up at the moon and decide to do what is hard, you’ll never, ever know.

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