Cindy Koepp's Blog, page 9

Like Herding the Wind

Hey! Check it out!!

https://www.amazon.com/Like-Herding-Wind-Urushalon-Novel/dp/194081264X


 


Amazon has it down to $3.26 again. Go get one! or two … or …


 


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A Mystery. A wounded path. An alien society with centuries of work to coexistent with humans, but someone isn’t happy with the progress made. Will the human-alien team find those responsible before another human dies? In the 1600s, an Eshuvani generation ship crash-landed in a farmer’s field in Germany. Unable to find the resources on Earth to fix their ship, the Eshuvani built enclaves and tried to let the humans develop without interference. Three hundred fifty years later, Eshuvani criminals start a crime wave in the Texas coastal town of Las Palomas. With police officers being injured and killed in the efforts to stop them, Sergeant Ed Osborn attempts to use his ties to the Eshuvani community to get help for his men, but the local leadership wants nothing to do with humans. Ed contacts his urushalon, Amaya Ulonya, the Eshuvani mother he adopted when he was a boy, and seeks her help. After the death of her partner, Amaya, the captain of a police and rescue team, finds more grief than joy in her current assignment. Amidst controversy, she arranges to spearhead the new Buffer Zone station between Las Palomas and the nearby Eshuvani enclave of Woran Oldue. She hopes the opportunity to help Ed train his people will help her bury the past. The indifference of the local administration leaves her with Ill-functioning equipment and inexperienced staff. It only gets worse when the attacks of an Eshuvani criminal grow personal. Amaya must get control of her grief to help Las Palomas or risk losing someone even more dear to her than her last partner.

The Last Mission: Elves

“The Last Mission” is a science fiction tale that appears in Seventh Star Press‘s anthology A Chimerical World: Tales of the Seelie Court.

Wait, elves and dwarves in a science fiction piece? Sure! Why not?

This one was written specifically for a call-for-submissions to a Port Yonder Press anthology about Elves. Rather than set the tale in the usual forest or cave settings, I went for something weird: outer space.

Elves, humans, and dwarves have an alliance against other, more nefarious forces who have built a missile capable of wiping out an outpost and everything within a huge range. Naturally, this missile needs to be stopped.

Most elves and humans handle the business of the outpost, including operations, medical, sciences, defense, and the all that happy stuff. A small number of highly trained elves and an even smaller number of very skilled humans form an elite force capable of doing all the really hazardous stuff that needs to be done to defeat the dastardly plans of the bad guys. Unfortunately, this hazardous duty ends up getting everyone injured from time to time, so elves have an agreement with the rest of the group: if they have children to take care of, they don’t do the rough stuff any more. They serve the group in other capacities.

The hero of the tale is Zanforil, one of those specially trained elites. His wife has been pregnant for a couple months, but he’s stayed in the elite forces until now. His commander gives him one last mission to go on before he can retire and turn his attention to inventing new equipment and training other elves and humans to take his place.

He’s not thrilled, and neither is his wife, but they agree on the condition that he uses a new prototype armor he has developed. The armor can do all kinds of wild stuff to protect him and help him succeed on the mission, and it takes advantage of the elven trait of perfect pitch so he can trigger the different features of his armor.

Ultimately, Port Yonder rejected the tale for their anthology, but then I heard about the Seventh Star Press one and went for it!

I don’t presently have a sequel in mind, but that might change. I’ve even been known to do crazy things like expand short stories into novels. You never know…

Food Without Much in It: Bread

One of the hardest things I had to adapt to when I became allergic to most of the universe was doing without bread. I had bread for breakfast (toast and jam), lunch (sandwiches), dinner (great with a good dense stew or soup), and even snacks (a little bread, some cheese, maybe some olive or tomato goo…).

Yes, there are wheat-deprived breads out there, but pretty nearly all of them either have a ton of sugar, soy, or potato in them. All 3 of those are toxic to me, so that’s no good, either.

I tried mutating some bread recipes, but the stuff either turned into bowling balls or disintegrated on contact. This is not conducive to tasty bread.

I have found one recipe for rice bread that holds together pretty well … if you let it cool to room temperature before you even think about approaching it with a knife. I did have to tweak it rather a lot to make it work for me.

Rice Bread Mutated Recipe

2 cups rice flour

1 tsp salt

1/3c rice water (make rice with too much water, keep 1/3c of the water)

1/2c + 2 Tbsp apple sauce (I make my own with an apple and a food processor)

3 Tbsp olive oil

1 C water

2 tsp cider vinegar

1 package yeast

Mix all the dry stuff
Mix all the wet stuff separately
Mix it all together
Cover and let it rise for a while  (until doubled in size)
bake uncovered at 350F for 30-40 minutes

You have to let it cool completely before slicing it or you get a plateful of crumbs.

Enjoy!

 

 

Gold

“The metals used in the temple have symbolic meanings for the Levitical priesthood (the priests of Israel descended from Levi).  What does gold mean, Levitically speaking?”

Gold is holiness.

The objects in the Holy and the Holy of Holies of the Temple and Tabernacle were either gold or thorn bush (acacia) wood overlaid with gold (Exodus 25).  Some of the priestly garments were made of gold or had gold embroidery (Exodus 28).

The magi brought Jesus gold, incense and myrrh.  Gold was for his deity.  The others were for his other two job descriptions, priest and prophet (Matthew 2:11).

We need the holiness of Christ to be truly rich (Revelation 3:18).

The Hat: Parrots

In addition to the novels I have out, there are a couple independent short stories that have made it into anthologies. One of those is “The Hat,” which appears in Seventh Star Press‘s anthology Hero’s Best Friend.

“The Hat” stars a cockatoo named Cloud who has to steal a hat that has the proof of a spy’s guilt hiding in the headband. There are other parrots in the adventure including a White Capped Pionus named Cappy, an African Grey named Ash, and a flock of cockatiels.

The story is told from Cloud’s point of view. This involved getting into the head of a crazy parrot. Fortunately, I’ve had a few of those. None of them were cockatoos, but I was able to extrapolate based on the small, feathered maniacs I have had. A few videos of cockatoos being goofy on YouTube didn’t hurt my ability to predict what was going on in the brain of a squawkatoo, either.

Cloud perceives the other birds and the humans as part of the flock. He defends them, argues with them, and takes on tasks he normally wouldn’t do to help them.

Some of that may be a bit of anthropomorphism, but there are some behavioral traits cockatoos are famous for. Pet cockatoos are sometimes called “Velcro birds” because they crave attention and affection from their humans. They can be very goofy. You’ve seen videos of cockatoos dancing and displaying, right?

And loud, wow. When I was working in a pet store, they had a Moluccan cockatoo. They’re a lovely shade of peach, and they have all the usual cockatoo traits. One day, a lady came in and saw the bird and immediately wanted it. Why? It matched her furniture. I kid you not. We tried to talk to her about what the bird was like, but she didn’t care because it matched her decor perfectly. So, while one fellow was showing her the stuff she would need, the rest of us got the bird riled up into full-on shriek mode. The lady changed her mind.

Writing from a cockatoo point of view was fun. Will there be a sequel to “The Hat?” I don’t know, but perhaps!

 

 

Silver

The metals used in the temple have symbolic meanings for the Levitical priesthood (the priests of Israel descended from Levi).  What does silver mean, Levitically speaking?

Silver represents blood.

The redemption coin used was silver (Leviticus 27).  When a person was killed by an ox, the coin paid to the family or owner was silver (Exodus 21:32).  The sockets the Tabernacle rested on were silver, indicating that the Tabernacle rested upon blood (of Christ) (Exodus 26:19).  The money Joab would have paid to a man to slay Absalom in spite of David’s orders to the contrary was silver (2 Samuel 18:11-12).  Haman paid for the privilege of wiping out the Jews with 10,000 talents of silver (Esther 3:9).  The coins the Sanhedrin paid Judas Iscariot with were silver (Matthew 26:15, Matthew 27:6).  When Judas tried to back out of the deal, he declared, “I have betrayed innocent blood (Matthew 27:4).”  By the way, for an interesting prediction of that event, check out Zechariah 11:12-13.  The price was 30 pieces of silver.  Then the money was cast to the potter in the Temple.  When Judas realized he’d condemned Christ, he threw the money back at the Sanhedrin in the Temple.  The money, being blood money, couldn’t be put in the treasury, so it was used to buy a potter’s field to bury strangers in.

The Condemned Courier: Aelstrians

In the summer of 2013, I was looking for writing contests and other similar things to try as a marketing ploy for my writing. I came across JukePop Serials. They were just getting started on a concept called “agile publishing.” The idea was that writers would write an episode or chapter, get feedback from readers about where to take the story next, and then write the next chapter.  Kind of like Choose Your Own Adventure done realtime. Readers could vote on their favorites and the top 30 would get actual money every month.

I quickly wrote a first chapter for a tale that had been bouncing around in my head for a while and sent it in. By the fall, I had been accepted in the initial run of JukePop Serials’s contest.

The Condemned Courier is a tale about a courier who finds evidence of a plot against her king and then races back across the continent to get the information to the Aelstrian court before the plans can go into effect.

Like the Eshuvani in Like Herding the Wind, the Aelstrians in The Condemned Courier were originally Elves in the initial planning stages of the story, and just like Like Herding the Wind, I decided I would either need to write very atypical Elves or come up with my own nonhuman race. I opted for the latter because it gave me more room to play.

Aelstrians look like large, erect-standing birds. Their wings end in hands they can use to grasp and manipulate things. Although they can’t fly on their own, they can glide if they start from a high position.

In the natural, their plumage comes in natural shades of camouflage: tans, grays, white, black, and browns. Many among the wealthy, though, choose to dye their feathers in colors never found in nature.

Aelstrians are remarkably agile and, with the right training, can do all kinds of weird acrobatics.

I would like to tell you that the name has some fascinating story behind it, but it doesn’t. I borrowed it from another short story I’d written in high school, and it’s probably a combination of syllables seen in the titles of books on my bookshelf.

The Condemned Courier actually did rather well for its run on JukePop, maintaining a position right around 15 or so out of over 100 for all 18 episodes. Six months after the last episode, the full rights to The Condemned Courier reverted to me, and PDMI Publishing now has a novel version of the book in queue for publication. The novel version retains the basic plot of the original but expands the tale to tell more about the Aelstrians.

 

Bronze

The metals used in the Temple and Tabernacle have symbolic meanings for the Levitical priesthood (the priests of Israel descended from Levi). What does bronze (or brass… they’re often used interchangeably. One is copper and tin. The other is copper and zinc) mean, Levitically speaking?

Bronze is an interesting metal. It can sustain high heat. Because of the ability to withstand extreme temperatures, bronze is a symbol for judgment. Things you read about in the Temple or Tabernacle that relate to cleansing or judging sin – like the bronze lavers, the molten sea (actually like a huge bronze “bathtub”), and the altar – are made of bronze. When God told Moses to put a bronze snake on a stick and stick it on the hill, that represented sin (the snake) judged (made of bronze).

Like Herding the Wind: Eshuvani

Like Herding the Wind is my most recent novel. It was released by PDMI Publishing in time for my brother’s birthday. Why that date?  Does the book have great significance for my brother?  No, not particularly. I picked that date so I’d remember it. The release was scheduled almost 3 months in advance.

Not unlike some of my other tales, Like Herding the Wind has a long, weird history of revisions and rewrites. The story is about an Eshuvani police and rescue captain whose adopted son, a sergeant in a Texas coastal town’s police force, is beseiged by Eshuvani criminals. She goes to help him resolve this problem in spite of sabotage from her own people and debilitating grief.

Eshuvani are taller than humans and unusually thin. In short bursts, they can be stronger and faster than humans, but they lack the endurance to keep that up. They have a birdlike hollow bone structure which contributes to their agility.

Psychologically, Eshuvani are more sensitive to some things, such as grief, which plagues Amaya throughout most of the story.

Rather than give them other universal traits like the unnatural patience Elves are often depicted with, I wrote the Eshuvani to have a variety of personality types. Some are unusually patient, but others are impulsive. One in particular is a bit goofy … or maybe more than a bit. Another is a belligerent, grouchy sort.

Technologically, Eshuvani are beyond human technology, but they haven’t re-developed space flight or other things that required resources not available on Earth.

The name for Eshuvani doesn’t have any significant meaning. After I came up with the rules for their native language, I played around with syllables and ended up with a sound I liked.

That’s all my novels, well, the ones out so far. I have a serial and a short story with nonhuman characters, so stay tuned!

Things God Can’t Do

Did you know there are things God cannot do?

 He can’t lie.  (Titus 1:2)
He can’t learn because he’s omniscient.  He knows all things.  (John 18:4)
By the same token, he can’t be surprised.  You have to not know something to be surprised.
He can’t change.  (Hebrews 13:8)
He can’t do something unjust.  (Job 34:10-12)

To do any of those things would be a violation of his nature.