David Lee Summers's Blog, page 72

2019 Hadrosaur Books

New Year’s Eve is a time for resolutions and making plans for the coming year. I thought this might be a great time to take a look ahead and see what books we have planned for release in 2019.

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We will kick things off with my own book, Firebrandt’s Legacy. This short story collection follows an arc of tales about space pirate, Captain Ellison Firebrandt. These can be read as individual short stories or as an episodic novel.  Ellison Firebrandt fights the good fight for Earth. Under a letter o...

2018 Publishing Year in Review

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As we approach the end of 2018, I wanted to take the opportunity to look back at my books and stories released over the previous year. First and foremost, is my novel Owl Riders, which is the fourth novel in my Clockwork Legion steampunk series. When Fatemeh Karimi married Ramon Morales at the end of Lightning Wolves, she neglected to share one small detail. She was already betrothed to a merchant named Hamid Farzan. She had no interest in Hamid or an arranged marriage. She wanted to live li...

Holiday Owls

Since today is Christmas Eve, I thought it would be fitting to share a short excerpt from my novel Owl Dance. In this scene, Ramon and Fatemeh find themselves on the run with little money in San Francisco. It’s a simple moment that gets to the heart of the season. Keep reading after the segment to learn about a special event later this week.

Ramon returned to the room he shared with Fatemeh late on Christmas Eve. Fatemeh noticed he wore a new pair of glasses. Like his old pair, they were rou...

Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories

There’s something about the long, dark nights just as autumn turns into full-fledged winter that seems especially suited to spooky tales. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons the Victorians were especially fond of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve. Of course, one of the most famous ghost stories of Christmas is none other than A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. The novel itself does a very good job of making the ghosts frightening and my favorite adaptations are the ones that truly captu...

Always Available

It occurs to me that a central theme in many of my stories is communication. Some of my stories are set in the past, well before the advent of modern communication, or they’re set in the distant future, when communication becomes a technical challenge again because of the constraints imposed both by the speed of light and signal degradation over distance. This proves to be an interesting time to write about these challenges, because most of us have some form or another of this device.

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Anthology Announcement: Exchange Students

I’m excited to announce that on February 1, Hadrosaur Productions will begin reading for a new anthology with the working title, Exchange Students, which will be edited by Sheila Hartney.  I thought this would be a great time for Sheila to tell us a little about herself and how she got the idea for the anthology. I will post the link to the anthology guidelines at the end of the post.

I started reading science fiction as soon as I learned to read. When I was a little girl in Utica, NY, the r...

Uncanny Encounters

During my first year of graduate school, I joined a small acting troop that called itself the Socorro Little Theater and we put on a series of related one-act plays known collectively as The God’s Honest: An Evening of Lies by playwright Jules Tasca. The idea is that in each play, one or more characters is lying and through their lies some truth is revealed. The whole thing was done with minimalist sets that could be used in each of segments. Below, is a photo from the segment called “The Twi...

Exploring Galaxies

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This past week, I’ve been working at Kitt Peak National Observatory’s WIYN telescope using one of the workhorse instruments called HexPak to help astronomers better understand how galaxies work. At left is a photo I took of the galaxy M51 with the New Mexico State University 1-meter telescope. While we can learn a lot studying photos like this, wouldn’t it be nice if we could learn more, and understand what chemical elements make up the different parts of a galaxy? The instrument HexPak is d...

Making Books Beautiful

This past week I’ve been laying out the print edition of my book Firebrandt’s Legacy. This is my collection of space pirate short stories that were assembled with the help of my Patreon supporters. If this is the first you’ve heard of my Patreon, you can still join in the fun at http://www.patreon.com/davidleesummers. Typesetting might sound like drudgery to some people, but I find it an enjoyable job. Also, over the last few years, I’ve learned that I can often tell the difference between an...

My Adventures Without Coffee

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Anyone who reads my books can probably guess that I love my coffee. Daniel the vampire astronomer cannot imagine being undead without coffee to warm the blood he consumes. Where would Ramon be without Fatemeh’s strong coffee to prime him for adventures in the wild west? Even my spacefaring adventurers make sure their ships are stocked with coffee.

As for me, I started drinking coffee during my senior year of college. I had housemates who made coffee, plus that was the year I worked at the Ve...