Elgin
By M.A. Harris
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About this ebook
Elgin’s old life was nothing much, Beauty Wyoming was as beautiful and remote as one could get, a town of cowboys and Indians, in a setting of rangeland, mountains and lakes. Elgin Chalmer’s was a cowboy and a part breed black-sheep slacker living with his huge Siamese cat Humph in a forty year old trailer. Life was OK for Elgin, he didn’t want much and didn’t get any more. Then one raw snowy day he made the mistake of heading into the mountains with a gut full of whisky and a head muddled by rotten drugs...death came easily considering.
And that was when things started to get really messy. A world of alien dangers and powers were waking up after two thousand years in hibernation and humanity’s protector needed a new helper. Now Elgin found himself dealing with flesh eating lizard girls, ancient spider monsters, along with werewolves and vampires who didn’t always play by the rules. And on top of it all he had to get used to eating sharks, raw and still fighting.
But now of course he had a chance to meet up with the cool girls; The Wiccan proprietor of the local New-Age gift shop, with an ancient Indian totem in her basement, the pistol packing deputy with a secret, and the beautiful Russian spy with a heart of gold and the killer instincts of a she wolf.
Elgin’s new life was....complicated.
Some words of explanation. First, the National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo, (www.nanowrimo.org) is run by a tiny nonprofit called he Office of Letters and Light, an organization that promotes writing in all its glorious permutations among the young, young at heart, and not so young (among whom I fall in the right hand distribution tail these days.) I wrote the first 60,000 words or so of Elgin in November 2011 and finished the remaining half by February 2012, since then, among many other things, my father and I have been editing so I can submit it for publication at Smashwords.
Second, this book isn’t SteamPunk, UrbanFantasy, Fantasy, I like to think of it as a type of SciFi, what I call Quantum Punk. Using the possibilities our quantum universe opens up to the imagination as a basis for something that tries to be Science Fiction with a very strong tint of UrbanFantasy and SteamPunk, I hope you enjoy.
M.A. Harris
Born in England in the mid years of the socialist experiment I moved to the US with my parents (economic refugees of a sort with three boys in a country where 1+ was more the norm) I have lived in the US ever since. I am a third generation engineer, a mechanical engineer who has worked for the government, myself, a tech start up and a foreign owned defense middle weight. I have experience in manufacturing, detail design, concept design, product development, and research in both government and corporate environments (in other words I've lived in Dilbert’s world). I usually love my job, (when its not driving me nuts) and have had the luck to work on a broad range of programs, developing concepts and proposals for systems from electromagnetic guns to nuclear electric space probes and remote monitoring systems for long term hospitalized children.Reading came late for a child who had some issues with a form of Dyslexia, but when I got the hang of it I went from having a hard time with Dick and Jane to reading Zane Grey, G.Heyer, Heinlein and Clark with the book hidden in my desk during class in less than six months. As soon as I learnt the wonders of reading and the wonders of the inner mind I wanted to write.In high school and college Arthur C. Clark was my muse (I still re read Rendezvous with Rama every few years) along with L.L’amour, J.Pournelle and L.Niven plus dozens of authors writing on the history of weapons and warfare like Ian Hogg and Keegan. Favorite contemporary authors are, Clancy, Weber, Francis, Ringo, Flint, Correia, etc.I started writing in high school, I was one of the few guys to take typing, convinced that it was a skill I would need for both computers and writing (though my early computer projects were on punch cards or tape.) In several advanced English courses in High School I wrote short stories that got me through on pure bravado if not technical skill.Then life and a career got in the way, I continued to see computers as the wave of the future for writing, and was almost always tinkering with something but time passed and all I did was tinker. Then a bit more than a decade ago I decided that I wanted to write professionally and took the advice of J.Pournelle and S.King on writing, both advising that in the end its about work and some luck, but mostly its about writing lots of words getting lots of critiques and doing more edits. But timing has never been my best skill and I got to the point of actually trying to sell my work just as the old publishing model began to implode.After more than five years of frustration (and having several full length novels at the point of at least being ready for a professional scrub) I discovered Smashwords. I bought my wife a Nook and then we began to acquire and read free and low cost eBooks, many of which were published by this strangely named company, Smashwords.And that’s how we come to meet....I hope you like the stuff I write, I actually enjoy writing it though like all jobs it has its down side (edits and critques) and it bad days (I really need to grow up and stop dreaming.) As I get into this I hope to be able to get to know more of you and get your opinions on the job I’m doing.
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