A New Dawn: With Bonus Material

By Robert Tinsley

AMI-42, the command AI for the damaged secret research vessel, New Dawn, finds itself alone with an escaped experimental subject that has killed all the human crew and now wants to kill AMI.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Liberte First
• Release date: Dec 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393937616

Robert Tinsley

I am a retired engineer living a nomadic lifestyle. I've lived in apartments, houses, boats, and RVs. The minimalist lifestyle appeals to both my wife and myself. I've been writing audio drama for over 10 years. You can find my current catalog on my website: https://robertwtinsley.com.

Book preview

Acknowledgments

This book and the audiobook would not have been possible without the generous contributions of my Kickstarter campaign backers.

CAPTAIN:

Sean Howard and Eli Hamada McIlveen

Brent Kerr

Timothy Dungan

Jacob

Michael Hudson

COMMANDER:

Alison Naomi Holt

Susan Voss

LIEUTENANT:

Gravely Desu

Kortnee Bryant

Edwin Docherty

Ken Hansen

CHIEF PETTY OFFICER:

Frank Guglielmelli

Sharon Scarborough

Marian Goldeen

Kate Pavelle

Eugene Lloyd MacRae

Eva Holmquist

Tracie Lee

Pulse Publishing

CREWMAN:

Ashley Pollard

AND A COUPLE OF OTHERS who didn’t wish public recognition. You know who you are.

THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH for your generous donations.

Introduction

This book began as a podcast. Well, it actually began as an entry into the 20 th running of the TV Writer ™ People’s Pilot script competition called ESCAPE!.

To my great surprise the pilot for ESCAPE! won Second Place in the Drama/Action category of the 2019 People’s Pilot competition, the first audio-only script in the 20-year history of the competition to place in the top 3.

I wrote all the episodes of the 12-episode series. I hired an actor (Sarah Golding playing Captain Serena Abhainn of the salvage vessel, Savior), recorded all the lines, mixed, and edited all the episodes and two trailers, researched and set up a podcast hosting account, set up a website, started a Patreon page and completed a strategy and promotion plan to publicize it.

This was, to the best of my knowledge, the first audio production to have the main character to be an artificial intelligence. Not only that, the third of the three main characters was also an AI. Not only that, both were played by real AIs, voices produced by Amazon Web Services’ Polly program.

Whew! I got tired just writing that.

My path to audio fiction writer/producer/sound designer was long and filled with gaping blank spaces when nothing happened. Mostly due to fear. Fear of doing something new, fear of failure, fear of success.

That last is the most insidious because it means changing your life, and most people prefer the discomfort of their known, current life to the perceived discomforts of a potential changed life, often unconsciously.

I got interested in writing audio fiction after reading The Complete Book of Scriptwriting by J. Michael Straczynski back in the mid-2000s, the Medieval Period of podcasting.

There was a chapter in the book about radio drama that fascinated me so I started writing. Again.

At that time websites were about the only place that published episodic audio fiction. I found one, Darker Projects, that was looking for new scripts and series concepts. I submitted and had several stand-alone scripts accepted and produced. I even had a series concept accepted, and three episodes of that were produced.

The problem was (is) that I am an instant gratification kinda guy. It took SO LONG to get the scripts produced that I became disillusioned and dropped out. For a long time.

At the time, I discussed my frustrations with Larry Brody at TVWriter.com. He asked the pertinent question: Why don’t you produce them yourself? Oh, I had excuses. I had a day job. Producing audio was a giant PITA. There was no money in it.