Adventures in E-Book Publishing

Guys!  I totally just published an e-book on Amazon!  It's called Her Eyes Were In The Stars and I couldn't be more proud of it!  Here's the link.

And here's the cover art! A dear old friend made it:

Artist is John Sheppard, and he's one of those graphic artists who goes to college not cause he needs the skills, but just to get the stupid piece of paper that proves how awesome he already is.  (He accepts commissions!)

Ah, but what's the book about, you ask?  Here's the Amazon book description:

"Have you ever taken entirely far longer than you would've strictly preferred to get over a lover? Jon Wilson takes centuries, as a malfunctioning hyperdrive hurtles him across space and time!

"The memory of Tasha, his ex, will both help and haunt him through multiple invasions, holy wars, and apocalypses; his heart-ache will be his one constant while a soldier, slave, monk, smuggler, and knight. He’ll forget her among the force-field legions of an interstellar heroic age, then seek her among the horse-bound knights of a new medieval era; all as Jon’s unwittingly guided to Paradise, the most accursed planet in the Heavens, for it is where all your dreams come true…"

In case you're still not enticed, here's the first page, to whet your appetite (more excerpts to follow):

When I dipt my eye into the future, far as human eye could see

Saw the Vision of the world and the wonder that would be

-Tennyson, Locksley Hall

This is not for you.

-MZD

Prologue

Her eyes were in the stars.

I told you once how hyperdrives work around gravity-wells and such, and therefore tend to take you to planets, even if you hyperjump at random.

Tend to.

This was not one of those times.

I floated in dead space, a million billion trillion miles from the nearest planet or the nearest star. I’d blown out the hyperdrive, which seemed appropriate enough—I’d intended to hyperjump till the end of time and the heat-death of the Universe, when all things would fail at last, but the engine failed long before then. Auxiliary power alone functioned, barely, maintaining only minimum life-support. The last light left on the console was a single faint, blinking point, signifying an automated distress call into the endless void of space.

Except that space is not void—if only. Tonouchi said the mystery of space is tremendous, and here I faced it directly, for the mystery is that there is no space at all. No, though I floated near no planets, no suns, yet all around were stars, everywhere stars, the totality of space shimmering with stars. Space is not empty but full, and you feel alone not in the emptiness but in the crowd of starlight. The music from the beginning of the universe, when the big bang was hardly the size of your fist, when the tones of the creation hymn vibrated from one end to the other in a nanosecond, this music still fills all of creation. My craft slowly rotated, round and round, agonizingly slowly, so I could see nothing but stars, in every direction, and her eyes were in all of them, every last single one.

The couple tears that now escaped my eyes floated in the air over me, and the immense view of stars was filtered only by the cloud my own freezing breath. Drifting in and out of conscience, I lifted my clotted arm, and began to trace out new constellations in the sky—

 Here’s what happened.

*Pst! Are you the least bit curious as to what happened? Here's that link again!