Have you ever thought about all the choices made in a day, or even an hour? All the time, we make choices that build pieces of our life story. The choices and their consequences may not be as clear as they are in a novel, but good or bad, they’re always there.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over this week as the characters in my current work in progress, a fantasy novel set in a time with steam power and the beginnings of electricity, ended up making choices that didn’t fit my outline. The results of those choices are that they’re on different paths.
With my day job slowing down my writing a little, I find myself thinking through my characters better and really analyzing why they make the choices they make. The consequences of their actions are both good and bad. Without the difficult choices and the characters’ choices, no story would really work.
It’s the same with life. Every day I’m hit with choices, and if I make poor choices, it can be really hard to return from that. Sometimes the choices lead into strange new, and sometimes wondrous, places I never would have gone before. Books are full of characters making choices we probably wouldn’t make. But just because they make poor choices doesn’t mean they can’t work to make amends. Life is too short to simply give up.
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My last book, Collected Lives, takes place near the end of the twenty-second century, with vacations and tourism to Earth by off-worlders controlled by major corporations. The largest corporation, Collected Lives, has several enemies. The story follows the events as four people from different portions of Collected Lives’ process are thrown into the middle of a larger problem.
My fantasy, A Map, a Mage, and a Sacrifice, is set in a world with limited technology, but where sacrifice is a necessary element to magical power. The greater the pain and suffering, the greater the magical power generated. The few mages in power use voluntary sacrifice of the citizens to generate power they use to protect and defend the empire. But their rule may be coming to a close.
Malignance, my third book in my time travel series that began with Resonance and Dissonance, is on Amazon as a kindle and a paperback. That was a fun series to write, and for now, it is completed. I have also placed all three books from that series into one volume titled The Machina of Time.
If you’re looking for a science fiction story, try my book The Promise of Dust, which takes place in a cloud city floating in the atmosphere of Venus. Or Progenitor’s Legacy: Deceit, which takes place many years in the future on a tidally locked world that orbits a red dwarf and has been reached by humanity in their search for the alien progenitors who seeded the galaxy with nano machines.
If a young adult science fiction is more to your liking, check out my series This New Earth, that starts with Demons of a Dead World and Secrets of a Dead World.
If you are looking for a young adult fantasy, check out my book The Threads Unbound.
DANIEL R. BURKHARD 