Bryan Thomas Schmidt: THE WORKER PRINCE

Hey, y’all. Remember that time I said I would be leasing blog space to friends with announcements and such to make. Well, here’s another installment in that series, this time featuring Bryan Thomas Schmidt, whose novel, The Worker Prince, debuted just a few short weeks ago.

Bryan was kind enough to let me post an excerpt from his novel for your perusal, so I’ll get right to that, shall I? Here goes!

Tela ordered a Tertullian Hammer and settled into a booth at the pub to wait for her drink. Through the dome overhead, she watched the sky fade from purple to gray as the planet’s two moons started their nightly climb.

As the waiter arrived with her drink, she spotted Davi behind him, coming in the door. Oh damn! She reached for her drink and took a long swallow. The ice cubes stacked in the glass held their position until the very last minute, then conveniently decided to collapse against her upper lip, sending a trickle of virulent green liquor down her chin to drip onto her clean, white jumpsuit.

God! Seriously? She swallowed hard and reached for a napkin, but it was too late. Glancing down, she saw a faint curl of smoke rising from the spreading stain on her collar as the drink melted the synthetic fibers. Oh, hells.

“Tela? What are you doing here?”

She looked up to find Davi standing across the table from her, smiling. He looked handsome in his flight jacket, his hair still wind-tousled from the training runs in the forest earlier. She blinked and offered a crooked grin.

Her head felt light all of a sudden. Was it getting hot in here?

A look of concern flashed across Davi’s face. “Is that a….Tertullian Hammer you’re drinking?”

Tela nodded. Her head was strangely wobbly on her neck. “Yez,” she said. Yez?

“Do you even know what’s in one of those?” Davi asked, shocked. “They’re almost pure, 160-proof Regallian vodka, mixed with spent fuel rod particles and synthetic alcohalgae! One sip is enough to knock a Vertullian yak on it’s hind end!”

Tela’s nose had gone inexplicably numb. She—

Bryan Thomas Schmidt: Excuse me!

Simon C. Larter: Um…yes?

BTS: That is not a scene from my novel!

SCL: *coughs* Are you sure? I distinctly remember a bar scene. There was a bar scene, wasn’t there?

BTS: Not like that, there wasn’t.

SCL: Oh.

BTS: ….

SCL: Perhaps I should copy directly from the text, instead of going from memory, then?

BTS: That might be a better idea, yes.

SCL: I think I can manage that.

BTS: Good. And, um…thanks for hosting me on  my blog tour. I think.

SCL: You’re welcome! Wait…what?

*

Davi nodded. “I know. I’ve been spending time in the Library learning the history of our people. I really believe in what we’re doing.” Tela couldn’t help being impressed by his effort. “That doesn’t make it any easier to think about sending kids to their possible deaths.”

“Some of them may surprise you,” Tela said.

Davi nodded. “I hope all of them do.” He took another sip, savoring the fruity taste a moment.

On impulse, she placed her hand on his atop the table. “Me, too.” She fought the urge to yank it back when she realized what she’d done. Yet he hadn’t tried to pull his hand away. Did he like this? She hated being so transparent, but then touching him like this felt so nice.

She slowly withdrew her hand. “We’ll have to work harder with them.”

Davi nodded. “I’ve been thinking the same thing.” He took one last long sip of his smoothie, and then set the empty glass back on the table. “I guess I should head back and start working up a more intense lesson plan.”

Tela joined him as he stood. “Do you want some help?”

Davi gave her a puzzled look. “Really?”

She shrugged. “Sure, why not?  I can come up with some decent ideas.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.” She smiled. “

I know.” He nodded and tossed some credits on the table. “Okay, let’s go.”

She had an impulse. “Wait.”

“What?”

“One more thing.”

Without thinking, she rushed around the table, and, before either understood what was happening, she kissed him.

After a moment, she pulled away, straightened her clothes and headed for the door. “Let’s go.”

Davi stood there stunned and watched her go.

She turned back in the doorway. “You coming?”

He nodded, moving toward her.

Oh my God! She fought to control her expression. Why did I do that? This is just what I need. But then she realized, she hadn’t wanted to stop.

*

Erm…sorry about the technical difficulties there, folks. I think we finally got the real excerpt there at the end. :)

Anyway, if you’re in the mood for some good, old-fashioned space opera, leavened with love, faith, and gunship battles, why not give The Worker Prince a look? More excerpts, and signed copies, are available on Bryan’s website, and the book is available at your friendly neighborhood online retailers. Links below!

Powell’s Books

Amazon.com: Kindle and Paperback

Barnes & Noble

Get your ass out of bed.

I get up early, y’all.

This may surprise you, given the regularity with which I talk about alcohol and all-night benders and crushing hangovers and such, but it’s true: I’m an early riser.

(And if you’re thinking that an early alarm puts a little crimp in the drinking schedule…you’re right. But don’t tell anyone. I wouldn’t want to tarnish my drunken reputation.)

Anyhow, for those of you writerly-types who don’t make a habit of getting up with or before the sun, I’m here to tell you you’re missing out a little. Not only does it allow you to get things done before the majority of the world has woken up, it also opens you up to a whole range of sensory experiences most folk just don’t get.

I run, see. And I ride my bike a lot. And if I want to do those things and still get to work before 7:30, I kind of have to get up early, don’t I? Yup.

Ergo, a list of things you can discover if you rise before the dawn. You’re welcome. (You can thank me later. After you’ve had a few cups of coffee, that is.)

1. The light is different at dawn.

In terms of the physics, there’s not much difference between the light at sunset and the light at dawn. When it comes to feel, though? They’re worlds apart. Thomas Hardy made mention of it in his Tess of the D’Urbervilles, back in 1891:

“The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the day’s close, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In the twilight of the morning seems active, darkness passive; in the twilight of the evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse.”

Don’t believe me? Try it. Get up before dawn and watch the light infiltrate the dark east. You’ll understand.

2. Your local 6-lane highway is deserted sometimes.

Y’know all those apocalyptic movies and shows where people wander down a deserted superhighway? Like this*:

Well, if you get up early enough, you, too, can see the nearest 6+ lane highway sans vehicles. I got up at 4am to run a few weeks ago (I had to be at a work appointment VERY early that day), and there were precisely zero cars on the roads. Even the very big roads. It’s something to see, I can assure you.

3. Your tracking skillz will improve.

One time, back in summer when it was actually light when I got up, I tried a different route on my morning run. I had doubled back, and was retracing my steps toward home, when I noticed something in the dew-wet grass. As it turned out, when I had run through the grass earlier, my feet had shaken loose the dew that had been clinging to the vegetation, so while the still-dewy grass was silvery in the morning light, my footsteps were visible as matte, green scars in the glimmering meadow.

And, having read a thousand and one fantasy novels in which tracking skills are used, my mind naturally jumped to the implications of my discovery: you can’t hide your tracks in grass at dawn.

4. New scents and sounds.

If you get up early enough in the summertime, the birds aren’t awake yet. The only sound you’ll hear is the crickets, scraping out their rhythmic call en masse, and the scrape of your own footsteps. (The rabbits rise before dawn, however. And that crane by the pond down the street is awake, but not talking.)

Wait a while, though, and the birds will begin to call as the cricketsong fades.

Too, in the still air of the morning, scents linger. The stain of diesel exhaust, the tang of algae down by the water, the odor of must and unwashed human from that house up the street that doesn’t get cleaned enough, the rot of garbage in the humid summer—all smells you might not catch in the busyness of the day.

5. A different community.

In my neighborhood, around 5:30 in the morning, three women wearing ballcaps and sweaters walk the track around the pond almost every morning. A slight, aging, Asian woman walks it too, but in the opposite direction. The lanky woman with the chocolate lab jogs through the park on the way to my street.

I greet them as I run, because it’s what you do at that time in the morning. You don’t ignore them; they’ve made the effort to be up early as well, so the least you could do is say hello.

Everyone I see before 6am has a certain amount of discipline. Our good mornings are both greeting, and tacit acknowledgement of that fact. It’s a self-focused, taciturn community, but it’s a community nonetheless, and a different one from that of the Starbucks at 8:30 am.

*

None of this, I realize, is necessarily inducement for you to drag your tired bones out of bed first thing in the morning, writer-friends. But if elucubration is your thing, you might want to try, just once, turning your schedule the opposite direction. Pretend you’re taking a friend to the airport or something. Y’know.

Set the alarm. Prepare the coffee maker. Resist the urge to hit the snooze button. Then get up. Go.

It’s a whole new world out here, folks, made fresh every day for those with eyes to see it.

Why not join me?

*Image ganked shamelessly from season 1 of The Walking Dead. Which is awesomesauce. I stayed up all night to watch the entire season last week. (I didn’t get up early the following morning. Sometimes it’s just that way.)