The Tesserene Imperative is now available!

The Tesserene Imperative, the follow-on to The Mars Imperative, has just been released in ebook format. Currently, it is available on the publisher's website.

Shortly, it will appear on Fictionwise.com. Then, in a few weeks, it will be available in trade paperback format, from Amazon.com and other booksellers.

For more information about either The Tesserene Imperative or The Mars Imperative, please visit my web site at http://tesserene.com.

Mark.

Yet another great review of The Mars Imperative

Here's another terrific reader review for The Mars Imperative:

I really enjoyed the science and engineering aspects regarding space elevators. After having read so much about them in other SciFi novels, I always intended to educate myself about the science and engineering that must be involved, but never did. I'm taking TMI as my primer into space elevator technology.

What I liked best about the book was the dialogue. MTC wrote great, both internal dialogue and conversational dialogue. Through his dialogue he developed several strong characters which I look forward to following into his next books. The plot was strong and like all good SciFi, believably takes today's issues and projects them into space. And perhaps best of all, it had its funny parts, lots of them actually, which just made it all the much more fun to read. Good humor must be extremely difficult to write because I so rarely see it, especially in SciFi. […] I'm ready for all of the other Planetary Imperatives.

By the way, I plan to take advantage of the Fair Use Doctrine and use excerpts from the book to teach my 9th grade Biology class about symbiotic relationships and organic molecules. I'm always looking for ways to introduce popular fiction into my teaching. The average reading grade level of my high school students is 3rd grade, so I'm constantly using fiction to teach science content in a way that will get them more interested in reading. I'll also put a check-out sleeve on the back cover so they can check out the book to read. I know it'll just get lost or stolen anyway, so at least you'll sell more books to me that way!

Sara Burns (GeoGoddess) from The Motley Fool web site "All Things Sci-Fi" discussion group.

New web site

I finally got around to setting up a web site to promote my novels. You can find out about all five of my novels (finished, unfinished, and finished but unsold), as well as my short fiction, nonfiction, humor, poetry, and children's books. Feel free to browse around, read the blurbs/excerpts/bio and the linked stories and poems, watch the video, and so on.

This site may or may not be permanent, but it'll do the job until something else comes along.

Mark.

Trade paperback now available

The trade paperback (i.e., printed) version of The Mars Imperative is now out. You can order it from Amazon.com, lulu.com, and the Shadowrose Publishing website, with other venues to follow soon. (See one of the blog entries for June 13, 2007 for a description of the book.)

Mark.

Ah, the Internet

Isn't the Internet amazing? When I wrote my first nonfiction book (The OS/2 Power User's Reference: From OS/2 2.0 through Warp) way back in 1995, I had to communicate with my editor by mail. (I had email, but he didn't.) He snail-mailed me this huge package with galley proofs to edit by hand and mail back to him. What a pain! (And the postage costs weren't trivial, either.)

Fast-forward to 2007. Now I e-mail my manuscripts to the editor, she reads them online, emails me the contracts, and we do all the editing and other necessary communications by email. By going all-electronic, we managed to reduce the editing process for The Mars Imperative from two months to two weeks. I expect the same to be true for The Tesserene Imperative (coming soon to bookstores near you). This means the books get to you that much sooner, and the revenues flow to the publisher and me that much sooner as well. Everyone wins. (Some/all of the major publisher still do things the old/slow way, which is why it can take a novel six months or more from contract-signing to bookshelves.)

The price we have to pay for this ease and convenience is spam and the elimination of "disconnectedness." Where once we could leave the office at the office, we now seem to be connected everywhere and anywhere. Between laptops and PDAs, Internet-enabled cell phones, text messaging and IMing, blogs and websites, it seems almost impossible to rip oneself away from the Internet for more than a few hours. (I've found emails from my editor at all hours of the day, including late nights and weekends. While I applaud her industry, I have to wonder about her stress level.)

I suppose that in time, as with most things, we'll all come to some accommodation with the pace of life and find some balance between connectedness and peace-and-quiet. In the meantime, I'll just keep writing my novels, checking my emails and blogging away, wondering how my life got so hectic lately.... 8^}

Mark.

Testing, testing . . . .

Hi, everyone! I'm new to this newfangled blogging-type stuff (despite my 28 years in the IT industry). I just sold my first two science fiction novels to Shadowmere Publishing, and my editor strongly (i.e., under pain of, well, pain) recommended setting up a blog. So here it is. How d'ya like it so far? 8^}

Anyway, my first novel is called The Mars Imperative. Set about 160 years from now, it follows the adventures of a rookie geologist, James McKie as he leaves Earth for his first job on Mars. Without giving everything away (and killing the sales of the book), let's just say that his cruise to the Red Planet is less than peaceful. We have sabotage, explosions, kidnap--whoops! I said I wouldn't give it all away.

Then when he finally reaches Mars, it seems like the ol' God of War is out to get him, too, between landslides, dust storms, and--darn it! I did it again. Somewhere along the way, if the perils of Mars and the terrorist--aarrgghh!--don't get him, he might just live long enough to make a momentous discovery that opens the door to widespread human habitation of Mars--assuming that discovery doesn't kill everyone on the planet first!

So the story is a rollicking adventure full of action, danger, humor, and lots and lots of SEX. (Okay, just kidding about the sex. Did I get your attention?) The Mars Imperative is scheduled for release on June 15, 2007.

My second novel, set in the same universe but 11 years later, is The Tesserene Imperative. With 43 billion people inhabiting this mudball of ours, natural resources are becoming increasingly scarce. As in The Mars Imperative, the only way for humanity to survive long-term is to mine and colonize other planets. Mars and the asteroid belt are not enough; we must expand to other systems. The ultra rare mineral, tesserene, is the key to the starflight drive. Without sufficient tesserene to fuel the ships of space, humanity is effectively imprisoned in its own system.

As a result, dozens of prospecting and mining ships are scouring the nearest star systems for tesserene and other mineral resources. One such ship, Shamu, is in the asteroid belt of the Richelieu system when it is nearly destroyed in a collision. The five-man crew has three days of air remaining, little water, and a smashed starflight drive. It'll take every ounce of ingenuity and stubborn pigheadedness to find a way to survive. But if they can, a prize awaits them that will open the galaxy to human exploration--and threats the likes of which humanity has never seen. (Sorry, still no HOT, PERVERTED SEX in this book, either.) The Tesserene Imperative is scheduled for release in October 2007.

In the months to come, the third saga in The Imperative Chronicles will find James McKie joining forces with the crew of Shamu in a new adventure. No release date yet for this tome. (Hey, gimme a chance to finish writing it for cryin' out loud....) I don't know about FILTHY, LUSTY, ANIMAL SEX yet, but it's doubtful. Stay tuned for further developments.

At some point, all the books will be available from Amazon.com, Borders, Lulu.com, and other venues. Initially, however, the ebooks and trade paperback books, will be available from the publisher's website, at shadowmerepublishing.com.

In addition, I have two other novels looking for a good home. The first is called Sunrise Destiny. It's about a private detective who gets an "offer he can't refuse" from a local mob boss. The search for a missing girl turns into a much larger case, involving dozens of missing women. Is it a case of a secret government conspiracy, a mad scientist trying to take over the world, or perhaps intergalactic vampires hungering for our blood? Donatello Sunrise doesn't know, but he's determined to find out. (No publisher yet.) There's plenty of kinky SEX in this book--but it's all off-screen. Sorry.)

And my latest novel (just finishing it up) is called My Other Car is a Spaceship. It begins with retired USAF jet-jockey Hal Nellis mowing his lawn. An instant later, he finds himself standing aboard a spaceship in orbit. Before long, he's recruited in a war to defend "backward" planets like Earth from space pirates that loot, pillage, and kidnap people as slaves. (Yes, that's where all those alien abduction stories come from. Now you know.) Can the pirates be defeated before they become too powerful? (No publisher yet.) Sorry, no DIRTY SEX in this book either. Jeez, people, get your minds out of the gutter!

If you're so all-fired interested in HOT, STEAMY, SWEATY, SEX, I suggest you check out the romance novel by Victoria Chapman (yes, we're related). It's called Devil's Embrace, and can be found at Shadowrosepublishing.net as of June 29, 2007 as well as from Amazon, etc.

And to answer the burning question of why this blog is called Tesserene Dreams . . . drum roll, please . . . it's because The Tesserene Imperative was actually my first novel, and was almost called Tesserene Dreams--in my mind, anyway. Calling this blog Tesserene Dreams is a way to remember its roots. (I know, I know, all that build-up for this?) Besides, sci-fi and fantasy is all about dreams, no?

So that's my first blog entry. How'd I do? Let me know.

(For more about me, check out my profile.)