Peak Amygdala

Photo purchased from Depositphotos

I got mugged by a story last August. It was completely and totally innocuous–I was working on the last book of the main Martiniere Legacy series, Repairing the Legacy. After a funeral in the same cemetery where Gabe’s parents and sister are buried, I had Gabe and Ruby laying flowers on Saul, Angelica, and Louisa’s graves–then speculating about what would have happened if that plane crash hadn’t occurred when Gabe was twelve. Ruby thinks they wouldn’t have met–Gabe disagrees, and tells her why.

A casual scene, right? Nothing to get excited about, right?

Um. Well. My brain went to work on that story and, well, A Different Life–What If? is not only up to 85k words, but it’s serializing on Kindle Vella, with release first on Kindle Unlimited this spring and then wide in the summer.

Just that one change–the survival of Saul, Angelica, and Louisa–brought about some huge characterization differences. I also subtracted the indentured servitude theme that is key to the main Martiniere Legacy series–in this alternate world, indenture didn’t happen. Martiniere mind control techniques weren’t devised. Philip Martiniere never rose to power within the Martiniere Group but simmered along, succumbing to his psychopathic side and expressing it through some nasty and decadent behavior.

Gabe is broken in a very different manner in A Different Life. In the main series, Philip not only takes control of the Martiniere Group after the death of Gabe’s family when he is twelve, but Philip immediately starts beating and drugging Gabe to reduce his resistance to the Martiniere mind control programming techniques. Gabe doesn’t learn until much later in life that Philip is his biological father and Justine his half-sister. He has no significant sibling support for those six years with Philip because Justine is too young to help him.

In A Different Life, Gabe has had younger sisters all along. He is Saul and Angelica’s petted and somewhat spoiled son, albeit with high expectations, until both he and his cousin Joseph are informed of the devil’s deal surrounding their conception. Due to the feuding between them which threatened the survival of the Martiniere Group, the twin brothers Saul and Philip reluctantly agree to raise each other’s sons to the age of sixteen. The twist? Their wives bear the other brother’s son, conceived through artificial insemination. This piece is common to both the main series and A Different Life. So Saul’s son Joseph is born to Philip’s wife Renate, and Philip’s son Gabriel is born to Saul’s wife Angelica. The notion is that this will keep Saul and Philip from attempting to further harm the other–except that Philip keeps sneaking around trying to destroy Saul (therefore, the plane crash that orphans Gabe at age twelve in the main series)

In the backstory of A Different Life, Joey and Gabe learn the truth about their fathers on Joey’s sixteenth birthday (Joey is the younger of the two). Philip immediately takes custody of Gabe and institutes a program intended to break Gabe to his will. It’s pretty hideous, and there are scenes I’ve visualized that will never be written. In some ways, Gabe in A Different Life is more fragile than the main series Gabe as a result. The main series Gabe learned survival at a younger age, before his teen years, including learning to drink hard to minimize the impact of Philip’s mind control techniques on him. But sixteen-year-old Gabe in A Different Life has started to mature under the influence of the much saner Saul, and everything comes as a shock to him. He’s been raised to expect he will follow in Saul’s footsteps and take control of the Martiniere Group. Then he learns that Saul is not his father, while the uncle he has grown to despise is. Furthermore, Gabe has to endure Philip’s household for two years in order to be eligible for that role in the succession–all determined by the edicts laid down by his grandmother Donna.

(Yes. This is twisty and complicated. I kinda like writing twisty and complicated things.)

The Gabe of A Different Life is not as hardened as the main series Gabe at the same age. He hasn’t had to defend himself against mind control, and he still had the hope of escaping Philip even during that hellish two years. He still has certain illusions about the world, fairness, and equity that his main series counterpart never developed. He’s not as sexually sophisticated as the main series Gabe–well, kinda sorta, because of what he experienced in Philip’s household. When he meets Ruby, he’s coming off a significant relationship with Miranda Cathcart-Rogers–that ended when he discovered her in bed with Joey. He escapes his demons by working until he collapses from exhaustion, to the point that it concerns his family. He’s a driven man, but the concern that drives him is worry about climate change, not trying to thwart Philip Martiniere’s abuses of indentured workers like the main series Gabe.

Anyway (if people haven’t gotten bored of all of this by now and stopped reading), it’s been interesting to take one of my characters and explore the impact of a different pathway upon their development. Certain traits are similar to both men–noble goals, a strong sense of right and wrong, high energy and intelligence, a fondness for horses, and protective instincts toward those he loves. The differences in behavior, however, are fascinating. The Gabe of the main series has learned to lie effectively, including to himself. A Different Life’s Gabe doesn’t have that skill. He never needed to develop it, and is much more open with Ruby as a result. Main series Gabe is hard enough to kill raiders attacking him and Ruby on an interstate highway without a lot of reaction. A Different Life Gabe reacts viscerally to the need to order an opponent’s death.

Ultimately, while the two Gabes share a lot of defining characteristics, that one change in their backstory leads to two very divergent stories. Could I have explored this concept by not reusing the characters? Possibly.

But it’s been a very interesting and effective exercise. I don’t think I would have learned as much from writing A Different Life–What If? with different characters.

It’s given me a lot to consider about the worldbuilding process, and how particular change points in a character’s history can lead to two very different stories.

Might be kinda useful since my next big project focuses on a multiverse Weird West story.

One of the things I try to do at the beginning of the year is create a planning document (as partially pictured in the screenshot above) which outlines the stories I plan to write for the year, and then try to update that plan quarterly. As a planning document, it’s not meant to be cast in stone. Rather, it’s intended to be a road map, something to give me guidance. In the years that I’ve dedicated to self-publishing rather than traditional publishing, I’ve expanded the document to include publication dates and production times.

But it’s all rough. This is something I’ve been doing for five years or so now, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that stuff happens. Life happens. Emergencies can throw the schedule out of whack, a story can prove to be more difficult, or other stories suddenly appear and shoulder the planned work out of the way. It’s a tentative plan, an attempt to help me focus on what I need to be doing. Checklists work well for me when it comes to accountability, and the full schedule (the above screenshot is just a snippet) is posted on the wall behind my computer.

However, just like the first draft of a story, this plan is a work in progress.

This year, I’ve decided that I am keeping Covid awareness in the schedule. To that end, it’s a year that I intend to spend working with half-finished stories that may or may not justify anything beyond ebook release. I’ve spend over two years working with a very intense series, The Martiniere Legacy, and I want a break from that type of intensity. Next year, I’ll be diving into the second series in the Goddess’s Honor world, the Goddess’s Vision series, and probably turning those books out in a short period of time (worldbuilding thoughts are happening idly right now, and I’m doing appropriate reading and thinking about where I want to go with the Vision books). I still need to finish the two Martiniere books I have on my schedule–A Different Life and Repairing the Legacy. That leaves one half-formed Martiniere set of stories to be turned out at some point, but they need to rest.

These other projects–most are short standalones, appropriate for a serial format, and I’m experimenting with that on both Substack and Kindle Vella. To some degree, working on them also requires that I maintain a schedule so that I am meeting my deadlines. One thing which has come out of networking with other writers on Substack and Vella has been an exposure to writers who are turning out a lot of work, and talking with them about production and writing discipline.

The other piece is that if I am going to have effective promotion and sales, I have to start scheduling work. I have to plan. I’ve done entirely too much promotion on the fly because my focus has been on writing. Well, that kinda sorta maybe works. I need to be creating the buzz and regularly talking about writing these stories. Doing this requires planning, scheduling, and looking at other parts of my life and planning and scheduling there.

I want to be turning out fabric art pieces as well as writing. I need to be able to do promotion and sales for those items.

I have to reinstate the discipline I somewhat lost during the first two years of Covid, when all I did was write about the Martinieres. Well, that was an impressive body of work–but it’s time to get to these other, someday pieces as well. To that end, I’m also getting back into blogging and daily journaling. At some point, I’ll be posting political thoughts exclusively on my political Substack, perhaps with a crosspost to Medium. I’ve mucked out my office and created a space where I can handwrite and plan–and the planner, plus a notepad for a daily to-do lists.

This isn’t new to me. I’ve done this sort of intense organizational structure before. Only then it was with a Dayrunner. During the teaching years, I used other accountability methods, including to-do lists, the early stages of the current format of publication planning, and a word count tracking sheet in Excel. I’m not going back to word count tracking–at least not yet–but I have the weekly Moleskine planner with a similar format as the Dayrunner I liked, and the to-do list.

We’ll see how long this flurry of organization works.

Well, that was a day.

Yesterday (January 3rd), I’d planned to blog about my projected publication schedule for 2022, moving into a wee bit of a writing process blog. Yeah, I’m trying to blog daily or mostly daily, along with journaling. Part of the new world of discipline to get myself back on track and stop letting the current situation rule my moods (and moving beyond writing about the Martinieres, though there’s still Martiniere work in my schedule!).

Yeah. That was the plan.

Husband woke me at around 7:30 as he was fumbling around to find his pants. A forecast windstorm was blowing hard, and he’d heard thumps against the side of the house. Concerned that it might be the wood stove chimney, he wanted to go outside and take a look (yes, it was blowing that hard). Fortunately, it wasn’t the chimney…just loose shingles from a couple of squares that a contractor had put on the neighbor’s roof, then never finished the job. Mostly (some were pieces of shingles that had blown off the house).

I got up, brewed a pot of tea, and started doing the quick version of social media browsing. Another vow I’d taken was that I would do limited social media, AFTER I wrote out a to-do list for the day to be affixed to the side of the iMac. Part of this ambitious publication and production schedule–including time for craft work–is that I need to get stuff done, which means The List. No sooner had I started breakfast than we started worrying about the bird feeders. The wind was blowing too hard for the husband to safely climb on the ladder, so he’d brought it in through the house–the wind had blown the snow into drifts blocking the garage door. I pulled on clothing and was ready to go out with him during a lull when they blew down.

And then–the power went off.

Welp, that meant a quick call to the power company to inform them. After thirty years living in Portland, and dealing with Portland General Electric, I quickly learned that the more reports an outage gets, the sooner it gets managed. It’s not quite the same here, but all the same, reaching for the phone to make an outage report is second nature anymore.

Next, I had to save my work and shut down the iMac. I started using a power supply rather than a surge protector when I bought my first iMac in 2009, because the Portland house had frequent issues (often due to suicidal squirrels electrocuting themselves on powerlines), and it’s awfully nice to have those few minutes to save my work. Then I had to turn off the power supply so it wouldn’t keep cheeping at me. Hubby took care of the rest of the electronics/breaker stuff.

Then we took stock. The estimate for power returning was 5:30 pm–after dark. It’s a lot better to round up all the stuff needed for power outages in daylight than after dark. So it became Quest for Flashlights, pulling everything out. We do have a decent supply of flashlights because of a lot of outdoor activity. Even when you go out to the woods during the day, it’s best to be prepared with flashlights in case trouble happens. So Flashlight Check happened, making sure that we had working batteries, etc, etc, and had them stationed where appropriate. Then he brought up our big battery-powered lantern. It’s cranky, so we fiddled with it until we got it to work. I pulled out a TV tray to set between our recliners, and went downstairs to bring up my PartyLite candle holders and the supply of tealights, happily discovering that I still had another three-wick candle as well.

We discussed refrigerator/freezer issues, and decided to treat the refrigerator like a camp cooler during a hot summer weekend–that is, don’t open it very often, plan what we were going to eat. The most problematic stuff was leftover pizza, which we ended up eating for lunch and dinner. There was an uncooked frozen whole chicken still thawing and it was definitely still frozen.

The wood stove was already burning, and we put the teakettle on to keep warm water available to make tea and cocoa.

Preparation done, we settled in to read. A recorded update call pushed back the power restoration to a couple of hours later. I occasionally surfed the local travel group on Facebook and learned the cause of our outage–a big tree in town had taken down a power pole with a lot of lines on it. Meanwhile, the county and state authorities were all saying STAY HOME. The wind was running about 40 mph steadily, with occasional 80-90 mph gusts. There were people already trapped in snowdrifts, and the county and state was struggling to keep the roads plowed.

We stayed home. I finished Jane Howard’s biography of Margaret Mead (a reread), and another anthropology text–both fodder for future worldbuilding ideas. The wind died down around 1 pm, so we started digging out of the drifts. The wind managed to blow most of the snow off of the roof and drift by the garage door. It was packed pretty hard as well. We wanted to get it out because there was a forecast for more snow coming in the evening–better to dig smaller amounts more frequently than one big pile all at once.

The power didn’t come back on by 5:30 pm. Not by 7:30 pm. The battery lantern worked well for reading. I lit the candles. By 10:30, it was clear that power coming back wasn’t going to happen right away. Snow was falling outside, and there was enough reflection from it on the ground and the lights from the part of town that still had power to see reasonably well. We went to bed, leaving the hallway light on to alert us when the power came back.

It came back at 4 am. We snuggled for fifteen minutes more, waiting to ensure it wasn’t a fluke, then got up. The other piece was not overloading the grid as it powered up (hubby and I both have childhood/youth experience with older power grids in rural areas), so we staggered the plugging in of major appliances. After taking care of things, and checking the refrigerator temperature–it had remained below 40 degrees, so yay! Safe food!–I went back to bed while hubby stayed up (he is a morning person, I am NOT).

The only victim of the outage was a long-life lamp bulb. We shoveled more snow today.

This is the only writing I’ve gotten done today, but hey, I shoveled more snow, hosted the monthly Soroptimist Zoom meeting, and spent time trying to catch up with emails and other things I’d fallen behind on due to the outage.

Normal schedule resumes tomorrow. I think.

Despite the sinking hunch that this post is nothing more than an exercise in futility, I’m going to let you all know what I’ve produced in the last year that is eligible for awards. At the very least, it’s an exercise in accountability.

All are eligible for the Nebulas, Hugos, Dragons, etc, etc.

Short Stories

“My Man Left Me, My Dog Hates Me, and There Goes My Truck,” in Black-Eyed Peas on New Year’s Day: An Anthology of Hope, edited by Shannon Page.

Amazon

“Queen of the Snows,” in Once Upon A Winter: A Folk and Fairy Tale Anthology, edited by H. L. Macfarlane. Note: this collection has earned The Fantasy Hive’s endorsement as the Best Short Story Collection of the Year.

Amazon

Books

The Heritage of Michael Martiniere

SERIES STANDALONE
“I’m a young man in an old man’s body.”–Mike Martiniere.

Clone Michael Martiniere was fated to die to keep his progenitor, Philip Martiniere, alive. Then Philip’s son Gabe rescued Mike at the age of five, whisking him off to the Double R Ranch where he learns about horses, biobots, robotics–and what it’s like to be loved by a family.

But the toxic physical, psychological, and political legacy of his progenitor continues to haunt Mike. Philip’s physical frailties cause clone effects in Mike, from arthritis and osteoporosis to cancer and heart disease. More than that, Philip has imprinted the notorious Martiniere mind control techniques on Mike, in an attempt to force Mike to submit to his will–even after Philip’s death.

Can Mike have something resembling a real life and win free of Philip’s influence? What will it take for him to banish that toxic legacy of his progenitor–and is it worth the price?

Amazon Books 2 Read

Broken Angel: The Lost Years of Gabriel Martiniere (currently still in the Self Published Science Fiction Competition)

Exiled heir. Rebel. Husband. Father.

In 2029, Gabriel Martiniere testified against the Martiniere Group’s forced imposition of mind control programming on unwilling indentured workers.

For his pains, he was forced into exile for over thirty years. Forced to divorce the love of his life.

But he’s still coming. Still bent on vengeance against the man who forced him into exile, Philip Martiniere.

Gabe will win…or die trying.

Amazon Books 2 Read

Justine Fixes Everything: Reflections on Mortality

EVEN THE MOST POWERFUL PEOPLE HAVE TO START SOMEWHERE…
Over the years, Justine Martiniere has become the fixer for the Martinieres. Have a problem? Go to Justine to get it remedied.

But it wasn’t always that way. First, Justine needed to escape the abuses of her father, Philip. She didn’t expect to fall in love with the man she married, Donald Atwood. But she did–and then she faced the choice between remaining married to Donald, or stopping her sociopathic, megalomaniac father.

Justine Fixes Everything is in part the unusual love story of Justine and Donald–and in part the saga of her rise to power, viewed in retrospect as she tells the history to Philip’s clone Mike, as he recovers from surgery. It’s about what she sacrificed to become powerful—and, at the same time, how that past comes to haunt the challenges she faces toward the end of her life.

Amazon Books 2 Read

Got up this morning to -14 F–not unheard of in this area, but it’s been a few years, thanks to whatever you want to call it. I’m not complaining. After dealing with the heat dome this past summer and everything else that was involved with the nasty hot, dry weather (no, I am not a hot weather fan–my body doesn’t like it). Reports are that it got down to -18 F.

New Year’s Eve was quiet, as it has been for us even before Covid hit. First, it was work-related stuff that kept us from making a big deal about New Year’s; now it’s simply that we do live in a place with snow and cold, and dealing with roads isn’t our thing. Hubby went to bed at eleven; I did at twelve-thirty, when the temperature was -10 F. It’s now eleven-thirty and we’re now at 2 F. Unlike last year the neighborhood didn’t blow up a lot of fireworks. Somebody was but not close enough to see any displays or hear more than the occasional boom. That’s a fairly new thing that’s been happening over the past 2-3 years. I blame newer residents who have come from places where certain holidays sound like war zones. Sigh.

While I’ve not written any formal resolutions, I have some general notions in mind about what I want to do for 2022. Amongst other things, I think I’ve pretty much written all I want to do with the Martinieres, at least the major novel portions. It’s been a good two-year ride, but once I finish the two books I have in progress (Repairing the Legacy, the last book of the main series, and A Different World–What If?, which is what would have happened differently if one small thing changed in the main series), I’ll be moving on. Repairing the Legacy is serializing for free on Substack (Martiniere Stories), every Friday, and A Different World–What If? is serializing on Kindle Vella. It goes to Monday-Wednesday-Friday starting on January 3rd, and will conclude in February. Then I need to leave it there for 30 days. After that, I can publish it.

I also have the edits back for the Netwalk revisions, but no covers. Not a big deal since I think I can make my own using a Depositphotos series. I know what they are, it’s just obtaining them and making the covers.

Beating the Apocalypse, a significant rewrite of an earlier published work, will be coming out in January. It’s up on Kindle Vella right now, and I’ll start by running it through Kindle Unlimited for 90 days, then moving it to wide distribution. This is something I am planning to try for future work–early drafts on Vella, then 90 days on KU, then wide. I have a multiverse Weird West story up on Vella, Bearing Witness, which will go into production for a February release. I plan to write the longer novel of that world once I wrap up the two Martiniere books.

However, the way things look, between the Netwalk Author Preferred version releases, the move of Vella books to KU and then wide, and the two Martiniere books, I should be able to hit a book a month in releases in 2022. At least for the first part of the year. We’ll see if I actually manage to pull this off.

I also want to get back into drafting short stories. One of my stories is in an anthology that earned the “Best Short Story Collection of the Year” from the Fantasy Hive, and there’s three more books planned in that series. The short story in Once Upon a Winter, “Queen of the Snows,” is from the Rust and Flame world that I’ve been poking at for some time now. I think I’m going to get more serious about Rust and Flame, because people either loved that story or were puzzled by it. These stories may kick Rust and Flame loose, especially given the seasonal themes that make up those anthologies. I want to tell that story–and since I tend to do my best worldbuilding through associated short stories–why not? Not sure if I’m getting back on the submissions hamster wheel, however. After having 50% of my stories fail in 2020 due to either falling through the cracks or from publications going dead without notice, I’m kinda “meh” about the hard core write and submit thing I used to do. There are more options now, and I might just suck it up, finish my financial info for Substack, and run them through Substack/Medium before putting them up as e-chapbooks.

But there’s other things as well. Two years of Covid have wiped out my bazaar income. Last year, I ran figures and winced at what it cost me. This year…sigh. I also do want to be doing more fabric art, since I have a sizeable cloth stash, and possibly get myself into more art shows. However, my inventory is somewhat small so I need to take the time to build it up. I don’t think I’m going to do a lot of bowl cozies unless things change drastically with Covid and I feel safe doing bazaars again. But I want to do one-of-a-kind wall hangings and stuff like that which I’ll probably list on Etsy, or another option if I can figure it out.

Overall, this is a regrouping year. Things have changed thanks to 2020, and with everything I see heading our way…haven’t even gotten into the discussions of my gloomy opinions about politics. That, plus turning sixty-four doesn’t help as far as my attitude about the future. I do see ageism, and sexism, and unfortunately I am of a demographic that youngers can dismiss or put aside easily. While I’ve done a lot of things in my life, none of them create the sort of exciting backstory that many in traditional publishing are looking for. If I were twenty years younger, I’d probably have a chance, given the stories I’m working on these days. But at my age? Sorry, I’m cynical.

Ah well. One of my goals this year is to spend more time journaling, both privately and online. We’ll see how that goes. I plan to do an award eligibility post, even though that’s just pissing into the wind at this point. Much as I’d hope otherwise, the reality is that I tend to be a perpetual semifinalist or “just missed” person, both personally and professionally.

Too much to hope for that this will change in my elder years.

As Justine Fixes Everything: Reflections on Mortality heads for its release date on October 15th and I settle in for the revisions to the first two books of The Netwalk Sequence to prepare them for rerelease (while working on Book Seven in the Martiniere books, Repairing the Legacy), I find myself doing a comparison between the two series. Some of that is due to when they came out in my writing career–the Netwalk books came first; the Martiniere books are my current work. But both are science fiction, both involve the use of biobots and digital cloning, both are near-future.

But there are huge structural differences between the two series.

The Netwalk Sequence is pretty much locked into its story. There really aren’t any points of divergence in the story; no place where a character making a different choice spins off an entirely new set of consequences and storylines. Changing one aspect of the sequence of events ends up bringing down the whole house of cards. It falls apart and–most importantly–I haven’t felt the urge to explore possible divergences.

Not so for The Martiniere Legacy. There are a number of nexus points where the story can veer off in a different direction into new adventures that make a rocking good tale. For example, if Saul, Angelica, and Louisa Martiniere weren’t killed in a plane crash when Gabe was twelve. In that scenario, Gabe learns that Philip is his biological father at age sixteen, spends two years in Philip’s household, and, upon becoming eighteen, petitions Saul, as the Martiniere (the Family and Group head), to remove Gabe’s half-sister Justine from Philip’s household (the reason given is the recent suicide of Justine’s mother Renate). Justine never undergoes abusive treatment in her teens from Philip and her other half-brother Joey, Gabe’s exposure to Philip’s mind control programming is restricted, and he openly competes with Joey to become the Martiniere-in-waiting. Justine doesn’t need to marry Donald Atwood at seventeen to escape Philip but goes on to college and meets/marries Donald after graduation. Gabe meets Ruby when interviewing her as a candidate for the Martiniere Grant, and they become involved with each other over the course of several years. Not that there aren’t obstacles–just different ones.

Another point where The Martiniere Legacy could go a different direction is when Gabe is confronted with the necessity of telling Ruby that he’s not really Gabe Ramirez, a broke saddle bronc rider, but is Gabriel Martiniere, heir in hiding. There are several different points where the storyline could go a drastically different direction from the current Martiniere canon if Gabe’s disclosure to Ruby happens before Philip silences him. And that brings out an entirely new set of obstacles which Gabe and Ruby have to face.

I haven’t decided if I’m going to write those stories yet–but those possibilities exist. I find them intriguing at times.

Those change points don’t exist in The Netwalk Sequence storyline. In part, I suspect it’s because the Legacy relies on the ambiguity of those change points. With the exception of the plane crash that kills his family, Gabe faces that disclosure turning point several times in his relationship with Ruby. Gabe’s choices drive the Legacy storyline, for better or worse. He could have told Ruby when Justine let him know that she was aware that he is Ruby’s boyfriend. When Ruby becomes pregnant and they marry. At Brandon’s birth, when Ruby’s grandfather Ron tells Gabe he knows Gabe’s secret. The things that keep Gabe from that disclosure are little interruptions, little choices…but oh so very different.

But in the Netwalk books? There really aren’t those points where a character’s choice–other than refusing to participate–changes things. Sarah’s secret doesn’t change the fabric of reality like Gabe’s does. It’s only her shame at learning that secret which could change things–and even then, it’s unlikely to have the same effect on the storyline, except to make it much, much darker and traversing places I really don’t want to go as an author.

I’m still not sure why these series are so different. My ability to craft a more complex storyline after nearly fifteen years of consistent fiction writing? Elements of the story? Or the basic characters who drive it? All I know is that I really don’t see variant storylines when I look at Netwalk. Perhaps it’s the difference between Sarah Stephens and Gabriel Martiniere.

Sarah Stephens is the heart of the Netwalk books. Her obsession with power, her desire to control access to that shameful secret about her origins, and how she faces the challenges brought by the Gizmo, including the way that Francis Stewart betrays her, all shape her character. Even after her death, when she exists as a Netwalker, power, access to that secret, Gizmo challenges, and Stewart’s betrayal shape who she is. But even though she’s a scion of a timber baron family, her heritage is purely American. There is no long history and tradition that she adheres to. No noblesse oblige. The Stephenses are all about raw political power. Sarah’s vision, until she spends time as a Netwalker with her granddaughter Melanie and great-granddaughter Bess, is about gathering as much power and control to herself as possible. It isn’t really until she has to deal with the fallout from controlling Gizmo that she develops a more altruistic vision–and even that is only over the course of many years.

On the other hand, Gabriel Martiniere is the descendant of European nobility, from a rich and powerful family that remembers and cherishes its origins. While born in Los Angeles, his upbringing is within the tradition of centuries of family history. The Martinieres descend from an illegitimate Valois descendant, which also means descent from the Medicis and the Borgias. Napoleon Bonaparte also comes into play, later on. The Martiniere family became The Family during the French Revolution, when the American branch formed an aid society to assist Family escapees from France. That aid society became The Martiniere Group, and it just kept on growing over the years with a focus on agricultural technology and research, pharmaceuticals, androids, cyborgs, and cloning.

More importantly, Gabe was raised not just to become the Martiniere and manage the Group, but as part of a large, complex, and social family with many, many connections and interactions. The tension within the Martinieres is between a striving for tangible political power and the strong family tradition of noblesse oblige. No matter what storyline I look at, Gabe is always the polite Martiniere heir. The one with a vision that leads to a better world. His father Philip desires money and power. Gabe wants a better world.

So I still don’t know. All the same, it’s fascinating to compare the two series. Two very different rich and powerful families.

Meanwhile, I’m still turning out work in the main Martiniere Legacy storyline. I’m serializing the current work-in-progress, Repairing the Legacy, about Gabe and Ruby’s attempts to deal with the toxic witches brew that Philip left behind. The serial can be found on Substack, as Martiniere Stories.

The latest Martiniere Legacy book, Justine Fixes Everything: Reflections on Mortality, is currently up for preorder on Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and more. Official release date is October 15th. What’s it about?

Well…

EVEN THE MOST POWERFUL PEOPLE HAVE TO START SOMEWHERE…

Over the years, Justine Martiniere has become the fixer for the Martinieres. Have a problem? Go to Justine to get it remedied.

But it wasn’t always that way.

First, Justine needed to escape the abuses of her father, Philip. She didn’t expect to fall in love with the man she married, Donald Atwood. But she did–and then she faced the choice between remaining married to Donald, or stopping her sociopathic, megalomaniac father.

Justine Fixes Everything is in part the unusual love story of Justine and Donald–and in part the saga of her rise to power, viewed in retrospect as she tells the history to Philip’s clone Mike, as he recovers from surgery. It’s about what she sacrificed to become powerful—and, at the same time, how that past comes to haunt the challenges she faces toward the end of her life.

I hope you check out Martiniere Stories and Justine Fixes Everything! And, hopefully, by November I’ll be able to announce the rerelease of The Netwalk Sequence.

Arrgh. Grumpy. Smoke. This is something like the 6th or 7th week of wildfire smoke here–probably more, it feels like forever, with probably at least six weeks left to go. No nearby fires, just smoke from…elsewhere.

So I’m finding myself getting grumpy when someone starts to get smoked in, and the complaints start. I guess I should be more sympathetic, but after what feels like permanent smoke which keeps me inside during the summer, I’m grumpy. Want to have an issue? Then talk to those of us inland who’ve been inundated with smoke regularly since the end of June. Oh, there’s been a run of clear days every now and then, but for the most part it’s been smoke, smoke, smoke, endless smoke. It’s everything I’ve dreaded ever since it was clear that despite allegedly being a La Nina winter, we weren’t getting much precipitation here in the Pacific Northwest.

I’ve decided that smoke is absolutely worse than a Covid lockdown. Combine the two and…well, the smoke is worse.

Keep in mind that I grew up in the south Willamette Valley near Eugene, in the late ’60s/ early ’70s. Grass seed field burning was a common management method in that area, and until one really horrific day (that I still vividly remember) when the skies were black in the Eugene area due to wind patterns, nothing was really done about it. If you lived there, you had to live with it. And the management methods after that? Sent the smoke over the Coburg Hills, right over the small mountain valley I lived in.

Between field burning and life with heavy smokers, I now have reactive airways. And lots of smoke for endless days ends up playing with my head, causing a low-level moodiness and irritability. I don’t want to ride the horse in it because she’s getting up there in years and I don’t want to put the strain on her. Not inspired to do much of anything outside, even if I’m masked.

(Please don’t tell me to move. I hate humidity, and other options aren’t the best in the world, either. Plus, really? No place is safe these days.)

And then there’s the rise of the Delta variant. Because of the smoke, I’m wearing a N95 valve shop mask if I go very far from the house, for very long. At this point I’m one of the annoyed vaccinated and cooperative people who’s just had enough, and if I’m asymptomatic and exhaling virus? Well, sorry. The shop mask helps with the smoke, and I’m the one who can tell the difference, okay? If it concerns you, then wear a mask yourself. Get vaccinated, if you can.

(Yes, I KNOW THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO LEGITIMATELY CAN’T GET VACCINATED. They aren’t the ones I’ll be running into who aren’t wearing masks.)

Oh well.

Writing is chugging along, with multiple projects humming. I need to get back to blogging and writing more essays that show up on Medium and Substack. Promote my serials on Kindle Vella as well as the books I have out and the new book that I plan to release in October. I’ve found some lovely images for the promotional campaign that nail Justine. It’s hard to switch out of fiction mode to write non-fiction, however. I’m finding myself lacking in motivation.

Meanwhile, I’ve started the ten-year-revision of Netwalk. Ouch. Some of my wincing is due to the use of language, but there’s also a LOT of proofing mistakes that I just wouldn’t allow these days. I have to wonder how much of those blunders are due to the swap between WordPerfect/Open Office/Word that happened with that book, however. Hidden coding that popped up in InDesign. Given that it happens more in certain sections, I certainly have to wonder about that issue.

Nonetheless, I’m enjoying rediscovering that particular world that I built. The story really isn’t that bad, and once I’m done with the rewrite, I’ll feel better about promoting The Netwalk Sequence along with The Martiniere Legacy. There’s a lot of similarities, but also a lot of differences. Both have biobots, and megalomaniac family members. But The Netwalk Sequence eventually has alien tech which explains digital personality uploads, while it’s sheer tech developments in The Martiniere Legacy, based on a mind control technology that doesn’t exist in Netwalk.

Anyway. Still alive here, even if smoky. Sigh.

Wow. I’ve not blogged since April. That’s been a HUGE omission, all things considered.

But I have an excuse. I think. Fictional, but real, because I’ve been cranking away hard on Justine Fixes Everything.

And then there were trips to Portland once I had the second Covid vax, and dealing with the reaction to the second vax, and then a trip to Yellowstone…yeah.

It certainly hasn’t been due to a lack of writing ideas, and I actually did write a blog after the Yellowstone trip. But it ended up being kinda whiny and bitchy because there were a lot of unmasked people, and judging from their license plates, I don’t think they were vaxxed! I decided to delete that blog because it just was problematic in a lot of ways.

Mostly, though, the lack of blogging has been because Justine Martiniere has decided to speak, and it’s a LOT of speaking. Up around 86k words right now, as a matter of fact, projected to be about 100-110k. Justine is old, a bit bad, and somewhat mad. That said, compared to her father Philip, Justine is pretty damn sane and ethical.

She’s always been the difficult Martiniere Legacy character when it comes to ethics, however. When she first appeared in Inheritance, Gabe didn’t know what side she was on at first. That says a lot, because he rescued her from abuse at the hands of their father when she was a teen. Until she rescues Gabe, Ruby, Brandon, and Kris from a confrontation with Philip, she’s clearly a morally ambiguous character. She continues to play that role throughout the core Martiniere Legacy trilogy (Inheritance, Ascendant, Realization). We see her aiding and abetting Ruby in figuring out whether she can succeed in the Martiniere world. She brings about the meeting of Ruby and Donna-gran, which results in Ruby receiving Donna-gran’s blessing and encouragement to remarry Gabe. She is revealed to be the Rescue Angel, a legendary figure fighting for women’s reproductive rights, especially for indentured women who have no agency or control over their own bodies. But she’s also an arms dealer and a security consultant. When Gabe makes his play to the Family and the Group to supplant Philip as the Martiniere, the Family and Group head, it’s Justine–now revealed to be his sister, not his cousin–who orchestrates the entire process.

Justine’s the logistics person who manages things and makes things happen, period. We see her even more in that role of the Family’s fixer in The Heritage of Michael Martiniere.

To understand Gabe, especially the Gabe we see in Broken Angel: The Lost Years of Gabriel Martiniere, we have to understand Justine. Half-brother and sister, the children of Philip Martiniere. One raised as his daughter; the other as his nephew. And during the thirty years of Gabe’s exile from the Martiniere family, they went through parallel experiences. Finding their loves. Forced into divorce by their father, for very different reasons. Both seeking to confront and destroy Philip because of his megalomaniac and sociopathic behaviors, including human rights violations involving mind control programming and experimentation. The pathways they fall into to bring about that shared goal are very different–and yet similar. Gabe becomes part of his brother-in-law’s mercenary company to fight Philip’s attempts to become a regional strongman and dictator in the American Southwest and South. Justine ends up performing the duties of the Martiniere-in-waiting without the title, because of her gender, for a few years. Then she also goes into the private army business, albeit as part of her work against growing restrictions on reproductive rights.

But those roles are just a small part of what they do during those years. Gabe’s more the idealist; Justine the pragmatist.

The other piece is that Justine Fixes Everything has two major but parallel plots. I’ve not done this kind of story before. One plot, the A plot, for lack of a better term, is the gradual build toward becoming who she is when she and Gabe meet again in Inheritance. The other plot (B) is Justine dealing with one final crisis before her death, involving digital cloning and the rise of a threat she thought she had dispensed with years before. We see her past through the stories she tells in the A plot. The B plot is reaction to those stories, and the growing realization that she has one more major fight to conduct.

Coordinating those two threads so that they peak simultaneously has been the challenge. In some respects, I’m somewhat pantsing this story rather than the rigorous plotting I’ve done in the past. I can get away with it for this story because I have a timeline which has become my continuity reference (and oh dear God, some of the flexing I’ve had to do to make story work has been hair-pulling). For me, pantsing is harder to do than writing with a defined road map. I’m finding that the story is eating more of my brain during the day, so that it’s hard to do a lot of other intellectual things such as…non-novel writing. It will be a relief to go back to some more structured work, I think.

But this book requires a lot more thinking about motives and scheming. Justine has reasons for everything she does. But until I started writing this book, I didn’t realize the degree to which her life has been a role play.

She married Donald Atwood to escape her father, then fell deeply in love with Donald.

She’s asexual, but feigned some very public relationships as a means to protect herself and others (I think I’m going to write another blog today about sexuality in my work so far, because there are some patterns. Besides, it’s Pride month. A good time for it).

She divorced Donald Atwood as a means to hide their underground political work and keep him safe when he was in poor health. She feigned relationships with two men to cover up their relationship, to keep them safe (and her, too, let’s be honest–and one of them was a valuable ally). She managed to break into her father’s hidden records to discover the degree to which he was engaged in downright evil behavior, and yet was able to work with him. Part of that lies in how she thinks of him. During the core Legacy trilogy, she always refers to Philip with cutesy but denigrating epithets–“Daddy-dear.” “Daddy-dearest.” “Daddy-poo.” That’s because we don’t see what she’s really thinking of him.

In her book, from her point of view, it’s “Daddy-damn-dearest.” “Daddy-damned-dearest.” “Daddy-fucking-dearest.” Justine hates her father but I suspect that only Donald knows how deep that hatred goes. Gabe suspects, of course, but it’s not until she tells these stories that he knows–and it’s not Gabe himself who finds out, it’s his digital clone.

And no one but Donald (and the people they enlist to help them hide it) knows the depth of her love for him.

I’m working on Justine Fixes Everything, and it’s one of those writing days. Write a little bit. Get up and wander around. Do small errands, like fix a buckle on Mocha’s mediumweight blanket before putting it away, and pulling out the rain sheet instead.

Write some more. Think about what I’ve written. Look at other chapters I’ve done so far. Fiddle around with something else that needs to be done.

Write more. Check out social media, and flinch away.

Not racking up the words today.

But there’s a reason for this. I’m writing a difficult passage, involving a young woman who’s been extracted from a traumatic situation. I’m literally feeling my way through this part paragraph by paragraph, because I need to think about it. Laying the foundation for the Justine that we see in other books of the Martiniere Legacy. Wondering if I’m going too far over the top with this story. Then thinking of real-life counterparts and saying “nope.”

Donald Atwood is almost too good to be true, until you realize the degree to which he’s been raised to be the kind of man who, while loving to love women, is also ethical about it. And–I think there’s going to be a physical issue involved. Still thinking about that.

But I’m still feeling my way along in this story. Justine’s voice comes slowly, in part because she wants to hide a lot of this. It’s about a period in her life where she is weak, and vulnerable. And yet it’s a part of her life that creates the foundations for her later strength, to become the fixer for the Martinieres, the one who pulls a lot of the logistics together not just for security but for transportation. It sets up the rationale for her eventually becoming the Rescue Angel.

It’s still not an easy section to write.

So it’s been a week now since Mocha colicked. She was doing fine before we took off on a ride, had gotten herself a drink from the trough, eaten her grain, and didn’t show any distress on saddling.

Two hours and five miles later, she was on the brink of colic, and wouldn’t take a treat, but didn’t have sufficiently obvious signs of distress to call the vet. And since she lives in pasture, there was a chance that she’d walk off whatever this was.

An hour later, she was dropping to her side, in obvious distress, and did so three times in 5-7 minutes. Her gums had not gotten to the point where they were pale white, and still showed good capillary refill. But gut sounds were limited.

Fortunately, we caught it early. Her vet gave her a shot of Banamine intravenously (pain reliever preferred for colic), then pumped some water into her stomach and did a rectal exam resulting in some small poops that were still pretty hydrated. Within a short period of time we had good gut sounds, she was reaching for grass to eat, and after being blanketed and turned back into the pasture headed off for where the hay was at a trot.

But. She’s twenty-one years old. We blanketed her because a cold, gusty storm was blowing in, and it brought snow flurries. Just a little extra care for an older horse who had just gone through a rough time. I didn’t bother trying to mix up wet feed for her because I’ve learned by experience that she doesn’t care for mush unless I add sweet stuff to it and, well, it didn’t seem to warrant that level of reaction.

It took her a couple of days to start acting like herself. I started pulling the blanket in the morning because she really only needed it at night–daytime temps were okay, nighttime were below freezing with breeze.

Monday, she went to the vet for a dental exam (previously scheduled) and vaccinations. And deworming, and shoes, since her farrier works with the vet clinic and it was easy to do (she had originally be scheduled to be shod the day after she colicked but we moved the date out, on the vet’s recommendation).

She passed the dental exam with flying colors–dental work for horses is filing off sharp points that form on the molars and leveling out uneven growth back there (some horses will develop what’s called a wave, where the molars are uneven and don’t meet properly). Got her vaccinations. Since she was in the stocks already and coming out of sedation, I popped in with the dewormer and took care of that chore.

The vet is concerned that parasite load might be an issue, and suggested a change from twice a year to four times a year deworming. I’m also considering a feed-through dewormer, Strongcid-C, but thinking about it. The big concern is that we just don’t have a real reason for her to have colicked, except…weather-coaster weather. But the only other time she’s come even close to doing this where I can pinpoint weather as a factor was at a horse show where a big nasty storm hit, and she started doing a colic-like fuss. But I got her back to her stall, stripped the saddle, blanketed her, and she settled with no problems, aggressively eating her hay. The other time she definitely colicked was part of a cascade of health issues tied to stress from moving, change in environment, and white line disease. She just doesn’t have a history of doing this–twenty-one years old, two definite colics, one possible developing that never went anywhere.

Stuff like this does happen with older horses, though, and it can be an indicator of decline. Or not.

Anyway, today was a week after the colic. She’s been cleared for light work. So I went out midday (after the morning blanket removal) and caught her up. When it came time to saddle her, she clearly remembered and associated colic pain with the saddle. I got the mare face stink-eye, with flattened ears and a head toss. Eased the cinch gently, didn’t push the issue.

The other thing is that I didn’t want to do a hard ride, either, because she’d also just gotten her hind shoes back on and that alters her stride a little bit.

She found a lot of things to look at during her ride. Ambled along, looking at everything, ears forward.

When we got back, she was careful about her first treat, again, clearly remembering the last time. Chewed it up, went “oh, okay, gut doesn’t hurt” and all was well.

Went back out tonight with her favorite blanket, the green one that she wore so many winters in her stall. She came to me, raised her head and stood square, in the proper position for easy blanketing. I flipped it on her back just like I used to do all those years riding with Gregg, where I might end up helping blanket 15 horses or so in the barn. She stood good and still for her blanket getting fastened, then asked for more cookies.

Apparently she wants her blanket at night right now.

Damn, I spoil this horse. But she’s worth it.