Excerpt: Mind Over All by Karina Fabian

Karina Fabian will be our chat guest August 2, 2015. Join us in the chatroom at 7 pm ET (New York Time).

Blurb: At last, Deryl has it all. He’s mastered his psychic abilities and escaped both the asylum on Earth where he was being studied and the influence of the alien Master who would use his powers as a weapon. He found acceptance among the psychic people of Kanaan and will soon be a father. However, the danger isn’t over.


The Master’s people plan to invade his new homeworld, but even worse, the planets are set to crash into each other. Deryl will have to accept his role as savior of both worlds and push his mind’s powers to the limit in order to save the people he loves most.

Excerpt 1:

Joshua rested his elbows on the counter and let out a long breath. He tried to imagine an entire planet being destroyed, but it was just too big; all his mind pictured were scenes from science fiction movies. But he could understand being terrified for someone he loved—oh, could he identify with that.

Rather than the smooth, nearly instantaneous trip he’d experienced teleporting to Earth, the return to Kanaan felt like trying to drive blind through a hurricane. Forces he didn’t have the thought power to define buffeted him from all sides, trying to draw him of course or tear his friends from his grasp. But his daughter Called him, reaching out to the only person she was aware of besides her mother, and Deryl followed her trust like a beacon, using all his stubbornness to push through the current while keeping Sachiko and Joshua tethered to him.

Excerpt 2:

Deryl braced his feet, splayed his hands palms downward, and sucked the energy from Barin. When Deryl had first been learning to control his abilities, particularly to deal with the legion of impressions coming at him from others around him, Joshua had taught him to shield himself from the mental/emotional aspects. Over the past year, he’d taught himself to filter those aspects out. It was energy, all energy, pure and neutral, like food once processed through the digestive tract. Now, he applied the same skills to Barin, stripping away the pain of the turmoil, taking the energy into himself, storing it, letting it build. The tremors under his feet stilled. The waves crashing against the rocks calmed. The wind that drove the poisonous air against his makeshift mask quieted.

In response, Deryl’s breathing accelerated, his blood raced, his stomach churned. Adrenalin coursed through him, making him shake. He ignored it, pulling further on Barin, reaching into the ground, through the air, and to the ley lines that arched weakly overhead. A detached part of his mind worked physics problems of angles and forces. Barin needed shields, and he was just the man to do it.

The key to his sanity lay in creating shields—barriers against unwanted thoughts and emotions, clumsily erected until Joshua and his neuro linguistic programming style of psychology had taken him at his word that he was truly psychic and helped him create stronger, more clever shields. He’d further honed his skills on Kanaan, training under Salgoud in anticipation of a Barin attack: manipulating energy to protect himself, then Tasmae, gradually expanding— He could do this. It was just a matter of size and energy.

Two minutes to atmosphere. Deryl’s muscles strained as he lifted his hands over his head, palms still fat but now toward the sky. His hasty calculations complete enough, he released the power to meet the Miscria Storm.

Crime Writing Resources

Crime writer Nancy J Cohen says "While researching my mysteries, I often need information that you can’t go around asking writer friends in public. Imagine discussing these topics in a restaurant...

"What kind of poison can I use that will kill someone right away and is easily obtainable? How can I stage a crime scene by hanging the victim to make it look like a suicide? Does firing a .38 give much of a recoil? What happens when a detective is personally involved in a murder case? What kind of poisonous snake can I have the bad guy put in my hero’s suitcase?"

No, these aren't questions you can ask in public. Not unless you want the police watching you. So where can you safely ask questions like this? How do you find out the information you need to make your stories authentic? Well, The Kill Zone is the perfect place for links.

Check out Nancy's post at http://killzoneauthors.blogspot.com/2014/05/crime-writing-resources.html . She lists 21 different websites where you can find the information you need.

Without police notice!

Writing Challenge!

“The sun shone on the body of the last living person in the world, as he gasped his final breath and fell silent.”

I came up with that line off the top of my head during an open chat a couple weeks ago. Karina Fabian thought it would make a great writing challenge, so we’re going to give it a try.

The challenge is to write a flash fiction story, using that as your FIRST line. Flash fiction is short, but should pack a punch, and must have a beginning and ending. We’re not looking for scenes here, but complete stories.

Think about it, write and EDIT your story, then come back and post it in the comment section. Remember, anything you post online should be clean, polished work. Don’t let yourself look like a sloppy, uneducated writer.

We’ll run this for two weeks, then we’ll have a vote to see whose story is the best. Comments to this post will be closed April 17, 2014. So get to work, and show us what you can do!

Remember, the first line in this post must be the FIRST line in your story. Go!

10 Things About...John Rosenman

(John Rosenman will be our guest in the chatroom Sunday, May 20, 2012)

Ten Things to Know About Me by John B. Rosenman

Everybody’s writing Top Ten Lists these days, so I thought I’d write a Top Ten List of Things You Should Know About Me. That way, when you meet me as a guest this Sunday in Audrey Shaffer’s The Writer’s Chatroom, I won’t be a stranger and you’ll actually feel you know me a little. Okay, here we go. (Drumroll, please.)

1. One of my novels cost me two jobs. In 1982 and again in1983, I published my first novel, The Best Laugh Last, about a white English professor in a small black Southern college. In that novel, I was critical about the quality of education the students received, and the result is that it cost me my teaching position at two historically black schools, including the one that inspired the novel in the first place.

2. I have published over 300 short stories and 20 books of fiction in the science fiction, horror, erotic horror, fantasy, and paranormal romance genres. Yes, I’ve scribbled a lot. Some of my short fiction has appeared in Weird Tales, Galaxy, Whitley Strieber’s Aliens, Fangoria, and Hot Blood.

3. I’ve been married 44 years to my wife Jane, and we have two children, Lori and David. Jane’s put up with a lot from me over the years, such as a novel which cost me two jobs (see #1). She also kept me alive recently when I almost died from Celiac disease. My boss and my soul mate, she’s a wonderful person.

4. I love to write about transformation in all its imaginable permutations. One of my stories is about a woman who contracts a mysterious disease which makes people fear her ten times more than if she merely had leprosy. Ultimately, she changes and changes and turns into a . . . Well, read the story. “The Blue of Her Hair, the Gold of Her Eyes” (cover above) was published by MuseItUp Publishing and won Preditors and Editors Annual Readers Poll in SF/F.

5. I also love to write about huge, mind-stretching concepts. Cosmic Christianity. Cosmic consciousness and states of being, you name it. In my novel, Inspector of the Cross, recently published by MuseItUp Publishing, Turtan is an elite agent nearly four thousand years old because he travels in suspended animation on missions to distant planets. What must it be like to live virtually forever while everybody around you lives mayfly lives? To meet a son you left as an infant and to see him again when he’s an old, decrepit man?

6. I believe that ordinary people you wouldn’t look at twice are often the greatest heroes. The last will be the first, and the underdog becomes the top dog. In Beyond Those Distant Stars, published by Mundania Press, Stella’s career has faded out until she has a radioactive accident while saving a comrade’s life. As a result she is given her first command of a spaceship and the opportunity to save the human race from invincible alien invaders. How many so-called ordinary people are potentially the greatest heroes and need only the right circumstances to achieve their potential?

7. I like to dabble in other forms and genres, or subgenres. Humorous metafiction, for example, which self-consciously calls attention to the fact that it’s a work of fiction itself. One of my characters is Humphrey Bogart, trapped forever in an endless rerun of Casablanca. It seems the movie’s mythic qualities have so resonated in the collective consciousness, that he can never get out and the damned movie will never end. In the process, Bogie gets to comment humorously on the movie and the sexual and other peccadilloes of some of its characters. In another tale, the main character struggles not only with events but with the author’s deficiencies. My characters turn up out of nowhere, and plot holes and implausibilities abound.

8. I’m a man of obsessions. Before I retired as an English prof at Norfolk State University, I had dozens of mementoes of the movie The Wizard of Oz in my office. A movie poster, WOZ mouse pad, a lock from Judy’s hair. No, just kidding about the last. I love SF and Horror movies, especially from the fifties. And I’ll play and watch tennis every chance I get.

9. Oh, and I’ve got to add my wife and family as a separate obsession. Family is important. And I believe the past you share with them is always present.

10. Last but not least, what can I say? Narrowing it down to the top ten is difficult. Maybe the top fifty would be easier. Let’s just say the creative life of the imagination is paramount to me. I think the arts are sacred and God is the chief writer, artist, musician, you-name-it. We follow along in Her wake and try to pick up whatever lessons we can.