“Green Zulu Five One” Free Giveaway

My Military/Science Fiction novella Green Zulu Five One and other stories from the Vyptellian War will be FREE on Amazon from Feb. 3-5.

Not sure if you like the military side of Sci-Fi? Or maybe you’re just not into Sci-Fi? You may still like GZ51 because for me the genre is simply where the characters are and it’s their stories that I’m most interested in exploring.

Here’s what a couple reviewers had to say about it:

“… The characters in GZ51 are all people you’ll feel like buying a drink for and spending hours with just listening to their war stories. They are each unique, interesting, surprising, and deeply substantive, which is a pleasant turn for a story that isn’t quite novel length about an intergalactic war.” — Tammy Salyer

” This book has a grim science fiction backdrop, reading like a collection of letters about the sum of war. Each of the characters are delicate, possessed of flaws, and real human limits. I never felt like a character was simply there to represent some philosophical constant in the book, and this made them intensely easy to relate to.” — A. Walker

So why not invest … well, NOTHING … and check out Green Zulu Five One?

Book Review: Green Zulu Five One and other stories from the Vyptellian War

Well this is a pretty cool thing to find. Readers of this blog know I’m a Tammy Salyer fan, so you should check out her books & blog if you haven’t already.

“Green Zulu Five One” available now

Today is the day! Green Zulu Five One (and other stories from the Vyptellian War) is now available to buy at Amazon.

A war of millions is fought by individuals.

For sixteen years humanity and the alien Vyptellians have battled in space and on hundreds of planets in a distant corner of the galaxy.

Tyko is a teenage space fighter pilot who has never known peace; insulated from the horrors of the battlefield, he’ll learn war isn’t a game. Sergeant Siengha is one of a handful to survive the war’s first battle; surrounded and vastly outnumbered by a merciless enemy, it takes everything she knows to keep those around her alive and fighting.

These are just two of the countless stories from the human side of the Vyptellian War. To those on the frontlines and their families at home, why the war began is unimportant, forgotten when the first shot was fired. What matters is the survival of the species.

But after years of bloody conflict, the war’s end is closer than anyone realizes.

The story behind “Green Zulu Five One”

Green Zulu Five One (and other stories from the Vyptellian War), my new Military/Sci-Fi novella, is available now for pre-sales & will be “live” tomorrow, November 4.

When I was briefly a sportswriter my favorite stories to write were profiles. The last question I always asked the person I was interviewing was this: What question do you wish I’d asked but didn’t. This gave them the chance to talk about their sponsors, coaches, teammates, or a cause they supported.

So, when preparing material to support the launch of Green Zulu Five One (and other stories from the Vyptellian War), I decided to interview myself and ask me the questions I’d hope someone would ask.

Where did the idea for Green Zulu Five One come from?

In August last year I was asked by writer and editor Tara Maya to contribute to the Space Jockey anthology, and I submitted a story about Tyko, a fifteen-year-old pilot whose call sign is Green Zulu Five One and who is fighting in a war against an alien race that started before he was born. The first reviewer of the anthology mentioned the story favorably and said he thought it would make a great opening chapter to a longer work. That got me to thinking about where Tyko’s story may lead.

The cover for “Green Zulu Five One” is just awesome

A war of millions is fought by individuals

My new Military/Sci-Fi novella, Green Zulu Five One (and other stories from the Vyptellian War) is available now for pre-order and will be “live” on Tuesday, November 4.

The cover, which I think is pretty awesome, was created by Norman Dixon Jr. (click on the picture to see a bigger version). Norm is the author of several novels including one of The Best I Read in 2013. and I had a lot of fun working with him.

Green Zulu Five One is a thought-provoking look at war, character-driven but with action sequences, too. In preparation for the book’s launch, I asked Norm a few questions about the cover:

How did the cover come about?

Believe it or not, the writing was easier

Spoiler Alert: Way down at the bottom is the reason for this post. Skip ahead if you want to … I won’t tell anyone  🙂

I haven’t been shy when it comes to talking about my problems writing the past couple years. In the Movie of My Life, the last twenty-four months of writing could be covered with a montage of me sitting at my desk, staring at blank Scivener pages while suitably sad music played — think Simon & Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence (“Hello Darkness, my old friend …”).

So I’m pretty excited to have actually started and finished something, a Military/Sci-Fi novella titled Green Zulu 51 (and other stories from the Vyptellian War). I’ve blogged about this novella before when I was waiting for feedback from beta readers. Well, now I’ve made revisions based on that feedback, added a couple chapters that I think were needed for balance, and even got a really kick-a$$ cover designed by the awesome Norman Dixon Jr. (@normandixonjr).

The book is off for one last look-through and then hopefully we’ll turn it into electrons that people can download from Amazon for less than the cost of a gallon of milk.

Updating What I’m Working On

Many months ago I blogged about my work in progress, a Military/Sci-Fi novella, and even posted a short excerpt from one chapter. The idea, based on a few other books I’ve seen, is to tell an overarching story through what I call ‘connected vignettes.’ In this case the story covers the final year of a future war between an alien species and human who have migrated from Earth.

A couple weeks ago I completed the rough draft of Green Zulu Five One (and other stories from the Vyptellian War) and sent it to a diverse group of folks to read and let me know what they think. As of today I’ve heard back from almost everyone and their feedback — positive and constructively critical — has been very encouraging. Side note: It never fails to amaze me how two people can look at the same thing but see it in completely different ways — we really are awesomely complex creatures.

Excerpt from “Green Zulu Five One”

 Last post I told you What I’m Working On, a Military/Sci-Fi project set in the future during a war between humans and the alien Vyptellians. Here’s a short excerpt from what should be the first chapter. I hope you enjoy it.

Green Zulu Five One

Tyko killed the first two Vyptellians quickly enough, sending bright green streams of charged slugs into spacefighters that were now millions of pieces of space debris. The first two Vyps had been bunched up, slow to respond, and then predictable in their evasive movements — easy prey for one of the fleet’s top pilots, a guy who one of his peers joked had created more space dust than God. But the third one, that was a different story. The Vyp had experience, Tyko could tell, the alien pilot taking full advantage of his craft’s superior maneuverability to avoid the pulsating green lances streaming at him.

Not his first rodeo, Tyko thought, using one of his favorite phrases, first heard in an old vid about one of Old Earth’s wars and then explained through archive research in the base station library. A smile crept across his face at the idea of a Vyp atop one of New Earth’s few surviving horses, kept from extinction along with thousands of other species in zoological preserves. Like the horse, few of Tyko’s generation had ever seen a live Vyp but propagandists made the most of the enemy’s reptilian visage, the commonly accepted image causing Tyko to smile at the pairing with a horse.

The Vyp twisted and turned, avoiding Tyko’s slugs while attempting to gain a position to return fire. The human countered each movement, both hands and feet working his craft’s flight controls while targeting and status data streamed across the vid screen he faced. The sleek Vyptellian fighter, shaped like one of the arrowheads shot at Tyko’s ancestors centuries ago on Old Earth, was locked in the targeting reticle in the center of the vid screen, the elongated pinlights of stars and planets on a backdrop of pure black providing visual references of the enemy’s moves.

What I’m working on

Even though my progress has been halting, slow, glacial, etc., I have actually been working on a new writing project. You may recall last year I was asked to submit a story to the sci-fi anthology Space Jockey. My contribution, a short story titled “Green Zulu Five One,” was well received by reviewers, including one who said it seemed like the start of a novel he’d like to read.

It took some time, but eventually that comment got me to thinking about how I could further explore the universe of my “GZ51” protagonist, a 16-year-old space fighter pilot named Tyko. There’s a war on between the alien Vyptellians and the humans who decades earlier pushed out into space to colonize new worlds — a war that’s lasted nearly as long as Tyko’s been alive.

Thinking about Tyko and what may happen to him, I saw the opportunity to explore a different approach to storytelling, what I’ve come to called connected vignettes where each chapter is more of a self-contained short story, set in the same universe. Full disclosure — I’m lifting this “connected vignette” approach from the works of two authors I admire: SC Harrison’s Planks and DES Richard’s 3024AD: Short Stories Series One. Ever since reading those great books I’ve had the notion of trying something similar, and this project seemed like a good bet.

Tyko will appear in about a third of the stories, as will a platoon sergeant involved in the ground war, and the balance will be one-offs or feature secondary characters. The (very) tentative title is Green Zulu Five One and other stories from the final year of the Vyptellian War. I enjoy writing Military/Sci-Fi (check out the short story “Re/Cycled”), a genre which my friend (and awesome editor and MSF author in her own right) Tammy Salyer suggested my previous novels could probably also squeeze into.