#Excerpt from JOHN SMITH : Last Known Survivor of the #Microsoft Wars by Roland Hughes #Dystopian

SK:  I ask again, what was the truth according to John Smith?

JS:    Later in life, when people were counting the number of wells and starting to not buy the “dead Dino” story, scientists made an even more ludicrous claim.  They claimed the jungle and forest, which covered all of the land during the age of the dinosaur, was also decomposing and creating large pools of oil.

SK:  Why was this so ludicrous?

JS:    Admittedly, plant and animal life will share some mineral content, and all things will create some kind of goo when they reach that liquefying stage of decomposition.  However, I do find it a stretch that both would end up creating crude oil, no matter how much heat and time were applied, unless crude is a very tiny subset of minerals that survive decomposition. 

Eventually, scientists started claiming crude was caused by decaying plant and animal life.  I guess fish never played into the formula.  Scientists really had no choice.  They had to explain to an increasingly skeptical public why some crude was yellow and some black.  Some crude was fast-flowing liquid and other crude was a solid brick.

SK:  I ask again, what was the truth according to John Smith?

JS:    Crude oil is decomposing humans from earlier cycles.  Each cycle lasts an unbelievably long time, as far as human life  is concerned.  Humans, by and large, have a need to build communities.  As the cycle progresses, these communities become cities of a massive scale.  When the earth shifts and heaves its continents around, these cities are buried deep in a matter of hours, if not seconds.  They are buried deep without air or the nutrients needed for bacterial decomposition.

The steel eventually reverts back to iron and carbon; the concrete, to limestone and sand.  I’m not certain what happens to the glass other than the fact it is crushed into pieces so tiny one wouldn’t notice them coming up with the drilling mud.  The humans and their pets, though—they are crushed and eventually, the heat of the earth cooks them into crude.

SK:  That is a disgusting thing to say.  We have one of those oil sites oozing stuff out of the ground near our city! People use it for all kinds of things.

JS:    Humans are useful in a variety of forms.  Have they invented a product called petroleum jelly yet?  It’s kind of greasy, helps cuts heal and looks a lot like animal fat.

SK:  Oh!  I cannot believe I’m being forced to sit here and listen to this!

JS:    Do you think I’m the first to point something like this out?  I suppose you have never heard of cannibalism either?

SK:  Another disgusting tale to frighten children!

JS:    Oh no.  It was real and existed in various forms around the globe.  Even in large cities, where everybody claimed it never happened, you would see the occasional news report that someone had been arrested with pieces of humans in their fridge or freezer.  There was even a movie about the earth running out of food and governments taking it upon themselves to make cannibalism palatable to the masses.

SK:  I simply cannot accept the premise anybody would believe such a story.

JS:    The story became a legend.  They would simply herd people to different areas of each city.  One area would be selected for recycling.  The people would be processed and turned into little food squares of “Soylent Green.”  There were lots of different colors of food squares made from the various forms of food still available but there wasn’t enough to go around.

“John Smith: Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars” is one big interview. It is a transcript of a dialogue between “John Smith” (who, as the title of the book implies is the last known survivor of the Microsoft wars) and the interviewer for a prominent news organization.

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Genre – Dystopian Fiction

Rating – PG

More details about the author

Website http://johnsmith-book.com/

Behind the Scenes of Saga of the Nine: #Area38 by Mikey D.B. @mikeydbii #Dystopian #Thriller

Ten things you didn’t know about Saga of the Nine: Area 38

1) It was originally going to be a musical.  The album that inspired it, This is War by 30 Seconds to Mars, was intended not only as the frame work of the story, but the bulk of the songs as well.  I thought about seeking out Jared Leto’s help/permission to use his music and possibly add more, but things ended up turning a different direction.  It really came down to the fact that I didn’t think a musical would do the story justice.  I still listened to the album probably a couple hundred times while writing it, but the story is much different now than the original musical.

2) Mica and the USA Division were inspired by a date I took a girl on.  My date and I doubled with my roommate and his date, each got some masquerade masks, and then went to dinner at a fancy restaurant while we wore them.  Like I said, bizarre, but hey, something worked because my date that night is now my wife.

3) Area 38 is actually a reference to the 38^th state of the United States of America.

4) The opening setting was inspired by the cold winter mornings in Utah.  I’ve been working the six am shift for as long as I can remember, and one of the joys about having to wake up so early in order to get to work on time, is it’s around the time that the sun rises.  The fog that covered the fields outside the industrial park were some of the most beautiful mornings I’ve seen.

5) Benedict Cumberbatch, the actor who played Sherlock Holmes in BBC’s Sherlock, is the person I pictured as I wrote and fine tuned Christopher Stone, the sadistic Area Leader of Area 38.  If he reads this, I hope he doesn’t get offended.  The way he talks in Star Trek: Into Darkness as Kahn is exactly how I imagine Christopher saying his lines.

6) I wrote the entire novel on the floor of my 500 square foot apartment--right at the foot of my bed.  I could only right for a few hours at a time though.  Any longer than three and my butt and legs would begin to go numb.

7) Saga of the Nine: Area 38 is actually a hybrid.  The entire plot began as two different stories.  Both of them were going nowhere, and one day I had the epiphany to combine the two.

8) Most, if not all, of my research for Area 38 came from listening to history podcasts I would listen to at my day job in the warehouse.

9) The flag on the cover was the brain child of my cousin, the cover designer.  The entire premise is that anything that is evil and corrupt usually isn’t original.  Evil simply takes originality and tweaks it.  That’s what the Nine did with the U.S. flag.

10) The foreign language in the novel is based off of Tahitian, which I picked up on my LDS mission in French Polynesia.

Change affects everyone and it is no different for Jackson. Living in Area 38 for as long as he can remember, he knows of no better way to exist than under the tyrannical rule of Christopher Stone, son of Stewart Stone from The Nine of The United Governmental Areas, aka The UGA. This all takes a dramatic turn when Jackson finds a red, metal box buried in his yard, filled with illegal artifacts—journals, a Bible, CDs, etc.—that are from a man of whom he has no recollection of: Mica Rouge.

 The year is 2036 and Mica, unlike Jackson, does know of a better way of life but is torn apart as he sees his country, The United States of America, crumbling from within by group known as The Political Mafia. The Mafia has infiltrated levels upon levels of governmental resources and it is up to Mica and a vigilante group known as The USA Division to stop them and their dark Utopian vision. To their demise, and at the country's expense, The Division fails and has no choice but to watch The Constitution dissolve and transform into The UGA.

In a final stand, having not given up hope, Mica and what is left of The Division, give one final fight in Colorado, or better known as Area 38. However, all is lost as The Division is betrayed by one of their own, Stewart Stone. Mica is left with no choice but to hide in exile, leaving what little history he can of himself and the great United States of America, with his wife, long time friends, and newly born son in hopes that they will one day finish what he could not.

Jackson, having found this legacy twenty-seven years later, decides to start the war that will end The Nine, and he with an outcast group known as The Raiders, begins his fight with Christopher Stone in Area 38. Filled with betrayal, unity, despair, hope, hate and love Area 38 follows both Mica and Jackson in their attempts to restore what they believe to be true freedom, and where one fails, the other rises to the seemingly impossible challenge.

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Genre – Dystopian Thriller

Rating – PG13

More details about the author

Connect with Mikey D. B. on Facebook & Twitter

Website www.mikeydb.com

Roland Hughes on Inspiration, John Smith & Lesedi #AmWriting #AmReading #Dystopian

What inspired you to write your first book?

A lack of usable documentation.  Software companies, particularly those who develop large scale libraries for computer programmers, are very good at producing large volumes of detailed documentation and a pile of hokey little examples.  What I mean by that is the documentation tends to be expert friendly reference material.  They provide a lot of “call this function with these parameters and it does this” type of documentation.  Where they fail miserably is in providing complete examples.  There was no documentation out there which told someone new to the product/library “here is how you create a data entry screen which adds record to a database.”

Nearly everyone reading this has went to a Web site and filled out an order form, or has gotten some form of computer generated bill/invoice in the mail.  What most reading this won’t know is the “how” behind creating all of the less than sexy programs behind that isn’t really taught.  Designers, artists, and management simply say “We want these graphics with those fonts to have this look and feel while doing this.”  Developers are left twisting in the breeze when it comes to the “how” portion of actually achieving that.

What made you want to be a writer?

“Word Processor of the Gods.”  It is a Stephen King story which first appeared in an issue of Playboy during my teenage years when Playboy was still considered cool.  It later appeared again in “Skeleton Crew” and was the primary reason I got my hands on a copy of that book.  The story was written early on in what later became known as “The Computer Age” and it sucked the reader in from the beginning.  Those scant few paragraphs (compared to a novel) really pulled the reader in and took them to a place where they seriously considered “what if?”

Did writing this book teach you anything and what was it?

One thing which always intrigues me is the phrase “writing this book” being in a question.  I am not alone when I say I didn’t write this book, I simply recorded what the characters told me.  I have seen the same statement from many other successful writers.  When I am working on my geek book series I actually am writing the book.  I’m choosing what needs to be in it and developing all examples.  They are very deliberate creations.  My fiction, and this book in particular, are created primarily by “watching” and “listening” to the characters as they show or tell their story to me.  My duty is to write it down as completely as possible.

That said, there was a lot of history I had to look up when John Smith chose to talk about it.  Most readers are quite shocked to learn just how much of the story is actual human history.

Do you intend to make writing a career?

I intend to make it my last career, audience willing.  There is a lot of truth to that retirement commercial when they ask “shouldn’t retirement be paying yourself to do what you love?”

What is your greatest strength as a writer?

My ability to type.  That may sound odd, but it is true.  I have encountered so many writers and computer programmers who cannot type.  They hammer away with two fingers and bemoan every day at the keyboard.  Some writers still write on paper and have someone else do the first keying for them.  Others have openly stated they purchased dictation software so they could speak their first draft instead of having to manually enter it.

I was lucky in my IT career.  One of the languages I had to work with was COBOL.  Even if you have never used a computer in your life you have probably gotten a bill or paycheck generated by a system written in COBOL.  If you have heard anything about the language you will have heard it is the wordiest programming language ever created.  We didn’t have speedy desktops and soft touch keyboards back then.  Many of the keyboards were closer to a manual typewriter than anything the younger generations would be familiar with today.  Typing required a lot of effort.  We morphed the famous French Foreign Legion motto “March or Die” into the COBOL programmer’s motto of “Type or Die.”  It was nothing to have a single module weigh in at thousands of lines of source.  Most applications (payroll, order processing, etc.) needed dozens if not hundreds of modules to achieve their task.

Have you ever had writer’s block? If so, what do you do about it?

I have never called it writer’s block.  In truth I am unfamiliar with the concept.  I have periods of time where the characters simply choose to rest.  During those times I occupy myself with various physical labor tasks which leaves my mind free for them to start talking again.

Another thing I do, which may sound odd, is change out keyboards.  Even when I’m writing with my netbook instead of my desktop I still use a full sized keyboard.  I keep a stack of spare keyboards I’ve accumulated over the years.  Some are the older “mechanical” or “clicky” keyboards.  Most have different layouts.  Each requires a bit of re-learning when it comes to the size of the backspace and return keys as well as the key spacing.  This tiny act seems to use a different part of my brain which gets the characters speaking again.

When I’m between consulting contracts and writing for days on end I will swap them out a couple of times per week.  Some of them are quite nostalgic for me, like an original IBM PS/2 keyboard and a Chicony keyboard from the days when they were second only to NCR in quality.  It was a sad day when NCR left the PC market.  They still make customized keyboards for their point of sale systems, or at least I still see them.  Most of you don’t bother to read the little booklet which comes with a new keyboard, you simply start typing.  If you did read it you would find most of today’s keyboards have a rated life span of around 1 million keystrokes.  Point of sale systems can have a million keystrokes in a year, if not a month. Quality is something most people don’t seem to care about these days.

Can you share a little of your current work with us?

The book currently out for first round editing is “Lesedi.”  It fills a large portion of the gap between the end of “Infinite Exposure” and “John Smith: Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars.”  At some point next year I hope begin work on “John Smith: The Last Gift of Atlantis.”  Some of the characters have made themselves known but others are just kind of lurking in the shadows.  Perhaps they are simply waiting for me to start telling the stories of the others before they feel confident enough to come forward.

How did you come up with the title?

I listened to the characters.  This was the story they told.

Who is your publisher?

I self-publish my work these days.

Will you write others in this same genre?

I plan to write/co-write another “John Smith” book to be the base for a series.  Hopefully I will be able to hand that series off to some young and talented writer.  The fleshing out of a new world rising from the ashes of the old should really be done by someone who hasn’t lived a long time in “Earth That Was.”

How much of the book is realistic?

A significant portion of “John Smith: Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars” is actual recorded human history.

“John Smith: Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars” is one big interview. It is a transcript of a dialogue between “John Smith” (who, as the title of the book implies is the last known survivor of the Microsoft wars) and the interviewer for a prominent news organization.

Buy Now @ Amazon & B&N

Genre – Dystopian Fiction

Rating – PG

More details about the author

Website http://johnsmith-book.com/