We all finished eating and Chief scooted up next to me. “You know already the star story,” he purred over the crackling fire.

I could tell somehow that it was a question and said no.


First there was only the World, alone in the black with nothing but the whispering Wind for company. The Wind grew bored of talking to his silent brother’s stony face, and so he fled up on astral currents until he found the Sun far away, only a distant speck of...

VerseD

Robert Heinlein Cassidy's resolve wore thin after weeks of living with the natives on Tarsus without speaking a word of their language.

I didn’t learn Taurian because I wanted to. As a kid I never took to other languages, even though my parents tried to make me take French and Latin. I was one of those “I just need English to get by, now let’s get on to the practical stuff” -kind of people.

No, I learned Taurian because I hated being the Human in the tribe. The Taurians...

VerseD

For my novel I wanted to use the landskipper vehicle that I came up with for the science fiction themed sentence starter. When I fleshed it out it turned kind of ridiculous, but hopefully remains physically possible. Here are three technical parts about the "tiny craft." I don't know much about actual piloting, so the details here would change in editing.

Toward the front of the hangar, six familiar vessels lined up side by side, angled toward the rising sun. Below a segmented...

VerseD

This is the first page from my NaNoWriMo novel. It's narrated by Robert Heinlein Cassidy, a lowly colonist of the world Tarsus, where humans discovered the first traces of sentient extraterrestrial life.

The Taurians were never much to look at in the first fuzzy vids beamed back by the news teams. Humanoid frames, elegant and atavistic, with peach-colored skin spotted like an old man’s. Long necks, narrow jaws, wide and drooping cheek-bones, and watery eyes without any trace of white....

VerseD