Which means I am in need of beta readers. The novel is roughly 96K words. And, like I said, it is a science fiction.
I am still working on the synopsis so I will put a bit here. If you are interested, email me or use the contact form. Be aware this novel has lesbians in it. And it is not very nice toward heterosexuals on the whole (I’m mad at most of y’all anyway). There are no sex scenes but there is mention of boobs and liking them. Oh, and there’s cussing. The f word flies about quite a lot. So, if none of this appeals to you, don’t volunteer. I really wanted to submit it before the GCLS con in June but I don’t see that happening (forgot I had to do a synopsis and those are things you just don’t whip together at the last minute). So I am aiming instead to submit it when I return. Therefore, I need your opinion no later than June 18th.
So what I am needing is someone to read it through and tell me how it went. Did you get thrown out of the book? Was there something that didn’t fit? Is there something missing? Was it believable? Etc etc. I am NOT looking for a “yeah, I liked it”. I am not looking for someone to edit it (unless something jumps out at you, then sure, tell me).
Below is a bit from the first chapter.
I woke up later to someone was banging on my door. I stumbled to it and looked out the peek hole to see Jose in his rainbow pajamas. I removed the chain and opened the door. “What the fuck are you doing? It’s–” I squinted at the clock. “Three a.m.”
“Comeoncomeoncomeon” He kept saying as he grabbed my hand and dragged me down the hall to his place. His apartment was one of the big ones even though it was just him. He was some sort of computer geek for some big company. He had this huge television. And I mean huge. As in my bed was smaller kind of huge. Watching football on that thing was better than being there in person.
Right then, his big ass television was showing a very tired Ray who was now in what looked like a press room. His hair was still glued in place but his eyes had dark circles under them. Someone really needed to relieve the guy. Unless this news was so big, he’d drop dead before he stepped out of the limelight.
Next to the big television were two others Jose had moved out of his office. One had the “All News, All the Time” channel and the other was on a local station. This one showed downtown Philly where cars were parked in the street and people seemed to be rioting or something.
“I knew you had to be sleeping and I waited as long as I could before waking you. You know about the asteroid or did that happen after you went to bed?”
“Last I heard, it had changed trajectories or whatever then Ray there got interrupted and there was a big ruckus.”
“Ah, well, you at least have some sort of clue. Here.” He picked up a wireless keyboard and quickly typed something in. The screen showing the news channel changed to his desktop screen then to a video. “Poor Ray is rambling through most of this so I’ll keep him on mute. That is the asteroid.” Jose looked at me to make sure I was following along.
“That’s the grainy image I saw, yes.”
“What interrupted poor Ray was telescopes and radar picked up this.”
On the screen was a slow moving white-ish blob. Jose tapped his keys and the recording sped up. As the blob came more into focus, even I could tell this was no asteroid. It was too smooth, too round. And it didn’t tumble or even rotate. It looked like a egg with the narrower end facing the camera. “Amateur astronomers were following this before the other one changed its course. This is their recording of it.” He tapped some more. “This is Spitzer-Webb looking at it.”
There were no crater pock marks on its surface. There were very little shadowing at all. “What is it?”
“This.” He clicked again and this time the image was very crystal clear. It was the biggest egg I’d ever seen. “It is stationary now. Parked itself in geocentric orbit over the Atlantic between the moon and the ISS3. The other object is slower but is coming to about the same area.”
“Ooookay. What the fuck is it?”
“Probably friends of these guys.” He tapped some more and the image changed to show two other whatevers. These were blurry again so I assumed they were either further away or were moving. “This is them an hour ago. Lemme see where they are now.” He did his thing with the keyboard and soon the image cleared. One of the objects was more arrowhead shaped, but instead of being flat, it was fluffed up with projections and angles. The other was a box. A very square box.
I couldn’t help myself. I guffawed. “The Borg?”
Jose laughed, too. “Yeah, the ‘Net is all over that theory.”
“Do I want to know whose system you are tapped into to get these images?”
“Doesn’t matter, I don’t think.”
“So, what, aliens?”
“No, dumbass, it’s the Russians.” He elbowed me. We had long debated that Russia’s continued failures to go further than the moon was because they were hiding something. They couldn’t be that bad at it. “Ray is waiting for a news conference to start. Meanwhile, the nutjobs are out in force.” He nodded toward the other small screen that showed the rioting downtown.
“Let’s show the aliens how stupid we are.” I mutter. “I probably should head to the hospital. They’re going to need all the help they can get.”
“No way. You can’t get there from here. Not even on your bike. Look.” He did some more with that magical keyboard of his and the big screen changed. Ray was put into a box in the upper middle while the rest of the view was about a dozen traffic cameras. Traffic jams, burning cars, accidents, rioting. Every road was blocked.
“Holy shit. How long has this been happening?”
“An hour or two. Like I said, I figured you’d need your sleep. Then when these things showed up, I knew it was time to wake you.”
Wake me. It seems as though I am still waking up. Something new each time I open my eyes.
See, soon after that, my alarm went off. Jose looked at me. He was kind of sad and I started to ask him why but he waved me toward my apartment. He told me I ought to go turn off my alarm and I moved to do so. Before I got to the door, I felt a buzz and it was as if I got lighter, like I’d stepped into a bees nest and they were lifting me.
Then I woke up.
