Illegal Aliens 9

Welcome to weekend writing warriors. Many fine authors, and me, contribute short snippets for your delectation. This is the start of a new work, Illegal Aliens. It is something of a cross between a horror story, a science fiction tale, and a romance.

Roland, an archaeology instructor at Reading University (academic ranks in the UK are different than in the US, he’d be an assistant professor in the land of the free), is on his way to London. He’s on call when something unusual turns up in the works on the new underground. After an interesting conversation on the train, he arrives to find the odd item – a block of Roman Concrete which is covered in inscriptions.

Roland’s dinner continues, with an unusual choice of meal. He has just asked his visitor if she’s hungry. She has just sniffed him and told him he’s the one. Shades of the Matrix?

“The one?”

“Yes,” She moved across the table from him, “This ‘beef burger’ of yours; it is meat?”

“Mostly.”

“Good,” She licked her lips. However, she also reached over and took his hand, “You’re nicer than I thought – than I remember.”

Roland found himself getting lost in her dark, her deep dark eyes, “Good … Are you a student at Reading?”

“No.”

“Oh, I thought you might be a foreign student, speaking that Italian dialect.”

“No … I am a student; is not this the language?”

“Sorry, no; you’re speaking an old Italian dialect, almost Latin.”

My sincere apologies for abusing semi-colons.

I’ve been experimenting with Amazon’s newish kindle creation tool (The down load link is here) It’s a bit kludgey, which may be my poor overstressed laptop, but has several neat features. The one I’m really pleased with is the ability to control the font in the text. If you generate a pdf it will keep the fonts!  So you can use various unusual characters for things like drop capitals and section breaks without losing them. I haven’t experimented with pictures – though one of our manuscripts will have a couple of maps, but expect they’ll work well. It doesn’t do a good job at generating tables of contents, so the old standby of bookmark/internal hyperlink is still a good idea (this works in pdf).  It’s also not clear when and where you associate the cover with the book, but presumably they’ll make that clear when we’re ready to pull the trigger.

The other program to experiment with is their textbook creator tool, but that’s more complicated.

You can find my, well our, works here.

Author: Amelia

A mild-mannered professor of computer science in real-life, I remove my glasses in the evening to become, well, a mild-mannered author in my alternate reality. I mostly write sweet romantic fiction, although with an occasional science-fiction or paranormal angle thrown in. I have interests in history, mathematics (D'oh), and cryptography. I'm also something of an Anglophile, and know that country pretty well. In addition to writing, research, and more writing, I volunteer with the scouts. I'm something of a nature-nut, enjoying long walks in the country with almost ultra-light gear, boating, and identifying wildlife. View all posts by Amelia