Courting Disaster is at the Top of my 2024 Resolutions!

Hmm, that may have sounded a bit like a prophecy of doom, but in reality Courting Disaster is my next project with a hopeful Spring-ish 2024 release date.

The original story was published as a part of the Pets in Space 2 anthology (when the series was still young), but the new incarnation is a much revised story with new, changed and expanded scenes. It's weighing in at roughly twice the word count.

Truth be told, although Courting Disaster was my second StarDog story in the Inherited Stars series, it's the one that required the most enhancing and tweaking because it's an important precursor to the grand finale of this timeline. (And yes, I'm an admitted perfectionist and that has sometimes pulled the rug out from under my schedule. I'd say that I'd try harder to be less of a perfectionist, but really....what reader really wants that?)

In hindsight, it actually will work out well with Courting Disaster being the final StarDog story released as a standalone, because it's the perfect segue into the novel that will wrap the timeline, Inherit the Vengeance. 

So in other words, it's all good.  :)

Let me leave you with an excerpt of the opening, where the reader meets (or gets reacquainted with) the hero, Captain Navene Jagger. If you've read the anchor novel, Inherit the Stars, Jagger might not have seemed like hero material....but there's a lot more to the man than his swagger. 

[But why is he wearing a helmet on the cover, you ask? Check back for the next excerpt where Jagger asks the same question. ;) ]

Here's a first look.

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Captain Navene Jagger smiled as he gazed out the viewport of the immense space station. Talstar. Home of the Universal Flight Academy, orbiting the lush blue world of Veros. Good memories here. Heady times with his fellow cadets during the three calendars it had required to earn his wings. He’d left the program with salutatorian honors.

But without Drea.

His smile slipped. Not every recollection of Talstar was a good one. The broken engagement. The devastation in Drea’s eyes. Watching her walk away for the last time. It had been his greatest defeat—Hades, his only defeat. And he had no one to blame but himself.

He’d left Talstar the day after graduation, stripped of his plans to test her father’s Mennelsohn prototype, and promptly joined the Carduwan military.

That had been ten calendars ago. Ten very long calendars. He’d spent the first seven trying to apologize to Drea for the unforgiveable, trying to prove to her he’d changed, trying desperately to win her back.

Then Sair happened. Drea had fallen in love with an escaped slave. A nobody. Or so he’d thought.

That was when he’d finally grasped the scale of the wedge he’d driven between them by his foolish, ego-driven folly. He’d done this. He’d destroyed their relationship. Not Drea. And, gods knew, not even Sair.

That realization had sparked his transformation. He’d reinvented himself, stopped being a ladies’ man, stopped being anything other than a dedicated officer married to his career. He didn’t have love…but at least he had pride. And purpose.

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More excerpts will follow soon.