Guess What's Coming? (And Guess What's Going?)

It's official...

Yes, it will be the Fifth Anniversary Edition of a Pets in Space® release!

Today you get a sneak peek of a bit of the cover and the authors in the graphic above...and yes, I'm in this one, too!

I've been very busy behind the scenes deciding on:

1) What pet?
My last three have been StarDogs. Will I stick with the program or write a totally different pet this time around? You'll see.

2) What setting?
It will definitely be a story in the Inherited Stars Series, but that leaves a lot of room to improvise. :) Will it take place on a planet? A space station? Aboard a starship? Dirtside? In the future of the anchor novel, Inherit the Stars? The past? At the same time? (Oh no! Not doing another one of those again! LOL--but hang on to your hat, because SpyDog will be out soon as a standalone!) Stay tuned.

3) What characters?
As with the other PISA stories, the lead characters will be someone you haven't met in other series books, but there may be a few cameos and interaction with some of your old friends.

4) What plot?
I've already started work on the story and I can't commit spoilers, but I will give you a couple of teasers. It involves a huge secret...and one I've been hinting at for years. [::: rubs hands together in anticipation:::] but it's so super secret, it has it's own security force to guard it! I'm excited about the idea, can you tell?

There will be more announcements coming soon, so keep an eye out for future posts.

LAST CALL FOR PETS IN SPACE® 4!

Pets in Space® 4 will NO LONGER BE AVAILABLE as of the end of February!

Some of the 13 stories may return as standalone books, but you'll never have another shot at getting the entire collection in one volume again. If you haven't yet grabbed your copy, you only have a few days to do it! Don't miss this highly successful, USA TODAY Bestselling, #1 seller on Amazon Kindle, Nook and Kobo! And did I mention it's currently averaging 4.7 STARS on Amazon Kindle with 120 reviews!

CLICK HERE TO SEE ALL VENDORS

(Scroll down for full story blurbs.)

The clock is ticking down, and once it's gone, it's gone FOREVER. You'll never have another chance to grab this volume from bestselling and award-winning authors. At nearly 1,500 pages--the size of 5 full length novels!--it will keep you in reading for many, many hours (days? weeks? months?) to come.

Don't miss your shot at having a part of Science Fiction Romance history!

And to our legion of readers who loved this collection, thank you from the bottom of our hearts! You truly made Pets in Space® 4 an exciting, amazing, fist-pumping, fun, and HUGELY rewarding experience!

Have a great week.

VAMPIRES, BATS AND THE LATEST PANDEMIC

We all know Dracula, no matter how he’s characterized in paranormal romance or screen horror, has never been sick a day in his life. In fact, any vampire is darn hard to kill, requiring a stake to the heart and/or exposure to the sun and/or beheading. A mere bout with the Romanian flu just isn’t going to get the job done. 

Good looking--and healthy, too!

Turns out the reason so many fictional vampires are immortal and immune to human diseases may be based in a real biological quirk of their flying, furry familiars—bats. A study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, published this month in the journal eLife, shows that bats’ immune systems have a unique ability to quickly wall off cells from invading viruses using interferon, thus protecting the host bats from infection. 

The viruses respond by reproducing at a higher rate, which hardly affects the bats at all but is bad news for any other mammals the bats may encounter. The viruses multiply and become much more deadly for mammals that do not have the bats’ super immune systems. Thus bats serve as a reservoir and, worse, an incubator for pathogenic viruses in the wild that infect intermediary mammal hosts and eventually work their way toward human populations.

The diseases that follow this pathway are a rogues’ gallery of highly transmissible assassins: Marburg, Ebola, SARS, MERS and quite possibly the newly emerged coronavirus, 2019 nCoV. "The bottom line is that bats are potentially special when it comes to hosting viruses," said Mike Boots, a disease ecologist and UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology. "It is not random that a lot of these viruses are coming from bats. Bats are not even that closely related to us, so we would not expect them to host many human viruses. But this work demonstrates how bat immune systems could drive the virulence that overcomes this."

In the case of Ebola and Marburg in Africa, monkeys and chimpanzees are most often the intermediary mammal hosts between bats and humans. In the case of SARS in China, a species of civet (a wild cat-like mammal) was the intermediary. In MERS, camels were the intermediate host. The intermediary host or hosts have not been conclusively identified in the case of the new coronavirus in China, but the source has been narrowed to a wildlife market in the city of Wuhan, where the disease first originated and is still centered.

Environmental damage and habitat destruction, the result of the incursion of human populations, increase stress on bat colonies. Instead of making individual bats more vulnerable to viruses, stress makes them shed higher numbers of viruses in their saliva, urine and feces than normal, infecting even more intermediaries and becoming a threat to those very humans. 

The research confirms this. "Heightened environmental threats to bats may add to the threat of zoonosis*," said Cara Brook, a postdoctoral Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley and the first author of the study. Brook also works with a bat monitoring program funded by DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in Madagascar, Bangladesh, Ghana and Australia exploring the link between loss of bat habitat and the spillover of bat viruses into other animals and humans, according to an article about the study in Science Daily.

 

A miracle of anti-inflammatory, virus-fighting evolution.

The researchers also noted that bats have a longer lifespan than other mammals their size, despite the higher metabolism and activity level required for flight. Some bats can live as long as 40 years, according to the study, while the typical rat only lives about two years. The secret to the bats’ longevity may lie in their ability to eliminate damaging inflammatory “free radicals” produced by their high metabolism. The same mechanism that allows this anti-inflammatory response kicks in with protective interferon when the bat’s body is invaded by a virus. Long life and disease protection in one mechanism!

I suppose it’s possible that in the dim past our more observant, but less scientific ancestors noticed that their sheep or cattle bitten by bats sometimes died of some strange disease while the bats themselves seemed to thrive unharmed. Combine that with the tales of a bloodthirsty Romanian nobleman with a reputation for impaling his opponents on the battlefield and a countess with a taste for the blood of virgins and you have the beginnings of the vampire legend. Add a bat’s everyday supernatural long life and ability to overcome disease and, well, all you need is a tall, dark guy with irresistible good looks and an exotic accent to kickstart your new paranormal romance series!

*A disease that can be transmitted from animals to humans.
   
Cheers, Donna




Information for this post adapted from “Coronavirus Outbreak Raises Question: Why are Bat Viruses So Deadly?” Science Daily, February 10, 2020. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200210144854.htm

SpyDog Snippet from Pets in Space® 4 (Soon to Disappear Forever!)

I was really excited to re-join the Pets in Space® 4 crew after writing for both PISA 1 and 2, but then skipping Pets in Space® 3 to work on some of my own material.

My story, SpyDog, gave me the opportunity to explore the flip-side of the action in my anchor novel, Inherit the Stars. It was both very fun, and extremely mind-boggling, to write a book that happened concurrently with the events in the novel, so a bit like the Star Wars: Rogue One of my series, except a tale where the main characters survive.

This is the third StarDog story in my series, this time starring Maura, a bio-engineered StarDog upgrade called a SpyDog.

Here's a quick peek at a snippet from my story SpyDog [edited slightly for context]:

_______________________________

Sona relaxed the tension in her trigger finger.

So did Rigel.

“You are a Network agent,” she whispered, her eyes going round.

This changed everything.

Whoever she was, whatever she’d seen, she was even more dangerous than he’d first thought. She’d IDed him as an agent? Not good. She was privy to Network passcodes? That left some big, fat, unresolved question marks. Leadership needed to know what she knew—and how she’d come to know it. How extensively had the Network been compromised? This breach could destroy everything they’d worked so hard for.

She wouldn’t die today. He’d just bagged a counter-intel asset. He’d deliver her to Network authorities so they could interrogate her—get to the bottom of how much damage had already been done and take corrective action. Meanwhile, he’d let her think he believed her story.

Always keep your enemies in your laze-sights. That was his motto.

“Right,” he muttered, easing his laze-pistol back to low ready. “You’re Network.”

She, too, lowered her weapon then holstered it.

He scowled when Maura left the confines of his satchel and took a few tentative steps toward the woman, nose twitching.

“Hello, little one,” the Rathskian said, going to one knee. “Can we be friends now?” She reached out to let the StarDog sniff her hand then gave Maura a gentle pat.

Maura responded by quickly scaling the women’s arm. The Rathski stiffened in surprise—and so did Rigel—when Maura wrapped herself around the woman’s shoulders like a furry, golden scarf.

Maura never took to strangers like this. It had to be an act.

The Rathski smiled and stroked the StarDog’s long back.

“Way to draw her in, partner.” Rigel managed not to smirk at his SpyDog’s cleverness. “Disarm and charm her. Let her think we’re falling for her story while we set the trap.”

_______________________________

But here's an important message about Pets in Space® 4. All the Pets in Space® volumes are only offered for a limited time, and we're now on approach to another *POOF!* point.

Pets in Space® 4 is about to disappear...FOREVER..on February 29th!

So if you haven't grabbed your copy of the most successful Pets in Space® volume EVER, let me recap:

USA TODAY BEST SELLER

#1 on Amazon

#1 on B&N Nook

#1 on Kobo

115 Amazon reviews (to date) and a 4.7 STAR average

13 Stories in 13 Popular SFR Series

13 Award Winning, Bestselling Authors

Over 1,400 Pages (equal to 5 full-length novels!)

$5.99

>>  FIND IT HERE!  <<

So the bottom line is that if you love SciFi Romance at an incredible price--

~ we're talking .46 cents per story! ~

--this volume is not to be missed! At 1,400 pages, this meaty collection has an average story length of about 100 pages!

Though some of these stories may be published as stand alones, with a minimum price of .99 each (and probably more) the total cost would run you at least $12.87 -- provided they're all offered elsewhere and you can track them all down again.

So far all of the reasons listed above, Pets in Space® 4 is one SFR collection readers really don't want to miss. Once it's gone, it's gone for good. Never to return.

Grab your copy before February 29th at your favorite vendor and capture a bit of SFR history!

Happy Reading!

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!

I've been getting used to some new eyeglasses this week. And yesterday (my usual blog-writing day) was my birthday. So, no post today. But . . .

Be back next week with more, um, words. 

Cheers, Donna