The adventures, and
misadventures of Captain Wil Litang continue with the release of The
Lost Star Tales #2, Castaways of the Lost Star. Wil Litang is
back to spin another of his “old spaceer's” tales, this time of
danger and romance amongst the floating islands of the Archipelago of
the Tenth Star. When we had last seen Litang, at the end of The
Bright Black Sea, he
had embarked on what proved to be an ill considered mission to warn
the friends he'd left behind that the old leader of the
counter-revolution, Hawker Vinden, could not be trusted. And that he
was brutally ruthless enough to murder a dozen people, including old
friends and shipmates, just to insure the secret of the Tenth Star
did not leak out.
As we know from the
end of The Bright Black Sea,
something went awry. Litang awakens in the wreckage of the gig
smashed into on a small floating island that is drifting ever deeper
into the archipelago. And he finds that he's not alone – a very
mixed blessing.
Castaways of the
Lost Star is the first story, or “episode” in Litang's
adventures amongst the islands of the Archipelago that will be
(hopefully) eventually collected into The Lost Star's Sea, a
companion volume to The Bright Black Sea. It is, however, a
novel length story – nearly 73K words long – and acts as the
hinge between Litang's adventures in the Nines Star Nebula and his
new adventures in the Archipelago of the Tenth Star, wrapping up the
loose ends in the former and introducing some of the mysteries and
settings in the latter.
Whereas the first
book of Litang's adventures was an old style space opera, written in
a richer, more character-driven style than the old pulp adventures,
Castaways of the Lost Star is a “planetary romance” redone
in a similar matter. It seems that the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories
that I read in my teen years, many years ago, left their mark in all
my writings, and in this story I've taken the typical Burroughs story
with a shipwrecked hero in a strange land filled with danger and
romance and re-imaged it my style, turning a few of the conventions
upside down, while still paying homage to those wonderful stories of
Barsoom, Venus, Pellucidar and the Land that Time Forgot.
Castaways of the
Lost Star is available for FREE on Smashwords, and will make its way to iBooks,
Barnes & Noble, and Kobo in the next few days. It is also available on Amazon
for $.99, Amazon's minimum price, along with The Bright Black Sea.
Smashwords offers a FREE kindle compatible version if you care to
take the trouble to side load the mobi version on to your kindle. I
am not in the “business” of writing or selling books. I write and
publish my stories simply because I enjoy the writing and sharing of
them, so that FREE is my preferred price.
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