So, first an update: I haven’t done much these last three days because I had a really weird reaction to the allergy desensitization treatment. As in, I woke up early morning feeling like someone was putting an ice pick through my skull. Turns out my sinus/ears were inflamed. I’ve managed to get it under control with home remedies, so I’m fine, but I was near useless for three days and today I’m just tired.

Anyway, I did manage to put out Christmas in Time, so that’s up for sale. Including a print version, in case you’re desperate for a Christmas stocking stuffer!

And now, though snippets will be irregular through the holidays (and you should get Witch’s Daughter e-arcs first) the first chapter of Orphans of the Stars.

Note all first chapters are public posts. It’s policy. I know because I just made it up.

HOWEVER IF YOU HAVEN’T READ NO MAN’S LAND AND INTEND TO, BE AWARE ORPHANS OF THE STARS CONTAINS SPOILERS. STARTING IN THE FIRST CHAPTER.

PROCEED ACCORDINGLY. I’m not going to tell you not to read spoilers. Some people aren’t bothered by them. So if you are, don’t read on.

SPOILERS BENEATH THIS LINE

Orphans Of The Stars

Sarah A. Hoyt

A Son is a Son

Vic (Virginia Aurelia Millburn, Countess Harcaster aka Victoria Torrenes):

I buried my only son once. They sent his body home from his very first mission with the Interplanetary Diplomatic Service.

This all came back to me that morning, after the incident in the nursery. I remembered Scipio’s funeral suddenly. Vividly.

I received his coffin – blue lacquered, embossed with the IDS logo – with all due ceremony, and planned his funeral, and received half the court and Queen Eleanor herself, all the while feeling none of it was real, or alternately as though my head were floating several feet above my body making me unable to connect with any emotions.

I stood with the Queen-Empress of Britannia on High on one side of me, and Uncle Zymon, my late husband’s great uncle on the other, and watched them lower Scipio’s coffin into the marble-white mausoleum where his father had been buried four years before.

It was snowing lightly on my ancestral family cemetery and the white marble of which the various statues – queens and space captains and angels – had been sculpted made them look as though they’d been created out of ice.

I held it together while the Archbishop read the service for the dead, familiar as it was, and while they closed the marble over my only son’s body. I held it while the band of the Interplanetary Diplomatic Service played Strains of Earth, and while the Queen handed me the folded flag of Britannia that had covered Scipio’s coffin.

But when the band of the Space Force – present because Scipio had become a war hero in the same battle that claimed his father’s life – played the sweet, haunting “Home of the Spacer” I broke down. To my everlasting shame, I felt tears coursing down my face.

Uncle Zymon and the Queen stood rigid, frozen, as though if they pretended I wasn’t crying no one, not even I, would notice.

But I noticed. I didn’t feel sad, much less grief stricken. Instead I felt like a house where every window had been left open, the roof caved in, and icy wind and snow blew through. Just a shell with nothing in it.

The tears didn’t stop. I’m afraid the mersi cameras captured it, as the Queen gave me a box with Scipio’s second medal of valor, with the big spaceship and said how my son was being awarded posthumous honors: the cross of valor, the order of St. George, the—Oh, I don’t even remember it all. Because all I could think was that the tears would never stop. I’d just cry and cry and cry until presently all my tears would be gone and my body would be nothing but a cold husk that blew away.

You see, it was the third time I buried someone close to my heart. The third of them whose life had been lost in the service of the empire. Surely three was too much for one family?

I remember when we’d learned that my much older brother died, far away fighting privateers who’d been harassing settlers at the very edges of the domains of Britannia on High, the Star Empire.

I was eight years old, in the library, working with my mathematics tutor when Father’s secretary came in, looking startled and wind blown and told me that Ambrose had died.

I didn’t cry. I didn’t even fully understand it. It was impossible.

Ambrose could not be dead.

He was the immortal, fifteen-year older-brother, the hero of my childhood, who had adventures in far away places and always returned with gifts for his little sister and stories of great adventures and exploits that made even Father listen in silence, in spellbound admiration.

There are people so much larger than life that they will never be stilled. Death will not dull them. For days, for weeks, I expected Ambrose to come striding in, telling us it was all a mistake. That somehow someone else had died and been taken for him. He’d give me jewelry, or a rare plant or some strange piece of music from a far away planet, and he’d laugh at us having believed him dead.

Not even Father’s starting to teach me how to administer the estate and everyone referring to me as Viscountess Webson, not even Ambrose’s funeral, one rainy day in the family cemetery with all the moss-covered statues and the jaunty tune of the IDS – Strains of Earth – played by a military band, had dented my internal certainty that it was all an awful mistake which would one day be corrected.

It was somehow an hoax, a monstruous confusion. I didn’t say it, of course. A mutter to that effect had got me a hard talking to from Father early on. So I didn’t say anything. But I knew Ambrose was alive somewhere and would come back home.

It was only when I was fourteen that the truth had sank in.

Father had sat at breakfast with me, reading his mail. At our level of society, the mail was not some electronic messages displayed on a reader, but real mail, in paper, often embossed papers or cards. Father always sat with his reader, of course, where he got news of the Empire, and business missives, and that sort of thing. But every once in a while the butler came in with an envelope on a silver salver. Invitations, announcements and such.

This was one of those mornings. We’d been eating in silence, because Father believed that chatter over breakfast disturbed the digestion, and suddenly he made an exclamation, as the threw the card aside, pushed back his chair and got up from the table.

His sound had been either disgust or annoyance, or perhaps an exclamation of pain, I wasn’t sure which. But I waited until he was gone, and then got the card and read it. I picked it up and read, written in ink by some paid secretary, the announcement of Miriam’s marriage to Lysander StJohn, Duke of Drakeford.

And my mind stopped. I’d met Miriam, you see. She had spent the summer when I was seven and been introduced as Ambrose’s fiancé. She was a lovely young woman, graceful and lithe, with a cloud of dark hair and a playful gleam in her eyes. She was supposed to be my sister.

Suddenly, eight years later, it was all too real that Ambrose was dead. Because I’d seen the way Miriam looked at him, and it simply wasn’t possible that she’d marry someone else while Ambrose might still live.

I’d gone to Ambrose’s room, then, instead of the offices, where I was supposed to be working on some of the domain’s accounting. Father would be furious with my lateness, but it didn’t matter.

The room was exactly as Ambrose had left it. Father and mother didn’t believe that children should have access to electronics, and this had been Ambrose’s room until he went to Space Academy at ten. So it was filled with paper books and those complex models of spaceships boys like to assemble. Except on his desk there was an electronic reader/writer from his later visits, and a hologram of him standing beside Miriam, looking at each other like they had the entire time and universe to live and love.

I stared at the hologram, then inhaled deeply the smell of travel, the scent of other worlds that Ambrose always brought with him, and a certain undefinable masculine musk that overlaid the whole room. And then I’d lain on his bed and cried my eyes out.

Father didn’t say anything when I showed up to the offices late, but he excused himself from dinner. That was the only time I was aware he too mourned Ambrose.

After that, it was just Father and I. The smallest of family units, for another ten years, after which Father got tired of the silent halls and keeping me in check, and died in his sleep.

Which was when I discovered my Mother wasn’t dead, but living somewhere in Far Itravine as the wife of a playboy millionaire. Apparently her marriage to father had been twenty years or two children, whichever came first, and after I was born she’d chosen to leave.

She’d come to Father’s funeral, and held up her nose at the house and at me, as though she were being put upon by visiting our unglamorous domain. And she never even asked about Ambrose, as though she didn’t remember he existed.

This is when I went insane. I don’t know if it was her indifference, or the fact that Father had been very strict with me and impressed upon me the absolute importance of marrying as soon as possible and having children to rule Aeris, to keep up the unbroken tradition of Millburns stretching back to the founding of Britannia.

Perhaps it was both. I realized Father expected me to do what he had done and contract a marriage of convenience, a marriage of need. Perhaps even twenty years or two children, and then stay behind and raise those children alone as he had, in the duty to Britannia, the strictures of administering a vast and prosperous domain; the glory of our ancestors, the emptiness of honor.

I didn’t want that, but I thought I’d give it a chance for love to emerge in its own way, and so I went to the capital – New London – and spent a year seeing and being seen, and allowing for any men who might be interested to pay me court.

It was a dismal failure. No one paid court, though a very nice, penniless actor offered to be the victim in my marriage of convenience. But I didn’t want that, and I was almost sure his interest didn’t lay in the female of the species.

So I’d turned him down and then I decided to-- The truth is I’m never precisely sure how it happened.

You see, Ambrose had been very interested in fencing and target shooting and all the arts needed for the life of adventure he lead. And I missed him horribly. From the time I was sixteen or so, unbeknownst to Father, while he thought I was studying or reading in my room, I’d contracted with retired spacers and others in Millburn Town to get the same sort of training. I thought nothing of it, of course, but it made me feel closer to Ambrose.

I’d taken advantage of the opportunity to learn more of such arts while I was in New London. I’d hired fencing masters, and people to teach me about the newest zappers and to train me in marksmanship. I’d studied self defense and learned other styles of fighting. All nonsense and more because I felt much more at home doing that than dancing the night away and smiling at men who seemed both too young and far too bland.

In the training classes no one thought of me as an “ice queen” which was my nick name in the ballrooms. Instead, in a mostly masculine environment, I found friends and comrades with whom I could talk and laugh and who reminded me of Ambrose.

And while I was sure they were only telling anecdotes suitable for a young lady’s ears it was still better than the ballrooms.

And then Lord Oakley approached me. Yes, that Lord Oakley. Master of spies. Friend of the Queen. He made me an offer I could not refuse. And what made me accept was his sincere appreciation of my fencing, my shooting and other fighting skills. Oh, no. He didn’t offer me marriage. He offered me a place in the SICF, Her Majesty’s most secret Scouts and Investigators Force that flew under the banner of the IDS but was far more effective, if less prone to airing their achievements. It turned out Ambrose had served with them, not the IDS, and died under their aegis.

So I went through IDS training and also learned other, darker arts till I was activated for field duty.

I won’t bore you with my missions. None of them signify. I went where I was sent and did what I needed to do to bring home the results I’d been instructed to bring. There was a commendation or two, and there might be some decorations in my desk drawer.

I was aware my time was growing late for bearing children, but it did not matter. I did not want Father’s marriage nor Father’s silent household, and for all I cared it could all go to the devil or the crown in the fullness of time, when I died. And until then my administrators and accountants could mind it.

Then there was a mission against pirates harassing the colonists in High Hesperus.

And I met him.

I won’t say it was love at first sight, but maybe it was. For one, I thought he was a pirate, but this didn’t dissuade me from the idea I could perhaps get with child, have the child legitimized by parliament…

Which was my plan until I found he was a fellow member of the SCIF and mission coordination had gone unbelievably wrong. He thought I was Victoria Torrenes – he always called me Vic – my nom de guerre in the service. And I thought he was a pirate.

After the mission blew up in our faces and we managed to rescue each other, we were confined in a lifeboat together, alone, for a full month. Just before we completely ran out of provisions, her Majesty’s Space Force heard our beacon and rescued us.

By then I was sure I was with child. I wrote a hasty resignation letter and returned to my domain, ready to apply for parliament to legitimize my son or daughter.

Samuel Adams Kayel Hayden, his real name, not the preposterous Arthur Morraine he’d been using on the mission, followed me home. Met with every possible obstacle and denial to reveal my real identity, he nonetheless ferreted it out, and came to find me.

And asked me to marry him.

I demurred. It wasn’t only that by then I’d informed myself of his history which was long, varied and scandalous even for a member of the SICF, but also that his name would add nothing to the chances of legitimizing the child. He was after all the son of no name miners from the asteroid belt outside Far Itravine’s system. People who lived on the frontier, mining for rare metals. Undistinguished, of no lineage.

And most of all, of course, I was afraid he only wanted to marry me for my position and to climb in society.

Only he wouldn’t go away. I got to know him. I came to understand Sam couldn’t really be bothered with either society or rank. He liked me because I’d fought with him both verbally and when still thinking he was a pirate, with sword and hand to hand, and held my own. And then he’d fallen in love with me in our time in the lifeboat.

Truth be told I’d fallen in love with him too, and after a few months we got married in the little chapel on my estate, just the two of us, the minister and two witnesses, one of whom was the vicar’s wife, the other a passerby we drafted and who might have been on his way to the pub.

Four months later our son, Cornelius Publius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden was born. The name was Sam’s idea. Among other things his restless mind fastened on, he was obsessed with Rome, particularly Rome’s military history. There was no need to have Scipio legitimized, since his parents were married.

We’d settled down. I administered the domain and minded Scipio and Sam joined the Space Force. Regular deployments and often no deployments at all, but merely administrative tasks in New London.

Neither of us did very well living with someone constantly, but we were happy seeing each other for a month every three and going on some adventure together. When apart we talked over the com every day. Unfortunately we had no more children. Two miscarriages and then I didn’t conceive again. But we were happy all the same.

Scipio got added to the pattern, with the difference that normally Sam took him on adventures in summer, after Scipio went away to school at ten.

See, I wanted to keep him at home and safe, but I remembered how father had brought me up, and how I’d almost thrown the entire domain and any future descendants because I didn’t want to be what I’d been brought up to be: someone who lived for duty alone.

So I’d let Scipio go to the Space Force Academy and go adventuring with Sam, and lived for his visits the way I’d once lived for Ambrose’s.

And then Sam had died, and Scipio had come home a war hero at seventeen. A hero with a deep wound in his psyche which I didn’t know how to cure. He’d resigned from the Space Force and gone to New London. I didn’t know how he lived, though I know he’d somewhat altered his appearance so he could do whatever he pleased incognito. Still, reports got back to me, because New London’s elite are a hive of gossip and villainy. And once Uncle Zymon went so far as to storm up to Aeris by star jumper and read me a sermon about how I should take the boy in hand and stop him destroying himself.

How I was supposed to do that to someone who was a head taller than myself and twice as stubborn as his father and I combined, I didn’t know.

But Sam had always told me Scipio would be fine, and he proved to be right, as he had an habit of being. After a year of wilding, my son had joined the IDS and gone through the training. I kept close tabs, mostly because I wished to make sure he wasn’t really joining the SICF. The IDS itself was a low risk service, where he could distinguish himself and keep busy without forcing me to live in fear of his death at any time. He’d graduated at the top of his class, and I’d been proud and sure he was on track for a quiet life.

Yet he’d died in his very first mission, anyway, the victim of a local, unforeseen rebellion in a world already approved to become a protectorate.

I’d buried him and consigned myself to administering my domains and minding my business until the clock of my days ran down and I could join him and Sam in the cemetery, and let the domain revert to the crown.

Early on, the Queen had suggested that if we had a child of Scipio’s created in a lab the crown would of course legitimize him and he could inherit. It seemed the IDS – like the SCIF – always kept genetic samples of its agents, in the case of such an eventuality.

I had considered it for maybe a minute, but not only did it seem a violation of Scipio’s will and ability to decide, and profoundly wrong to bring a child who was both fatherless and motherless into the world, but also at the time, having buried three men related to me, I was sure that I’d only bury this one too, and my heart wouldn’t allow me to start a foray I knew would end in grief and tears.

And so, I’d declined. And time had passed. I won’t say I was unhappy. Or happy. I don’t think I was anything but the shell of duty I’d been raised to become.

Until the miracle happened, the same miracle I’d hoped and prayed for with Ambrose. Only with Scipio I’d ever even hoped that he’d still alive; that it was a stranger buried in his tomb.

And yet – you’ll know it from all the mersi news – he came back. He came suddenly, and as Scipio tends to do things, with a flare for the dramatic, appearing seemingly out of nowhere in the middle of a parliament session to confirm the new prime-minister.

He’d come to stop the minister being confirmed, to stop the new world – the one to which he’d been first sent – from being admitted to the Empire. Beneath the impeccable façade that had convinced IDS agents to offer protectorate to world of Draksah lurked things wilder and horrible, and also fantastic and almost unimaginable.

Draksah was not one world, but an empire of its own. Its expansionist, slave-holding rule was forwarded by the existence of a group they called “magicians” but who were in fact people who, due to seriously mutated nanos and strange genetics and the intersection of the two could manipulate physics beyond what would seem to be the realm of possibility.

Worse, the magic had come to their genetic lines from another world altogether different, a world they kept trying to conquer and whose inhabitants they had enslaved – and, it was rumored, eaten -- off and on for thousands of years.

Scipio had indeed been targeted for assassination in their domain, and been rescued by a group of people from this other world. Where he’d lived for almost a year, surviving wild adventures and several assassination attempts.

When he erupted into parliament through a tear in space and time – one of the abilities of magicians in that other world, Elly – he’d had hair down to the middle of his back and been dressed in furs and covered in blood. The blood was not his own but the marks of a great battle.

He’d shown the whole history of what happened to him, and how members of Britannia’s own upper crust had been involved in crimes, including the trafficking of the natives of Elly. He’d displayed it in vivid images spun without any equipment. I know it only by report, since seeing him appear when I’d thought him dead had caused me – to my ever lasting shame – to lose consciousness in front of everyone.

But he had somehow – which I later understood better – acquired some of the magical power himself. He’d opened the portal between worlds himself, and spun the images of what happened himself. Using far too much power – because he was new at it and while not unskilled, inexperienced – he’d managed to get to a state in which his nanos were feeding off the energy he needed to live and function.

In other words, my son, Scipio, had not been dead but spun himself into a coma for almost four months, until a magician from Elly, visiting our world for other reasons, had repaired the problem.

Then he’d healed slowly. Because he’d been so ill, it had taken me months to realize that he was also suffering from deep heartbreak.

You see, the inhabitants of Elly, created by founders deeply deluded, had been made so each individual was both female and male – though they looked more like males, or at least had no breasts – each capable of siring and bearing children. This was supposed to make them peaceful and, somehow, communitarian and prone to sharing everything. Don’t ask me how. I’m not an expert in twenty first century psycho-pathology.

Of course it had done none of that. Because the society had been almost instantly upon landing sent into barbarism with a hammer – the ship crashed and most of the adults died – but their nature seemed to involve complications and work-arounds that made them unique, different and… intricately fraught. Scipio once referred to the people as savages with the manners of high society dowagers, who would duel you and kill you for using the wrong name for one of them.

After Scipio recovered and regained his strength – spending more time at home than he ever had since ten – I noticed that when he spoke of Elly and his time in Elly a look of deep longing came into his eyes.

I didn’t think much of it, to be honest. I’d worked with the SCIF. The type of mission he served, to an undiscovered planet and thinking himself abandoned and beyond the reach of our people, as well, he’d have gone native and there is always longing and missing of such people, even though we come back to our rightful place.

Only it hadn’t diminished. And when they called him to New London to recall his adventures under hypnosis, so they could be recorded and a deeper understanding of Elly formed, rumors through my contacts in the SICF and my old friends, filtered back to me.

You’d think the SICF people would be good at keeping secrets. And they were. But there was among us, even those of us long retired the tendency to tell our comrades everything. And when the everything was mildly scandalous gossip, from a service widely rumored to do what it took to complete the mission, up to and including seducing extraplanetary dignitaries, it traveled twice as fast.

Though I’ll never understand why they acted as if they were giving me news when telling me that Scipio might have odd sexual preferences. Other than perhaps thinking I was born blind and dumb. But they’d been downright skittish as they informed me they thought my son had been involved with an Ellyan. At which point I’d arranged to have access to the recordings of his interviews. There was no might about it. The silly boy had fallen in love. I didn’t know whether to be gratified that he’d fallen in love with the king of Elly – not just some commoner -- or that the silly children – the king was his age more or less – had been all noble about giving each other up.

As I was trying to plan how to resolve the problem, the Queen contacted me asking me how to convince Scipio to marry, or whatever the equivalent, the king, then lie back and think of Britannia. It was to laugh. My son had convinced himself that if anyone found out about his extracurricular activities – prudishly alluded to by him as “getting horizontal” – with a native, he’d be killed, drummed out of the service, killed again, his name blotted from the roles of nobility, killed again-- You get the point. In fact the truth was that Ellyan magical abilities were an immeasurable strategic advantage to anyone securing an alliance, and that cementing alliances through marriages was what Britannia liked best.

It had taken months of maneuvering to bring them together, but the king had been trying to contact me, anyway, since – remember the thing about both impregnating and giving birth – it had apparently never occurred to Scipio that he could impregnate one of his sexual partners, and he’d left the king in what used to be called “an interesting condition.” Which had resulted in the birth of a boy. This was a problem since in Elly single sex children were culled.

Had to be, as otherwise they’d get mistreated on suspicion of being Draksall by-blows and natural enemies.

No, the king hadn’t culled the child, but he wanted to send him to our world, so he could be raised in safety and without being an impediment to the succession of the Ellyan throne.

To make a long, circuitous road that involved not a little deception on my part, short, I brought Scipio and the king – Brundar Mahar – together.

They were married almost immediately in a native self-administered ceremony. And then married with due pomp and circumstance in the Cathedral of St. George, near the royal palace in New London, with all the nobility of Britannia on High in attendance. The Queen herself stood with Brundar who wore a lovely wedding dress.

Look, yes, it had all been reported, and everyone knew very well what was under that dress. But being a noble of Britannia consisted in large part in sweeping the odd, the unexpected and the shocking under the rug of ritual, tradition and impeccable manners.

So, though Scipio tried to kick, it was pointed out to him that Brundar was as much female as male, and marrying in a wedding dress would diminish most of the scandal. Besides, Brundar had an entirely female interest in lace, and buttock-long lovely red hair, which made the whole thing very believable.

Then they’d returned to Elly together. And left me to raise my grandson, Sam, then six months old.

Which should be where the story ended and happily ever after began. Only—

I’ve lived over sixty years in the world. I’ve never heard of a happily ever after this side of the grave.

Brundar missed his child, of course. As did Scipio. Which led to—

Perhaps it’s easier if I say what happened. One fine morning, about five months after their wedding, I went to the nursery on my way to breakfast. I must be getting old, because I’d acquired an habit of checking on Sam at all odd hours of the day and night. He was just eleven months old, and had a way of smiling at me that displayed his lone tooth – in the front – and was utterly irresistible. My entire day went better after one of those smiles.

So I went by the nursery, but no more had I put my hand on the knob than I heard an horrific crash, and then a scream.

I didn’t know what the crash was, but the scream was in the voice of Madeleine, Sam’s nurse.

There are things you don’t forget, no matter how long you’ve been retired. Things that were trained so far deep in SCIF agents you’d never forget them. Ever.

Other things—

I’d gotten sloppy, I realized, as I reached for a gun I wasn’t carrying. I wasn’t even carrying a knife. Just a reading pad I was taking to breakfast, to do my morning reading and gage the state of my investments.

But a pad was a pad. Meaning it was hard ceramic and 20 inches by ten. And besides, having woken up lazy, I was wearing my dressing gown.

By the time I thought of all this, I was using my free hand to open the door to the nursery, ever so slowly. Madeleine had continued to scream. This was good. It meant she was alive. Sam had joined his voice in, which meant he also was alive.

Even better, their caterwauling had commanded the full attention of the man wearing what can only be described as barbaric splendor in leather and metal and carrying an up to the minute zapper in his right hand.

I’d say my heart just about stopped, which wouldn’t be a lie, except that my heart was used to doing whatever it might do, while my body did what it had been trained to do.

I slid into the room. The man – tall, blond and bearded – screamed, in oddly accented English, “Give me the boy, and I won’t hurt you.”

I slammed the pad into his wrist as hard as I could. He dropped his zapper. I kicked it away. He screamed. Madeleine screamed. Sam screamed.

The intruder wheeled around and grabbed at my shoulder. By then I’d removed the belt of my dressing gown and was holding it in my right hand.

I screamed as loudly as I could and stepped hard in his right instep, then his left instep. He screamed again. I had the belt around his neck and tightened it.

There is a flick of the wrist, in this situation, and a way to twist the cord hard around your own arm. Done properly it breaks the neck.

I did it right. The intruder went limp in my grasp.

Madeleine was sobbing and screaming. “He came through the wall!”

I looked at the wall. It looked untouched. But it would. Ellyan magic. However, I knew somewhere behind there was a portal, which my grandchild’s birth parent used to visit Sam nightly.

It was run by Ellyan magic and supposed to open only for Brundar or Scipio.

Something had gone terribly wrong.

I was going to find out what.

So, how it happened was like this: Right after my mom died, I found myself incapable of writing anything of any length. Even blogging has been spotty, since I had to fight for every word.

Inexplicably, though, I could write lyrics. And since older son got me into Suno.ai, which generates music from lyrics and prompt, I started making songs about the book. I think I posted some here. Some are rather nice. I’ll link two, both mentioned in the book at the end of this.

BUT— but— someone on my blog comments started talking about doing a sound track for the book, which she’s done for her book with Suno.

And then my brain decided that yeah, we had to do this. I don’t know how long it will take me, since I’m awfully busy till the middle of November and the new Elly book, Orphans of the Stars is being noisy (I hope to start excerpting for subscribers in December.) Also the book is…. looooooong. And I need to learn how to put lyrics subtitles and also … other stuff.

Anyway, right now there are three songs, corresponding roughly to the first three chapters of No Man’s Land (though the whole dream thing of the third chapter gets broken, for creative reasons, into his signing up for the IDS.) And yes, I do realize “Seventeen” is weird, because it’s set in Elly. I can’t help that. Might as well start as I mean to go on.

Of course the bad influence — aka my beloved husband — says since I’m writing a rock opera I might as well write the script, and the Little Pickle (Younger DIL) is encouraging this. I’m fairly sure I can resist it, (BOOKS I need to write) but my family isn’t helping.

So, without further ado the links to youtube:

Track One: Space Admiral’s Son

Track Two: Seventeen (Chill, it’s not that kind of book.)

Track 3: New London, New London (It’s a hell of a Town) (The cheeriest heartbreak song ever. Very catchy.)

The other two, I’ll put in as you tube links, since I inexplicably seem to have done something arcane with the files (I’m still ADD as all get out.)

This is the anthem of the Space Force, mentioned in the first chapter as being played at Skip’s father’s funeral:

Home of the Spacer. I asked for it in bagpipes, and rendered the pipers, and then the clanker wouldn’t oblige. I have since managed to get it, and will upload it with bagpipes also. (For reasons only explicable by the psychiatrist I don’t actually have, I think Heinlein would want this song in bagpipes. WHY this song and why in bagpipes is beyond my rational mind, so let’s go with “loony.”)

And the next one Skip alludes to in book two as probably having been played at his funeral (Well, if you’re going to ask!) and was indeed played at his funeral as well as Home of the Spacer because his mom is a mad woman who decided since he was a Space Force Hero he should have home of the spacer.

But Strains of Earth is the Anthem of the IDS — Interplanetary Diplomatic Service — and frankly they’re such bright eyed earnest bunny and play it at everything given half a chance. And of course they had a strong need to play it since Skip (Allegedly) had died in the course of duty. so here it is. Be ready to drown in EARNESTNESS. (It’s a bit jarring in our jaded world, but I THINK I like it, actually.)

There will be more. Again not sure in what schedule, as things are more than a little crazy till mid November. But I’ll do what I can.

Most of all, though, I NEED to finish Witch’s Daughter and start writing on Orphans of the Stars, book two of the Chronicles of Lost Elly.