Colin Barrett: Blog

Well, you knew Linda finally had to pick up on Hugo's true origin.
Put yourself in her position. Yeah, this is science fiction, but suppose something like this really happened to you. Sure, it'd be hard to credit, but what if nothing else made sense?
And we haven't yet got to the point that Hugo, too, must come to grips with the reality of his situation. I know I'm taking the realizations of my characters a little fast, but the actual lengthy process wouldn't be much fun to read, and you wind up at the same place anyhow, it just takes longer.
Anyhow, much more to come. Hope you're enjoying it. I know I had fun writing the story.

I've tried in these early chapters to put myself in the places of the characters. How would I react in circumstances such as they find themselves? It's of course difficult to fully realize how one might respond to such disparate stimuli and situations, so different from the familiar, but with imagination a thought pattern and physical follow-through can be conceived. Perhaps it's not the way you, with a different mind-set from my own, would behave or perceive matters, but it made sense to me as I wrote this, and still does; and from this conceit the rest of the story is developed. Bear in mind that it's not just Hugo, the caveman of the title, who's so vastly out of his comfort zone, Linda is in a different way also in unfamiliar territory, both because of her personal turmoil and the sudden and disturbing arrival of Hugo into her heretofore comfortable retreat. It's on their interaction that my story is focused.
I hope you're enjoying it so far. The early ratings are as I've come to expect with the slow development that my fiction employs, and I hope that with time they move upward as have my other works.

You know, nobody told me I was even in the running for an award. And I still wouldn't know anything about winning for "the best erotic long story" of the year, with Castaway, if an appreciative reader hadn't e-mailed congratulations. Somehow I think the folks who run these awards could use an upgrade to their communications.
Even so, I very much appreciate the honor--my first for fiction. A lot of years back I won several non-fiction awards, which I thought was really neat, but it's even neater to win recognition for something that emanates entirely from my imagination, Thanks very much to those who voted for me, as well as everyone who read Castaway, or, for that matter, any of my novels or short stories.

One reader expressed surprise that I hadn't ended the story with Asmedogh's pickup. This is why; there were a few loose ends to clean up. Housekeeping, as it were.
I think the news media's abrupt loss of interest in Nick and Camilla after their release is actually pretty realistic. Few people have a shorter attention span than a reporter working on a story about which there are no new developments. Back in my early days of journalism I was taught that any story, to be considered "newsworthy," must first pass what my then-mentor called "the WGAS test." WGAS, he told me, is short for "Who Gives A Shit," and any story that doesn't attract enough public interest to fulfill this requirement isn't worth reporting. The public, whose attention span is even shorter than the reporters', isn't interested in hearing more about stories that were yesterday's headlines unless something new has happened, or been said, etc. Nick's strategem of making things "boring" for the reporters who've tracked him and Camilla down, is thus virtually guaranteed to turn off reportorial interest in the absence of anybody else who's willing to talk. And of course nobody is; the only ones who know anything worth mentioning are a few in DHS, and naturally they aren't saying anything.
The operas I mention fit the voices I've assigned to my characters as I describe them. If you're an opera buff, you'll know. If you aren't, well, there's that WGAS test again.
Thanks for reading. Once more, all my longer fiction is available on Amazon. If you don't have one of their Kindles, most tablets will accept Amazon's format, or there's a freebie emulation for PCs or Macs.

I'm not kidding about the configuration of the Akulla flier. Check on-line for some of the experimental aircraft; they look as I've described.
I used this kind of design because the stories (and movies) of "flying saucers" strike me as pretty dumb. There's no way that a true saucer-like configuration can be aerodynamically sound. Think about a frisbie for a moment. Sure, it sails along merrily through the air, but it gets its "lift"-actually, more a resistance to falling-by rotating speedily as it goes. Rapid rotation would be pretty dizzying to anyone (or anything) inside, don't you think? A saucer simply won't fly. But, as I point out in the story, the short-winged, short-fuselage design of some experimental craft will, and at a quick glance it could also be mistaken for a saucer. Q.E.D.
We're nearing the end of my story. Rather than drag out the denouement across multiple postings on separate days, I'm doing two chapters today and will finish up with the remaining three Friday. For those who'd like to keep the whole thing for revisiting, I'll again mention that it's available on Amazon for $3, as is the rest of my longer fiction (including some that I haven't posted on SOL). Thanks very much for reading; and thanks, too, to all those who've e-mailed. It's all been very encouraging-especially the fact that so many folks have been willing to go for a novel that has grand opera as its sub-theme.