Excerpt: Ordinary Dust

Readers, below is the opening to my science fiction novel, Ordinary Dust, which premiers late in 2020 or early 2021. It is the second or third release of my new Aligned Worlds™ series. (I haven’t decided which one; they are all independent books.) If anyone is interested as performing as a beta reader, and thereby getting an early (free) look at the book, or any in the series, let me know in the comments below.

 

Cheers!

Blurb:
On a planet where nothing matters as much as status, a twenty-five year-old woman who has always been treated like “ordinary dust” by her family, bonds with her fourteen-year-old nephew and tries to carve a life for herself. When they are both forced to leave home, traveling to distant planets, they will find their idyllic lives will never be the same again. Full of adventure, romance, and suspense, this novel is half literary fiction romance and half science fiction / crime thriller.

Excerpt:

1 – The Goddess Appears

Year 1909 of the Grand Epoch (1909 GE): Findlay Nevrose

I had known Mara, or at least the divine physical form that she secreted beneath her layers of drab cloth, for three months before I was able to convince myself that she was real. She was a puzzle that I would spend the entirety of my childhood seeking to unravel, but that night, just past the zero hour that began our twenty-six-hour day, she was a chimera, a perfect vision of silky flesh in a tattered white shawl that I deemed obscene due to its attempts to barely cover her naked flesh. I was no more than nine years old then, a mere wisp of a man-ling, and before that night no more interested in the ways of feminine adulthood than I was in the mating rituals of fong beasts, but as her storm blew her out of the bathroom and past my door, I became interested in the ways of this one woman to the exclusion of all else.

My life changed, at that moment, solely because I had to wee. I’d emerged from yet another dream about waterfalls, and this time I was determined to have my water fall in the loo rather than my bed. I would have made it all the way, I imagine, except that at that moment this cloistered angel flew across my open doorway and in her haste knocked me from my feet. Though I fell immediately, she barely stumbled, faltering just enough that her shawl briefly fell away from her and I caught sight of her nude flesh: perfect, slender legs that tapered into long, delicate, impossibly curved feet; taut, round buttocks that protruded just enough to allow my eyes to glide over their curves and to the small of her back; rivulets of wet hair that fell provocatively to her mid-back; and though as fleeting as the wakening from a dream, the barest glimpse of the side of one perfect, nippled globe.