One of the things I like about OpenSalon is that it not only welcomes people to blog their fiction, it also solicits stories through the OS Weekend Fiction Club. That's why I've blogged so many of my short stories here, including several that expand the world I created in my first novel. Well, at long last, that book, "The Shoals of Time", is once again available in electronic form, this time for the Nook.

"...a big novel that's richer, more intricate, and has more going on than most of the science fiction novels on the shelves these days... " --- Writer's Digest

"...an engrossing saga of love, betrayal, disaster, and repercussions ... highly recommended ... an enjoyable, complex, interwoven narrative..." --- Midwest Book Review

In 2001, Homeland Security was given the task of eliminating the threat of terrorism, not only within the US, but around the globe. It was granted broad powers, autonomy, and told to do whatever it took to accomplish its objective.

What if an agency like this became the centerpiece of a global peace effort, and that in turn created the need for a global government with the power to maintain the peace provided by that agency? What if it was so successful that peace was enforced for over a century? Now imagine your world and its people faced with the threat of extinction, and the one thing preventing you from doing something about it was that very same agency. What would you do?

"The Shoals of Time" is about such a world. Except that after the conflict between peacekeeper and revolutionary was reduced to a game of cat and mouse between their leaders, the cheese escaped into the past...

In 2291, psychically-trained Healer Gillian Thomas is gathering herbs in the hills above Los Angeles when she's unceremoniously escorted back to town by a pair of brusque MedCenter Security workers. Her former bond-partner, a government peacekeeper, had been injured, and one of her escorts suspects that he ought to have been treated at the holistic Kübler-Ross Hospice Center where Gillian worked, rather than at the tech-heavy East-Side MedCenter.

Engaging her escort in an illicit investigation, she visits the crime scene, and discovers that there was more to the story than she'd been told. But while mulling over the evidence with some medicinal tea, she inexplicably passes out. When she regains consciousness, she finds she has a serious problem: she can't move, can't open her eyes, can't even call for help, and nobody responds to her psychic pleas for help. Having no alternative, she decides to go out-of-body to look for answers.

Intent on finding whoever was responsible for causing the situation, she sets out on a dangerous journey, knowing full well that not everyone who had made the attempt returned alive.

And yet, as big and consuming as this novel was to write, I learned later that the world I had created wasn't through with me. First there were a few related short stories, which you can read at my blog, and then there was a prequel, "Deadly Attractor", which is also available for Nook.