Bruce Dorluin: A Guest Post!

 

Here is a guest post from SF author Bruce Dorluin, who kindly agreed to write for the Great Raven about his space opera/dystopia. He has supplied links to where you can buy his books. 

And here is a very impressive book trailer for Bruce’s series! 

https://brucedorluin.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/shards_of_space_third_draft-1080p1.mp4

I admit we have one thing in common, which is playing Dungeons And Dragons, though I never got as far as playing the Dungeon Master! 

Take it away, Bruce!

My whole, adult life, as I struggled to pay the bills, I have always wanted to write at least one book. As a teenager, I loved creating storybook format Dungeons and Dragons games for my friends. Oftentimes, while playing, four hours would pass before someone would say, “Wow, look what time it is!” The enjoyment and emersion of the players into my games was genuine and I felt appreciated and encouraged to create more. 

Well, after twenty years since I hung up my dungeon master hat, I finally got to write a book. 

Just for context, my youth was filled with video games, Star Trek, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. To this day, I would choose to watch Stargate SG-1 over any other TV show. When I wasn’t glued to a TV screen, I built custom Lego castles. My brother and I spent hours assembling our Lego armies and having castle battles with a dungeons and dragons style battle system applied to each figure, based on their equipment. Those days will never come back. 

Today however, I have new opportunities to enjoy life. I have four children who each have their own personalities. I spend a good share of my time with them, helping and guiding them to be productive, emotionally stable individuals. My motto is, “Raise good adults, not kids.” So far, as I try to instill in them all the wisdom I can muster, teaching them the failures of my life, I am encouraged and excited to see each of them grow into adulthood.  

As far as book writing, I have considered writing a book for some time. For instance, I have had a dungeons and dragons campaign that has been stuck in my head, unplayed for twenty years. I plan to advance that campaign, but it will be in a book rather than rolled by dice. But I didn’t want to start with writing a fantasy series, relieving my imaginary story queue into a sea of other fantasy books. I wasn’t ready for that. 

However, there was story I had in mind. It’s a story, or at least a memory I kept in queue for much longer than the dungeons and dragons campaign. When I was a youth, in my early to mid-teens, I had many episodes of déjà vu and vivid dreams. 

One night, I had a dream I was an older version of myself. In my dream, I was a person of reasonable dexterity, but not exactly youthful. I was on the rooftops of city brick apartment buildings, jumping from one building to the next. It was dark and I was afraid but driven. Inside one of those apartment buildings, was a young blonde woman who I loved very much and was trying to rescue. Within in the dream, in my mind I held the image of a blonde woman I did not know. 

As I jumped from building to building, part of me wanted to seek the local police to help me. After all, police were trustworthy and could help me. However, within the dream, I pushed away the thought. My trust of the police, replaced by betrayal and fear, drove me to vigilantism. Within the dream, I reminded myself of who I feared with an image of the new police. These police were different from the heroes in blue. These police wore black outfits with matching knee-high black boots and black hats. These police were more likely to beat you and send you to jail for nothing, than help. 

The fear of the police in black startled me awake. For thirty years, I have held the memory of that dream. 

While in my twenties, that dream remained in my mind as a permanent memory. The dream had little meaning, until I met my would-be blonde wife. I thought for several years that the woman in the dream was her. 

As the years passed, and we didn’t get police in black, I considered the dream was drawn from my imagination and not an example of a precognition dream. However, as life would have it, my eldest daughter looks like my wife. My daughter is eleven. Needless to say, I will be on high alert for police who wear black for the next twenty years. 

That’s enough about the ‘police in black’ story. 

In 2019, I sat awake night after night, lying in bed, reliving a new story in my head. After a time, I wrote it down on paper, refining the story as it progressed. While I always wanted to write a book, I didn’t consider myself great at writing and I didn’t know how to publish. However, I had a ‘Go-For-It!’ moment and I have not looked back. At the end of 2021, after many re-writes, revisions, and WTF’s from my wife, I published my first book. 

For my first book, The Shards of Space: Echoes of Destiny, I created a future when the police in black exist. Additionally, I love sci-fi and I came up with a plot where humans search for planets to colonize. For this book series, I mixed the despotic future, space exploration, and sci-fi components. 

The entire series is about Curtis Jecker, 16 sent on missions to find a new planet to colonize, to save humanity. Along his search for a new planet, his ship collides with a space anomaly causing his ship to spiral out of control causing a rift in space. He is lost, alone, and out of fuel when he arrives on an Earth-like planet. On this Earth-like planet, he finds humans and an angrier Curtis Jecker, who is hell-bent on killing him. 

In the second book, The Shards of Space: Frequency Stone, Curtis tries to find his way home as hostile aliens and more Curtis Jeckers are in search of him. Curtis falls in love and begins to unravel the mystery that is his life. 

Overall, after finishing the first book and ready to publish my second book, I am happy to have experienced the trials of writing a book. I learned many lessons the hard way. And unfortunately, if you read Echoes of Destiny, you can likely tell it was re-written several times. For those who want to know how this story progresses and ends, you will not be disappointed. 

For my next series, which I will write next and is intended for a younger audience, I am excited to apply the learned lessons. 

Thank you Sue, for letting me take up precious blog space. And to anyone reading this, feel free to reach out anytime. 

I am taking pre-orders for book 2 at brucedorluin.com_book2

If you want book 1 and 2 together, you can order them together

Also, some people have read the first book and rated/reviewed it. If you read it, please provide feedback directly or on these sites. 

Goodreads:

https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/157846538-bruce-dorluin

Amazon Author:

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Bruce-Dorluin/author/B0BL73YC1D?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true

OnlineBookClub:

https://forums.onlinebookclub.org/shelves/author.php?a=236027