Vale is convincing, and Charlie allows him to administer a dose of “perilium” to Miriam, though he’s a bit unnerved by the revelation that the substance is controlled by a primitive Indian tribe which demands some beads-and-rattling by their priestess before they’ll offer it up.

To Charlie’s surprise and delight, the medicine works. Miriam is not only cured of her Alzheimer’s, she’s being completely rejuvenated, though she’s acquired an appetite for super-sized portions of meat, preferably uncooked. Vale insists it’s the body’s normal adaptation to a supercharged immune system, and again, Charlie’s fears are quieted. He certainly can’t argue with the results.

The only problem is, little disturbing issues keep popping up. Some of the other residents of Vale’s tiny community seem less than happy to be there. One of them insists she can never leave, for reasons she refuses to explain.

Then, Miriam has a brief relapse and requires another dose of perilium. It seems the drug’s effects can only be sustained with regular use, the only supply lies beneath Beckon, and Vale wants to keep a lid on the secret until he can synthesize perilium himself. If Charlie wants to keep Miriam healthy, they’ll have to resettle in Beckon permanently, and Charlie must use his influence to protect Vale from government meddling. Miriam’s regeneration begins to look more and more like a fountain of youth, and Vale finally admits the drug isn’t merely a cure-all. It provides virtual immortality with sustained use. Nearly everyone in Beckon is over 100 years old and in the prime of life. If Charlie will play ball and join Vale’s cabal, he can enjoy eternal youth with Miriam.

It’s a tempting offer, and Charlie even figures if he plays his cards right, he can steal the whole operation from under Vale’s nose. There’s just one hitch—Miriam wants no part of it. As she’s regained her faculties, she’s become increasingly tortured by guilt and misgivings. It all seems unnatural, and wrong. People aren’t meant to cheat death. There must be consequences lurking somewhere in this deal with the devil.

It’s not long before her fears are confirmed. Some late-night snooping in the chateau’s basement reveals a secret passage into the caverns and Vale’s holding area for Elina and the other kidnap victims. Charlie and Miriam promise to find a way to release the prisoners—but Vale catches them coming out of the caverns. The curtain falls again, and Act 4 begins.

But first, some brief comments on Act 3. This episode felt more like a standard set-piece—”Desperate couple arrives at isolated mansion in search of miracle cure from sketchy philanthropist.” The cure works, sort of, but the couple’s blundered into an evil conspiracy and are now trapped. However, Charlie is presented with a gut-wrenching dilemma: join the conspiracy, or watch his wife die by inches all over again. That’s the element that saved this part of the story for me. There’s no easy out here, even for someone with a strong moral compass. Charlie’s ridden the coattails of his wife’s faith most of his life, so he doesn’t have much faith of his own to help guide his actions. As Miriam grows more cogent, she senses a monstrous evil at the heart of this miracle cure, but she’s just as stymied because Charlie can’t see things her way.

Anyhow, all three of our protagonists are now in deep kimshi. What will they do?

On to Act 4…

I was wondering how Pawlik was going to pull these three perspectives together at the end. Now we’re switching protagonists every chapter, which also adds a sense of acceleration to the story’s climax as we flash back and forth from Jack to George to Elina, though not always in that sequence.

Jack Kendrick finally meets Thomas Vale, then George Wilcox is faced with yet another ethical dilemma and another nasty bit of information about how perilium works—and what happens when it’s withheld from a user. George makes his choice, perhaps too late.

Meanwhile, there’s something very special in store for Elina Gutierrez.

Everything comes tumbling out of the shadows in Act 4—the backstory of Beckon, the hidden tribe, the nature of the beasties lurking in the underground cavern, and the fate of Jack’s father. Jack and company find a reluctant ally, and the battle between good and evil is joined in an apocalyptic conflagration of blood and goo.

I’m getting to the point where spoilers are almost inevitable, but I’ll simply say there is a resolution at the end, and some closure, though I expect our heroes will have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do in a few days.

So, in summary…

I liked Beckon. It’s a taut, suspenseful thriller with plenty of action and some supremely creepy moments. Along the way, it raises some interesting ethical and spiritual questions about life, death, immortality, and the sorts of things that happen when we try to take these matters into our own hands. I may post a little more about this after I’ve had a day or two to process the story.

I didn’t have many gripes, and there were only a couple of missteps worth mentioning. I thought Elina started out as a very strong character, but I was disappointed that her promise wasn’t fully realized. She nearly devolved into what’s known in the trade as the “distressed damsel” (Scream Elina! Scream for your very life!).

There was also a moment very late in the story that veered into cliche’ and felt sort of tacked-on. I had to back up and read the sentence again to confirm the publisher hadn’t mistakenly stapled in a page from another book. Please tell me she’s not checking him out. Yep, she is. Sigh. And then a couple of pages later, Please tell me he’s not checking her out. Yep, he is. Sigh. Not that these sorts of things don’t happen, but it seemed like absolutely the wrong place and time, and it broke my immersion in the story.

Minor points, though. It’s a good read. Go, buy, and enjoy.

And don’t just take my word for it. Pay a visit to the other fine stops on this month’s CSFF Blog Tour:

Purchase Beckon - http://www.amazon.com/Beckon-Tom-Pawlik/dp/1414338732/ Tom Pawlik’s Web site  - http://www.tompawlik.com/
Tom Pawlik’s Blog – http://tompawlik.blogspot.com/
Tom Pawlik’s Facebook page – http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tom-Pawlik/42692434035
Author Twitter account – https://twitter.com/#!/TomPawlik
(Wow, this guy is seriously networked)

Noah Arsenault
Julie Bihn
Thomas Clayton Booher
Thomas Fletcher Booher
Beckie Burnham
Brenda Castro
Theresa Dunlap
Nikole Hahn
Ryan Heart
Bruce Hennigan
Janeen Ippolito
Becky Jesse
Jason Joyner
Carol Keen
Leighton
Rebekah Loper
Katie McCurdy
Shannon McDermott
Karen McSpadden
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Nissa
Joan Nienhuis
Faye Oygard
Crista Richey
Kathleen Smith
Jessica Thomas
Steve Trower
Shane Werlinger

>>This review is based upon a copy of the book provided to me free of charge by the publisher, a courtesy I appreciate, but which does not guarantee my recommendation. I strive to evaluate every book I review purely on its intrinsic merits.<<

This time, we join furloughed LAPD officer Elina Gutierrez as she’s surveilling a large chateau overlooking the village of Beckon. One of her cousins was abducted in Los Angeles, and she traced the kidnappers’ van to this odd destination. Elina is quickly discovered, and she flees for her car with a group of burly men following in hot pursuit. Despite discharging a .40 caliber bullet into one of her pursuers at point-blank range, she’s captured and taken to the chateau. The man she shot seems a bit shaken, but otherwise none the worse for wear.

Well, body armor is a lot less obvious than it used to be, right? Yes, that must be it.

Elina is brought before the abduction ring’s kingpin, an unassuming man named Vale with a taste for steak tartare. Elina bluffs her way through the interview, but she’s operating alone, without backup or authorization, a cop under investigation back home for a questionable shooting, and her cousin is an undocumented alien (in the legal sense, not the extraterrestrial). Vale figures rightly that she knows too much to release. His goons take her to a subterranean dungeon to await an uncertain fate.

It’s perhaps even creepier for us because we already know what’s crawling around in that cavern. Ick.

There, in the dark, she discovers she’s not alone. Other prisoners are locked in cells adjoining hers, and one is convinced there’s something far worse than death in store for them. Elina prays for help, endures another, decidedly less-friendly interrogation, and prays some more. When she’s almost given up hope, help arrives, after a fashion. Has it come in time? Will it be enough?

I don’t know. I haven’t finished the book yet. Tomorrow, Acts 3 and 4.

I’m still liking this. Elina is a great character—I want to know more about her and the circumstances leading to her suspension. I expect there are more details forthcoming. She’s also the first “person of faith” we’ve met in the story, and it sounds as if she may have recently returned to her walk with God, perhaps as one outcome of her suspension. This is a good example of presenting a character’s faith in a way that’s organic to the character and offers natural opportunities to explore what her relationship with God means to her in greater depth as the story develops.

However, I feel like we’ve prematurely swung away from Elina to another protagonist’s story, especially given how many pages Jack got up front, but Pawlik’s piqued my interest enough to be patient and let him develop the story his own way. He continues to demonstrate a good feel for action scenes, and I also wouldn’t have minded if the chase through the woods went on a little bit longer.

I’m avoiding the other Tourists until after Day 3 so as to not bias my reaction to the book, but do as I say, not as I do, and check out their reviews. Take a gander at Tom Pawlik’s web presence while you’re at it:

Purchase Beckon - http://www.amazon.com/Beckon-Tom-Pawlik/dp/1414338732/ Tom Pawlik’s Web site  - http://www.tompawlik.com/
Tom Pawlik’s Blog – http://tompawlik.blogspot.com/
Tom Pawlik’s Facebook page – http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tom-Pawlik/42692434035
Author Twitter account – https://twitter.com/#!/TomPawlik
(Wow, this guy is seriously networked)

Noah Arsenault
Julie Bihn
Thomas Clayton Booher
Thomas Fletcher Booher
Beckie Burnham
Brenda Castro
Theresa Dunlap
Nikole Hahn
Ryan Heart
Bruce Hennigan
Janeen Ippolito
Becky Jesse
Jason Joyner
Carol Keen
Leighton
Rebekah Loper
Katie McCurdy
Shannon McDermott
Karen McSpadden
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Nissa
Joan Nienhuis
Faye Oygard
Crista Richey
Kathleen Smith
Jessica Thomas
Steve Trower
Shane Werlinger

>>This review is based upon a copy of the book provided to me free of charge by the publisher, a courtesy I appreciate, but which does not guarantee my recommendation. I strive to evaluate every book I review purely on its intrinsic merits.<<

I am so there.

My review of Tom Pawlik’s Beckon will diverge a bit from my usual pattern. This is partly because my daughter graduated from high school yesterday, and I’ve been immersed in the accompanying festivities, so I’m still reading the book. Another reason is that the story lends itself to a three-part review, being told from the perspective of three different protagonists, whose stories converge at the end.

Predictability is also boring, so I like to mix things up now and again.

To that end, we’ll start things off with a look at the first part of Beckon, which concerns one Jack Kendrick. Jack’s father, David, an anthropologist, vanished some years earlier while investigating a legendary pre-Columbian civilization in the mountains of Wyoming, and his colleagues were quick to dismiss his theories as so much pixie dust. Jack, meanwhile, has become an anthropologist himself in the hopes of vindicating his father’s reputation, but has given up hope of finding David, alive or dead—until he discovers a piece of evidence that rekindles his hope. He travels to Wyoming, enlisting a scientist friend and a guide from the local Caieche Indian tribe to help him investigate a remote cavern that might be connected to his father’s disappearance.

He finds a lot more than he bargained for. After a harrowing adventure, Jack wanders into the nearby town of Beckon, whose citizens seem friendly enough until he begins to share the details of his little expedition. At this point, Jack realizes he’s in even more trouble than he thought.

And then…fade to black, and it’s off to the next protagonist. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow for that.

Pawlik doesn’t waste much time with preliminaries. He sets the stage quickly with the mystery of David Hendrick’s vanishing, hands Jack an enigmatic clue, and sends him, and us, off to Wyoming for a little extreme spelunking.

Really extreme spelunking.

What-in-the-Mines-of-Moria-possessed-you-to-enter-this-lightless-hole-you-idiot spelunking.

There are some very strong echoes of Stephen King here, what with Native American legends, ancient terrors lurking in dark, dank caverns, and a firm reminder that some forgotten towns are forgotten purposely, for reasons we’re better off not knowing.

Beckon makes a good first impression. Pawlik’s direct, unadorned style yields a quick and easy read, though I think there was room to build up a little more suspense—the pacing of the first section felt a bit like one of the Indiana Jones movies, plunging from hazard to hazard with little time for reflection. Or perhaps I was just reading too fast. It’s fun, though, and I expect most readers will be quickly hooked.

I was unable to find a reference for a tribe called the Caieche. It may simply be obscure. If not, I’m curious about why Pawlik chose to go with a fictional Native American community. He may have figured it was better not to saddle a real tribe with fictional lore. Anyhow, if Tom’s looking in on the Tour, I’d be interested to hear about his thought process for this aspect of the story.

Tiny Spoiler Zone Ahead

The supporting cast takes a pretty harsh beating right out of the gate, but I’ve not seen a body yet, so I won’t jump to conclusions about that issue, especially given the book’s subtitle: “Come. And Live Forever.”

End Tiny Spoiler Zone, and Today’s Review.

Be sure to check out the other fine sites on this month’s CSFF Blog Tour:

Purchase Beckon - http://www.amazon.com/Beckon-Tom-Pawlik/dp/1414338732/ Tom Pawlik’s Web site  - http://www.tompawlik.com/
Tom Pawlik’s Blog – http://tompawlik.blogspot.com/
Tom Pawlik’s Facebook page – http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tom-Pawlik/42692434035
Author Twitter account – https://twitter.com/#!/TomPawlik
(Wow, this guy is seriously networked)

Noah Arsenault
Julie Bihn
Thomas Clayton Booher
Thomas Fletcher Booher
Beckie Burnham
Brenda Castro
Theresa Dunlap
Nikole Hahn
Ryan Heart
Bruce Hennigan
Janeen Ippolito
Becky Jesse
Jason Joyner
Carol Keen
Leighton
Rebekah Loper
Katie McCurdy
Shannon McDermott
Karen McSpadden
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Nissa
Joan Nienhuis
Faye Oygard
Crista Richey
Kathleen Smith
Jessica Thomas
Steve Trower
Shane Werlinger

>>This review is based upon a copy of the book provided to me free of charge by the publisher, a courtesy I appreciate, but which does not guarantee my recommendation. I strive to evaluate every book I review purely on its intrinsic merits.<<

As I’ve mentioned before, I tend to think of stories as children. Short stories are the most fun for me. They’re small enough to whisk up into the air and carry on my shoulders. I watch them grow up, I play games with them, I bandage their boo-boos, and they help me see all the old, familiar things I love about life through fresh eyes.

Novels, on the other hand, are stories that hang around the house for months after getting their college diploma—unshaven, sleeping past noon, emptying the refrigerator, generating dirty laundry, and refusing to go look for a proper job. I still love them, I just…wish…they’d…launch. You know, get married, have a few kids of their own, save the world, the usual.

Anyhow, this was my take on what happens when all the children come home for the family reunion.

——————————————–

Why an anthology? Most of these stories were published before, sometime, somewhere. What’s accomplished by hauling them all back in and putting them between the covers of a book?

If stories are the children of our mind, then an anthology is the family reunion. Almost everybody shows up—old and young, rich and poor, goody-two-shoes and rebels. The certified and the certifiable. Beauty to charm the savage beast, and ugliness sufficient to stop a clock. Line them all up for the big group photo, everybody says, “Cheese,” and you spend the next few weeks staring at the picture in wonderment, unable to believe that all these people could ever be kin.

And yet, a subtle, undeniable resemblance whispers in chorus from that sea of cowlicks and crooked smiles. We’re yours. Live with it.

There are practical reasons that have nothing to do with sentimentality. Short stories are wanderers by nature. They end up in obscure corners of the internet, in little hand-stapled paperback journals, or in magazines nobody ever heard of. Some get happily married into somebody else’s anthology. A competent detective might track down most of them, but an author shouldn’t make his readers work that hard. There are also stories that haven’t yet found a home, and their chances of adoption decrease as they age, even if they’re attractive, smart kids. They deserve a sporting chance, just like their siblings.

Or, sometimes your publisher e-mails you and says, “Hey, Fred, how about we do an anthology of your short stories?” and you say, “Sure.”

So where’s the family resemblance? What ties this pack of mongrel tales together, besides the fact I happened to write all of them? That’s a great question, one I asked myself as I read through the stories assembled for this collection. It finally struck me that the single frame that fit this picture was miracles, but not just any miracles. Quirky miracles. Odd, eccentric, freaky little things not fully explained by science or imagined in our comfortable philosophies. The stuff way out on the tails of the bell-shaped curve that rocks our world when it collides with the normal—and then we have to figure out what to do about it. That’s what all these stories are about, more or less.

So much for the family portrait. Next time, I’ll take a closer look at some of my favorite members of the clan, and maybe share a few gossipy tidbits, like embarassing behavior, felonies, and genetic mutations. You know, the usual.

Odd Little Miracles is available from Splashdown Darkwater via Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and Smashwords.com.

And here’s a cool video trailer for the book, courtesy of the talented folks at Newsome Creative.

1. Today is National Flash Fiction Day — In Great Britain. Huzzah! Follow @nationalflashfd on Twitter for a slew of links to some very British stories of 1000 words or thereabouts. Here’s a link to one I chose at—you guessed it—random: Umbrella, by Stephen Shieber. Quite good, that.

Not her class picture, but the similarities are uncanny.

2. High School Never Ends — In celebration of my Darling Daughter’s graduation from high school this week, here are bullet reviews of the three most random high-school-themed anime of my acquaintance:

• School Rumble: Bad-boy Haruma loves space-case Tenma. Tenma is oblivious to Haruma, but loves mysterious Karasuma, who may be an alien life form. Karasuma is oblivious to Tenma, but loves curry. Their classmates have their own issues, and nobody has any common sense. Almost as ridiculous as high school in real life. The Battle Royale spoof in Season 2 is not to be missed. Available at funimation.com and on Netflix and Hulu.
• Azumanga Daioh: The Seinfeld of anime, A.D. follows the adventures of an adorably ditzy class of young ladies pondering the truly deep questions of life—things like toast, and cats, and detachable pigtails. Just when you think you understand what’s going on, an episode will take a left turn into the Twilight Zone. Available on Netflix, and some episodes are posted on YouTube.
• Nichijou (My Ordinary Life): A pint-sized mad scientist, her wind-up robot (with special features only an 8-year-old genius would design), a rich boy who rides a goat to school, a talking cat, and a girl with an unlimited supply of military weaponry. This one is Azumanga Daioh on steroids—same random issues, more explosions. Available at Crunchyroll.

3. Onomatopoeia! Random.

4. The International Publishing Empire That Is Splashdown Books — Nothing random here, just a lot of cool spec-fic coming out of the New Zealand-based company that published two of my novels and an anthology of my short stories. Latest titles include Star of Justice, by Robynn Tolbert, I Am Ocilla, by Diane Graham, and Blood and Brine, by Caprice Hokstad. Last year’s corporate anthology, Aquasynthesis, which includes a couple of my short stories, is a finalist in the 2012 Next Generation Indie Book Awards.

Don’t look directly at her, either.

5. There’s a Little Black Spot on the Sun Today: Actually, it will happen on June 5th (or 6th, depending on where you live). Venus will transit the solar disk over a period of about 7 hours, and such an event will not happen again until 2117, so THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE. Probably. Also, DON’T EVER LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SUN WITHOUT A HIGH-QUALITY SOLAR FILTER. That would be both random and dangerous. Using an unshielded telescope or binoculars is even worse and will likely blind you. A safe, cheap, and elegantly low-tech alternative is to view the transit with a simple pinhole projector. Directions here. 

6. Stereopticon! Yep, random.

Well, maybe not #6…I hate confrontation.

Perhaps it’s time to take a stab at that musical. “Rewrite it once, rewrite it twice, rewriting chicken soup with rice…“

Because you can never be ineffective enough…

1. Be unteachable. Genius is always unappreciated, and the towering lighthouse of your  intellect dwarfs the feeble mental candle of your peers. Be not deceived–advice is a thinly-veiled attempt to make you ordinary.

2. Cultivate a thin skin. The only possible reason for others to criticize your writing is jealousy, plain and simple. You must not tolerate the faintest breath of disapproval. Unleash divine wrath upon all who dare abuse the precious children of your mind.

3. Pay no attention to detail. Your prose was meant to soar on eagles’ wings! Hobbling it with the shackles of punctuation and repressive grammatical rules is the mark of a soulless conformist.

4. Imitate the current fad. You can’t argue with success. No, that’s not conforming, it’s being realistic.

5. Obsessively rewrite your work. It’s soooo pretty, but it can be even prettier if you polish it just a little bit more! Even if no one else ever reads it, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that nothing less than perfection ever entered the world with your name on it.

6. Demonize publishers who reject your stories. They’re The Man, and The Man just wants to keep you down. Vent your spleen on Twitter, Facebook, Farmville, and their inbox. Better yet, show those Neanderthals you’re the Cro Magnon of literature. Start a revolution! Self-publish! Exercise your God-given right to Habits 1 through 5! Power to the People!

7. Find a community of Highly Ineffective Writers and hang out with them. They may be the only people in the world who truly understand you. Permit them to bask in the warm sunshine of your wisdom.

Coming soon, Chicken Soup With Rice for the Highly Ineffective Writer–The Musical!

In “Folly,” a group of virtual-reality gamers discover an anomaly that might be the gate to Paradise…or a quick, nasty death:

Whatever lives behind that firewall caught Jumbo when he broke through, and it fried his brain.”

Carson slapped Orca’s helmet. “But the point is, he broke through. And if what’s behind that firewall is important enough to defend, it’s important enough to investigate.”

In “Expanse,” John Milton has his first meeting with the Dreamers, in a world he’d thought was lost forever:

In the distance, visible between the trees, was an expanse of translucent blue, tipped here and there with frothy white. The door had vanished behind him, and as he turned first to the right, then to the left, then all the way around, he could see the water encompassed the land on all sides.

It was an ocean. A real, living ocean.

If you need to catch up with my piece of the Avenir Eclectia opus, this link will pull up everything I’ve written there to date. If you’re a first-time visitor to our little lost colony, I’d recommend starting from the very beginning, here. There’s also some very cool electronic music and art by Michael Rogers at this link that creates the perfect atmosphere for reading.

This has been a crazy couple of weeks, and they’re not over yet. Most of it has been the good sort of crazyness, the sort that gets my creative juices flowing—days afterward—but in the meantime, I’ve been physically, emotionally, spiritually, and about every other sort of -ally, buried.

So, here’s the recap.

Variety is the Spice of Life, but Monotony Buys the Groceries: Several months of work planning an upcoming Army exercise culminated in two weeks of revising diagrams and spreadsheets that total about the same number of pages as my last novel. I enjoy my job very much, but this part is both frustrating and tedious, as all the players are making last-minute decisions about who’s participating in the exercise and what they’re bringing with them. There isn’t much time to incorporate all the revisions into the master plan, so I’m working under a deadline with a lot of senior management interest in the project. Thankfully, it’s almost finished, but I’ve been staggering around like a zombie for several days now, wondering where I’ve mislaid my brains.

The Good News is Our Robotic Overlords are Benevolent: Last week, we spent three days in St. Louis (dragging my work laptop along so I could keep working on the project) while the Darling Daughter’s team competed in the 2012 FIRST Robotics World Championships. Click the link for details. Anyhow, they garnered a couple of peer awards, sent many foam basketballs arching through tiny hoops and yea, verily, balanced with precision upon many wobbly ramps. I caught a glimpse of Lord Segway Himself, Dean Kamen, and was heartily encouraged for our country’s technological prospects as I watched an NFL stadium full of budding engineers solve some very complex problems—and have a ball doing it.

“At the Senior Prom, we danced ’til three…” The Robotics Championships were followed immediately by the Olathe Northwest High School Senior Prom, and all the Prom-iness pertaining thereto. It was a long night, but my little girl was radiant. Fair enough.

Bring Out Your Dead: The Darling Daughter’s triumphs in St. Louis and on the dance floor were immediately followed by a bout of food poisoning. Or something. Enough said.

Kiss the Girl: And give her a big, honkin’ rock while you’re at it. The Eldest Son went down on one knee for his sweetheart last week near the fountain over there on the right (bonus points if you can pinpoint the location). She said, “It’s about time, ya big palooka,” or words to that effect. Her future designation will be the Delightful Daughter-in-Law, and so she is. The two of them seem well-matched.

No need to buy a howl.

Three Quick Questions for the Weekly Weimaraner:

1. Greatest baseball player? “Ruth!”
2. Texture of sandpaper? “Rough!”
3. What’s getting replaced on our house this weekend? “Roof!”

That’s right, Josie. Several years of hail, hurricane-force windstorms, and driving rain have rendered our roof less than watertight. With a little help from the insurance company (and an uncomfortably large deductible), the whole works will be resurfaced this weekend. I also need a new wallet. This one’s flat.

Writing: Hmm? What is this “writing” of which you speak? Well, I have been doing some of that. Just wrapped up a seven-part series on icons in literature at Speculative Faith, in collaboration with E. Stephen Burnett. The latest installment in my Gamers thread at Avenir Eclectia, “Folly,” went online a couple of weeks ago, and I’m still waiting on word from Kaleidotrope regarding my short story submission there. Now that the chaos in my life has subsided, maybe I can get back on track.

Or not. Two weeks to the Darling Daughter’s graduation. Eek.

This super-streamlined choo choo looks so fast, I bet it can bust through the sound barrier standing still. No sissy carbon-fiber composites, either. The Atomic Train is all metal, because nothing less could confine the nuclear inferno raging within.

Finally, a train you can’t overwind! And it sparks!

Sadly, it comes with only six feet of track. That’s not enough to make a connection to the Andromeda Galaxy, but if you assemble it into an oval, you stand a better than average chance of discovering the Higgs Boson before those latte-sipping eggheads at CERN.

The Atomic Train runs on subjective time. It has to. Conventional time can’t keep up with it.

You can find the original image and lots more cool stuff from the future…future…future at the Alphadrome Robot and Space Toy Database.

She’s in.

This June, my daughter will take her place in the USAFA Cadet Wing, Class of 2016.

My reaction? Proud, certainly. I knew she had the tools to make the cut, but her poise, patience, and determination continue to astonish me. On top of everything, the selection process was tougher than usual this year—budget cuts mandated a smaller entering class, so fewer candidates received appointments. She had other options, but this is the one she’s chosen to pursue after months of college tours, applications, interviews, soul-searching, prayers, and tears. I left the decision in her hands, as I promised her I would.

I was surprised when she initially expressed interest in the Academy. My wife and I used to joke that our daughter would turn out to be the fighter pilot in the family, and now, here we are. Life’s funny that way, sometimes.

And, yes, it’s a little scary. Joining the military carries the promise that you will likely, at some point, find yourself in harm’s way. We’ve worked hard to shield our children from harm, particularly this one.

We live in a world filled with danger, though, and the idea that she’s any safer in an office building, in a school, or on the back roads of Kansas has proven to be a sad illusion. Bright, courageous, self-sacrificing young people like her preserve the measure of freedom we all enjoy, and now she’s willing to take her turn on the ramparts. Once again, I’m proud, and I’m immensely thankful and privileged to be her father.

She’s got a challenging road ahead, but she’s better prepared for it than I was at her age, and she will be stronger and richer for the challenge. I have no doubt she will succeed, with style, as she would succeed anywhere.

Godspeed, my Darling Daughter.