In November for national novel writing month, I drafted a novel titled Rainbow Lullaby. Right now, I'm in the process of finalizing this work's layouts/typesetting etc for distribution.
Here's the description that will appear on the back of the book:
A Lagu is an ancient and magical medium-sized mammal. When one of these strange creatures is accidentally seen by a human boy named Luke, everything changes.
Traha is a sentient tree from a planet 23 light years away. When her one-way journey to Earth is completed with the help of a sorcerer named Taavi, everything changes.
The blue man is many things. A safe driver. An inspiration. A lover of root beer floats. When the blue man surprises a woman named Nneka at a shopping mall, everything changes.
These intertwined tales unfold in circumstances where magical creatures, telepathy, a revolutionary new currency, and a mysteriously powerful dance come together in unlikely ways. Through it all, the everyday world is transformed into someplace unfamiliar, and the reader is left questioning everything but the value of friendship.
Here are the first two chapters, exclusively on Steemit:
Chapter 1 - A remarkable encounter
The emergency exit out of which he'd unceremoniously slipped clicked closed, reducing the fire alarm's blare to background noise. The eighth-grader moved quickly away from the school auditorium. He did not stop, or give in to the impulse to run, and quickly reached a nearby tree-lined street with plenty of shadows for him to hide in while gathering his wits. From this vantage, Luke studied the slow, stupid chaos behind him.
A crowd of maybe sixty gussied-up teenagers unhappily ambled around in front of the building's main entrance. Several parents who'd apparently waiting in their cars for the dance to end had come running when the alarm went off, and a couple of these were frantically grabbing kid after kid shouting the name of what child they sought. One of the older students backed into an arriving fire truck, prompting a stern-faced cop to break off whatever she'd been saying to the school's frowning principle, and jog across the parking lot to take charge of the minor accident scene.
Luke didn't know who had pulled the alarm, but it was a small school so he could guess who was behind the prank. And he was happy for the excuse to get out of there. Before the alarm went off, he'd just been standing alone, watching classmates he didn't fit with dance to music he didn't like, feeling sad about the recent loss of a few classmates he'd got on well with. Now, headed towards home, and in no hurry once clear of the unhappy dance and false-alarm panic, he leaned heavily against a big maple tree, let a few silent tears fall for what remained of the sadness he'd stifled during the event, reset his thinking by briefly considering the current Dungeons and Dragon's campaign, then slowly put everything except the cool evening air out of his mind.
After a time, Luke chanced a look up into the tree against which he leaned. And in one of the tree's lowermost branches, not four feet above, was the strangest thing. An animal unlike any creature seen. Or heard of. Or, before that moment, could have imagined. It had very short fur over most of it and a sturdy, dark tail that could've belonged to a monkey. Longer tufts of fur stuck out at weird angles from the thing's face, back, neck, and wrists. It was not small, nor large, but somewhere in between, measuring perhaps thirty inches from end to end, with the black-and-white coloration of panda bears and skunks, but an overall shape that reminded him of a koala.
A faint glow like foxfire emanated from the creature's visible skin. The face -- like a lemur's but with much larger eyes and different specifics -- appeared friendly enough, but seemed unreasonably intelligent for an animal. And the thing was looking right at him, with an expression Luke interpreted as saying, "hey you there, I know you can see me so don't pretend that you can't."
Although Luke did not avert his eyes, for the animal was fascinating, he did take a big step back in case the critter perched on the branch above where he stood decided to poop. "I'm not going to poop," the creature's expression said, as if in response, which prompted Luke to wonder aloud, "Are you an alien? What are you?"
The creature just looked at him.
"No," Luke continued with the gentle tone he'd learned to use with livestock on the edge of getting spooked. "No, you look made by this planet. But what are you? Are there more of you?"
Sometime after asking the question, as the sun went down, still within sight of his school, Luke found himself on the block where he lived, in full night, walking towards his house. While it was clear that more than a few minutes had passed, he suspected it was not yet late. And he wondered at the mysterious animal he'd come upon during what should have been an uneventful walk home.
Chapter 2 - Traha and Burblehoot converse
As usual, Traha stood with her family. They were all still as trees, sunk deep in a state they called the share-trance, attending to the warm glow of a star known on Earth as Gliese 667 C, their minds intently focused on other worlds. Traha, in a late stage of the long exploratory learning phase of her kind's life-cycle, was studying.
Of all the planets Traha had investigated directly, the Lagu world was by far the most interesting. Half a million years ago, when Traha's ancestors began clumsily attempting to initiate contact with intelligent life beyond their own star system, the Lagu had been among the first to respond with a greeting. And as Traha's people further evolved the psychic capacities which all space-faring species understood to be a prerequisite for interstellar travel, various Lagu had freely shared their knowledge, and even helped with the great Tree explorer Nrix's physical visit to their planet. But all of that was ancient history.
Presently, the Lagu world was interesting to Traha mostly because her best friend was a Lagu. Strictly speaking, the Lagu had neither names nor titles, but Traha called her friend Burblehoot -- after its hallmark exclamation -- and Burblehoot didn't seem to mind. They'd started to communicate because both of them had been looking into the way small changes in solar activity might impact the distribution of nutrients carried by a planet's trade winds. After several months, sharing information on this subject gave way to sharing information about their lives in general, and they'd kept the habit up. The connection had made Traha one of her kind's foremost experts on the Lagu -- which Traha took pride in, but no one else much cared about -- as well as provided Burblehoot with great insight into how best to go about locating places where nutrients might begin accumulating if certain celestial events were to occur.
Today's chat began in typical fashion. "Traha? It is I, in this place," said Burblehoot. "Today was an exciting day. I found a sick bee! And one of the Copy Manglers found me. A young one physically saw and greeted me!"
"Hi Burblehoot," Traha greeted. "What of your local atmosphere? Did your star's recent minor flare impact airborne particulates in your region?"
"Oh lets see." Then, after a brief pause, "There's a bit less sulfur and a bit more phosphor in the air than usual."
"Could that difference explain the sick bee?" Traha asked, leaping at the chance to learn something of the Lagu world's bees, which she knew almost nothing about.
"The difference is small," Burblehoot answered thoughtfully. "It would not itself cause the illness I saw, which appeared as a systemic immune issue caused by nutrient deficiency, combined with a parasitic infection which could not have taken hold in a healthy bee. But there may be some less direct relationship between the creature's illness and the tiny change in our local air chemistry. I will have to pursue the matter further."
The last was her cue to change the subject. "And what of the Copy Mangler? That's what you call those invasive monkeys, right? I thought you shared the planet with this species; that the Lagu had been in communication with them for ages. And aren't at least some of my people seeing things through those animals' eyes right now, having learned from you that they are safe to learn from directly? So why is it important that this young one saw you?"
Though just making conversation, Traha could tell the friendly inquiry had struck a sore spot. Hints of dismay and confusion colored Burblehoot's end of the psychic link in an unmistakable way.
"Much has changed since you and I last spoke of this species. It is true that some of them can communicate with the Lagu, but these are fewer and fewer," Burblehoot answered. "And even of these, almost none know us in physical form. To them, we're just disembodied spirits. As are any of your kind who might be in communication with them. The Copy Manglers see us as imaginary, and their own imaginary spirits as real, and are too primitive to hold both kinds of spirits alongside one another in their thinking. If they ever found out where we live they'd wreck our habitats, and then try to force us to live in mangled copies of our habitats, or worse -- mangled copies of their habitats. Of course, they are interesting enough, and we're happy to share the planet with them. But they're also an invasive species as bad as any of the intelligent blights which once plagued your world. And one of them saw me! It is a cause for great worry."
Traha had never sensed this level of intensity from her friend before. While it was a little frightening, it was also intriguing. To focus her thoughts while hopefully soothing Burblehoot, Traha introduced more of her sun's warm glow into the communication channel before proceeding. "If all Copy Manglers are not the same, and you say this one greeted you? Well if it greeted you then perhaps it is capable of real communication, and you could find it in i-space and discover its intentions?"
"Thank you for the generous glow," Burblehoot responded, acknowledging her gesture. "However, it is too risky for me to interact further with this animal at this time." Then, after a pause that could be read as mild embarrassment, "The problem is that in the excitement at having been greeted by this Copy Mangler's mind directly -- the young thing stood before me, and could see me, which was very novel -- I may have given it somewhat more information than was strictly necessary. In theory, it has all the information it needs to contact me directly now. So even if I avoid the thing, it may yet cause me trouble."
This was all new territory for Traha. Though she'd glided alongside the perceptual centers of many of the Lagu world's large mammals -- primates included -- at one time or another, she could not recall having ever given this Copy Mangler species much thought one way or another. Based on what Burblehoot was saying, this would have to change if she was to be prepared for their next conversation.