Terrestrial Affairs now available

So I've got a new novella out.  As you can see (and might have read in the title of this post), it's called Terrestrial Affairs, and it's a Space Corps story.  This is significant, because I've been working on Space Corps as a storytelling concepts for, well, decades now, but it's taken me a while to start producing material for it, material that you don't have to look under a rock to find.  So on one level, that's what Terrestrial Affairs is, a short work that helps me explore Space Corps' actual potential, and helps readers potentially discover it.

But it's a good story, too (hopefully).  It concerns the emissary of an alien invasion suffering a catastrophic systems failure in his ship, which leads to a crash-landing.  He all but falls to earth in the backyard of an isolated young woman.  Immediately, the authorities come sniffing, both among humans and the alien's own boss.  So it becomes a thorny situation, and to make matters more complicated, the young woman kind of falls instantly in love with the alien, and...

Well, anyway, I think it's a pretty good story.  It also includes a subplot of the story I actually set out to write, which had been intended to be entirely unrelated to genre storytelling, the various offspring of a rotten man, all with different mothers, converging on a town called Wendale.  When I was writing Terrestrial Affairs, I realized Wendale fit right in.  It becomes a story the young woman tells, and then sort of becomes the coda of Terrestrial Affairs itself.

Kind of the thing that most interested me about this project was that I made an effort to make a real cover.  Not just a template that used elements I wouldn't have otherwise included, but creative choices I made deliberately, all the way around.  It'll at least look pretty, in other words. 

I also include a brief sketch of the complete Space Corps saga, plus two short stories I'd written for my WriteClubCo group over in Colorado Springs, efforts that helped make this particular story a reality in a roundabout way, when I was beginning to give myself permission to let Space Corps loose in the world.

If you're interested, you can find paperback and ebook editions for purchase.