The first two volumes in the Teristaque series are finally ready for purchase. You can read them right now if you’d like, or if you can wait a week. The kindle editions of Kal’s Fate will be free and Kal’s Quandary will be 99 cents. The sale will last through 12/21/21-12/25/21 (Merry Christmas!).
If you have been keeping up with the series and already own parts 1 through 8, part 9 can be purchased here.
This has been my longest running writing project. Part 1, Kal’s Fall, was published before I knew what I was doing, even before I could afford an editor. However, Kal’s Fall had done something for me that no other story had done before that. It got me my first sale, not just one or two, but a dozen. I was thrilled and felt like a success. Up to then, if a story had sold, it was because someone I knew bought it. These sales were strangers who decided to take a chance on li’l ol’ me.
However, followed by the high of seeing my sales numbers sky rocket to the moon (okay, so I could pay for a cup of coffee with that first royalty check), I felt instant regret. See, at the time, I was writing short stories, and challenged myself to produce one a month for a year. Kal’s Fall was baked in that challenge. So here I was selling people a story for 99 cents for the equivalent of the first chapter of something much bigger.
So, I wrote more, Kal’s Truth (which was based on a dream I had and Kal’s Fall was a preamble to get me to where I could write about the dream). Then came Hayden’s Mistake because I wanted to write more about Kal’s homeworld because I felt as if I left it too early. Then Kal’s Revenge, and so forth. I dropped Kal’s Fall to permafree because I knew more about writing and didn’t want people to pay 99 cents for what felt to me like a preview.
Finally, here I am in 2021, still thinking about the story. Still pounding out pages. I know where it’s going, but I don’t know how it will end. Maybe it will be 12 parts or 542. I don’t know when or if I’ll ever be done writing this series. This hits on everything I love about space opera science fiction.
What brought upon this repackaging and rebranding of this series was when I began reading it out loud on my podcast per listener request. I noticed that the first few stories really needed some rewriting. When I compared Kal’s Fall (Part 1) to Sarge’s Secret (Part 8), I noticed how much I had really grown as a writer. I wanted to bring the caliber of my writing now to the stories published as far back as 2014. So while Kal’s Fall felt like it took a chainsaw to edit, the stories got easier to handle up until Sarge’s Secret where I changed a few words here and there, mainly out of preference.
I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.
Thanks for being here.
Time Burrito 