Guest Author ~ Michael Offutt

Autumn has arrived in New York, and Jordan Pendragon attends his first classes as a freshman at Cornell. Born with a brilliant mathematical mind, he balances life as a research assistant with that of a student athlete.

But Jordan also has a quest. He must find the Black Tower, a monolithic edifice housing a thing that defines the very structure of the universe. Jordan believes it is buried somewhere in Antarctica under miles of prehistoric ice.

October finds Jordan earning a starting position with the Cornell hockey team. But a dark cloud gathers over his rookie season. Unexplained deaths, whispers of a cannibal cult, a prophecy, and a stone known only as the Oculus, cast a shadow over his athletic ambitions. It is the start of a terrifying journey down a path of mystery, murder, and to a confrontation with an Evil more ancient than the stars.

Free short story that’s a lead-in to this book series: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/236636

Enter for a chance to win one of six signed copies of Oculus, open worldwide, HERE

From Michael, the character background of Kolin Lightfoot:

I am by no means the first writer that has used assassins in a fiction book. However, rather than make one a villain, I chose to make one a hero. The particular killer I’m talking about is named Kolin Lightfoot, and he has a background that I meticulously thought about while I created him.

Kolin speaks with an accent that echoes the one you hear Brits use on Earth. Because he’s not an actual “earthling” I won’t go so far to say to you in this post that he is completely British. But he’s close enough that it should be apparent that’s what he sounds like in the telling of the story.

Now for those who have read Slipstream or my short story “The Insanity of Zero,” Kolin is pretty much established as an Avalonian assassin with an ambiguous age that lies somewhere between 80 and 100 years old (perhaps a little older). However, in a novella that I published on the Nifty Archive entitled W.R.A.I.T.H., I explored further the background of this mysterious fellow. As a disclaimer, W.R.A.I.T.H. is a free read on a gay pornographic website (NSFW) but contains very little pornography itself until the last two chapters. There is no sex between characters…merely a very tense sexual situation brought on by very dark circumstances that befall the characters in the story.

I wrote W.R.A.I.T.H. from material I had to cut out from the original book Slipstream. Those of you who are writers, know that word count is the death knell of the traditionally published. Even though I’m with a small press, Slipstream minus the novella was at the maximum cap of 120,000 words. With W.R.A.I.T.H., we were looking at a 180,000 word manuscript, which is simply “unpublishable.” So W.R.A.I.T.H. is kind of an “alternative timeline” that branches off from the time when Jordan first arrives on Avalon and to them getting a ride into Kilvarough City for the first time. The whole story takes place in “The Stygian Waste.”

In this novella that I published online, Kolin is revealed to be a result of genetic engineering. Z.E.R.O. at some point after the apocalypse created a robot and gave it a directive to engineer a perfect man and a perfect woman. Then it sent the robot back into time before the apocalypse happened in order to work on this directive. It got a lab set up, took on the best and the brightest for its staff, and weathered the storm that followed the day the world died. This “brain trust” made a lot of mistakes that resulted in the creation of some of the monsters. But they did finally create a perfect human male and they called him Adam. All he needed was an Eve. So Kolin’s real name is “Adam” and the reason why he’s such a badass is because he’s been genetically manipulated to be this way.

Anyway, the robots plan was simple. Create one Adam, and one Eve, and then send those two into orbit in a spaceship that it had engineered and kept beneath the laboratory. Inside the laboratory, there’s an Armageddon button that when pressed, will basically plunge the world into a nuclear winter, killing off all life on the surface. Once the world is reset, robots would follow a directive and reseed the earth and the oceans with life. The two humans in the spaceship would land and repopulate the Earth with other humans because their D.N.A. and genetic makeup is flawless. Their offspring would not themselves develop mutations to their D.N.A. for many generations to come, so brother and sister could essentially interbreed. And thus, the human race could be reborn.

But this isn’t what happened. Kolin escaped from the lab with no real memory of whom he is, and we meet up with him in Slipstream as he befriends Jordan and later becomes his boyfriend. But make no mistake, he’s genetically perfect, and that will come into play at some point in the chronicles.

To purchase “Oculus” or to know more about the series “A Crisis of Two Worlds” please follow the link below:

http://slckismet.blogspot.com/p/books.html

About the Author:

Michael Offutt writes speculative fiction books that have science fiction, LGBT, and paranormal elements. His first book, “Slipstream” has received some critical acclaim and was published by Double Dragon in the spring. The sequel, “Oculus” came out in November 2012. He has one brother, no pets, and a few roots that keep his tree of life sufficiently watered. By day, he works for the State of Utah as a Technical Specialist. By night, he watches lots of t.v., writes, draws, and sometimes dreams of chocolate.

Michael Offutt graduated from the University of Idaho in 1994 with a Bachelor’s degree in English.

He keeps a blog and would appreciate a visit or two even if all you want to do is say hi.

Website: http://slckismet.blogspot.com/p/books.html

Art relating to books: http://slckismet.blogspot.com/p/my-artwork.html

Blog: http://slckismet.blogspot.com

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3099632.Michael_Offutt

Twitter: @MichaelOffutt

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Slipstream/164452693676933