You ever get the feeling you don’t quite live by the same rules as the rest of people? Like…. You go to the same places and look at the same things, but what you’re interested in, what you remember, what makes your pulse pound isn’t…. quite… what people expect?

First, before I go any further, and because I tend to forget, I put No Man’s Land (all three VOLUMES — one YUGE book!) up for pre-sale. Indulge, me okay. And yes, No man’s land comes up later in the post, so, it’s RELEVANT. (I’m such a dorky self-promoter. I mean… my cats are better at this than I am.)

No Man’s Land, Chronicles of Lost Elly.

No Man’s Land
Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.

On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends— has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all.
Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction.
Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.

Volume 1
The Ambassador Corps has rules: you cannot know everything, don’t get horizontal with the natives, don’t make promises you can’t keep.
They’re a lot harder to follow when assassins are hunting you, your barbarian allies could kill you for the wrong word, and death lurks around every corner.
The unwritten rule? Never identify with the natives.
Skip’s already broken that one.
Now he’s racing against time to save his new friends from slavery—or worse—while dodging energy blasts and political intrigue. One crash-landed diplomat. A world of deadly secrets. And absolutely no backup.


Some rules are meant to be broken. Others will get you killed.

Right… Now a minor digression. There is another author who writes things set in in Shakespeare’s England. I can tell she’s done her research. Same setting. Same characters.

But the characters look completely different, and what I concentrated on she ignored, and vice versa.

And you know what? I very much doubt she’s the weirdo. Because I’m the weirdo. I’m always the weirdo.

For instance, close your eyes and think of Denver. What would you like to do and see in Denver?

You probably thought of the Denver Opera House. Maybe the Stadium, right? Oh, oh, hit some of the bars on 16th Street?

Bah. Me? I want to go to city park, and sit and wait for the lights to come on on the fountains. I want to go to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and take a slow stroll through the Hall of Life. Ooh, ooh, I want to go to the zoo, and spend an hour or six staring at the elephants. Then I’ll go to a late dinner at Pete’s kitchen, and top it off by hitting the botanic gardens early morning the next day, sitting by the Koi pond where the air is nice and cool and the fish are beautiful and lively.

Sigh. It’s not you. It’s me. No. I mean, it’s really me. I’m not right in the head. I… well… I look in the other direction.

I didn’t realize how much of a problem this could be until I was trying to get an AI to help me write the blurb for this book. Look, I didn’t even tell it the main character — the Earth-view character, as it was — is gay. I didn’t tell it that, because frankly if I did, it would start spazzing majorly over how wonderful the book was and what a blow for equality and–

It’s not. The character is gay — maybe. Look, he doesn’t even know anymore. That boy has problems. Okay, fine, that’s probably disrespectful. That there viscount has problems. And the least of his problems is figuring out precisely the gradations of what he likes to bump uglies with — and he becomes marooned in a world of hermaphrodites.

And–

Oh, yeah, you’ll never see it coming. The society is neat. Turns out that being absolutely self-sufficient and capable of doing it all on your own, and having pregnancy be a thing of very little account (though that has a price) means that social structures are really weird and everyone is super-prickly. Imagine a society of Regency Dowagers who are prone to duel each other over the wrong sniff at the wrong time.

And our boy Skip who is an hyper-competent hero is dropped in the middle of it and most of the time stays one step ahead of death.

His orientation? Their admittedly weird sexual conformation? Well, that’s super important, because it sets up the stakes. It makes everything meet and fit and work …. weirdly and dangerously.

Oh, take your minds out of the gutter, will yah. Yes, there is one sex episode in the book, and an allusion, and one rather obvious consequence. (Not in the first volume.) If you’re an adult you’ll know exactly what happened. If you’re a kid…. Or absent minded… no, you won’t.

As for anatomical descriptions, yeah, you get one, but you get one when one of our characters who is with Skip on a rescue mission has to serve as midwife (look, I’m not happy with that term, either, given everything, but acoucheur seems weird, okay? And doula is worse.) So we get a rather graphic description. Except it’s through Skip’s eyes, and he’s mostly going “ew ew ew ew ew” and looking away. Though you do get a sense for how things are arranged. (Third volume. No, not the birth referred to in the blurb. Another one. Horse nomads. Oh, yeah, let me tell you about the horse nomads. They are a completely messed up– WHAT?)

As was, the AI kept trying to push things on me about “The crown of the hermaphrodite king!”

Look, guys, yeah Brundar is an hermaphrodite, but he has other issues, okay, and they’re sort of more pressing. For one, someone murdered his birth parent. For another, there are aliens in his world. And for another one, this weird guy keeps calling him The Blooming of the Peas. (Peaseblossom. I told you Skip was weird.)

The AI also assured me that the fact the world is full of hermaphrodites is a very big point because gender issues are hot right now. (Apparently hot means “We’ve had enough. The issue is actually burned and stuck to the bottom of the pan. And inedible.)

It matters. Of course it matters. If it didn’t matter, I’d not have put it in. But the fact is that it matters like Skip’s preferring the company of gentlemen (or being strangely unbothered by penis (penises? peni? Not that it matters, I don’t think I use the word once in the book. No, I also don’t use member, manhood, or other euphemisms.) matters because it sets up how he reacts to the insanity. But…

In the end they’re humans. Granted imaginary humans in and impossibly crazy situation.

Still, they do what humans do. Fight to survive. Care for those they love. And those who are with them. And those who save their lives. They meet, give mutual support, save each other’s lives, try to right injustice and defend the innocent.

My beta readers’ verdict was that weirdly (WEIRDLY. PFUI. It’s like they never met me!) given the characters, the world, the setup, this is a bizarrely wholesome story.

Would it be the same written by someone else?

Well, depends on who the someone else is. If it’s, let’s say, Dave Freer, no. It won’t be the same. It will manage to be even more wholesome, and the biological in-jokes will make you giggle to yourself at the most inopportune times for weeks.

If it’s your normal, average, run of the mill sf writer — as normal, average and run of the mill as my people ever come — well, it could be good. Perhaps very good. But it will be all about the sex, the gender, the precise definition of everything. And there will be several episodes of what goes where and goes out of there, and goes where again, and–

You get the idea.

Is my way better? I doubt it. I mean, if I am so smart why am I not rich?

But it is mine. There was only one story I could tell with that setup, and it’s in that book.

And as weird as it is, it is mine.

Because I’m a weirdo. And I ain’t gonna apologize for it.