Zero Hour hot gay sci fi by Jordan Castillo Price

Be careful what you say in public…

One randomly generated prompt and two and a half years later, I've got me a novel. A novel way the heck outside my comfort zone, but a novel nonetheless.

On December 2, 2007's Packing Heat, I fired off a randomly generated prompt from Seventh Sanctum, just as an example, mind you. And as I kept talking on the podcast, the idea nagged and nagged at me, and I thought, "You know, I think I could actually write that."

The original prompt was, "This is a gross-out comedy. The story is about an organized spy, a comic, and an artificial life form. It starts out in a coffee shop. The religion of the world will turn out not to be what it seems. "

I've achieved everything except the "gross out comedy/comic" aspect. The main gross-out part happened when Ernest encountered the Reclaim machine, but that was more horrific and faith-shattering than funny. And the comedy is pretty subdued; it manifests mainly in the way that language has eroded to the point where people can no longer communicate, and instead hide from their employers so they can sit around playing Tetris all day.

Although I read SF, not exclusively, but fairly regularly, I'm dismayed to see my handling of the science aspects of the story. Even though I read up on things like degaussing coils and radiation sickness, I felt like a bit of an impostor whenever something scientific came up. Many of the concepts are influenced by great books and films such as Logan's Run, Uglies, The Company Series, and Soylent Green.

Despite my clumsiness in the genre, I think there's a core of something likeable in the story. It turned into a post-apocalyptic quest, and my hero, Ernest, is one of the bravest, most decent, least screwed up protagonists I've ever dreamt up (even if he does enjoy lying a bit too much.) It was always a joy to write from his point of view.

I'll leave this first draft of Zero Hour up online for whoever wants to read it. I'll be editing the story—because I kept getting ideas of things I wanted to go back and change, but I couldn't!—and releasing it in both ebook and paperback once it's finished, likely by the end of the year.

I've never written anything over such a long span of time. I'm a little misty-eyed about saying goodbye to it, however I can't wait to launch it into the world with the glorious PL Nunn cover I commissioned almost two years ago!

Hopefully the grand experiment we'll be trying with Zero Hour's replacement, The Starving Years, will yield another interesting story. And I'll just have to deal with it being outside my comfort zone!

ZERO HOUR is a serialized story published monthly in Jordan's newsletter, JCP News.

Curious? Read online. It's free!

Look for Zero Hour in ebook and paperback with cover art by PL Nunn in 2010.

 

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