Jack and Ann have taken me on a great adventure full of mystery and incredible technology, I hope you'll join us. I know you have a lot of reading choices, but if you have space left in your literary adventure cup, please join Jack and Ann as 2021 turns into 2022, happy reading!
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The demon whispers inside Jack's mind. "They are not worthy, they are cattle, these new humans you covet. The so-called creator has betrayed you, replaced you with these organic imitations. Slaughter them all." It's funny, not in a ha-ha funny way, but a sad, my madness doesn't make sense type of way, Jack thinks, because wasn't he human? Worse still, the voice comes with impulses that are hard to resist. Violence usually ensues. That's why he joined the military. A way to channel his urges into mind-numbing physical effort and war. It works for a time. But alcohol and fighting can only carry on for so long. Finally, he realizes, his only way out is suicide. But when he opens his eyes, he's in the In-Between. The creator has other plans for him, and she won't take no for an answer. Apparently, this isn't his first life and if he doesn't free her from her prison, it won't be his last. His curse is to be reborn without end, without rest, without memory. Only madness. Now Jack is on the run from forces he doesn't understand. It's a new world. The mundane replaced by ethereal artificial intelligence, spontaneous virtual realities, and homicidal bible salesmen. But the creator promises the demon's voice will disappear as soon as he finds the right girl, the right bond. After that, they just have to escape the clutches of those who hunt them, find the Isle of Song, and free the creator from her prison. Or maybe this time, in this life, Jack will figure out what true freedom is. Come along on this action-packed thriller as Jack fights to remember who he is, tries to end an eternal war, and atone for sins he doesn't remember...yet.
**OPEN NOVELLA CONTEST SHORTLIST**
Even if she is killed, she is never dead.
*****
She'd spent many, many years in the same body, getting used to her quirks, her mannerisms, learning how to survive through the ages. Yet Josephine wakes up one night and realizes she's been asleep for a century: it's now 2023, and her last memory was being on a boat with friends back in 1923. As an immortal woman--a Reborn--she can never truly die, but if mortally wounded or killed, her body disintegrates, and her essence roams for one hundred years before it creates a new body to inhabit.
If she slept for so long, it can only mean one thing: someone murdered her back on that boat, and now she needs to find out who and why.
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ONC entry based on prompt #2: "One night you woke from the dead. For you, you were gone mere seconds, for the world you were gone almost a century. How will you navigate this new world?"