Derin Edala

Patreon bonus story: Flight traininig

It was her first day of practical field training, and Sienna had to admit, she was nervous. She balled her hands, willed herself not to fidget, and looked up at the flight instructor.

Elat Den Hol, the tallest natural-born Lunari that Sienna had ever seen, scowled down at her. “You’re the new one, huh?”

“Yessir! Sienna Kae Jin Tep Kel Tan Hol Ap Sik, sir!”

“Hol, huh? Well, I hope you’re not expecting any special treatment, cousin.”

“No, sir! No, I wou...

3: Orbits of metal and plastics

Sometimes I look back on my life and try to figure out exactly how I ended up on the edge of charted space with the Princess, outrunning the authorities. It is not, I suppose, a difficult question; every step in the sequence makes sense. I chose my Template because he caught my interest. I followed the Princess because my Template did. I was here, on a poorly maintained biohauler that was dangerously unfit for the flight-and-raiding work to which we were pressing it and inefficiently over-out...

174: CONTACT

“I don’t like it,” Celti tells me later. “Trading that tech gives her actions legitimacy. We could have a civil war on our hands.”

“Over a couple of unsanctioned unethical science experiments?” I’ve been an unwilling test subject enough times that I barely remember feeling the level of outrage in Celti’s voice. “Everyone who’s heard of what she did to me so far has reacted like she’s been going around acidifying fishponds. I don’t think you have to worry about ...

What should the next derinwrites web serial be?

Choose a story to run concurrently with Charlie MacNamara, once Time to Orbit: Unknown is finished.

I've removed a few of the options because they're either not something I want to run concurrently with CM or they're not ready/I'm not able to get excited about them right now. Sample chapters for all these options are available on patreon.

The poll is multiple choice, so vote for as many of your favourites as you like.

Sample chapter: Child of a Wandering Star

You’re not supposed to do it, of course, but it’s not unheard of for parents to try to ensure good destinies for their daughters by timing their conception carefully. Most hatchings take place under somewhat clear skies, so the gods that bear witness to the young larvae and claim them for their paths are stars. And stars are notoriously regular in their habits, for the most part; if you want a sturdy and caring daughter born under Zimma, or a strong leader under Yorlu, then it’s all a m...

Sample chapter: The Princess of Ruby Island

Jessica wasn’t sure that she liked her niece’s new boyfriend. It wasn’t necessarily the way he spent the whole party lurking in the corner on his phone – he didn’t know anybody except Steph very well, and frankly it was kind of bizarre for Steph to have invited a guy she’d been seeing for a month to her aunt’s 40th birthday, of course he was going to be shy and hide behind his phone, and Jessica’s mother muttering about him ‘being rude’ clearly didn’t remember what it wa...

2: Shanghai

The interpreter led the way down the tube. I followed closely, taking the opportunity to study them. They must have been watching me, too, because even though I was kind of drifting between hatches rather than actually walking, the interpreter’s faux-arms and legs moved in a noticeably more humanlike manner over our journey. The spiders, despite their wings, didn’t seem to be able to fly very well; probably the air pressure. They instead clung to each other, and used the interpreter’s h...

1: Fuck Photography

As any decent stargazer will tell you, you can’t do it in the city. You can’t do it in a town either, really, not properly. Too much light pollution. No; to properly see the stars, you have to wait for a moonless night and head out far from any electric light source and wait for your eyes to adjust and then, then you can see the majesty of the heavens.

I’m a stubborn person, so I had to have casual beers with three different groups of over-enthusiastic stargazers and amateur astro...

Sample Chapter: Silverbane

“Okay, that’s the end of our session. See you next month, Jane.” The old woman turned and walked out of the room without a second glance.

“Jade,” Jade muttered under he breath, but the trust was, she preferred this woman to the previous guy who’d run these jobseeker meetings. He’d been so enthusiastic about trying to get everyone into a job, pushing people to apply for every job on every website and piling the pressure on any time someone tool a moment to breathe.

An...

Sample Chapter: The Cinder Boy

Of the wizard tower’s fourteen floors, Owen’s favourite was the library. He couldn’t read the grand tomes stacked in their towering shelves, couldn’t make out a single word of the letters that the wizard spent long hours reading and writing at his heavy desk, but that didn’t matter. It was far from the richest-looking room in the tower, unless you counted the immense value of the books themselves; the worn carpets and faded curtains were nothing compared to the luxurious fabrics and...

173: AI

“Okay, look,” I say. “There’s something you should probably know.”

I explain the synnerve experiment. The Leadership stare at me with uniformly horrified expressions.

“We’re so, so sorry that that happened to you,” Tana says. “We should have picked up on what was happening. That should never have happened to you.”

“Is that why you were so upset about your friends getting treatment?” Spruggent asks. “Did you think they were being experimented on, too...

Sample Chapter: Inner Life

The first thing I learn upon coming into existence is that I have no idea what sort of a creature I am. I have lineage memories of being dozens of different types of organisms, and none of them are anything like this.

There are a couple of possible reasons for that. Maybe the memories of this biochemistry, this nerve type, this body structure were simply not deemed worth passing on somewhere in my ancestry, the limited memory space needed for more critical things. Or, worryingly, this m...

Sample Chapter: Holy Light

The Rapture occurred in 2030, when God called His chosen up to heaven and seven years of Tribulation started. Of course, no one noticed.

Seven years of war and famine and disease is not, when you think about it, all that different to how life was beforehand. These things come in waves, and humanity absorbed it in waves. As for the Rapture itself, we’ve found very little record. We suspect that the handful of Raptured individuals, waking up intact in body and mind if not soul, were sim...

Options for the next web serial

Sample chapters for each option will be provided shortly, then a poll will go up so that patrons can vote on what web serial I should write next.

Inner Life

Nobody knows who they really are when they’re first born. But most people get time to figure it out, and when you’re a body-snatching alien parasite, you don’t get that luxury. The parasites that find themselves on the starship Jolly Codger don’t know what a human is, or what their...

Next steps for Derinwrites

So, the draft for Time to Orbit: Unknown is complete. The story is 183 chapters long and will continue to release on the website until completion.

At this stage, the plan is to have a Patreon vote, where all patrons get to decide which story I write and release next. However, there is a slight complication to this -- a popular option in these votes is the Charlie MacNamara series, an almost-finished series that I wrote for r/hfy before I started doing regular web serials. The plan, shou...