Hello....
The reason I've been away so long this time is, I've been working on prequel to my Rat Queen series. At the same time as a prequel, it's also a sequel to one of my short stories, The Last Shall be First. You'll find that in my collection, The Wrong Time.
The short story is about a group of orphans in a home that's being transplanted to a new planet. Because of a mishap and a miss calculation, time dilation works in mysterious ways. You can get The Wrong Time by signing up to my newsletter. If you're reading this on a PC, there should be a link on the right. If you're on a smartphone, you can click "View Web Version" at the bottom of the page, and then look on the right. Or, buy it direct here.
The new story is about another group of people moving to the same planet 200 years later, where the descendants of the orphans are living a simple peaceful life. The new arrivals are refugees from a planet that was hit by a comet. The planet, named Grand Central World, is a major hub for humanity in the galaxy. Twenty large ships, each capable of carrying 1000 passengers, are sent to twenty locations on the planet. However because of communications problems, they are not able to get the pick-up coordinates. One of the main characters is the captain of a ship, who decides to land at the first city they see, and fill the ship to capacity. That city is Motown, which is probably the least desirable city, the slum of the planet. So, from a planet of interstellar bankers, galaxy-renown celebrities and captains of industry, that's the group that arrives on the Planet Ron. In that group are people with hearts of gold as well as some of the most evil people you could find: a saintly priest, the scientist that first predicted the comet fall but was disbelieved and disgraced, a couple of street kids, an autistic savant child, some Nazis, a paedophile, a gangster/slum-lord, some business types who simply don't want to settle down to a simple life like the natives, and many others in between. I'm having fun writing it.
All this takes place 100 years or so before most of the events described in The Rat Queen. I will need to change the name of one of the planets referred to in The Last Shall Be First, just to make it compatible with the Rat Queen series.
If you want to read The Rat Queen, the link for that will also be on the right (or by clicking on "web version").
