Aurura Rescue Summary

            The summer of 2024, when Solar Cycle 25 reaches its highest level of solar wind activity, is a time of auroras and adventure for Marty Clark, high school graduate, and her former tutor, Cy Riverton, age 18, a physics and math prodigy entering the master's program at the university.

            For Cy, the hike to Dead Man's Drop Cliff means gathering information to solve the toughest physics problem he has ever faced: How did his friend, Eddie Burrows, disappear from there during 2024 Spring Break and end up in Pennsylvania in the year 1857?

            Marty joins the hike to spend time with Cy, someone she hopes will someday be more than a friend, just days before she is to leave on a two-month history immersion tour. She has no idea just how immersed in history she will shortly become.

            As a joke, Marty calls Cy's cell number while on Dead Man’s Drop Cliff. That starts an adventure through time that takes her from 1748 western Pennsylvania to 1758 Maryland where the fox terrier, Hunter, joins her. She befriends a Lenni Lenape woman, Green Corn, and stays with an English colonial woman, Maggie. She must rely on her wits as she is threatened by tribal warriors and British colonists alike.

            Only after Marty disappears does Cy realize how much she means to him. Unlike Eddie, Marty’s cell has rechargeable solar batteries, which he believes is key to getting her back. He communicates with Marty using text messages as they work to solve the physics involved with her travel back through time.

            Because law enforcement is already suspicious of him due to his involvement with Eddie, Cy decides his best hope for helping Marty is for him to keep her disappearance a secret. Their efforts become more urgent as FBI Special Agent Lee Hardin, refuses to “cold case” Eddie's disappearance and pursues Cy relentlessly.

            Cy and Marty race against time and across eras in an effort to use the power of auroras to become reunited before it is too late for both of them.

e-Book on Amazon

Aurora Rescue is now available as an eBook on amazon.com. You can find it at the following link:
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http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004A157GW/ref=cm_sw_r_fa_dp_H7HZmb13NY9TJ
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Or, you can click on the link on the right of my page.
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You can also download a Kindle reader for PC, iPhone, iPod Touch, BlackBerry, iPad and Android from this page if you do not already own a Kindle.
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Do you want to read the first two and a half chapters for free? Click the link on my Aurora Rescue page on Amazon. I hope you enjoy it so much you will want to buy my book to read the rest.
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I loved writing this novel ~~ I hope you enjoy reading it!

Cover Art for Aurora Rescue

In The Mail

Cover letter, one-page synopsis, manuscript, SASE and SASP in the mail--two of them to two different publishers. One was sent Friday, the other today. Until I hear something, on to my next writing project -- either Armitage or the development of the G.O.A.L.S./Jennie Graves series -- details to follow on "Books by Robyn Echols" at www.robynechols.blogspot.com.

Just as a weird little aside -- one of the reasons I like to watch "Ice Road Truckers" with my husband sometimes is occasionally they slip in a shot of an aurora flashing across the darkened sky.....

And the Final-Final Is.....

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81,300 words. 278 double-spaced 12 pt. typewritten pages.

I am finished -- again -- after how many rewrites? But, yes, I am happy with this one. I am writing up my submissions forms and preparing my letters for submitting to L.D.S. publishers.

Yup! You read it right.


I had not considered this avenue very seriously before. I was not interested in promoting this book to an exclusive L.D.S. audience even though I consider my work very appropriate for this group. After looking into their websites and seeing book reviews of what they are publishing, I liked what I saw. I started digging deeper into publishing guidelines.

I am still hoping for mass-market exposure and sales. It appears that several L.D.S. publishers will fit that bill if they take on my novel.

With no agent, it means I will not receive an advance. Most of these publishers are "pay as you go," meaning I need to wait until the sales come in to receive any royalties. I can live with that.

Here goes!

Series Of Changes

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I have decided that the easy part of writing a novel is to get the story down on paper (aka computer). The hard part is to prepare it for marketing. At least, that has been the case with Aurora Rescue.

I just wrote the story as it came to me without thought of word count. For one thing, when I first started writing, I could not conceive writing too many words for my story. I have edited this manuscript several times, and I still find misspells and phrases I want reworded. I was so proud when I got this thing from 148,000 words down to a word count of 106,635.

However, I have contacted several agents, and the rejections keep coming back. Me and my analytical mind keeps looking at the situation and asking, "What might be turning them off? Is it because I am new? Is it my writing style? Is it the plot or characters? What?"

So, back to the drawing board a little. After looking at several agents' Young Adult genre wants for "Edgy" YA, meaning, let's have some drugs, sex and abuse thrown into the plot, I thought of redoing the book more for the Middle-age/Tween market. When I started looking into guidelines, I found YA guidelines along with them. After going through several sources, I have decided this is still a Young Adult novel.

This is more of a futuristic urban fantasy/science fiction adventure story. It turns out that genre fiction for Young Adults, which is what this is, is a lot shorter than what I could get away with for an adult novel. Right now, it is an epic novel, very hard to market in the current publishing climate.

And, that is after I cut off the part I was going to originally write into this book. That section later was designated Book 2. Now it is Book 3, Aurora Recover. Why the change? Because, in order to fit my story into the YA genre guidelines of between 60,000 to 75,000 words, the Kezia story needs to be its own separate book--Book 2, Aurora Redress. (I chose that title to be a play on words for more than one purpose.)

Marty in the colonial world of 1748 and 1758 is enough for a stand-alone book. That is how I feel I need to rewrite it before I query any more agents.

I have already tentatively separated the two sections of the book. I had to rearrange some of the Cy and Lee Hardin chapters to make Rescue work. I am still toying with the idea of changing Marty's age to 16 and Cy's age to 17, making Eddie and Andrea closer friends of them both and maybe involving Marty's younger brother Jason more. I will think on that a bit. My biggest challenge will be to come up with a satisfying ending for a stand-alone book that will also allow me to use the closing scene as a jump-off for the next book.

Right now, without rewrites, I ended up with the new Aurora Rescue at 61,547 words--right in the ballpark. The Kezia section weighed in at 45,337 words, but there is a lot more I can do with that story.

So, I am beyond a quintology. If this group of stories gets sold, I have enough adventures planned, including a trip into a dystopian future, to make it a series.

Bite the Bullet

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I am going to have to "bite the bullet", as the expression goes, and fork over the money to buy Microsoft Word for my new laptop. Yes, you can open a Word document in Open Office. No, you can not transfer files interchangeably between the two programs and expect the formatting to hold.

I even tried to save my files in Rich Text Format, which both programs open, and still the formatting went all whacko. When I tried to correct it, I lost my paragraph indents.

So, now I am once again working on my full manuscript in Word, going back through it to not only edit excess, check spelling and grammar, etc., but to be sure all my paragraph indentations, quote marks and other formatting are where I want them.

All this transferring file formats back and forth--not to mention trying the copy and paste to and from the body of emails--has resulted in dropped letters and other anamolies. I know I have been through the first part of my manuscript--the part I need to send to agents--many times. Some of those errors that I worked on today are so obvious, I know I would have caught if they had been my typos. That was before all the file type and computer swapping. But, I fear, some of my sample pages have gone out with errors that will not doubt turn some agents off.

Whoops!

Some literary agents are agents because they love to read. Others, I get the feeling, are closet English professors who consider themselves the grammar and spelling police. Hopefully, my sample pages on which there are a couple of goofs due to my formatting problems of transferring Word files between RTF and Open Office will end up in the hands of the former kinds of agents who look more at the story and understand the little typos are the reason we have copy-editors.

Anyways, I am doing myself a favor and sticking to one version of one brand of software that will transfer text files cleanly from one computer to the other and will produce a clean Rich Text Format document that will copy cleanly into the body of an email. Time to go software shopping.

Oh, by the way, I am down to 107,104 words and not finished with this final edit.