Storm is coming...

As the dark clouds are taking the rule of the blue sky from the flaming sun, and as the heavy raindrops hit the ground Alex J. Cavanaugh new book comes to the selfs of the American bookstores.

 

The "CassaStorm" official release date is 17th September, so be prepared!

 

According to the author the third book will be last book of the Cassan series. I'm a little bit sad about it, because I very enjoyed the first two book, and I have high hopes toward the CassaStorm also. I hope a I won't be disapointed!

 

I had a personal question to Alex, about the third book, and I received the answer for it.

 

Will you plan to write one or two (or more) short novell in the Cassa-Universe?

I’ve thought about it and could easily do spinoff stories with several characters. At the moment, I am finished with the Cassan world though and if I continue writing, I will move on to something new.

 

 

CassaStorm

By Alex J Cavanaugh

From the Amazon Best Selling Series!

A storm gathers across the galaxy…

Commanding the Cassan base on Tgren, Byron thought he’d put the days of battle behind him. As a galaxy-wide war encroaches upon the desert planet, Byron’s ideal life is threatened and he’s caught between the Tgrens and the Cassans.

After enemy ships attack the desert planet, Byron discovers another battle within his own family. The declaration of war between all ten races triggers nightmares in his son, threatening to destroy the boy’s mind.

Meanwhile the ancient alien ship is transmitting a code that might signal the end of all life in the galaxy. And the mysterious probe that almost destroyed Tgren twenty years ago could return. As his world begins to crumble, Byron suspects a connection. The storm is about to break, and Byron is caught in the middle…

“With a talent for worldbuilding and a compelling cast of characters, Alex J. Cavanaugh combines high powered space battles and the challenges of family dynamics to provide readers a space opera with heart.”
- Elizabeth S. Craig, author of the Southern Quilting and Myrtle Clover mysteries

“CassaStorM is a touching and mesmerizing space opera full of action and emotion with strong characters and a cosmic mystery.” – Edi’s Book Lighhouse

“Cavanaugh creates such an unforgettable world, and these characters will stay with you long after their story is over.”
- Cassie Mae, author of Friday Night Alibi and How to Date a Nerd

$16.95 USA, 6x9 Trade paperback, 268 pages, Dancing Lemur Press, L.L.C.

Science fiction/adventure and science fiction/space opera

Print ISBN 9781939844002 eBook ISBN 9781939844019

$4.99 EBook available in all formats (Update: As I see the ebook format is available from 8th September at Amazon.com for $8.88.)

Find CassaStorm:

Barnes and Noble

Amazon
Amazon Kindle

Goodreads

 

About the author
Alex J. Cavanaugh has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and works in web design and graphics. He is experienced in technical editing and worked with an adult literacy program for several years. A fan of all things science fiction, his interests range from books and movies to music and games. Online he is the Ninja Captain and founder of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group. The author of the Amazon bestsellers, CassaStar and CassaFire, he lives in the Carolinas with his wife.

Website

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Comment on Alex’s blog this week for a chance to win a Cassa mug, mousepad, magnet, and swag!

Firefly

I have mixed feelings today, the day of the 10th aniversary of the first airing date of the cult-series, Firefly. We can be thankful for the FOX to ordering and sharing with us this great adventure. I liked almost every moment of the Firefly. But shame on you FOX for mixing the order of the show and after the dropping rates cancelling our entertainment!

I wasn't a big series-follower that time when I saw this one first. I was just a casual tv-viewer, who somedays watch a show or two. But the Firefly (and the Prison Break) was a real breakthrough... I became an addict for series. Most for the science fiction shows of course.

It wasn't an easy case, because I infected my wife as well. First she was unwilling to watch with me the first minutes but after she joined to me, and wanted to start over again. And after an episode she wanted to see another episode. It was crazy! We watched the whole season in a week. But after the last episode and the Serenity movie we both felt a big emptyness and a slight disappointment. We didn't want tbis end...

We wanted get back Mal, Jayne, Inara, Kaylee, River and the others back. The Firefly was a real milestone in our (my wife and me) relationship. We felt love into the sci-fi and/or sci-fantasy series, and our big journey continued with the Stargate, Stargate Atlantis, Battlestar Galactica and other shows as well. But this is another story to tell...

Take my love, take my land

Take me where I cannot stand

I don't care, I'm still free

You can't take the sky from me

Take me out to the black

Tell 'em I ain't comin' back

Burn the land and boil the sea

You can't take the sky from me

There's no place I can be

Since I found serenity

But you can't take the sky from me

Genre Favorites Blogfest

I deceided to participate my blogger-friend, the author of some great great books, Ninja Captain Alex J. Cavanaugh's actual blogfest, the Genre Favorites Blogfest. I'll try to use out the advantage of the local timezone and finish my post before the others. I've admit I was lazy to wrote it before, so I'm writting it now live, without any pre-schedule.

Favourite genre of MOVIE:

I knew as I looked to the first category it means very big problem to me, because I love more than 1 genre, but I have to choose 1 of them. At the first round I reduced my favourites to three: fantasy, sci-fi and based on comics. Maybe this third category doesn't exist so I deducted that one from the list. I'm still before the big decision because definatelly hard to vote one of my favourite. Maybe I'll break the rules when I say draw between fantasy and science fiction. Below you can see my reasons.

Fantasy: If you look into the past and try to find good - I mean really good - fantasy films you can find only one film (or filmseries) The Lord of the rings. But if you look in to the things deeper you can found other good films from the past. I have to mention only the classic, the one-and-only real Star Wars trilogy. It's a classic fantasy with knights, magic, valor and princess... but in space environment!

Sci-fi: I've admit I love the space and I love the science, but not every movie takes place in space means it's science-fiction (see Star Wars). I love the sci-fi movies when I have to thing about consequences of decisions, or think about the realisticness of the future. Sometimes I fell like we're already live in the future with great gadgets, but it's also cause a horrible feelings to. 

Favourite genre of MUSIC:

It was the easiest choice...

Rave: I still love rave music, and I can't explain why. Maybe about the rawness and the high BPM. These style really fast... Unfortuntely it's completely die to the 21st century, and the UK happy hardcore or much slower electronic musics are pure mockeries. I embeded one of my favourites:

Favourite genre of BOOKS:

I didn't allow myself the luxury to pick more than one favorite genre, so I choiced:
Fantasy: This genre give me the most pleasure and entertainment. I can completely switch-off my mind and I can imagine anything. While the sci-fi give some borders to a story, in the case of fantasy there are NO barriers. Luckily in genre of fantasy I can find the pulp-fiction and high-concept fantasy as well. I know I have to recite the name of great authors like Steven Erikson and George R. R. Martin, but as I sad I like the lighter books from authors like R. A. Salvatore or Elaine Cunningham. And I would be unfair if I have don't mention the writer of the mind-blowing Dark Tower series, Stephen King.

Guilty pleasure genre of movie:

It was also a hard decision... to choose a music genre (trance), or a book genre (sci-fi, detective stories or steampunk), but I choiced the previously mentioned
Comicbooks adaptions from movie category: At the past 3-5 years the comicbooks adaptations were the greatest hits to me. Due to the development of movie creating technologies these kind of films improved a lot, and we can believe these things can be real. We can see our childhood heroes on the big screens of movie theathers, and we don't think they're lames as we think the early Batman movies/series. Now we can believe Tony Start is a real person, Peter Parker able to walk on walls and the Avengers able to defend our planet at the end.
But I must admit the older comicbooks heroes have an ancient, nostalgic charm. We could love the old Batman and Superman with their underpants on their paints. And I still love the noir-feeling Sin City as the alternative history from the cold-war period of the Watchmen.

It was my post about my favorite genres. Maybe I should had found some other pictures and youtube videos to decorate the post, but I have to 5 hours left to early get up. So, maybe next time... ;)

Oh, I almost forgot. If you interested more about this blogfest and the other participants choices, then please visit will visit Alex J. Cavanaugh's blogpost!

Projects

I have admit I quite lazy about doing things. Mostly I like spent my sparetime with passive thing with watching series/film or reading books. But I'm running some projects pararell in my active sparetime, and I'd like to tell some words about them in my blog. I put it them different categories.

Boardgame

Because my whole family is a gameboad geek nest, it's almost obvious I'll try to do something like that. In my previous post I wrote about the bedtime tales spiced with a small portion roll/role-playing. I came to the conclusion I'd like to improve it further, with creating a map, with random events and 'children-friendly monsters'. It's a little bit funny, because many bad, horrible thing happens in the tales. There you can find hereos and the enemies of the heroes (villains, monsters, other bad things). There are many confrontations which have to solve with force or use of the cunningness of the mind. I'd like to implements these items and factors to my boardgame. I'm in the very beginning of it, but I have many good ideas and concepts.

Translation

At the past I translated many computer games from English to Hungarian. Translating things to my native language is not so hard thing, it only depends on the understanding of the original texts, and write them on Hungarian. Usually I have freedom enough to from the things as I'd like. There were some non-official translation (I did them voluntary without any payment from anyone) where I didn't translate everything words by words, and I Hungarising the texts not translating.

My last official translation was the Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, which is an Diablo-clone. The creators of the game were German, which means the original texts were German too. First the developers translated the texts to English then sent them to the translators of many countries to modify the texts to their language such as French, Italian or Hungarian. It was interesting because we got the original German texts are well, and we saw there are many difference compared to the English. So we had some hard, cumbersome time with the translation of the game, but the final product was really great. At the end my colleauge and me translated nearly 1 million English words to Hungarian.

Unfortunatelly the Hungarian distributor didn't agreed the term of distributing of the expansion of the game, so you can't buy Sacred 2 Ice & Blood and Gold from the local shops. We didn't get any support from the developers of th troubled company. We had offered them to translated the texts of the expansion for free, if we got translation tools but they refused.

But a German team wanted to pimp the game for the fans. They added to the game new monsters, quests and texts which means they've got a translation tool. Fortunatelly I got it from them, so I can export and import the texts I like. Now I'm at the 2/3 of the texts of the expansion. I hope I'll finish it this year.

(Here you can find my 'translategraphy')

Novell

I deceided to participate a novell-writing contest. I have to write a short novell with 5000-20000 words in fantasy or sci-fi genre, but in western style (like Firefly). In the story itself must be a sheriff, a priest and a dynamite. I almost finished with it, but there lot things to do with it. BUT, I knowing myself well enough to rewrite the story every time, when I look into it.

Am I geek enough?

Sometimes I just wondering how geek I am. I don't know, I'm very unsure the answer. Maybe I just put on the wrong questions. Am I a geek? Or I just want to be a geek? Or not?

First, I love any kind of electronic gadgets. I'm so lucky to be an owner of iPad 2, and I have admit I love it! But it isn't jailbreaked (yet?). As I have a smartphone with android OS, which is not rooted (yet?). Maybe I'm not really geek or not brave enough to be a real gadget-geek. (Sadly, I have to mention last week somebody stole my wife smartphone.) My love towards to any kind of computer and computer games is a well-known thing. I love look in to the case of PC's and identifying, upgrading the parts of it.

At my Hungarian blog I many times wrote about boardgames. It add an anothet geek-factor to my personality. 10 years ago I said the boardgames are stupid things and they just for kids/children. It's not true! Maybe a boardgame just a game as the name suggest it us, but it means great fun. I bought dozens of boardgames at the past five year, and nowday I live them better than the computer games. Unfortunatelly I haven't got chance to play with many geekish one as Battlestar Galactica or the famous Arkham Horror, but my favorite is a real tough game, the Race for the Galaxy.

I'm owner of 43 boardgame (excluded expansions), but I really count as a boardgame geek?

When I was teenager I bought many comicbooks. I adored for the colorful advantures of X-men, Spiderman, Superman or the mighty Transformers, as I had eagerly read less know comics like Bobo or Góliát. But somehow this devotion is suddenly disapeared. I don't remember the reason of, but something is changed. From an exact point I hadn't bought any comics for a long time, while at 2009 I bought the Watchmen series. Suprise! My all time comicbook adoptation is this movie! The Sin City was great, the new comicsmovies were great (Iron man, Captain America, Thor, etc) and I liked the Spiderman movies, but my personal favourite is still the Watchmen. I have to admit I haven't seen yet The Avengers, but I don't think it will change my mind... But who knows?

I always was a big science-fiction and fantasy fan (I'm sure I'll write about it later), which is still strenghten the geek-factor in me. 

So, as you see from my short post I love doing geek things. But may I say to myself "I'am a geek"? Or am I geek enough?

Imperium Galactica 2 for iPad

Today morning I run into a very pleasant suprise. My first thought was it's just an April's fool joke, but the date of the news entry was in 30th March and I found it the Apple Store also. So, the big news is the famous Hungarian PC game, the Imperium Galactica 2 released to iPad!

According the early short reviews there are many bugs in the game and sometime freeze, but... BUT... This is Imperium Galactica!