At The Bright Empire....

ong76win2 wrote: Hello Brantley. I just want to ask. In the Tales of Aurora series at velorian.net/aoa/aoa-tales.html, is there a Episode 18/ Chapter 18? It is missing. Thank you.

I vaguely remember that chapter 18 turned in a dozen or so chapters of its own, and is part of a different series. It was such a divergence that it didn't belong in the original AOA story line. Let me go confirm my memory, and if so, I'll get you a link to that series.

Shadar

Thanks for the reply Brantley. Thanks for your reply Shadar. I do really love your Aurora series especially Kara. My very favorite part is in Episode 10 where Kara in the Test Lab of George, crushing a steel beam into her breasts and nipples while making love to George!

I wish to see Kara experiment with her strength where she would slowly, erotically, destroy and crush cars using her body especially her breasts and nipples while her boyfriend watch with excitement and not in fear!

Thanks again Shadar for replying. Hope to read all your previous stuff at aurora universe.

Another thing. When will we have the continuation to Shore Leave? I is a great series. Superb plot and storyline. When I am reading it, I would be thinking as if I am also there with the action. Great work! Please do continue. Thank you.

My reboots of the first two parts of SHORE LEAVE haven't gotten a great response. Shadar never did a complete draft of the third part, and there were so many problems with it I hardly knew where to begin. One of the old collaborators got in touch with me about getting involved again, but I haven't heard from him since. But one of these days...

--Brantley

Meanwhile... did the ancient Sumerians invent porn?

cavernsmeasureless.blogspot.com/2010/11/...ans-invent-porn.html

--Brantley

Father's Day at the Aurora Universe? Well, "Sharon Best" was its father 20 years or more ago, and "Heart of Darkness" was one of his pioneering stories -- and like a lot of his stories, never finished. It was aborted in 2003, when he took down the AU-2 site, but after he returned as Shadar Tarot Barnes and I worked occasionally on new and revised chapters. We actually came close to finishing it, and indeed "Sharon" had had an ending all along even though some of the middle was missing. Perhaps a final version will appear here or elsewhere, but in the meantime, here's what we have.
brightempire.com/teaser-1.htm

--Brantley

brantley wrote: Father's Day at the Aurora Universe? Well, "Sharon Best" was its father 20 years or more ago, and "Heart of Darkness" was one of his pioneering stories -- and like a lot of his stories, never finished. It was aborted in 2003, when he took down the AU-2 site, but after he returned as Shadar Tarot Barnes and I worked occasionally on new and revised chapters. We actually came close to finishing it, and indeed "Sharon" had had an ending all along even though some of the middle was missing. Perhaps a final version will appear here or elsewhere, but in the meantime, here's what we have.
brightempire.com/teaser-1.htm

--Brantley

Wow! I do hope Heart of Darkness can be continued. It is one of the great series in the previous site of Sharon Best. Thanks for sharing it to us. Be waiting for the continuation and updates to it in the future.

By the way, I do like the part where Allan meets Karalyn's mother, Kara. What will happen next? So both keith and Allan are kiralings to Kara and Karalyn? Hope this can be continued.

There's some interesting discussion about this at the Aurora Universe Readers Group, for anyone here who may be a member of same.

--Brantley

brantley wrote: There's some interesting discussion about this at the Aurora Universe Readers Group, for anyone here who may be a member of same.

--Brantley

Where can I find Aurora Universe Readers Group? Care to send me the link where members are discussion about this? Thank you.

groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Aurora_Universe_Readers/info

What started as just a housekeeping job has turned into a small update. I was fixing some missing links in stories relating to the Diaboli, and in my own archive and the Wayback Machine (for the long-defunct Sybaritical Stories site) found a couple of chapters of Ultrasybarite's Harvest that had never been posted before. Part Two of Harvest is now available, with Chapters Two and Three relating to the Egyptians and the Olmecs. Those date back to at least ten years, and there were never any more. The related story is Finding Sanctuary, which was one of the sequels to Shadar's McCloud's Daughters, along with my own Bird in Paradise.

brightempire.com/Harvest2.html

--Brantley

brightempire.com/Verite.htm

It was ten years ago today that I met Velvet Belle Tree. We found that we had a lot of tastes in common, including favorite science fiction, mysteries and movies. Before long, we were becoming a couple, and writing together. Naturally, I wanted something from her for today's anniversary, but she didn't have any ideas for fiction that she could develop on short notice. What she did have was a true-life story. "La Vérité: A Memoir" is a reminiscence of an experience during a trip to France long before I knew her. A case of truth stranger than fiction, but without giving the name of the subject, obviously.

brightempire.com/Lucy.htm

This past Friday, a superheroine movie called Lucy opened here. It's also showing in Europe, and has raised the hopes of a lot of superheroine fiction fans. But the French director, Luc Besson, best known for La Femme Nikita and The Fifth Element, isn't content with turning the title character into a superwoman with some miracle drug; he wants to Say Something, and what he has to say about the human mind and human evolution is bunk. Read "That Lucy Movie -- Badass or Just Dumbass" for the sad story behind the story.

brightempire.com/Empress-3.pdf

And then there's Empress of the Dawn. Book Three has gone through several revisions as well as updates already, based in part on advice from Tarot and Shadar. The trick has been to have Kalla stay in character as both a woman and a superwoman, while challenging her with a potential crisis so serious that the Scalantrans and Indrans don't want her to share her knowledge of it with anyone on Andros. Yet she still has to work with Patriarch Nestor and others on projects that are bringing revolutionary changes to the world, while finding solace with a new lover -- only there are secrets and lies even in her relationship with him. Kalla faces both outward and inward conflicts, and she doesn't yet know what some of them are going to be.

People have already posted here about Lucy and Wonder Woman. I just hope they'll post about Empress. I miss the feedback...

--Brantley

There are also some edits to Book Two of Empress, mostly minor but I did insert an account of the lottery program on Siguo were the local Companion was the prize. (It was previously in Book Three, and is now briefly referenced there.)

brightempire.com/Empress-2.pdf

-Brantley

Still making tweaks to SHORE LEAVE I and SHORE LEAVE II, while working towards the completion of SHORE LEAVE III. Some of the tweaks are minor, like kilometers plausibly being familiar to Klara (Ann came from the Enlightenment,which is familar with Terran terms) but not to people on Rostran. But the big problem was that in SHORE LEAVE I there seemed to be an appearance by the Goddess Tyla at a Gal'an Night pageant, whereas in SHORE LEAVE II Tyla has been recalled to Sanctuary for some time. I think Shadar and his collaborators must have shifted gears between the two episodes, so I fixed things as best I could by having the pageant be a re-creation by the Queen -- there was some oblique hint of that already. For some reason, the Queen is referred to a lot, but never otherwise seen in person, or even given a name -- so I worked the idea of a reclusive Queen whose name isn't spoken into the narrative.

--Brantley

www.brightempire.com/ShoreLeave3.pdf

www.brightempire.com/ShoreLeave1.htm

www.brightempire.com/ShoreLeave2.htm

Another update to Changing Goddesses, only this time in pdf format; I'm having a problem with html. There's a lot of ground to cover in preparing the Rostrans and the Outworlders from the Anders Flame, especially Alisa and Andre, to deal with Klara and her mission to establish a new form of government. There's also further editing of the first and second installments of Shore Leave, in an effort to resolve confusion as to who did what and who knew what and when they did so or knew so in the tangled background of Rostran history and politics. I think I have things straightened out, just barely. What isn't straightened out may be a matter of the players themselves being deceived, or deceiving themselves. But now it's time for things to come out in the open — and next time, I'll have to do the really hard part of resolving the whole story.

Be nice to get some feedback!

--Brantley Thompsn Elkins

brantley wrote: www.brightempire.com/ShoreLeave3.pdf

www.brightempire.com/ShoreLeave1.htm

www.brightempire.com/ShoreLeave2.htm

Another update to Changing Goddesses, only this time in pdf format; I'm having a problem with html. There's a lot of ground to cover in preparing the Rostrans and the Outworlders from the Anders Flame, especially Alisa and Andre, to deal with Klara and her mission to establish a new form of government. There's also further editing of the first and second installments of Shore Leave, in an effort to resolve confusion as to who did what and who knew what and when they did so or knew so in the tangled background of Rostran history and politics. I think I have things straightened out, just barely. What isn't straightened out may be a matter of the players themselves being deceived, or deceiving themselves. But now it's time for things to come out in the open — and next time, I'll have to do the really hard part of resolving the whole story.

Be nice to get some feedback!

--Brantley Thompsn Elkins

Thanks for sharing your newest work! I really really love this series! Please do continue on. By the way, hope you can fix this in html format. Thank you.

brightempire.com/FindingSanctuary.html

An unexpected update. Ultrasybarite has submitted a revised and corrected version of his Finding Sanctuary, third of a series that began with Shadar's McCloud's Daughters and Continued with my own Bird in Paradise. These three stories are related to the Shore Leave series through Ann McCloud and her daughters Aayla, Klara and Myra.

Ultrasybarite's was the first to tie the Diaboli in with the Aurora Universe 3 history. We may see more of Sanctuary and the Diaboli in times to come. We certainly hope to see more from him.

-- Brantley

ong76win2 wrote:

brantley wrote: www.brightempire.com/ShoreLeave3.pdf

Be nice to get some feedback!

--Brantley Thompsn Elkins

Thanks for sharing your newest work! I really really love this series! Please do continue on. By the way, hope you can fix this in html format. Thank you.

Discovered this week I could get around the html formatting problem by opening doc versions in Text Edit, saving them as odts, then saving those at html.

--Brantley

brightempire.com/Empress-3.pdf

Book Three of Empress of the Dawn gets another reboot today, my birthday, and I think I'm finally getting it right. The version posted July 27 got too far ahead of the game, bringing in the Aurean War as too imminent a threat.

That war still figures in the more distant future, but the story now focuses more on Kalla herself, her life and her loves – one cut short by the legacy of the struggle against Kyros and something she had to do during that struggle, the other an unexpected blessing for her. There is her relationship with Nestor, the patriarch who came to his position young and inexperienced, but must gain experience and even wisdom to guide Andros into a new age. There are the Scalantrans and the Indrans, behind the scenes, who have a stake in the future of what they know is a strategic world.

My thanks to Velvet for some tough but good advice on two chapters, one here that sets the stage for heartbreak, the other included prematurely in the July 27 version but now to come in its proper order in a future update.

brightempire.com/ShoreLeave3.htm

Book Three of Shore Leave, Changing Goddesses, gets a makeover today (And goes back to htm format). I wasn't ready yet to deal with what will happen after Klara reveals herself to Rostrans at large, but I realized I hadn't done enough with what happens to Andre and Alisa and their relationship before that -- and also to some of the other characters, major and minor (See chapters now numbered 77-79). Plus, I wanted to sort of deconstruct the history/mythology of the Rostrans as seen from the inside and the outside -- how much of it is really true, and how much of it simply believed? I'm being heretical here -- might drive purists nuts, and not only Shadar!

--Brantley

Call it Bright Friday, as opposed to Black Friday. The latter may have been something of a disappointment, economists say. But here things are really looking up.

Book Three of Empress of the Dawn has been updated, launching the romance of Kalla and Alexius – but that has its challenges as well as its rewards for both of them.

www.brightempire.com/Empress-3.pdf

Speaking of launches, the SyFy Channel just broadcast a new much-heralded miniseries called Ascension. But as Velvet Belle Tree observes, "It Totally Didn't Fly:"

www.brightempire.com/Ascension.htm

As for Shore Leave III, I'm still working on the continuation, but comments on the Nov. 25 update have led me to make some edits in the account of events at München to clarify the narrative:

www.brightempire.com/ShoreLeave3.htm

Happy New Year. Just some slight updates, and the most important one actually comes from the Wayback Machine on the Links page:


www.brightempire.com/Links.htm


Although it is still shown on the Aurora Universe Writers Group home page, the Jolie Howard Fiction link there (like several others) is dead. But I've added a link to the archived version further down, just below that for the Julie of Velor archive. Jolie Howard, a.k.a. Lisa Binkley, is the author of some classic AU fiction like the Nova'yul saga, but also other outstanding sf and fantasy including As Pretty Girls Do and The Secrets of Katie Zurin. She was an early inspiration to me:


http://www/brightempire.com/Binkley.html


Another dead link on the main AUWG page is actually still a live sub-link at Infinity Bridge: Susan, the Amazing Adventures of Sara Corel, a legendary story by Toomey Starks (killed in a car crash back in 2000), an inspiration to Shadar and others. Thanks to Tyler Spivey at the Aurora Universe Readers Group for pointing this out!


www.infinitybridge.net/Susan


Although it isn't a real update, I've made a tweak to Shore Leave III reversing the two last chapters (79 and 80) to create more of a cliffhanger, based on discussion at the AURG about a new development -- an anti-matter explosion -- in the crisis that faces Rostran.


brightempire.com/ShoreLeave3.htm


--Brantley

Have just uploaded slightly tweaked versions of EMPRESS OF THE DAWN, Parts One and Two:

www.brightempire.com/empress.pdf

www.brightempire.com/Empress-2.pdf

It's a matter of chronology; there'd been some comment at AURG that it was hard to tell when things were happening, in either Terran or Galactic years. So I've added some references at the time of Kalla's arrival at Andros in Part One, and at the beginning and end of Part Two. But something that dawned on me was that Scalantrans would do business in terms of Galactic years, so that the Indentures of Companions would be 111 Terrans years (I'm not sure how long a Velorian year is, but it wouldn't make sense to have contracts of different terms on different seeded worlds). I have adjusted by own file on the chronology of the series according, with the expiration of the Indenture coming in 1271 instead of 1260, and the Restoration (at the end of Part Two) in 1277 instead of 1265 -- since the previous dates weren't mentioned the previous story files.

--Brantley

Forget about Super Sunday in the NFL. This is Super Sunday at The Bright Empire.

First up, there's more of Shore Leave III, now retitled To Hold the Center. Klara has made her way to the headquarters of the human underground at the end, but there are complications she doesn't know about in the deteriorating situation on Rostran – and Alisa Liddell and her comrades are caught up in those same complications. I've done some editing of the version posted Nov. 25 in line with my latest conception of how the rest of the story will play out.

www.brightempire.com/ShoreLeave3.htm

Second, there's a revised version of McCloud's Daughters, Shadar's story from 2004 that introduced Sanctuary and the McCloud family, including Klara. It was written before what we call Aurora Universe 3 had fully evolved from AU-2, and some of the details – including how Ben Shaffer first met Xara – didn't jibe with AU-3. I also wanted to soften the details of Klara's personality cult, which in the original version made it difficult at best for her to emerge as a sympathetic character in Shore Leave. There were some other inconsistencies between the two stories that I had to resolve as best I could in further edits.

www.brightempire.com/McCloud.htm

Finally, from Velvet Belle Tree, there's "Imitation Biopic." We'd both been to see The Imitation Game, which purports to tell the true story of Alan Turing, the British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and pioneering computer scientist who was a key figure in cracking Nazi Germany's naval Enigma code, which helped the Allies win the Second World War – only to later be prosecuted for his homosexuality. It may be a terrific movie, but like a lot of film biopics, it shades the truth – shades it a lot, in fact. Velvet went to the trouble of reading the doorstopper of a biography on which the film is supposedly based, and found it so far off base that it left me wondering whether its makers could have passed the Turing test (an approach he devised to determine a machine's capacity to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human).

www.brightempire.com/Imitation.htm

--Brantley Thompson Elkins

brantley wrote: Forget about Super Sunday in the NFL. This is Super Sunday at The Bright Empire.

--Brantley Thompson Elkins

Sacrilege...!!!

Shadar