Spotlight on Ghosts In The Machine (Richard Farr), First Chapter Reveal, & Giveaway!!

 

Today we’re excited to share an interview with Richard Farr,

author of Ghosts In The Machine! 

Below you’ll find more about Richard, his book, plus a giveaway!

 

 

YABC:   What gave you the inspiration to write this book?

A good story often has the main characters trying to make sense of weird, mysterious stuff that the author has invented – a body floating in the pool, a warning from another planet, giant killer cupcakes, etc. etc. But there’s some very, very weird and mysterious stuff that I didn’t have to invent because it’s going on right now, inside your head, as you read this sentence. It’s called consciousness – the fact that you don’t just do things, but also experience things. Why do we have this spooky, invisible inner life? Where does it come from? How could it possibly work? (Could supernatural beings have it? Could machines have it?) Guess what … nobody has a clue! in fact professional philosophers have a kind of joke name for consciousness: they call it The Hard Problem. The Babel Trilogy rewrites the history of our entire species in order to offer two kinds of answers … and reject both of them in favor of something weirder.

YABC:   Who is your favorite character in the book?

Tough. Should I say Daniel, who narrates The Fire Seekers, or Morag, who narrates Ghosts in the Machine? Hmm. They’re so different that I’m going to have to say … Kit! Kit Cerenkov! Kit is crazy young Russian womans, yah, with the English not so best. But she have major sarcasms – and is really knowing the good stuff, like correct technical for kick down door. 

YABC:   Which came first, the title or the novel?

I knew what the novel was about, then I chose the title, then I wrote the novel. As you’ll find out, there’s more than one reason for that being the title.

YABC:   What do you like most about the cover of the book?

That it’s exactly what I wanted. Writers sometimes don’t get much say about their covers – or even their book titles. (Imagine having a child, and then being told by someone in the hospital “Congratulations!  A beautiful boy! You’ll be calling him Wigglesworth.”) But I was lucky: I got the title I wanted, and the publisher really listen when I said “The cover needs to be abstract, and dark, with no specific images or faces.” And then brilliant designer Will Staehle somehow captured exactly what I had in mind.

YABC:   What was your favorite book in 2015?

 I’m going to put in a sentimental vote for Terry Pratchett’s The Shepherd’s Crown. It’s not his best book, but alas and alack it’s the last one we’ll ever have – rest in peace, comic genius – and it’s a good introduction to the wonderful world of Tiffany Aching, Miss Tick, and the Nac Mac Feegle.  

YABC:   What’s up next for you?

First, finishing Book Three of the Babel Trilogy, Infinity’s Illusion. Then, a comic novel for middle graders of all ages. (Yes, that includes you; I can tell from here that you’re some age or other.) For as long as anyone can remember, Oliver Dreary’s home town, Dirtlefirkin, has been steady in the rankings at Thirteenth Most Boring Place in the World. In A Plague of Frogs, that’s about to change ….

YABC:   Is there anything that you would like to add?

Ghosts in the Machine is, um, unusual. Some novels fit neatly into a genre – you know: Murder Mystery, Wilderness Adventure, Zombie Road-Trip Time-Paradox Bromance, etc. But this is a sort-of-supernatural, sort-of-sci-fi, speculative mystery-thriller, and it’s about gods, immortality, artificial intelligence, human evolution, and an ancient philosophical puzzler. Oh, and the book finishes with 50 pages of endnotes! They were written especially for the black belt nerds among you, and topics include Frankenstein, ancient languages, genetics, thinking machines, and the exact meaning of the word “bullshit.”

YABC:   Which was the most difficult or emotional scene to narrate?

Morag sitting next to Kit on the long drive, not knowing what Kit is thinking or feeling. Morag complains that other people think she’s unemotional – I hope I managed to capture in that scene just how wrong about you other people can be.

YABC:   Which character gave you the most trouble when writing your latest book?

You might think the answer has to be my narrator, Morag. She’s a seventeen-year old half-Chinese gay girl genius. Since I’m a distinctly non-genius middle-aged straight white guy, I score a nice round zero out of five there in the “know what you’re talking about” department. But I felt that I knew her – because the frustrations of seeming like an oddball, and feeling that other people have a picture of you from the outside that doesn’t fit how it feels to be you on the inside, is pretty universal. No, the answer is Daniel, who narrated The Fire Seekers. He is (trying not to give too much away here) present-yet-absent in every part of Ghosts in the Machine, so you see him only through Morag’s eyes. That was hard to do!

YABC:   Which part of the writing process do you enjoy more: Drafting or Revising?

Not even close. Drafting is beating your head against a wall. Revising is the ice pack!

 

 

 

 

Meet Ghosts In The Machine!

Young genius Morag Chen doesn’t believe in the supernatural. Or not until a thousand gods show up in front of her, appearing from a clear-blue sky. The Architects are terrifying, they’re hypnotically attractive, and they’re real—but what are they, and what do they want, and why have they stolen the mind of Daniel Calder, the person she is closest to?

Ancient gods? Invading aliens? Everyone has a theory, but no one has guessed the truth. In this dark, suspenseful, mind-bending sequel to The Fire Seekers, Morag picks up the narration from Daniel as she works to accept that there’s more than one way to think about the nature of humanity. And she will find that the only way forward is through secrets that Daniel himself seems desperate but unable to convey.

A mysterious lab. The house of a dying billionaire. The hidden home of a strange and forgotten people. In each of these places, Morag and Daniel will come a step closer to answers, hope, and a way of fighting back.

 

 

Click here to purchase Ghosts In The Machine!

 

 

Meet Richard Farr!

Richard Farr is the author of The Fire Seekers (The Babel Trilogy, Book One) and several other books. He lives in Seattle. You can find him at www.richardfarr.net.

 

 

http://www.richardfarr.net 

 

 

 

Chapter 1

The Universe Vanishes

Don’t worry, I’m going to tell you the whole story. Everything you missed, everything you were robbed of, everything that happened at the edge of your understanding when you were present but absent. Yes, the whole story of what I tried to make sense of, and what I tried to do to help you, and what happened instead. But I can’t do that, can’t give you a true picture of what happened out there in the world, without you knowing what I was dealing with privately, inside me, in here. (The public and the private. Facts versus feelings. Is and seems. “A theme to which we’ll return,” as your dad liked to say in his lectures. Oh aye.) And I want especially to make one wee detail of my inner emotional geography totally clear.

OK by you if we do that?

Cards on the table, before we move on?

  So. The short version is that when we got back from Ararat, your famously brilliant, logical, levelheaded sister was a sniveling, useless mess. A mental and emotional farm-fry. Exhausted, rattled, a bag of

nerves without a clue. I wanted answers, and I wanted them yesterday, and I had to face the fact that I didn’t even know what questions to ask. Oh, and I was desperately, desperately thirsty for you to recognize me and say my name; failing that, to answer a question, or ask one; fail- ing that, to at least say something I could understand. But you weren’t there. Your will, your motivation, your self wasn’t there—or else it was there, but it was buried under layers of rubble, like an earthquake vic- tim, trying and failing to claw its way back to the surface.

     “It’s everything, and it’s nothing,” you’d say. “It’s everywhere and nowhere. Now.”

  “What is, D? Are you talking about the Architects? Are you talking about something you saw, something you experienced when they were there?”

“It’s light, everywhere. It’s a—, it’s a—” “A what?”

“A kind of perfection.” “What is?”

“A hunger.” “Daniel, please—”

“No bodies. No emotions. No time.” “Daniel—”

  Then there’d be five minutes of silence, or a day of silence, and you’d suddenly say: “They will return for us.”

  That was the kind of thing that came out, when you spoke, and even the half-lucid moments were erratic and fleeting. You had a foot in two worlds, and you were fully present in neither of them. Limbo: isn’t that what Catholics call it—like, a traffic jam in the afterlife, when you’ve departed but you can’t arrive? Ninety-nine percent of the time you were silent, enigmatic, and unreachable. And on top of that you scared the crap out of me by shifting without warning between     a manner that was relaxed, as if you were just an amused observer of the human comedy, and a burning anguish that only your eyes could

articulate. Above all else, I wanted to find a way to bring you back, to rescue you from whatever had happened up there, but both your anx- iousness and your long silences reminded me of the worst rumor from the outside world. One by one the Mysteries were “coming to a stop,” as someone had said, “like battery-powered toys when the juice runs out.” For all their superficial physical health, the people the Architects had left behind as blanks, as empty husks, were dying.

  What was I to believe? What was I to do? Why could I no lon- ger even concentrate on what to believe or do? One thing I did, even though I’d kind of guessed it’d be useless, was persuade Gabi Eisler to be the designated grown-up and take you to a doctor, then a neurolo- gist, then a shrink. Three pale balding men in their fifties: they could have been brothers.

Or parrots on a perch: “We can do nothing for these people.”

  I was really just going through the motions—no stone unturned and all. But “these people”—how dare they? Violent impulses aren’t usually my thing, but I imagined them saying what they were so clearly thinking—The Mysteries are a lost cause; let it go; we shouldn’t waste resources on them—and then I imagined punching their oversized noses. It wasn’t their fault. I just wanted them to have answers because I didn’t. So much for the cool, intellectually hyperconfident, somewhere- on-the-spectrum savant. So much for the miniature know-it-all, blink- ing cutely in the glare of the Shanghai TV lights. That’s who I was supposed to be, D. That’s how I’d been constructed. An adult genius in a child’s body. A thinking machine. A once-in-a-lifetime phenom. Daughter of archaeologists can speak twelve languages, has “unmeasurable” IQ, et cetera, et cetera, et bloody cetera. I’d spent seventeen years sur- rounded by those bright, tinny trumpet notes of amazement and igno- rant praise. And now, when I needed it most, my confidence in my own understanding, even my own mental stability, was no longer just lower

than people had come to expect. It was zero.

Nobody suggested we move back into your parents’ house, or use it, or even visit, and at the beginning I was way too fried to argue with Gabi Eisler’s brittle hausfrau efficiency. She welcomed us, fussed over us, and laughed too loud in short bursts, like a person with depression in a smiley-face T-shirt. She also shoveled enormous quantities of heavy, wintery food at us—chili with corn bread, sausages with shredded red cabbage and mashies, great steaming bricks of beef-and-mushroom lasa- gna. You ate it all, mechanically and without interest, like an engine that needs fuel—and you still lost weight. Me, I pushed it around on my plate, tried to make the right noises of gratitude, and gave most of it to you or Rosko when she wasn’t looking. When she thought I wasn’t looking, she’d reach out and touch his damaged face, her eyes bright with tears. She was trying to pretend—to me and to herself—that she’d forgiven me for nearly getting him killed. She was trying to pretend, also, that you weren’t giving her the creeps.

  She made up a temporary bedroom, two camp cots divided by  a curtain in their half-finished basement. It smelled of old paint and dryer lint. And maybe it was the physical claustrophobia, or the guilt and helplessness I felt every time I looked at you, or my fears for the future, but down there I felt myself turning into a person I just didn’t much like.

  I was pissed off with Gabi and Stefan for their frosty hospitality— as if they owed me any other kind! I was pissed off with all the people whose brains I’d have picked, if only they hadn’t all been so inconsider- ately dead. (Julius Quinn. Mayo. Both your parents. Derek Partridge.) I even got pissed off with Rosko, because he’d totally clammed up about Ararat; oh aye, and because one afternoon he actually said, “Morag, what are you so pissed off about?” Boy, did that do the trick!

  Giving me a constant stream of advice was one of his techniques for not talking about himself.

   “You have to sleep more, Morag. And eat more. And drink less cof- fee. Maybe get away from Seattle to somewhere you feel safer and can relax. Some friends of my parents have a poky little cabin out on the Olympic Peninsula that we could use. At least put some drops in your eyes—they look terrible.”

  I wanted to say to him, Thanks, yes, excellent advice, Rosko, and I appreciate the concern, and now please, please would you bugger off, because yes, OK, the drops, I’ll do the drops if you insist, but right now I need to concentrate on, uh, whatever it was I was thinking about a minute ago, and could you at least not stand in the light like that, because this cuneiform of Shul-hura’s that I’m rereading, which by the way seems to suggest that the Architects said they’d come back when we were ready, is a swine to read in the best of circs, the individual wedges small as a rat’s teeth, and—

  My eyes were red because I was getting even less sleep than normal.

Also because every third time I looked at you, I had to take a deep breath, steal five minutes of privacy in the loo, and cry. And the sadness, the sense that I’d failed you, was combining with a rising tide of anxiety that threatened to breach my seawall and drown me in pure salt panic. Deer in the headlights? Ha. It was more like deer just galloped off a cliff. When I did get two straight hours of blissful unconsciousness—or, more likely, two straight hours of vile dreams—I’d wake up with my heart hammering, exhausted and  desperate.

By way of unpleasant static in the background, the ’rents were still totally off-radar, and I found that I couldn’t stop worrying about them. Jimmy, Lorna: Why why why no message, no contact? After crossing into Armenia, we spent two weeks stuck in Yerevan, while Rosko got one and a half fingers amputated and we jousted with four different

national bureaucracies—German, Scottish, American, Armenian—over the delicate matter of being in the wrong country with no paperwork. I got one message from my parents there, just one, saying they were safely out of Iraq. Then nothing. Captured on the border by lethal jihadi wan- nabes and dragged back to a filthy bunker in Mosul or Raqqa? Captured by the Seraphim themselves in what was left of Turkey? Already killed for ticking the wrong box on the Supernatural Commitments form by some brand-new group with an acronym the West hadn’t even heard of yet? I needed to know. The pinnacle of human achievement, the cherry on western civilization’s five-thousand-layer cake, is that you can post a cat video from any yurt in Kazakhstan. But week after week Jimmy and Lorna sent nothing. We’re still alive—that would have been nice. We’re safe. Even: We’ve been detained, but we’re safe. I could have settled for any of those. Nothing.

  I couldn’t contact Charlie Balakrishnan either. Sure, I’m a seven- teen-year-old nobody and he’s a busy international tycoon—a mover and shaker in the financial and industrial ionosphere whose daily wor- ries no doubt range from the well-being and efficiency of thirty thou- sand employees on five continents to the new custom paint job on his backup Gulfstream. But when the director of his own fancy institute has disappeared, and his old friend Bill Calder ditto, and then he gets messages from me on his corporate email account saying, Daniel and I were at Ararat, and I heard Julius Quinn’s last words, and I tried to inter- vene in the Anabasis, and failed, and survived, and Bill and Mayo were there too, and Mayo spoke to me, but they died too, and I need to talk to you, please? Like, yesterday, was it too much to expect that he would take a moment away from the company spreadsheets to snap his fingers and instruct the nearest PA/minion/lackey/aide to press “Call Back” on his gold-plated speakerphone?

Apparently it was too much to expect.

It was so irritating to be so irritated—with myself and everyone else. It was like having the worst PMS of my life, for weeks and weeks.

Can you imagine?

  No, obviously not. Fair enough. So let me cut to the chase. With all that swirling around in my head, I have to get this one thing clear. Out in the open. Out of the way.

  Are you truly ready? Good. So here it is: I decided to make things easier for myself by refusing even then, just as I refuse now, to feel even a tiny bit guilty about, you  know.

That.

Kit was over at the Eislers’ constantly, right from the start. She wanted to hear the stories and help look after you—which she was annoyingly good at—and she said she needed to get out of the apartment because her mother was acting “wa-wa.”

  “What do I mean, ‘wa-wa’? I mean that she is like totally freaked, ever since you tell her about Mayo being on Ararat. Eyes is jumping around like two mice on hot plate. OK, so he was her boss, and instead of Mr. Smooth Science Guy, he is some kind of crazy. So I expect, you know, she is upset. But not like this. Fourteen-hour days is normal for my mother. Twenty hour, not so much. Probably thinks she can figure everything out single-handed. Understand what happened to Daniel. Explain Ararat. Explain what her boss was doing. Save whole world from creepy Architects if only she never sleeps.”

“Sounds like someone else I know,” Rosko said pointedly.

   “Yah,” she said, giving me a long stare. “Like Morag, who also is putting herself under too much stress, also getting, how is it, snapple?”

“Snappish,” I snapped.

  “My mother is all freaked because she is in middle of big some- thing at her lab, and Institute’s fancy mainframe computer is acting all

screw-loose since a week at least, and her favorite student, who does all her coding and babysits the computer has, ka-pow, what you say, puff of smoke.”

“Disappeared? That’s the code geek she shared with Mayo, isn’t it?

Carl Bates?”

  She nodded. “Is no big deal, I think, but my mother is like, total hysteria. Invites him to dinner, because she thinks he is lonely over the summer and needs a mother. He says, ‘Yes, thank you for invitation, Professor, I’d love to come.’ And I say to Natazscha, ‘What you think we feed him, given you are worst cook in history of world?’ This is true, actually. She makes Ukrainian stew with lentils, and smell is maximum bad, maximum, like you microwave old running socks. Whole apart- ment you can’t breathe. And, lucky for that, he never shows up. I say to her, ‘Good, relax, he probably forgot. Or he went on vacation or something.’”

  Not wanting to deal with her mother’s problems, Kit had plenty of incentive to hang with us at the Eislers—even though Rosko liked yanking her chain. “One thing I don’t understand,” he said. “Why is your mother’s English so much better than yours? It’s not like she’s a Babbler.”

  “No, Rosko, she is not freak like you and Morag. But she studies English in school ten, fifteen years, and I study two years. Also, she is obsessive-competitive—”

“Compulsive.”

“Whatever. Work maniac.”

  For me, having Kit around was wonderful. And also—how shall I put this?—really difficult. Because it meant that, on top of everything else, I was forced to put up with another, if possible even more painful layer of confusion and inner struggle.

Over and over, from the first time I saw her again, I said to myself:

No, Morag. No.

Be calm. Be sensible.

Bad bad bad even to think about this now.

You don’t feel this way really. You only think you do.

   I’d say things like that to myself while my back was turned to her, while maybe she fixed you a sandwich or played cards with you. (She was the one who discovered that you could still play, and enjoy, a game like Hearts.) I’d shuffle blindly through something on my screen, resist- ing and resisting the temptation to glance back at  her.

  Work, Morag. Work on Bill’s notes about the Disks. Or the few bits of Shul-hura’s Babylon tablets that you still haven’t translated. Or why not email some random people who might have known Mayo?

Everyone goes on about your brain, so use it.

  Then I’d glance back at her. And maybe her face would be at a new angle, or lit differently, or I’d be just in time to catch some characteristic gesture, like the way she always tilted her head slightly as she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. And my heart would stop beating for a dangerously long interval.

Don’t make a fool of yourself, Morag.

It’s irrational. It’s pathetic. It’s ridiculous.

  You have more important things to think about. The job is to under- stand what Mayo was doing on Ararat. In the hope of that helping you make sense of the Architects. In the hope of that making it easier to bring Daniel back.

   A mission! A lifesaving mission! So put this silly, trivial, personal stuff aside. Emotions! Nothing but a bloody nuisance.

Who needs them?

It was right after one of these pathetic little autotherapy sessions that you gave me the picture of her.

Magnificent, it was. Uncanny.

  The one positive thing those first weeks was that you’d begun to draw. It wasn’t a skill you’d ever had, but you were visibly trying to teach yourself, on every scrap of paper you could find, like a frustrated mute seeking another line of communication. Old envelopes. The back of a foot-long Costco receipt. A yellow pad. Unintelligible squiggles at first, they morphed into thumbnail-sized kindergarten images: chairs that looked like a pile of sticks and faces that looked like potatoes. Then plausible houses emerged, and groups of stick figures. There was something that looked vaguely like a cave, with more figures, and you did that one many times, and though the features were hazy, the bodies gradually became more detailed, more accurate. Next you produced a larger, full-page outline of a woman’s head; it was much more sophis- ticated, and though you left the face blank, I knew immediately that it was Iona.

    “That’s your mother, Daniel. Iona. She was trying to find out about the Mysteries when she—when she died. And you wanted to carry on that work.”

   “Yes,” you said, but when I asked you about drawing the face, you looked away.

  Then the drawing of Kit. It was on a totally different level again, like something a beginning art student had taken a week to complete. Head and shoulders, it was, with the head turned slightly. And the strik- ing thing wasn’t just that you’d drawn her face, but that you’d made it so real. With full eye contact.

  I could easily have believed, and part of me wanted to believe, that in some sense this was a memory. Were you really dredging up the fact that once you’d had a thing for the green-eyed Russian girl, who you’d found so friendly and yet so oddly resistant to the Calder charm? But you didn’t keep the drawing to yourself, and you didn’t show it to her either. Instead, in private, you handed it to me. Presented it to me. Made a gift of it, with a formal gesture and a look that was hard for me not to read as amusement.

“For me, Daniel? Thank you. But why?” “It’s Kit.”

   “Yes, I can see that. You’ve done it so well, especially her eyes. She looks—she’s so—it’s a really good drawing. But why are you giving it to me?”

   As if I didn’t know! As if I didn’t know that somehow you knew. By then, I’d already begun to see that your silences and absences hid a strangely sharpened intuition. You knew things it was surprising you knew. You knew things you couldn’t possibly know.

  I put the drawing away on the slatted IKEA utility shelf in the basement, under my collection of five identical black T-shirts. It would be safe there and not in anyone’s way. I was grateful for it, and I made a genuine effort not to slip it out and stare at it more than four or five times an hour.

  You know how Kit never seems to think about her appearance? Old jeans, no cosmetics, ponytail held in place with the blue rubber band from her mother’s unread newspaper. So it was a mild surprise, a couple of mornings after you’d given me the sketch, when she reached into her day pack, pulled out a small hairbrush, and asked if I’d fix her hair.

  I probably spent about half an hour just staring at the brush  with my mouth open. It was an ordinary black plastic thing, five bucks at the drugstore, but it sort of amazed me, like I’d been offered the first-ever glimpse of a scientific instrument from another planet. Whoa! In the depths of that secondhand Lands’ End day pack, Kit carries around a hairbrush! Fascinating! My whole concept of who she was shifted subtly at that moment. I don’t mean it made her better or worse. It just made her someone who sometimes carried a hairbrush around, and I’d never thought of her like that before.  It opened up a whole world of other possibilities. Delicious trivial secrets about her that were still out there by the dozen, waiting to   be known. Maybe she loved Indian food? Or was allergic to cats?  Or

quite liked early Taylor Swift, but had never admitted it to anyone because it would fry her credibility as a fan of Russian punk? I had no idea! Whole continents to  explore—

“Morag? Can you?” “Sorry. What?”

“Brush my hair out. That’s all. Do you mind?”

  Mind? Was she kidding? I couldn’t hold my hands steady. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think, or string a sentence together. I was so afraid of my own feelings that I blurted something idiotic like Your hair looks fine. After which, naturally, I wanted to stab myself and crawl away to die, because now she would shrug, as if nothing in the world mattered much, and put the brush back in the bag, or worse, ignore me and turn to Rosko, and tell him a joke and ask him to do it instead, in which case I’d have to stand there and watch him do it, and feel horribly excluded, and on top of that feel ashamed of having such ridiculous feelings.

  She didn’t ask Rosko. Instead she took my hand, placed the brush in it, and gave me a look that made me feel like I was trapped in front of a heat lamp and might get blisters on my eyelids. So I brushed her hair. And it was a strange experience, because while I was doing it,  the rest of the universe, including not just you and Rosko and the kitchen table, but all hundred billion galaxies, simply vanished, ceased to exist—evaporated and gone like a snowflake. Later, when she left, the universe showed up again, or enough of it did for me to watch from the kitchen window as she walked away up the street, trailing her fingers against the side of a yellow car. I felt violently, insanely, murderously jealous of the car. To get over the feeling—and maybe hide myself from the sheer embarrassment of having had it—I put my face in my hands and closed my eyes and took deep breaths, only to discover that I’d just perfumed my entire consciousness, every nook and corner of my mind, with the scent of her.

   That’s when I gave in. That’s when I admitted to myself that for the first time in my life my emotions were not mine to control—had been, in fact, hijacked. It was thrilling. It was frightening too. And (how’s this for irrational?) it managed to make me pissed off even at Kit. I didn’t have the time for this. I was too preoccupied with Really Important Stuff, like saving you from a condition I didn’t under- stand and saving the world from a threat I didn’t understand or even believe in, but had to believe in because I’d seen it with my own eyes. Now, of all times, when I was trying to play the part of Morag Chen, Metaphysical Detective (Private Eye: Clients Include Daniel Calder and the Rest of the Human Race), how dare this tall, calm, kind,    sane, funny, sensible, sarcastic goddess wander into my life and pick me up and pull me down without permission into this whirlpool of sentimental, self-indulgent longing? I had romance novels for this. Captured by Love. Hunter’s Heart. Tonight and Forever. I can read one in an hour. I can scratch that obscure emotional itch without examin- ing it too closely. I don’t even mind that the narrator’s always a think- ing girl’s nightmare, or that her dreamy stud-muffin of a savior is a spray-tanned chunk of lunk with a chiseled jaw, a Rolex collection,  and the conversational skills of Washoe the chimp. Consume, toss aside, get on with other things. For years, that’s been my technique for not admitting to myself that I’m a wee bit confused about certain feelings. My technique for coping with Lorna when she tells me one more time that it’s a lonely life in an archaeological camp, but I’ll meet a nice boy eventually.

  Yekaterina Pavelevna Cerenkov. She was never meant for you, and it wasn’t my fault that being pickled in testosterone prevented you from seeing it. So I want you to know this, D: as soon as I admitted to myself how I felt—and still without even the slightest shadow of a reason to think she was interested—I made a decision to expend zero emotional energy on feeling guilty about it.

OK?

  Got all that, Daniel Calder? Not going to hate your “twin sister” for not being who you thought she was?

Good.

  Now we have that sorted out, you can stop biting your nails and listen. Because, kiddo, it’s story time. By the fireside. At whatever’s left of your local library.

 

 

 

Ghosts In The Machine

By: Richard Farr

Release Date: September 20, 2016 

Publisher: Skyscape Publishing

 

 

 

*GIVEAWAY DETAILS* 

Five winners will each receive copies of The Fire Seekers series and Ghosts In The Machine series (First two books in Babel trilogy) ~ (US only).

*Click the Rafflecopter link below to enter the giveaway*

 

a Rafflecopter giveaway