Daniel Bensen

[Кал]

Да започнем направо:



... Дан така си представя змея.

А вие даже не можете да си представите какъв е неговият роман...

(Да подскажа все пак: в него – романа, де – змейове няма.)

[Кал]

For those of you who read in English: check what a genuine science fiction discussion feels like.

[Кал]

Ако още не сте стигнали до личния блог на Daniel:

Давайте.

[Кал]

Даниел е готов с романа си Groom of the Tyrannosaur Queen. Бета-читатели, видяхте ли го в пощите си?

А това виждали ли сте го?

[Vessey]

I am pleased to announce that Junction's book launch will take place at Fox Book Cafe on 32 William Gladstone at 7pm on Thursday, the 10th of January. Please invite everyone you know ;)

Dan

[Vessey]

Daniel Bensen написа:



Junction is out! You can buy it at Amazon, Barnes and Nobel, and everywhere else in the Anglosphere. Soon, we shall invade the other spheres, as well.



240 pages, ~90,000 words, first line: Daisuke Matsumori faked a smile and held out a dead mouse. The little corpse dangled by its tail, its eyes closed, its toes clenched, observed by the cassowary.





Begun: late July 2015 at Belchin hosprings, Bulgaria

First draft done: February 3rd 2016 in Sofia, Bulgaria

Second draft done: December 28th 2016 in Borovets, Bulgaria

Third draft done: February 28th 2017 in Sofia, Bulgaria

Third draft picked up by Flame Tree: April 9th 2018

Fourth draft finished: late August 2018 in Mountain View, California

Copy edits finished: late September 2018 in Missoula, Montana

final edits on Advance Reader Copy: mid-October 2018 in Sofia

Launch: January 10th 2019 7pm at Fox Book Cafe ul. “William Gladstone” 32, 1000 Sofia Center, Sofia (you’re invited!)

Thank you, everyone, for staying with me on this long and wild ride.



Other Junction pictures, process notes, and more

Thank you all once again. And stay tuned for some rewards for the people who helped me with this monster of a book ;)

Dan

[Кал]

A very strong, very personal piece by Dan appeared in Apex Magazine:

Writing Wrongly

Trigger warnings: writing and cancer.

[Кал]

My Goodreads review of Junction:

Junction is a fast-paced, erudite novel, which turned out to be not quite my cup of tea, as explained in the final note below.

The other notes contain some of the moments I really enjoyed.

~ Already at the start, I'm wowed by the international cast. We have Japanese, Indonesian, American, Australian, Russian characters ... did I miss anyone? It's an ambitious scope, and I'm looking forward to learning more about these cultures--besides xenobiology. ;) ([a href="http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/"]Daniel[/a] has lived in Japan, so I will trust his insights.)

~ Here's something I'd never thought about before:

“When animals on Earth climbed out of the sea, they took the sea with them, as blood contained in a sack inside their bodies. (...)”

So ... it's not just the common sky that unites us. We're one already in our veins ....

~ A sample of the humor in Junction. (It starts seriously, but wait for the juxtaposition.)

Daisuke held the glass plate high over the wafting steam. In the chilly air of dusk, water condensed almost immediately on the under-surface of the glass. Little droplets merged as Daisuke tilted the glass, ran together like rivers running down a mountain to water, or veins spreading the heart’s nourishment to a man’s hand. He lifted the glass high, and water bulged on the lower lip of the glass plate, shone red in the light of the setting sun, and fell onto Daisuke’s outstretched tongue.
Anne watched his experiment, her brows together. “I wish there was some other way to test this. Don’t swallow immediately. Any weird tastes?”
Daisuke held the water in his mouth. There was still some sour sulfur there, but no stinging or numbness. Daisuke swallowed, and smiled. “Yum,” he said.

* * *

“Yuck,” said Tyaney.
Daisuke agreed. Hardly chilly or shaky at all now, he forced himself to eat another mouthful of something that said Turkey Tetrazzini on the package, but tasted like poultry-flavored vomit.
“Is this what the American military has to eat?” Hariyadi asked.
“No rice?” Nurul asked her silvery food-pack.
“I like,” said Rahman. “Good like wife cooking.”
Nurul shoved him.
“We don’t usually rehydrate the stuff with sulfuric acid,” said Pearson.
“Very diluted acid.” Daisuke spoke around a spoonful of sulfurous sweet and sour pork. “This is no worse than what’s already in your stomach.”
“That’s hydrochloric, though,” Anne contributed.
“So you mean this food is pre-digested,” said Misha. “Efficient!”

~ One fourth into the book, I was wondering if I could relate to any of the characters. Their interactions seemed too pragmatic--and too guarded? (Even Anne's, yes. She explodes, but I can't really see what's in there, at the bottom of the crater.) Is it just the effect of the ever-watching cameras? Or is it a fundamental incompatibility between the typical interaction of people and my need for openness, even with relatively new acquaintances? (Especially if I sense that we click on one level or another.)

Then I reached the scene where Daisuke spills out his divorce and the reasons for it, and I started liking him. For real.

(Not Anne, though. "Are you available then?" is totally the wrong thing to say when someone is showing you their guts for the first time. So Anne is totally in character. ;)

~ What good is a book with a Japanese MC without some fanservice for the lovers of, uh, anime?

“Ah,” said Misha, “geysers of plant semen. What’s that word, Daisuke? Bukkake?”
Daisuke made a disgusted face.
Rahman giggled and, thank goodness, put the camera down.
Nurul squinted at her husband. “How do you know about bukkake?”
“Well, how do you?” asked Misha and burst into laughter at her blush. “Ah, when a married couple finds they share a fetish—”
“Shut up, Misha,” Anne said. “I’m thinking about sulfur-reducing bacteria.”
“Oh, were you?” said Misha. “I was thinking about—”
“On Earth!” Anne said heavily.

~ Have I mentioned the linguistic fun?

“So,” she said. “What are you thinking about?”
‘Eating you for breakfast’ would be, perhaps, too forward. “I was thinking about how I am a shell with no egg inside, and you are an egg with no shell,” he said. “Maybe that’s why we suit each other.”
Anne looked at him. “Naw,” she said. “I think your ex-wife is wrong. You’re not a hollow shell, you’re just a big fucking nerd who doesn’t know how to talk to human beings.”
“That’s…a strange thing to say.”
“Ha. You mean it’s the pot calling the kettle black.”
Daisuke had to think for a moment before he remembered the meaning of that expression. He smiled and said, “It’s better in Japanese. ‘The eye-shit laughs at the nose-shit.’”
She screwed up her face. “Eye-shit?”
Daisuke rubbed the inner corner of an eye. He ignored the unmanly tear he found there and said. “You know, eye-shit. After you sleep, the stuff in your eyes. It shouldn’t laugh at nose-shit, because it’s all the same stuff.” The word came to him. “Mucus!”
Anne’s laughter bounced off the glowing mountainside. “Ah, the subtle poetry of the Land of the Rising Sun.” She clapped her hands. “That’s it, you’ve seduced me. Let’s go to my tent.”

~ Over the past few days, I've been thinking about the main incompatibility between this book and my needs as a reader, and it comes down to this: Junction offers a story of survival in a biologically hostile environment. The question "Are they gonna make it?" does not thrill me but stresses me (perhaps because I'm going through a period where I'd very much like to see everyone around me "make it"--not in terms of physical survival but still). On top of that, it's a story about a group of people brought together by circumstances

Spoiler

who do not become a team (a fellowship ;) but instead treat each other with paranoia and mistrust--which turn out to be well founded, too

. I'm aware there're such situations but I'm not at a point where I want to read about them. (Haven't been in a long time either.) Right now, I need my faith in humanity ... and may I have a second helping too? ;)

[Guest]

I am quite excited that Tantor Media (Tantor freaking media!) has recorded this audiobook of Junction.

"When Japanese nature show host Daisuke Matsumori finds himself on an alien world, he hopes to rekindle his passion for his work. Traveling through a newly discovered wormhole in the Papuan highlands, he joins biologist Anne Houlihan on Junction, a patchwork planet of competing alien ecosystems.

When their exploratory party crashes in the alien wilderness, Daisuke and Anne try to lead bickering soldiers and civilians back to civilization alive. As they trek across one unearthly biome after another and members of the party continue to die, however, Daisuke wonders whether human politics might be more deadly than alien biology. One of his companions might be a murderer.

Contains mature themes."

Yeah. There are some mature themes.

BTW: The reader, Joe Hempel, is great. His questions about the correct pronunciations of people's names led me to discover that actually I'd been pronouncing some of them wrong. This is why audiobooks are important.

You can find the audiobook on Audible, the Tantor website, or Amazon.