QSFer J. Scott Coatsworth has a new gay sci fi short out: Repetition.
What if you wanted to go back into the closet? What if you could?
Need a little something tweaked in your past? Davis your guy, as long as it won’t screw with his own t-line. He’s your typical everyday past-pathing time nerd, and he’s seen it all.
Then one day he gets an unorthodox proposal, even by his standards. And when he finds out who his new client is, things quickly go from complicated to crazy-dangerous, challenging his mantra:
You’re not God.
Never mess with your own past.
Remember, you’re not God.
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Giveaway
Scott is giving away ten copies of “Skythane,” the first book in his “Oberon Cycle” trilogy with this post. Enter via Rafflecopter:a
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Excerpt
“Sure, it’s unorthodox. Past-pathing’s always a dicey proposition.”
Davis twisted the phone cord between his fingers, frowning, thinking of all the contingencies involved. The background work alone would be extensive, but the challenge might make it worthwhile. “When can you come down? That’s right, 147 Alpine, corner of Main, just behind the Quickmart. Long gray building with a flat roof, military barracks conversion. Can’t miss it.”
Harlan’s framed image stared back at him as he talked, his handsome face a mockery of the present. Davis snorted and tossed the frame in the trash. Long past due.
“Oh, nothing, sir. Just a sneeze.” He spun around in the chair, fingers rambling over the key slate. “Tomorrow, ten sharp? I’ll need to do a preliminary scan, then feed the data through our AI server to find the best places to start. It’ll take me, what, maybe two days? Then we can talk.” He scratched behind his ear unconsciously, the ideas already spinning in his brain. He’d have to write some code tonight to weed out the worst of the dross from the first run in the morning. Then he’d see about narrowing down the resulting data set and cleaning up the main lines from there.
“Gotcha. What? Nothing… just yourself. Right-o. See you then.” Coupla days, no sleep. It was doable.
He sat back, rubbing his chin, staring out the window at the reflective glass windows of the soaring forty-story tenements. He’d never had a request quite so close to home.
Why would someone want to go back into the closet?
It had been hard enough coming out in the first place back in the late nineties in conservative Arizona, when many folks still blamed AIDS on the sexual promiscuity, despite the hard scientific evidence to the contrary.
Davis sighed. The longer he lived, the more he realized things always came around again.
The current administration was proof enough of that.
The real question was, could he do it?
He glanced at the neat, hand-lettered sign he had hung above the desk:
You’re not God.
Never mess with your own past.
Remember, you’re not God.
He decided to take the case.
Author Bio
Scott lives with his husband of twenty five years in a Sacramento suburb, in a cute little yellow house with a brick fireplace and two pink flamingoes out front.
He inhabits in the space between the here and now and the what could be. Indoctrinated into science fiction and fantasy by his mom at the tender age of nine, he quickly finished her entire library. But he soon began to wonder where all the queer people were.
After coming out at twenty three, he started writing the kinds of stories he couldn’t find at Crown Books. If there weren’t many queer characters in his favorite genres, he would will them into existence, subverting them to his own ends. And if he was lucky enough, someone else would want to read them.
His friends say Scott’s mind works a little differently than most – he makes connections between ideas that others don’t, and somehow does more in a day than most people manage in a week. Although born an introvert, he forced himself to reach outside himself, and learned to connect with others like him.
Scott’s stories subvert expectations that transform traditional science fiction, fantasy, and contemporary worlds into something different and unexpected. He runs both Queer Sci Fi and QueeRomance Ink with his husband Mark.
His romance and genre fiction writing brings a queer energy to his stories, filling them with love, beauty and power. He imagines how the world could be – in the process, he hopes to change the world, just a little.
Scott was recognized as one of the top new gay authors in the 2017 Rainbow Awards, and his debut novel “Skythane” received two awards and an honorable mention.
You can find him at Dreamspinner here, Goodreads here, on Amazon here, on QueeRomance Ink here, and on Facebook here.