The Short Blurb

Other dimensions exist, flush with resources to be exploited.

With the delivery of a cryptic flash drive, doctor of applied physics and recent science journalist hire to a popular magazine, Pei Xiao has just landed her first big break. Driven by the need to prove herself to a family she betrayed, she finds herself partnered to a photojournalist when she accepts a mysterious assignment. It is a path of intrigue, adventure, and horror in this science fiction tale.

Story Inspirations, Influences, & Hard Science

So, I was on a bus heading home from work, reading a Lovecraft short on my Kindle and listening to an episode of Star Talk. The story was From Beyond and the episode centered around the physics of multiple dimensionality. A Venn diagram began to form in my mind and slowly, at the center of it, Shift began to take shape.

The characters, especially the main and secondary protagonists Pei and Roy, are seeded in the geek vs. nerd duality of my head combined with my experiences living the first half of my life in the U.S. and the second half overseas in Taiwan. For those who don’t know how old I am, that’s 20 years, then 20 years more.

The science behind the book is as close to accurate as I could manage according to current scientific theory. Some of what story elements are based on are theoretical principles like the distribution of gravity across dimensions and how that would effect the formation of that dimension and the biomes within it, the ability of uncharged particles (singlets) to move freely across dimensions, dark matter being extradimensional matter whose gravitational influence is felt in our dimensional set, and so on. These were extremely fun things for my layman’s (but obsessively nerdy) grasp of the science to play with.

Even the intelligent, giant, floating jellyfish are objectively plausible. ;-)

A Cool Bit of Fan Art (I Love This)

The artist is Jessica Teng (a.k.a. Elger Teng), a graphical arts student. She doesn’t have a dA page, FB fan page, or anything like that. She has a Flickr page, but it hasn’t been updated in two years. She also has a Tumblr, which seems more current.

NOTE: InkShares removes all formatting from submitted samples, which includes my use of italics for inner monologues and bold for readouts and signs. Please keep that in mind when reading the sample chapter below.