Blurbs

Let's give you a choice:

A short pitch
A longer pitch, more like they'd do in Hollywood
A modest blurb

The difference between a "blurb" & a "pitch?" Not semantics, more like nuance. I write blurbs for reading where you are responsible for emphasis & pitches for speaking where I can control emphasis.

A Short Pitch

A Longer Pitch

Seeds of Disaster …

crosses business with soldiers — like Cryptonomicon, only these are rebel soldiers
follows — among other characters — the crises of a person whose whole life revolves around her job — like Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full
incorporates and ridicules the vagaries of corporate life — like Scott Adams’ Dilbert
proposes an organization for society that is based on the fundamental patterns of human psychology while incorporating the latest technology, as I see it will be in 50 years — unlike any other book

The protagonist PHOEBE manages a combine that protects and serves a city of a million people — police, fire, counseling. An oldest child, she grew up taking care of other people & when her first major love affair collapsed, she filled her life with caring for her combine and her customers. She’ll fight her own consortium, she’ll fight the competition, she’ll fight anybody to protect her city.

The antagonist DAIN — ah, Dain, my critique group’s favorite character — had his psyche shattered early in life … let’s not say why here except every society, no matter how well it works for the majority, generates a fringe element … Dain has vowed that no more children will suffer as he did and has prepared diligently, even brilliantly, within the consortium as well as among the fringe elements that he identifies with so well.

The precipitating crisis comes at the end of the first chapter. The rules say that Phoebe’s contract — in fact, all contracts, public & private — must be opened to competition once a year. Phoebe and her boss and her boss’ boss — NORMA, an interesting character in her own right — don’t feel a threat because their consortium has every contract & combine on the continent sewed up. But the largest international consortium on the planet does file its intent to compete — with WEIR as its point man — & rips everything wide open, disrupting the social fabric in Phoebe’s city enough to give Dain the chance he’s been waiting for.

I worked for Corporate America for 15 years, the last five bidding on & delivering projects, so I know what it’s like on the inside of that enclave. Since 1992, I’ve worked for customers of Corporate America, so I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end. I’ve also spent much of the last 30 years writing, with some early stories appearing in Analog and Lone Star Universe (along with Bruce Sterling and Howard Waldrop) and many technical manuals and articles published. After several intense years of adapting my skills to fiction writing while earning a living as a computer consultant, I am ready to publish Seeds of Disaster, dedicated to project managers everywhere, and the first co-quel in the Midway for Combines trilogy.

And hey! There’s a contest — based on a crypto-puzzle — built into the novel.

A Modest Blurb

Seeds of Disaster is a science-fiction novel about a chief of public safety raised on a Settled Planet where ownership is completely collective and operations are completely privatized. Accountable to a massive consortium for a city's safety, responsible to the city's Collective of citizens as well, she discovers life-threatening danger from criminal agitators starting a continent-wide insurrection in her city as she faces an unexpected challenge to her professional future from legal foreign competition for renewal of her annual contract. To save herself and her beloved city, she must accept help from one adversary to defeat the other.

The Founders of this human society gave their Settled Planet the name "Yeibichai," after a Navaho supernatural with curative powers. These Founders recognized that people exist as complex permutations of the same basic factors. Change, from person to person, and even within a single person during her or his lifetime, is an inevitable result of this pattern. However, they also knew that the Universe has its constants. They therefore established a society geared for change in the midst of stability. They placed responsibility for the immutable parts of life, such as real property and operational contracts, into each community's hands, and they left the everyday decisions to individuals.

But even with such an enlightened foundation, not everybody understands. Some people, such as Har Norma Byukan, prefer constancy, especially when they're in charge. After inheriting the reins of a consortium whose components deliver every contract on the Continent of Popovich, she perfected the organization and her power over it until the unexpected vanished and change was unthinkable.

Stability is just another word for stagnancy, which generates its own Seeds of Disaster. For instance, in the midst of all this perfection, not everyone fits in. For another, on a planet where change and competition and improvement are cherished, even a whole continent cannot isolate itself, and challenge must come across the seas inevitably.

A fundamental pattern on Yeibichai is the universality of communication, achieved through a virtual infrastructure called the Mirnaya Direvnya (Global Village). Using the Em-Deh, the misfits can organize ... and wait. Using the Em-Deh, other consortia can monitor contract renewals ... and challenge the home team.

When change finally comes, it comes with a force and from directions totally unexpected, all of which collide in a reasonably peaceful city, named Amerwon, whose safety is cared for by a woman who has invested her whole life in this job, a woman named Doyle Phoebe Heejanus.

This novel tells the stories of Phoebe and one of her most trusted detectives, Bre Harlan D'Grennan; of Foxfire, a Nurse in Training in Amerwon; of Jik Dain Bedlip, a senior Partner for the Consortium and the organizer of the insurrection, and one of his agitators, 13'Sao-La; of Weir Annadetcall, leader of the foreign competition; of a few others caught up in the swirl of change; and of Norma, whose domination of a continent enables the very Seeds of Disaster she's planted to blossom.