The Authors Community is a collection of contemporary authors and a social network meeting place for readers and authors.
Fiction Literature
Excerpt: Chapter One - I am a master criminal, a jewel thief to be precise - and quite capable at my trade, if I do say so. You see, I have extraordinary powers that enable me to escape detection, that allow me to never be suspected by the law enforcement community. I am a vampire, and as such, I am empowered with talents suited to this lifestyle; after all, I can scale buildings, become a raven, and pass as a shadow to mortals...slipping easily in and out of mansions, l...
Classic Literature
Excerpt: Grief - Where are you now // When dark stalks my heart // Like a grim reaper? // Where are you now // When blackness seeps // Into my soul // Like a crying cold? // Where are you now // When teardrops rain sorrow // Like a sad storm sighing? // Where are you now, // My hope, my faith, // My everlasting trust // In the human quest?
Excerpt: Wasteland - The days and nights that come no more // And round us all sorrow grows; // The sun and moon have died // And in our hearts are black lies; // The stars whirl in a dark universe // And over us all the dust of death descends. // I dream of Love in gold and blue // My last burning vision of truth, // I dream of Love with haunted hopes // The first brief glimpse of a lost cause: // The end was deeper than the worst doom.
Poetry
Excerpt: Walking The Wilderness // Step by step, trudge on; // Walk on, walk on, // Climb the mountain that beckons; // A lonely plateau that calls // For only the few, // The few who are to be // Vessels for the muse. // Wider paths are on the earth, // Easier to navigate, safer to steer // Through life's many trials... // But the mountaintop beckons // For those who know their Fate.
Excerpt: Chapter One - I always thought of him as the man who never smiled. He was grieving, it was said, but I couldn't fathom his grief, couldn't grasp the depth of his sorrow - and yet I found him hauntingly appealing; his sadness touched me. I'm Alison Kent, never married, twenty-three; my position at our family-owned newspaper, The Clarion, afforded me opportunity to lunch in Magnolia Park where I occasionally saw him on those lovely April days of 1988.
Excerpt: If you're like me, you probably turned to the Afterword first, before reading the book that it is the Afterword to. If you have done this, . Go back to the beginning, and read the book. It's no fair just skimming the good parts, either, you must read the whole thing or you can't read the Afterword.
Excerpt: Players - the child, the actor, and the gambler. The idea of chance is absent from the world of the child and the primitive. The gambler also feels in service of an alien power. Chance is a survival of religion in the modern city...
Excerpt: Co-re-spon-dence /kor-e-'span-den(t)s/ n 1 a: the agreement of things with one another b: a particular similarity c: association of one or more members of a set with each member of a second set: Function, Mapping 2 a: communication by letters; also, the letters exchanged...
Excerpt: Insert - New York Times Bestseller List; The Number One entry for nonfiction is The Last Dancer, by Richard Stone. The Number One entry for fiction is of course Devlin's Razor, also by Richard Stone.
Introduction: The Face Of Night is set on United Earth, in the year 2496. It is an Earth radically different from our own; there is no hunger, no want, and no overpopulation. Humanity has had star travel for nearly four hundred years; the Exodus from Earth has been ongoing for most of that time. Some five million people leave Earth for the frontier each year; Earth's population,...
Excerpt: Dawn of the last day was clear. The sun lifted up over the hills to the east just before seven A.M. Down on the beach, Costigan knelt in the sand with the sun to his back, his shadow striking out over the ocean in the long low light of morning. When he had finished praying, Costigan rose, picked up his weapons, and began dressing. The forest here reached down toward the beach; a strip of sand fifty meters wide separated the water and the trees. Costigan glanced ...
Excerpt: If you can keep your head while all those about you are losing theirs, then perhaps you have misunderstood the situation. - Graffiti on the side of the Flushing Street Temple of Eris in New York Fade In: Int. Limbo - A Black Emptiness - Medium Distance A man sits in the blackness, in half lotus, the only object in a black universe. He is clothed in white: cloak, gloves, boots, a hood; mist crawls where his face should be. On his chest is a pattern of nine circle...
Excerpt: On Tuesday, October 5, 2049, a starship of the Zaradin Church exited Sol System's Second Gate. Not just starship; this was a Cathedral, one of nine to be found in the galaxy. Sol's Second Gate lies outside the orbit of Saturn, and far off the ecliptic; but had the Cathedral stayed at the Second Gate long enough, darkened though it was, humanity would have found it in time, through its gravitational disturbance upon the orbits of the other bodies in the System. It was large.
Excerpt: The sun still set as it had for all the thousands of years that humanity had existed. Darkness gathered at the windows, and the children of the race still shivered in their beds when the night winds brought them the scent of monsters. And because the adults were busy, too busy to tend to the children, the children turned to the machines, and the computers told them stories. On that cold, dark winter night, the little girl whose name was Cia did something she had...
Excerpt: Just a brief note to everyone; my sister and I are about to offer a signed, limited first edition of a novel we wrote together called Terminal Freedom. I'll be sending the first three chapters to the list in subsequent messages.
Excerpt: The following novel, according to current plans, will be Crystal Wind. Crystal Wind is the novel that was originally called Players: Revolution. The novel after that is the novel I told a bunch of people would be following The Last Dancer. This is Lord November: The Man-Spacething War. LN:TMSW is set in approximately 2680, six hundred years after the Trent/Denice stories. It's a very big novel novel, and the first Continuing Time novel that's really set out in t...
Excerpt: This short story series, characters, plots, concepts, fonts, styles, and alphanumeric characters, etc. etc. What this means is if you write a story called Haven Born with wacky characters named Doc, Random, or Lime, I can sue your ass off and laugh hysterically as my ordinarily thin pockets are amplified by legal reprimands. You've been warned.
Excerpt: This story SERIES (ongoing until I find an end) is a mix of what I like best in my FWLS (A Future We'd Like to See) series and my Ranma 1/2 anime fan fictions. As a result, it will be posted to both, since it applies to both. Here are some individual notes for both groups...
Excerpt: The story you are about to read is the collective work of a year and a half of writing. Some of it was done for a writing class, some just for fun. It is the basis for my A Future We'd Like to See series, introducing many elements of the 'universe' I work and play in. In other words, it's a prequel to FWLS.