Deborah's Journal

For all you faithful Jaydium readers, a peek into my writing and revision process, with a rather embarrassing first draft of the opening for you to enjoy!

Deborah J. Ross: SPECIAL: Jaydium - Revising a False Start

Chapter 35 of Jaydium, for your reading pleasure:

For a long moment, Duvach sat immobile and Eril feared it was too lost in its own alien emotions to help them. Then it extended a feathery tendril and brushed Kithri's cheek. A droplet glistened on the silvery strand.

"Water . . . salt water. The water of life."

Behind Duvach's heavy, inflectionless voice, Eril sensed its wonderment. Kithri, beside him, gulped and blinked, more tears streaming down her face.

"My Clan-superior Raerquel was right all along," Duvach murmured. "The light is in each of us, however strange our outer forms. Beneath all differentness, our waters flow as one."

Deborah J. Ross: Jaydium - Chapter 35

Jaydium - Chapter 30

Eril's first impulse was to laugh in Brianna=s face. No one but his sister Avery could rant in such an operatic mode, and he thought Brianna would fare well in the comparison. But one look at Kithri's face convinced him that she, for one, was taking Brianna seriously.

"Calm down, Bri," he said as diplomatically as he could. "There's nothing to be gained by blaming one another. If there was a mistake, it was my mistake, not Kithri's."

"I don't blame her and I am quite calm already." Brianna began gathering the sheets of seaweed-film into meticulous piles, as if to underscore her rationality. "After all, she's had no more education than a herd-beast. Not a shred of decent methodological training. It isn't her fault--"

Kithri had started toward her own cubicle, but now she froze and turned slowly back. Her face flooded with color and her old nose break stood out as a chalky brand. She strode to the table and swept the entire contents--all of Brianna's notes, styluses, and specimens--to the floor. Still without a word, she shoved one fist a hairsbreadth from Brianna=s nose and made an emphatic gesture. Then she spun around and marched out the door.

Brianna looked at Eril, her eyes innocently wide. "What--what did she--"

"Never mind." Eril bent to pick up a pile of films. "You don't want to know what that meant."

Things get more desperate as war looms even closer. Read the latest chapter on my blog.

"I was wrong about you," Lennart said slowly. "What I said before the hearing..."

"We were all swiping at each other. You were just--"

"Shut up and let me apologize! I can't hold you accountable for the crazy things your Federation did, any more than I can blame Kithri--or Raerquel. Even Bri, with all her academic bullshit, she'd stand on her head to save these folks. Protesting all the while that her only interest was as a scientist. Maybe in my time, it was people like you that kept us from destroying it all."

"Hey, don't go making me into a hero," Eril said with an embarrassed laugh. "I'm just your everyday fly-boy. I followed orders, I didn't make policy."

"Maybe things would've been better if you had..."

We're going to die anyway, all of us. You think your little studies of alien architecture are going to save this planet?"

Brianna offered no reply. Kithri looked at the woman and two men who had, in a few days, gone from strangers to people she'd die for. She had no strength to argue with them. She barely had enough for herself. All her instincts, all her experience urged her to keep silent, to stay out of it. There might be nothing she could do, or she might die anyway. She thought again of her father, wrestling alone with his own choices, his own unknown future. How much more difficult it must have been for him with a child, perhaps already knowing he was dying. All these years she=d blamed him for being a coward because he=d run away.

"You do whatever you want," she said, closing the door on everything that had gone before in her life. "Me, I'm going to go out fighting for something besides my own skin."


Deborah J. Ross: Jaydium - Chapter 25

If it's Friday, Kithri and her friends are about to be caught up in the aliens' interstellar war...

Deborah J. Ross: Jaydium - Chapter 20

Orycon ate my weekend, so I failed to connect with the internet last Friday to blather about Chapter 18 of my serialized sf novel, Jaydium.<\i> The question of whether vertebrates in general and mammals in particular (our heroes included) qualify as persons is debated.

Deborah J. Ross: Jaydium, Chapter 18

It's Jaydium Friday, and Kithri matches wits with the pirates, with surprising results.

Deborah J. Ross: Jaydium, Chapter 15

And not only are we not i/n/K/a/n/s/a/s on Stayman any more, but relationships are about to get complicated. Here's the link.


"Eril and that Brianna, I've seen their type before," Lennart nodded. "They're always so excited about what they're doing, they never look to see who's bringing up the rear."

"And that's us?"

"In a matter of speaking. I don't know what your story is, but I always figured that being a loner was the price of space flight. It never seemed like too much to pay before. Most other people couldn't understand what I wanted, anyway. But maybe it was the opposite, that I never got close to them because I knew I'd only have to leave."

"So you pushed them away... Are you telling me I do the same thing?"

Lennart shrugged. "I'm not saying it's bad to do that. You make your choice and you live by it."

"But I didn't choose this!" Kithri's nerves sizzled. "I had nothing to say about any of it! First I get dragged off Albion, then the goddamned war strands us in the dustpit of the universe, and now this crazy place--"

"And you're pissed at Eril because he sees it as a chance instead of a dead end?"

Something hot and red welled up inside Kithri until she could hardly see. "Why should you care what I feel?"

"Because you could use a friend."

For a moment Kithri saw herself reflected in his eyes, saw beauty in the taut, muscled grace of her body, the ragged curls. He stood before her, his big hands at his sides. The sky was light enough to reveal the startling red-brown of his eyes.

"A...friend," she repeated, heart pounding.

He smiled, one corner of his mouth turned down. "And so could I. Whether we stay here or make it back to your Fifth Fed, nobody's going to run me through a weekend refresher course and zap me back into space. I'll be lucky to get a job pushing a broom."

the plot thickens...

Just one night won't hurt anything, Eril told himself, knowing full well that he was rationalizing. The truth was that he wanted the city to himself for a little longer, before it swarmed with Federation scientists.

Read it here (and previous chapters are up - click "Read A Story" for the index)