spinningyarns:lanewilliam: So I recently published my first book on Amazon Market. Check out the exc
spinningyarns:lanewilliam: So I recently published my first book on Amazon Market. Check out the excerpt below and let me know what you think! If you like it enough please check out the paperback copy :-)The Boy Who Couldn’t WinThe presiding judge was an old general who looked just like one of the three images generally summoned by the word “judge.” Specifically, the overweight but extremely dignified one. His name was Archer Harris, and he was keeping an eye on a man in a white suit. Most people avoided looking at the man, because his face was twisted with tumors and pale with pain, but his eyes took everything in. In some ways this was not a difficult case, but in the few ways it was challenging, it was so in ways he was not used to. Most of his hard cases were puzzles. Complicated events, webs of deception, or intricate legal codes to decipher. But once the questions were resolved, the answers presented themselves, and it was only a matter of explaining those answers from legal language to something more understandable to the jury. In the case of Mateo Santiago, the facts were straightforward, and the morality was not, and there was no jury. Judge Harris had to decide for himself what he, and he alone, thought was right. Then he had to justify it to the world.The world was not an exaggeration, given the number of reporters in attendance. The story would cross the whole colony, and probably reach several of the space stations.He was doing his best to ignore them, and kept glancing at the man. He was sitting among the spectators, not involved with the trial itself. He met his eyes without giving any other sign of acknowledgement.Judge Harris declared a recess to consider his verdict. The spectators filed away to stretch their legs and speculate. The white-suited man mingled with the crowd just briefly before slipping away to the judge’s office.“Well,” Harris said, as he closed the door. “That was certainly interesting.”“He will be polarizing. He said things that people will strongly like and things that people will strongly dislike. Half the people will pick out their favorite parts and rewrite their least favorite to fit in with it. The other half will do the opposite. Mostly they will do this to fit whatever they already believed. Then they’ll judge your decision accordingly.”“So whatever I choose, I’ll be half popular, half unpopular.”“The way I see it, you have a safe way to neutralize all this, and a risky way to turn it to your advantage.”“Tell me the safe option first.”“Please nobody. Choose a sentence that’s too heavy for the ones who will like him, and too light for the ones who will hate him.”“That sounds more like the risky option. It will make everyone hate me.”“Voters don’t care about you. They care about picking fights with each other. It’s fun to fight when one side got what they wanted and the other did not. But when everyone is disappointed equally, the subject becomes boring. This will make Mateo Santiago disappear from the public eye, and you will find some other victory to run on in two years.”“Tell me the risky option.”“Turn him into a Trojan horse. The president’s electorate mostly favored leaving Arcadia alone, or finding a peaceful way to re-integrate them into Valkyrie. Yours mostly wanted to eradicate them. Mateo Santiago handed him a way to look good to everyone; an invited invasion. Of course, ruling Arcadia will create problems, but they will mostly be boring, sad and without easy answers. The kind of thing the public loves to forget about. The president will want his successes to be amplified and his failures to be forgotten. If he can do that, his entire party will have an advantage going into the election. Including your opposition, whomever that will be. But if Mateo Santiago stays in the spotlight… He’s the worst thing a party politician could ask for; a divisive figurehead. He complicates matters enough to sow discord among his friends, and irritates his enemies enough to unite them. There will be mistakes, and he won’t let them go unnoticed. Force the president to claim him, and he will destroy them from within.”*******Available in Kindle and Paperback https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08T856TT4 ******** I GET TO FOR-REAL BUY A LANE MAXFIELD NOVEL!!!And you should too- he’s a wonderful writer and also a top-notch friend ;) Thank you! I am so excited to finally have this out. I hope you like the tweaks I made to the setting. -- source link