Science Fiction Space Opera
Get your FREE copy of Star Rider Emerges by Heidi Skarie!
Will a young woman survive when her village is destroyed by an alien space fleet?
Toemeka lives with her family in an idyllic mountain village on a distant planet. The village is aware of the war that rages on their planet but the elders believe it won’t touch them. They are about to be proved wrong.
The tale is the exciting backstory to Star Rider on the Razor’s Edge that reveals the events that led up to Toemeka joining the Coalition of Free Nation and becoming an undercover operative.
Download your free copy today and dive into an exhilarating adventure!
My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a promotion in July: Sci-Fi & Fantasy 2026.
Nearly 50 books, short stories, samples, and previews, available at no cost.
by Brian Scott Pauls
Well, where have I been for a year?
A Yiddish expression tells us, “man plans and God laughs.” Last May, I suddenly found myself laid off from my corporate job. I wasn’t exactly surprised.
For a decade, I ran my own IT support business before selling it to another managed services company in 2016. Then I spent several years working for other small IT managed services companies in the Kansas City area. Eventually, I realized I wasn’t happy because working for the owners of small, local IT companies wasn’t nearly as much fun as being one. So I elected to return to the coporate fold I’d exited when I took my business full time in 2006.
At first everything was great. This was national IT company located in Denver which had been around for many years and had grown into a multi-million dollar enterprise. They were largely remote even before COVID, so I only had to travel to Denver for big company events or to meet with clients located there. The income stability of working for a large business even gave me time to focus on my writing.
But 2024 was a bad year for sales. Then the first round of tariffs hit in 2025, giving clients a reason to reconsider their contract renewals.
The company decided to let their long-time sales director go and bring in someone from a competing national IT vendor. He showed up and immediately started talking about “hypergrowth”—a potential period in the lifecycle of a company when it begins to expand rapidly—perhaps even exponentially.
In my experience, hypergrowth, while good for the top-line, can be bad for almost everything else—employees, ethics, company culture, professional relationships, you name it. Hypergrowth can act like cancer, uncontrolled growth that kills the host.
So I wasn’t surprised when people started losing their jobs (I later learned many were replaced by new people from the same company as the new sales director.) Being one of the most recently hired people in my position, I knew I was at risk. Which is why I also wasn’t surprised when I got a call telling me my services would no longer be required.
Fortunately, about a month earlier a former customer had dropped me a note on LinkedIn. The gist was, he knew I no longer worked for myself, but he needed to find someone like me to help him with his IT. At the time, I had reached out and politely confirmed I wasn’t in a position to assist, but said I would keep my eyes open for someone who fit the bill.
Well, circumstances had changed.
After first telling my wife what had happened, I picked up my phone and called my former customer’s cell. The conversation went something like this.
”Did you ever find someone to help you with the project we discussed.”
”No, I’m still looking for someone.”
”Well, I have plenty of time now!”
Within three days I had my first recurring customer for Cloudessy, a consulting business providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. It’s even a sponser of this newsletter. So if you or someone you know needs professional tech guidance for their author, coaching, or indepedent publishing business, you can find an ad for Cloudessy at the end of this message. Thanks!
Building a business from the ground up, as I already knew, is hard. And so I made the difficult decision to cancel or suspend may of my other activities, including my first-ever trips to the World Science Fiction Convention (in Seattle), and to the Nebulas (right here in Kansas City,) as well as my work on both The Cosmic Codex and my unfinished debut short story collection, Probability Amplitudes. But a year has passed. I’m making more as a fractional CTO than I did at the company that let me go, and I miss it around here.
So I’m back, I’m more in control of my destiny, and I’m ready to weigh-in once again on this marvelous science fiction universe in which we all live. I hope you’ll stick around.
And if, from time-to-time, I hear a chuckle in the background that could be God laughing, I’ll assume it’s good natured and roll with the punches.
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