This weekend I wrapped reading Silk & Steel: A Queer Speculative Adventure Anthology. It was a really fun read and I highly recommend it. One of the stories is, to readers of Okazu, instantly recognizable as a fanfic on a series we have been enjoying for a good 20 years.  It was so obviously a fanfic, that it put me in mind of a fanfic I had started some 20 years ago as well, that grew into an original novella and I had never done a damn thing with. It took me 14 years to write the story. I started it in the late 1990s and kept putting it aside. It came with me to 4 jobs that I can think of, where I occasionally pulled it out and wrote another paragraph or two. I had thought it would work for a particular publication, but by the time I finished it, that publication had moved on and wanted something different than what I wanted for the story.

A few years ago, on a lark, I created a cover for it – a cover, it turned out, that had a typo. D’oh ^_^

This week I dragged it out, gave it a dust off and found I didn’t hate it. So while I was thinking about fanfic, I put it up on Kindle. It’s not a magnum opus, it’s a fanfic that outgrew it’s skin. (This is a pun and about as funny as puns usually are.) Here’s the synopsis:

Claudia Moreno was a good soldier, but the military saw her as a problem to be disappeared. Now she has a second chance as an Investigator for A/CINet and she’s determined to make her life work.

On her first solo case, she finds herself caught up in security for the most powerful corporation in the worlds; and its beautiful, charismatic leader, Lyrin Hayasu. Who is infiltrating this mysterious Artificial/Created Intelligence’s network…? Can Claudia save Lyrin from the intruder? And, can she save herself from Lyrin?

It’s a hardboiled-ish, science fictiony, cyberpunkesque, lesbian story. A/CINet Case File: An Inside Job is available for $2.99 on Kindle.I hope you’ll read it and, if you find some interesting bits in it, drop a review.