In my Dinosaur Wars stories, Kit Daniels’ college friend Maddy Meyer has a knack for getting into trouble. I’m not talking boy trouble, although she’s no stranger to that, nor am I talking car trouble, or grade-point-average trouble. I’m talking the kind of trouble you can get into when Tyrannosaurus rex roams the landscape. And that’s pretty big trouble, as you can see.
Here, Maddy has wandered too far from the safety of an escorted tour of Yellowstone Park, where dinosaurs have taken up residence again after 65 million years of, shall we say, skipping class? Yellowstone Country never has been a good place to stray from the safety a vehicle or a group of fellow travelers. There have always been hungry grizzly bears, mountain lions, wolves and quite a few other beasts that might be inclined to eat you, stomp you, gore you or all of the above. So, going off by herself to snap a couple of cool photos has proven to be one of the worst choices of her young life, and maybe the last. Whatever will she do? How about RUN FASTER!
But never fear, Maddy. Just as you are a master–or mistress–of getting into trouble, your school chum Kit is skilled in getting people out of the fixes they get into. It probably has something to do with the kind of experience that a cattle rancher’s daughter gains from years of escapades with Black Angus cattle and the carnivores that occasionally try to claim some beef for dinner. In this case, she’s plucky enough to ride one of the mighty flying pterodactyls brought to earth by the Kra, those human-sized intelligent dinosaurs that have turned evolution topsy-turvy in Yellowstone and quite a few other places around the world.
The big unanswered question here is, will Kit and her flying mount move fast enough to keep you out of the jaws of that hungry T rex? Or did you finally get yourself into trouble just one too many times?
The answers can be found in my short story, Riding Quetzalcoatlus, available as an ebook on Kindle and Nook and Sony and Kobo and iTunes and Diesel, or go directly to my publisher Smashwords for other versions.
To my favorite sci-fi author Tom Hopp. Question: I bought your previous Dinosaur Wars books, and the Jihad Virus book, in hard copy. I now have an iPad, and have downloaded the free ebook #1 of Dinosaur Wars. Can I get free downloads of the other ebooks that I’ve already bought in hard copy too, or do I have to buy them again? I hope to see them in movies someday! Keep up the good work!
Thanks Matt, for your long-running interest in my stories. The bad news is, my publishers haven’t made any of my stories available for free except the first Dinosaur Wars novel, Earthfall. So, yup, you’ll have to spring for a few dollars to pick up Counterattack — $3.99 to be exact. That’s not too bad, considering it took me months to revamp it from cover to cover since the days of the old paperback that’s now out-of-print. I didn’t change the story at all, but I edited the prose to make the story read more quickly and move more smoothly. You probably noticed that in Earthfall. Or if you didn’t notice, then that’s good news for me, because an author’s job is to make the words race by while you read without really noticing them. I’m at about the 2/3 point in writing the third book in the series, Blood On The Moon, so keep your eyes open for it. It will probably be priced like Counterattack. I hope you’ll keep enjoying my work and try some of the short stories while waiting for the next novel. Thanks again, Matt!