Tag Archives: Children of Legend

Legendary Stories – Monetization

So I’ve had a few thoughts about how I want to get these stories out there and wanted to bounce them off of you, my loyal readers, to see what you thought.

Obviously, I’ll be selling them individually. Given their length I’m thinking $1.49 for each one on Amazon/Smashwords. I wanted to try something new, in addition to that.

$10 – You get all twelve stories, plus the prequel stories, personalized, in e-book format as they come out (possibly even a day or two early). This would save you $10.85 off of the cover price and hey PERSONALIZATION!

$15 – This would get you the above, plus e-book version of the stories I’m writing for the Action Pack. This is a joint project between Mike Plested, JR Murdock, and myself. Mike’s story will be Boy Scouts of the Apocalypse. JR’s will be a western/steampunk mashup. I’ll be writing a story that takes place in the Legend universe. I’m going to give the back story for one of the secondary characters. He’s basically Indiana Jones + Fox Mulder + Rube Goldberg. It’ll detail what REALLY happened at area 51 and events from it will enhance the modern stories I’m telling in the Legend universe. There should be twelve stories in there that I would sell for $.99 individually (and I’m not planning on doing that, only way to get those will be to buy the Action Pack or get this deal) so you’d get 24 stories for $15 that would ordinarily cost you $29.76.

$20 – Same as the $10 level, but you’d also get the further edited and SIGNED paperback version of the first season of Children of Legend when it comes out next year (may have to charge you for S&H when I get that out to you if you’re international). I’m thinking the paperback will run about $20 since it will be around 120-140K words.

$30 – Same as the $15 plus a SIGNED paperback version of my Action Pack short stories done up in a novelized fashion.

Now, this would be a sort of subsciption/pre-order deal. I’m not sure when I’d make this live per se. You might want to see the first few stories and I respect that. I’m also open to suggestions. If you think you’d like to do this leave me a comment with what level you’re interested in. I won’t hold anyone to this informal poll, but it will let me gauge interest. This worked well for Ginnie Dare and let me pay for the cover. I’d also like to get this professionally edited so this would help pay for that as well.

I may do this via Kickstarter or Indiegogo when the time comes so any thoughts on additional swag/levels of support are appreciated.

Hostile Takeover – WIP

This story takes place in the same universe as X Marks the Spot and will be my own take on a super hero universe. It will owe a little bit to the Wild Cards series of books. This is a WIP and is covered by the Creative Commons License below.

Finding that box in the woods was both the best thing and the worst thing to ever happen to me. I was right that my life would never be boring again, but like my favorite comic book says, with great power comes great responsibility. I had a clear vision of how the world needed to be. The aliens told me that they had given me my abilities to fight in a war that had already passed. That was their mistake. There was still a war on of sorts and it needed fighting. The world was being controlled by idiots. I needed look no further than my own high school to see that. The power structure was determined by looks, popularity, and money in varying combinations. I had none of the above. For the first couple of years after my experience with the box I just sat back and observed. I tested my abilities, sipping intelligence from those around me and learning how to use the limited telekinesis. I read volumes that were beyond my years. I kept these things secret from those around me, even my beloved mother.

Once I was ready to begin my journey to power, I began to build the cadre I needed. I surrounded myself with outcasts. Boys and girls who were smart enough to be of use to me, but not so smart that they would catch on to what I was doing. I tried to add one other gifted person to the circle but that ended in disaster. I mishandled it and she doesn’t trust me any more than perhaps she should. Overall I was successful in my efforts. I had a few friends that I carried with me to the beginning of my Freshmen year and was able to convince my mother and my teachers to let me engage in a period of self study with these people. I used that time to begin to build to my ultimate goal, the takeover of the entire school.

Mind you, I don’t mean that in the strictest political sense. I didn’t want to be class president or the like. I wanted to run the daily operations. I wanted to control the actions of the adults from the principal down to my fellow students. If I could do that, I reasoned, then I could do the same thing once I was out in the real world. School would serve for me the same purpose it purported to serve the boys and girls that would grind through the next four years. It would mold them into what they wanted to be.

The school bell rung shrilly on that first morning. It amplified the headache that I carried with me nearly constantly. Being around too many people made me feel like I was in a vast echo chamber. I was able to damp down the effect, but it cost me. The pain was a dull throb that was only alleviated by solitude. Even my prescription for migraines, the source of which only I was aware, barely touched it. But I could function.

Billy sat across from me. We were the only two in the library during the homeroom period. I was supposed to be tutoring him. I had helped him all through Middle School, at first to avoid beatings. Eventually, even he saw the benefit of a more amiable relationship. While we could never be friends, he was now less of a threat and more of a weapon I could use when I needed strength of arms.

He flipped through Captain Underpants, while I took notes and doodled in my moleskine. It was the end of the first grading period and I had my first target in my sites. There was a small gang of miscreants that “ruled” the ninth grade. They were lead by Joseph Ramirez, a tenth grader who was by all accounts smart for his age. They weren’t a gang as such, but they certainly had a loose power structure and even made money by selling everything from tests to illicit over the counter and prescription drugs. Ramirez was smart enough not to delve into the harder drug trade. The Dragons and Ochos filled that niche and would step hard on anyone who tried to interfere. I was certain that he knew where the boundaries were and was likely being groomed for upward mobility.
Continue reading Hostile Takeover – WIP

Compass Rose Pt. 2 – WIP

This story takes place in the same universe as X Marks the Spot and will be my own take on a super hero universe. It will owe a little bit to the Wild Cards series of books. This is a WIP and is covered by the Creative Commons License below.

Read Pt. 1 here.

Ben flinched.

Jackson balled up his fist. “Nah. We were just hanging out and this little queer got too nosy for its own good.”

I drew back at the smell of cigarette smoke on his breath. “Sneaking a smoke out behind the school and you got caught. No reason to beat up a little kid.”

“She was going to tell the teachers. Things got out of hand.” Jackson bent down as though to help Dawn up.

“You leave her alone and get the hell out of here, before I finish what she started. I saw Mr. Reed out by the shop class. He could be here in two minutes and you two would be out of school for the rest of the year.”

“No. You can’t do that. I won’t be able to run track and we’re doing good this year.” As handsome as Ben was, his world was all about that asphalt oval. “You can’t tell on us. She’ll be okay.”

“I won’t tell if you just get lost.”

Jackson punched Ben in the chest. “Come on big guy, let’s leave these two queers alone.” He looked down at me. “I’ll talk with you later.”

The boys turned and left the yard, and I stooped down again.

“Can you stand up, buddy?” I rested one hand on her shoulder.

“I… I think so. If you help.”

I could tell that she was going to have a black eye at least. The nose bleed wasn’t bad. The way she winced when I got her to her feet meant that she had a few bruises around her ribs. Together we eased to the building.

Dawn stopped us halfway. “You’re not gonna tell are you?”

“Do you want me to?”

“No. I think that would just make things worse.”

There was a lot of wisdom there. Even then I realized that and how horrible that truth was. Both of us had seen movies and heard talks about bullying, but on the schoolyard tattletales always paid double. If I told then she would get another beating whether she did or not. “I’ll leave that up to you. If you tell then I’ll say that I saw everything. If you decide not to then mum’s the word.”

Mr. Reed was still talking to the Robotics teacher. When they saw us come in, Mr. Reed said something I’d never heard him say in class. We were whisked to the office in short order. Dawn claimed that she had fallen from the monkey bars. That was plausible, but I would know later in life that the look Ms. Mayhew had given her was called incredulous. We would all know by the summer of our Sophomore year that her previous husband had beaten her more than once. That’s why she was a Ms. now.

Once everything was calm, I excused myself.

“Are you sure that you don’t want one of us to take you home?”

I shook my head. “No, thank you, Mr. Reed. I only live a couple of blocks away and there’s still plenty of light.”

“Okay. But be careful.”

I nodded solemnly. In a world where you could get a beating for being in the wrong place at the wrong time though, no amount of care was capable of protecting you from getting hurt eventually.

I left by the back way again. There was a shortcut to my house through the woods at the edge of the school property. I could get there in around eight minutes. Four minutes into my walk I hit the thicket and smelled smoke. That was when I felt something hit me between the shoulder blades. I blacked out before I even felt my face hit the thorn bush.

Creative Commons License
Compass Rose by Scott Roche is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.scottroche.com.

Compass Rose – WIP

This story takes place in the same universe as X Marks the Spot and will be my own take on a super hero universe. It will owe a little bit to the Wild Cards series of books. This is a WIP and is covered by the Creative Commons License below.

I heard the screaming as I left the school by its back door. There was no way for me to resist going to check it out. It was a scream of abject terror in a high pitched boy’s voice. Such screams had torn from my own throat on more than one occasion. I cursed the decision to wear the long gypsy like skirts today. As cute as I think I looked in them, they got in the way of an all out run. Still, I pushed my body as hard as I could.

The playground was only a few dozen yards away. School was out for the day and the kids in lower grades should all be on their buses and well on their way home. Older kids like me might still be around, but it would be for organized after school activities, not for random play or climbing monkey bars. Most eighth graders believed themselves to be above such pursuits, even though swinging was the closest thing to flying that any of us would achieve.

In spite of my skirts and the non-sensible, but lovely sandals Mom had given me, I got to the fenced in playground in good time. A couple of my classmates, Ben a tall blond that I thought was the handsomest boy in Mr. Lester’s biology class, and Jackson a bullying ginger that had been my terror since third grade, stood over the prone body of someone much smaller than they were. I saw Jackson fetch one more kick at him as I ran up.

“Get off of him.” I shouted. My voice picked that instant to crack.

The pair looked up from their victim. Ben had the decency to look guilty. Jackson just looked annoyed at the interruption. “Well, well if it isn’t Ross the busybody.”

“It’s Rose, you moron.” Getting most people to acknowledge my new name had been difficult to say the least. People like Jackson probably never would. “Now, what are you doing to…” I looked at the ground and was shocked to see Dawn. She was a sixth grader I had taken under my wing. Still a tomboy, she came to me a few times about the way I dressed and we talked a lot about choices. I saw a thread of bright blood trickling down her upper lip.

I’d often heard of people seeing scarlet when they were angry. I thought it was just a figure of speech until that day. I planted both of my hands on the short fence and somehow made it over without getting caught. It was one of the few times I was grateful for the testosterone I had raging through my system. My first target wasn’t either of the two bullies, though. I went to my friend and knelt by her.

She opened her eyes and scrubbed at them with her bright green sleeve. She had been crying for a long time if the redness was any indication. “Rose?” Her voice was thick with snot.

“It’s okay, sweetie. I’m here. We’re going to get you some help. Just lay still for a few minutes.” I stood, not coming anywhere close to either boys’ height. “So, what’s going on here. You guys run out of things to pull the wings off of?”

Creative Commons License
Here There Be Dragons by Scott Roche is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.scottroche.com.