A-to-Z Challenge Day 8: The Letter H

Craig Hudson

A Tremor of Bones

Space Corps Book 3

One of the elements that makes A Tremor of Bones pretty unique in the Space Corps saga is that it features the initiate archetype.  I didn't really appreciate that until I realized that I'm currently reading that kind of book right now (Duncan Hamilton's The Tattered Banner, for the record).  The initiate archetype is your basic introduction character, who helps guide the reader into the functional reality of a fictional world.  Now, let me just briefly recap the specific order of books.  So far we have Seven Thunders, the only book that has actually been written so far.  It's the Zero Book.  Then there's The Dark Side of Space, a prequel that ends with the same circumstances that begin Seven Thunders.  Then there's The Fateful Lightning, which is a sequel to Seven Thunders.  That brings us to A Tremor of Bones, which thematically is a more or less complete break from the narrative that has so far been introduced.  That's probably why I felt it was okay to do something different, perhaps a little more...expected?  Craig Hudson is specifically being inducted into the covert operations Division of the Space Corps.  He's tasked with doing the dirty work no one will ever know about, and he's teamed with a veteran, whom you'll meet on V Day, who's very much a grizzled veteran, who definitely didn't have all the lucky breaks Hudson gets to enjoy in Bones.  (Isn't that how it is with these initiate types?)  Hudson is surrounded by some of my favorite characters in the whole saga, and it was at this point that I started making each subsequent book feature more characters like that.  Some of that had crept up in Fateful Lightning (there's a rogue named Lonestar who is not the Lonestar of Spaceballs but very much a rogue in his own right, more like the Han Solo who would have existed before he met Luke Skywalker).  Following the arc of Hudson's budding career is the backbone of Bones, though it's always being contrasted by the fortunes of others.  Good fun.

Uncle Henry

Yoshimi and the Shadow Clan

Yoshimi Trilogy Volume 1

Central to the story of the warrior orphan Yoshimi is that she is indeed an orphan.  Her story begins as she's just emerging from a decade bouncing around the foster care system, and her social worker is a man she knows as Uncle Henry, the only positive, stable element of her life to this point.  Yet it's this Uncle Henry who serves as her introduction into the life she will know in the rest of the story.  For one thing, he's not really her uncle, and his name is not really Henry.  It's Alan Babbage, the only complete name in the entire story that I came up with entirely on my own rather than borrowed from one thing or another.  (One thing I won't tell you here or at my eponymous writer's blog is the source of most of those names.  I will tell you that the foster families get their names from the credits in the Flaming Lips album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, which was the inspiration for our warrior orphan's name.)  I list Uncle Henry only for the first volume, but Babbage plays a role in the complete story.  I cannot tell you what that role is, much like the character you'll meet in W Day, because there's only so much I can say without spoiling the story.  But I will say that if you love Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban as much as I do, you will probably enjoy Yoshimi's story, and the role Babbage plays.

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Clay Buchholz, whom Red Sox fans have been hoping will blossom into a pitching ace for several seasons now, helped the team win again yesterday with a strong outing.  That was the Fenway opener, by the way!  The team sits perched atop its division with a two-game lead.  Although three teams are two games away, including the Yankees, while the fourth is only a half-game below that.  It's still early in the season.

Pitcher Jered Weaver will miss about a month with a broken elbow, not his pitching arm, for the Angels.  Speedy recovery, Jered.  The Angels will be playing their home opener, meanwhile, against the A's.

The Cardinals lost their home opener.