What I’ve been up to lately, and a brief summary of THE BALANCE
I’ve been busy working, and collaborating with Benjamin, on the editing of The Balance. I made a few plot adjustments that shortened the book by 2 chapters, but without losing any of the best parts of the story.
The main character is Phoebe, a seventeen year old girl who was the last product of the Order’s Sensitives Program. She is unaware of why she feels like a freak—she didn’t know that both her long lost mother and her were both genetically engineered and then further engineered in the womb using other technologies—they were created using both biological and physics (manufacturing) techniques. This latter was to amplify the characteristics created genetically and to control how the genes expressed themselves.
The story will, ultimately span 3 volumes. This first volume is a Young Adult story. It contains almost 50 chapters and will probably be bout 500 pages. To understand the look and feel of the Land (the place where Phoebe lives) and what it’s like to live under the rule of the Council of God, I’ve posted a rough draft introduction and less rough (but still draft) sample chapters on my web at this address:
https://michaelselden.com/the-balance/
Phoebe lives with her adopted father, Daniel, who was like a spouse to her mother, although the Order (the organization that created both Phoebe and her mother) determined who Phoebe’s “father” would be and manipulated her genes.
Together, they’ve worked hard to hide who and what Phoebe is, which is difficult because she doesn’t always have control over the things that happen to her. This is brought out in the early chapters (the one’s posted). The Land has gone through changes. Both the Council and God and the Order ruled the land together for over a century after a global thermonuclear war that kill over 8 billion people and rendered most of the world uninhabitable. However, the Order had kept their genetics programs (a part of the Future Man project) a secret since it’s inception (before the war). But it was heresy and, when revealed, caused an uprising that resulted in members of the order and the engineered humans to be killed or driven into hiding. Since that time, most technology has been banned. Certainly anyone who might have been engineered, like Phoebe, would be subject to immediate execution if they are discovered.
Story concepts and characters are copyright Michael Selden 2011 – 2014
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