I am super excited to present a guest post written by my dear friend, the amazing Adam Dreece. It has been a long time since he debuted his Yellow Hoods series, and now has branched off into riveting, and intelligent science fiction. Now, he gives us a brief look into how certain experiences in his life inspired and are interconnected to The Man of Cloud 9!
5 Personal Moments Connected to
The Man of Cloud 9
5. When I worked in Silicon Valley for a Startup, we went through rounds of funding and fought for every customer. I heard a lot of people talking about their startups at the cafes, restaurants, and was regularly interviewed by many. The energy was high, the ideas sometimes ludicrous. I installed the story with that.
4. When I worked at Microsoft, I made two enemies. Both of them tried their best to have me denied a promotion. One by creating new procedures and lobbying as hard as they could for me to be denied, and the other actually was a director who went so far as to “uncheck” my promotion in the software that tracked that and managed to do it without leaving a trace. Both were vehement that I should be out. Why? Because for one, they hated that I had turned a friend’s career around, from him being ready to fire to becoming a super-star, and the other because I had been asked for my honest opinion in a meeting and I gave it to her, politely and politically wrapped but still honest. When finally confronted, both of them admitted to what they did and didn’t care. There were no consequences. I did get my promotion, but left a year or two later.I took some of this sentiment, this “it has nothing to do with you, but rather what you represent” hostility and incorporated it into my villain in the story. Moreover, I took that sense of “you are the manifestation of my imperfection” as the root of the conflict.
3. I’ve had people shut down my ideas because they didn’t want to take the time to understand them,. I adapted by learning it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission, particularly when I had been brought on to fix software projects. This idea is at the heart of Niko as a genius and inventor. He knows that few would potentially understand what he really wants, and he keeps it wrapped in layers and hidden impossibly deeply.
2. Several points in my life, I made a personal decision that was the right moral one, but it slowed my technical career. Niko faces the implications of such a moral decision, though we don’t know fully what it was until the end.
1. When I was 17 years old, I ran into the older brother of one of my best friends in the street. I asked how my friend was doing. He’d suffered a brain tumor a year before. The parents didn’t always allow my calls to pass through, they weren’t particularly fond of me because I was younger and didn’t share their ethnicity. I was told that my friend had died two months ago. It hit me like a ton of bricks. Niko suffers a loss at that age, and like me, he found purpose to help him come out of it. It gave him ruthless focus, only enough room for barely two things in his life.
In 2014, Adam Dreece stopped hoping to be an author one day. He wrote and indie published the first two installments in his young adult, steampunk meets fairy tale, series The Yellow Hoods. In 2015, when the first two books became IAN Book of the Year finalists in YA and Fantasy, he released two more in the series, as well as a novelette. Along the way, Adam has become a fixture on Twitter and Facebook for his blog articles and willingness to help other authors. He's a frequent speaker on cons, festivals and events. He's currently working on his first science fiction novel called The Man of Cloud 9, and has a weekly serial called The Wizard Killer. In 2016 he plans to also bring out the 5th book in The Yellow Hoods series. He currently resides in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his wife and children. He is an active online mentor at adamdreece.com, and is a busy public speaker, panelist, and author in Canada and the Pacific Northwest.
The Man of Cloud 9
"a truly unique voice" - Tracy A. Fischer, Readers' Favorite
“Adam Dreece continues to surprise, enthrall, and sweep us, his avid readers, along - with his elegant prose and insightful story telling. If you, like I, enjoy the scifi/fantasy genre - you can’t do better than The Man of Cloud 9.” - Rene Auberjonois, Avid Reader, Actor/Director (incl Star Trek Deep Space 9's Odo)
-- On extended Launch promotion (reg. $6.99) --
Seventy years from now, climate change has damaged the world, and civilization has lost its appetite for radical dreamers and innovation.
Niko Rafaelo believes that the key to our future lies in revisiting the banned technology of nanobots, and binding it with the human microbial cloud (the bacteria that surrounds each person). Cut from the same cloth as Steve Jobs and his Silicon Valley heroes of history, Niko is driven to see his dream become a reality, no matter the consequences.
The Man of Cloud 9 is an intimate story, centred around the life of Niko Rafaelo and those closest to him. It reveals an all new side of Adam Dreece, best-selling author of The Yellow Hoods and The Wizard Killer.
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