Codename Salamander, Book 1 of the Operation Stargate series

Blurb:

Xenologist Bret Grayson was hired to make contact with one of the indigenous tribes roaming the savannas on the planet Salamander. He soon finds out the real purpose he is on Salamander. His uncle, the legendary Master Scout Terrex Stonewall, also has a hidden agenda, but even he doesn’t know about the secret that lies beneath the original military outpost. It seems every species living in this part of the Galaxy has a sudden interest in Salamander and they are willing to risk a war to keep the secret from falling into human hands. Grayson and Stonewall have no choice but to form an alliance with representatives from the Spiders, the Anorians, and the Accilla. The motley group embarks on a journey that takes them to regions unknown. They face dangers they can only overcome if they set aside their prejudices and work together as one unit.

Excerpt:
There was a time when everyone who knew Phillip Lacrosse considered him a handsome man. Handsome and young. Now he was neither. Now he was just a lonely, crabby old man who should have retired a long time ago. That had been his plan, but what does a man do with his time after losing his wife and two daughters?

Lacrosse studied the picture of the woman and the two girls at her side, the only piece of memorabilia left of his family. Everything else was destroyed when a pirate ship attacked and blew up the transporter that was supposed to take them to one of the newly established colonies.

The pirates had been members of the reptilian species known as Mollard. It didn’t matter to Lacrosse which one of the Dragon races had been responsible. He had little love for any of the scaly races. Even the fact that a Union Battle Cruiser hunted and obliterated the pirate ship did nothing to appease Lacrosse and to change his attitude toward the Dragons.

After the mishap with his family, his plans changed. He had no reason to retire and spend his time feeling sorry for himself. When Salamander Mining Ventures offered him the position of Supervisor of Salamander Town he accepted. The planet was far enough from civilization and established trade routes to make it the ideal place for a man like him. Of course, his loneliness was not the only reason he accepted the offered position. The people he worked for urged him to forget about retirement, because he was the ideal candidate for that job.

Salamander Mining paid him a salary he would have died for years ago, but now it meant nothing. He would probably die a rich man. Without heirs, all his wealth would go to the Agency, but that was okay.
He stopped contemplating and looked up when the door to his office opened. A man wearing the brown uniform of the Scouts entered. Behind him stood four humans he had never seen before. At least, he didn’t remember them.

“Master Scout Stonewall, what can I do for you?” He scanned the faces of the strangers. Two men and two women, dressed in primitive clothing fashioned from swamp grass.

“I just returned from a training exercise,” Stonewall said. “We ran into some people you may want to meet, sir.”

Lacrosse wasn’t aware of a ship carrying civilians landing on Salamander, not in the recent past anyway. The only ship he knew of was the one that arrived only a couple of weeks before, but that one had landed by the original outpost.

“Where did you find them?” he asked.

“Actually, they found us. They’re not really people, by that I mean they’re not humans.”

Lacrosse looked past Stonewall. “They look human to me. Are they androids?”

“No, sir, not androids.” Stonewall smiled thinly. “They’re Accilla.”

Buy links:

Melange Books
LULU FOR PRINT
Amazon Kindle
Amazon Print
Smashwords
Nook

Let’s meet Herbert:

NA: Herbert, welcome and thank you for being here.
HG: Thank you for having me and giving me the opportunity to tell readers about myself.

NA: How did you come up with the idea for your Codename Salamander?
Codename Salamander is actually the fifth book in a series I originally called ‘The Spider Wars’, which started with ‘Outpost Epsilon’, the precursor of the series. The main character in that book was a man by the name of Derek Stonewall, a young Scout in the Solar Union. The next 3 books in that series were published under ‘Lizard World’. Outpost Savanna takes place 15 years after the events in ‘Lizard World’. To avoid confusion and allow me to write more books in the ‘Lizard World’ series I dropped ‘The Spider Wars’ and changed the series name of the first 4 books to ‘The Stonewall Chronicles’ and created another series which takes place in the same universe. The new series name is ‘Operation Stargate’, of which Codename Salamander is the first volume. I’ve always liked reading stories about outposts, so I created a planet with an outpost. Derek Stonewall, one of the characters, already existed, but he was getting old and that’s why his nephew appeared. The other characters came into existence as they were needed.

NA: What sort of research did you do to write this book?
Not much. The universe in which the planet Salamander exists was already there. The aliens featured in the book also existed already. I brought one of the characters, Scout Derek Stonewall, to the outpost and went from there.

NA: What is the main thing you want readers to take away from your book?
I want them to travel with me to an imaginary world, experience and enjoy the excitement of meeting peoples different from us humans on the outside, but realizing that even if they don’t look like us, inside they are just like us. They have desires and aspirations the same as ours. Even though they may be more advanced technologically, they still have faults and are not perfect. I want my readers to see that it is possible to get along with others, no matter how different we all may seem. That getting along is the only way to a peaceful existence here on our own planet and in the rest of the universe.

NA: Do you have a day job? What was your job before you started writing full time?
I am retired. I used to be an electrical contractor before I retired. Writing isn’t my full-time job. I have many other interests which I pursue, but writing stories is my main hobby.

NA: What started you on the path to writing?
Even as a kid I told stories and to start writing them down was a natural progression. I’ve always had a fertile imagination and I want to share the adventures I dream up in my head with others.

NA: What do your friends and family think about your being a writer?
Without making this a religious thing, I’d like to quote something from the Bible. Mark 6:4. ‘Then Jesus told them, “A prophet is honored everywhere except in his own hometown and among his relatives and his own family.”
I’m a writer not a prophet, but that quote pretty much answers the question. I read one time about Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, besides being a super-movie-star, became the governor of California, but in his hometown he was still the local yokel.

One of my friends once said to me, “I’m not going to pay to read your books.” Most of them don’t read Science Fiction, if they read at all. My wife reads my stories only because I ask her to.

Even though my sons are avid readers, I don’t think they’ve read any of my books. [I share this with you! I write erotic romance. I realize it’s not for everyone, but it’s not for anyone–apparently–in my circle of family or friends. It’s a bit annoying, isn’t it?]

NA: Do you outline books ahead of time or are you more of a by-the-seat-of-your-pants writer?
I am more of a by-the-seat-of-your-pants writer. If I get an idea for a story, I jot it down, but then I wait for inspiration, not really knowing where I’m going with what I wrote down. One of my stories started with ‘She had emerald eyes.’ I heard that phrase in a song and it intrigued me. Then I sat there and stared at the page thinking, ‘Okay. I established that. She has emerald eyes. Now what?’ Then I wrote down another sentence and another until I had the first paragraph. I wrote more and more and I had the first chapter, still not really knowing where it would lead, but now my imagination began to work and ideas popped into my head. A story began to develop. I ended up writing two books from that one sentence. Eden’s Gate and Hell’s Gate. I called the series Seeds of Chaos.

Once I’m deeper into the story, I will try to write an outline, but that is only there as a guide. My characters usually don’t follow that outline and take me into a completely different direction. I’m always amazed how things fall into place in the end.

NA: Which kind of scenes are the hardest for you to write? Action, dialogue, sex?
I have to say action. I have no problem writing dialogue. The easiest scenes for me to write are sex-scenes, but since I try to keep those scenes out of my stories now, I have to work a little harder with the other two.

NA: What do you like to do when you’re not writing?
I listen to music. I work in my garden in the summer. I have a couple of aquariums with fish, which I take care of. I enjoy fishing and hunting. I belong to a hunting and fishing club where I am the membership chairman and I enjoy that. I write articles for our newsletter. I make my own fishing jigs and I built bird houses and other projects. I fix things around the house. I make soups. I like to blog and read other blogs. I read news articles on line. I go shopping with my wife. I spend my evenings with my wife watching TV. We like movies, comedies, and many of the action shows. We never miss the news. The list is endless. Let’s put it this way: I’m never bored. In fact, there isn’t enough time in a day for all the things I like to do.

You may notice that reading books isn’t on the list. That’s because I rarely read books anymore. I used to be a bookworm and spent much of my time reading. Now I can’t find the time to invest in a long story. I’d rather write my own. I have an extensive library and I have read all the books. I wish I had the time to read many of them again, but now I look at them fondly, remembering the pleasure they brought me when I read them. My hope is now that I can bring the same joy to readers with my stories.

NA: What are your top three favorite books of all time?
That is a tough question for me to answer. There are so many. Perhaps I should tell you who my top three favorite authors are. Let’s see: A. E. van Vogt. Philip José Farmer. Leigh Bracket. I could go on. The list is long. All of them influenced my writing.

NA: A pet peeve.
Women wearing ripped jeans. Honestly. I wouldn’t even wear those when I work in the garden. When I grew up, people, especially girls, dressed in nice clothes. Even poor people that couldn’t afford new clothes didn’t walk around in rags. My wife tells me to get over it. [LOL!]

NA: First thought when the alarm goes off in the morning?
I wonder what the weather will be like today.

NA: What famous person would you like to have dinner with?
God. I would ask him why the Hell He created this insane, violent, and destructive race and let it loose on a beautiful planet like Earth.

NA: What are you working on now? Book 3 in my series Operation Stargate. The working title is The Aregon Files.

NA: What is any question we didn’t ask that you would like to answer?
How do you keep track of time-lines, your characters, and the places and locations your characters visit?

I create charts and I make maps. Drawing maps is part of the enjoyment I get while writing a story. Sometimes, just looking at the map gets my creative juices flowing. I also make lists of the characters. At first, they are just names, but as the story develops, I flesh out the characters and write backgrounds for them, like their age, appearance, place of birth, parents, brothers and sister, and any other relevant information I may need or not.
To make sure I don’t screw up the time it takes between one scene and another, I make a list of dates and events.

Here’s Herbert:

Herbert Grosshans was born in Germany. Even as a young boy he was already a voracious reader. He read every book in the small School library at least three times. His teacher gave him even a few books from his own private collection. His favorite books were stories about heroes and gods. He loved the old legends. At age fourteen, a friend gave him a Science Fiction book and he fell in love with that genre, saving his allowance to buy every SF book he could find, but he also loved Westerns and Mysteries. Later he became a member of the Science Fiction Club Deutschland (Germany) and began writing his own stories. One of his short stories was made into a play and broadcast via radio to schools in Germany.

In his early twenties, he emigrated to Canada. He began reading books written in English and studied to become proficient in this new language. And there was no better way to learn than to also write. Writing became his passion and he enjoyed making his fertile imagination come alive in his stories. During his lunch hour, he wrote into a scribbler and at home he pounded away on his manual typewriter whenever time allowed. The majority of his stories were science fiction.

With the arrival of computers and the internet it suddenly became a lot easier to write, and, most importantly, to get published. His first full length novel Daughter of the Dark, Book 1 of his ‘The Xandra’ series was published in 2006 by Midnight Showcase. Then followed Book 2, Mother of Light, and Book 3, Goddess of Life. The series has since grown to eight volumes. So far, Herbert has published more than 30 books in different genres. Most of Herbert’s stories contain erotica and are for adult readers. His books are available from his publisher Melange Books, LLC, but also from Amazon and other outlets. To find out more about Herbert’s books, please, visit his website and his blog.

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