Storm Runners: A Storm for the Future

The idea  for Storm Runners was born during Super Storm Sande. With the hurricane seasons running much later and starting much earlier than they used to—sometimes we have tropical storms forming in Atlantic in January or February a—the potential for storms that are tropical in origins but developing into blizzards, or what some call snowicanes increases. In addition to the massive coastal damage Sande caused in New York and New Jersey, Sande dropped 3-5 feet of snow in locations on the western side of the storm.

In Storm Runners we get an early season hurricane moving up the coast and turning into a snow storm. That mad rush to get out of town is in full force because everyone waited until the last minute. Airports have shut down. Trains have stopped running and the first bands of snow are cranking up over Atlantic City. Trella has seven dollars in her pocket and a bus ticket on the last bus out of town.  The plot is in motion and this trailer sets it up for you:

But I wanted to do more with Storm Runners than just tell you the story. I wanted to experiment with new features from Amazon that let me put the book in motion. I talked about that quite a bit as I worked on making the characters and sets for these images and in the run-up to release.

Which I did, including motion graphics and links to let you choose who Trella would fall in love with and where that path would lead her in the end. It works great—everywhere but on Amazon. When I upload the book to Amazon it strips out all the animation and replaces that with a static image that is a splotchy mess. The only solution, and I did try many alternatives, was to upload a text-only version there. While it is not the book I envisioned, you can still choose your path through the story and the links work fine. If you have a Kindle so bought the text version at Amazon and would like to try the animated version, simply send me proof of purchase and I will send you a desktop version of the book that will run on a Windows or Mac system.

Storm Runners at Amazon

Since the Kindle format does not support the story as I intended I will push forward with converting the story to game format and releasing it as an app. Watch for it. I’ll probably offer that as some sort of promotional giveaway in the future. Meanwhile, to keep up with my newest efforts to take romance into the next dimension,  please sign up for my newsletter (I’m giving away a copy of my novella, Snatch Me to all new subscribers)