Joey Rogers's Blog

My fourth book, The Belfore Void, is now available on Amazon for Kindle.

What’s the premise of the book? What if the biggest scientific discovery of all time turned out to be a colossal dud? The discovery of the Void happened thirty years earlier, but nobody knows exactly what it is or what to do with it. The Void is another place—another dimension, an alternate reality. It’s unclear. There’s nothing there but deadly radiation and blackness. Electronics won’t work there either. Everyone thought it would change the world, but it didn’t, and the world lost interest.

What is the book about? Belfore University, where the Void was discovered, is desperately trying to hold on to a grant that funds the entire school. This grant was set up thirty years earlier to accelerate Void research, and Belfore receives the bulk of the money because the discovery took place there. After decades of disappointment, Belfore has found it difficult to meet the minimum grant requirements, and the last Voidology program is in trouble—which means the university is also in trouble. The main character, Andi Fyffe, is a graduate student who makes a deal with her father, the dean, to fill a slot in the Voidology department so they can reach the minimum number of required students. She has no interest in Voidology. She wants to be an actress and go to Juilliard, and she’s using the deal with her father to get her there. Unfortunately, she’s flunking her classes, and the grant is still in jeopardy. Also, it turns out that Belfore is not the only party interested in the Void. There’s a crazy cult, and when they learn Andi has a special talent they can exploit, she’s no longer safe.

Is the book a sequel to An Alien, a Time Machine, and a Loser, An Alien, a Time Machine, and a Hero, or A Funny Thing Happened on the Moon? No, not in any way. It is completely standalone and not even part of the GegoVerse. I wrap everything up. That doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be a sequel or prequel, but it would be with different characters and at a different time.

Is this book super technical/nerdy? Certainly not as much as my last 3 books. I have tried to tone down the technobabble, but it might still be a little nerdy.

Several people have asked me when the sequel to A Funny Thing Happened on the Moon (AFTHOTM) will be available. I don’t really know. I do know what happens in it, and the title will probably be A Funny Thing Happened on Mars. (Remember all of that stuff being sent to Mars???)

While the sequel to AFTHOTM may not be written, there are 2 prequels! They are sort of prequels, anyway. It may not be readily obvious, but An Alien, a Time Machine, and a Loser (ATML) and An Alien, a Time Machine, and a Hero (ATMH) are both set in the same world as AFTHOTM. It’s called the GegoVerse. ATML and ATMH are just set a hundred years earlier in the timeline.

AFTHOTM was always meant to be read by itself. Reading the prequels is not necessary. If you do read the 2 prequels, you will get a few more pieces of the big picture, but none of them are essential for plot. But there are many details in ATML/ATMH that appear in AFTHOTM, even if it is not completely obvious at this point in time what they are.

What’s missing in the GegoVerse timeline? There should be a book after ATMH which ended on a pretty high note. But the world has to fall apart in that hundred years before AFTHOTM. The third Skylar book will tell why the world suddenly became dystopian. The name of this book might be An Alien, a Time Machine, and Skylar or An Alien, a Time Machine, and the Human. I actually started writing it, but switched to write AFTHOTM.

So, what happens after AFTHOTM? A Funny Thing Happens on Mars will be the sequel, but there will probably be another one after it, A Funny Thing Happened on Earth. This one is not so clearly defined in my head, but it could see the return of Skylar and Victoria (or they could rejoin the timeline in a following book). How do they get 100 years into the future? Well, “Time Machine” is in the title of their books.

My next book, The Belfore Void (title subject to change), is not part of the GegoVerse. It’s a different world with different problems and different characters. There are no plans for it to have any more installments since everything is wrapped up. But it’s possible. Who knows? It could either be a prequel with the characters in the Prologue or a sequel with the characters in the Epilogue.

With the exception of The Before Void coming out in the very near future (it is written and now being edited), the rest of my future books are subject to change. Lol

I'm a huge Star Trek fan, so I wrote a short piece of Fan Fiction. I was speculating what the new Picard show would be like if it were a 30-minute sitcom.

http://gegodyne.com/fan-fiction/star-...

I updated all of my Kindle books to support the X-Ray feature. ATML and ATMH have lots of references, so it was great for them. It also seems to work pretty well for AFTHOTM too.

I had no other books in my Kindle library that supported it, so I wasn't sure how it was actually supposed to look.

I may have missed some of the references, so let me know if something important is not linked.