October is speculative month! Why? A) Because its my birthday B) I will be covering/reviewing a bunch of sci-fi fantasy books and internet sites C) Marcher Lord Press is releasing 5 excellent books and C) A holiday on the 31st where I get to eat lots of candy, compliments of my husband and children 🙂

So to start off October I want to showcase a book that just released today over at Marcher Lord Press. For anyone visiting or doesn’t know, Marcher Lord Press has been dubbed the premier publisher of Christian speculative fiction. It is also the publishing company that will be producing my own book Daughter of Light (release date TBA).

Anyone who knows me knows I like the weird, the strange, and the fantastical. So anytime I can promote my love for this genre in book, movie, or game form, I will. And here, to begin Speculative month, I give you Oxygen.

I asked Randy to tell me why he and John decided to re-release Oxygen. After all, the original book was great, garnering both readers and awards. Here is what Randy had to say:

When John and I started working on the new release back in March, we thought it would be pretty easy to tighten up the writing a bit. But then we started talking about the parts of OXYGEN that we didn’t like so much, and we discovered that there were some scenes we both hated.

And that scared the liver out of us, because as a whole, the original story worked very well. A lot of readers loved it and we won a pile of awards for it. So we didn’t want to break anything, but we still wanted to fix those pesky scenes that seemed to us to be clearly broken. It took us months to polish them up, but we finally got it done, and just in time.

The main “catastrophe in space” storyline hasn’t changed at all. That’s still exactly the same.

So what’s changed?

The romantic storyline between our heroine and hero has been buffed up a bit.  We added a little more heat where it was needed early on, and we removed some conflict which we thought was heavy-handed artificial — mainly conflict over faith issues.  Along the way, we inserted a little more humor.

We think the result is better than before.  Not hugely better, but enough better that we feel good about every single scene now.

I can’t wait to read this new version of Oxygen and will probably write up a review sometime. But don’t wait to hear what I have to say about it, click here and check it out yourself. And check back the next few weeks to find more speculative goodness 🙂