Marlene Dotterer is a winner in the Writer Advice Contest “Scintillating Starts to Forthcoming Books.”

Marlene’s current Work-in-Progress, “Verdandi,” is a space opera loaded with drum-beat suspense as two groups of humans converge on an unexplored planet. Survivors of a space station disaster take refuge there because it’s the closest planet with breathable air and they can tweak their biology enough to handle the plant life and water. An exploratory team from the Asteroid Ship Rachel Carson also lands, with orders to perform a brief pre-colonization survey – a constant need for the ever-growing human population.

Neither group knows about the other, but a rising number of IIE’s (Inexplicable and Illogical Events) bring them together as they face a terrifying possibility: is the planet itself trying to kill them?

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