Evening, everybody!

Dropping in with the next Discarded tidbit (and possibly the last for a while, if I'm unable to dig up more), and a couple of minor updates on other writing matters to mark the fourth month of this campaign.

First, a major thank-you to those who contributed this past month! Crowdfunding is never a fast or smooth process even on good days, with so many projects here and across countless other sites, so it's always a pleasure when you're heard through the white noise. The Facebook promo event is still up, and invites to this and the Unbound campaign page itself are still spreading and being sent out; please share these if you've seen or still have them handy, and help bring Discarded further into the public eye!

Next, I'm happy to confirm that the next promo period on Amazon Kindle does in fact start right around 8/11, so I will be putting all three of my ebooks up for a FREE campaign that same day or the day after; the campaign links will be posted on Facebook and Twitter. If you've already picked up or read the works, please share these with anyone jonesing for new fiction, or consider posting a review to Amazon. Reader opinions help get books out there as much as promos, if not more, and help writers to improve on the next draft, so don't hesitate to make yours clear!

Here's the next tidbit, to close out the week: Some additional info on the "Pulse", the follow-up to the Seattle Bomb in 2046. Still digging to find bits both interesting and non-spoiler; I'll keep you posted, and search out other material to take their place if I can't. Feel free to drop me a line here or on my FB or Twitter pages if you have any suggestions; otherwise, share and comment as always!

The "Pulse": Popular term for the global-scale cyberattack which occurred moments after the Seattle Bomb, on July 29th, 2046. Initial speculation pointed to an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), delivered through the U.S. and international power grids; later tentatively determined to be a distributed denial-of-service attack, targeting the entire Internet, with additional hack and data erasure elements. Origin point and perpetrators still unknown; timing suggests links with the Seattle Bomb, but no conclusive evidence has yet emerged. General impact of the attack--power outages across swathes of the U.S. and world, the shutdown of satellite, Internet, cellular and hardline communication systems, the collapse of most financial, social media and other public websites worldwide--remedied within hours, due to what was afterwards found to be a "suicide" code written into the DDoS program; most data in these structures was left unaffected, though corruption and other damages were still commonplace over the following several months. Worst-affected targets--military, covert and government databases throughout the U.S., and those connected to such in other nations--crippled for days or weeks. Repairs were ultimately successful at many of these sites, after herculean efforts; nonetheless, petabytes of data are still damaged or otherwise unreadable five years later, severely hampering efforts to confirm whether the attack was aimed at general disruption, or a targeted erasure of specific servers or files. Official consensus in D.C. is that the attack was intended to cripple the global infrastructure, and failed to achieve its full effect due to existing protections and heroic anti-cyberterror efforts at home and abroad.