STALKER7

Been a long time coming, this one. In fact, I brought the first draft to the Viable Paradise writer’s workshop in 2015.

For those long-time SFF readers/writers, that was the year of the Sad Puppies Hugo Award controversy – a mess that unfortunately spilled over into my experience there, so much so I regretted going and gave up on it for a while.

But like its half-breed protagonist, Addas, this post-apocalyptic, dark fantasy story refused to give up and die. Now, many years, many drafts, and three editors later, I’m kicking it out the door.

It’s different. And if the several dozen, recent, polite rejections/no responses from literary agents is anything to go by, not in line with the current mainstream fantasy market expectations. Oh well.

I mean, Broken Moon, Scorned Lands is a typical fantasy setting, with all its tropes and traditions. It’s got dwarves, elves, humans, orcs, goblins, monsters, even a quest, only its set in the dark aftermath of an all-out, murder-frenzy between gods. As you’d expect, that didn’t go well for anyone – particularly the puny mortals caught in the crossfire.

Problem is what was thought to be the “end of everything as we know it!” choked on its own blood before all life could be extinguished. So, there were survivors to the world-shattering cataclysm. And enough ‘world’ left for them to survive in. Enter our battered, half-orc outcast, Addas Dashag, going on a journey with a cast of grubby, angry characters.

Think LOTR meets Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and you’re in the right neighborhood.

It will be released later this month at Amazon, available for Kindle and a trade paperback. As for audio, I might need to run with Amazon’s new ‘Virtual Voice’ narration.

Full Disclosure: At this point, none of my shorter audio books have returned the cost of the hired human narrators. I think each one did a fantastic job but at just shy of 100,000 words, I simply don’t have the budget or the readership to justify re-hiring one of them for Broken Moon, Scorned Lands.

That’s it for now. Thanks for stopping by. Watch this space for the official release of Broken Moon, Scorned Lands. Book One of the Shattered Worlds duology.

*excerpt below

Addas persisted. “So, why there? Why go to Tol Amroth?”

“It was the last human city to fall,” the scholar explained. “Fortress. Huge treasury. More important, the remaining gods of Order rallied an alliance there after the slaughter on the Gray Plains. It was then, near the end, the High Council decided to counterattack rather than split up and fall back to the remote strongholds that still endured.”

“They attacked?”

Levi nodded. “Gathered every last soldier, creature, and celestial that could still fight and marched out. One vast army, beautiful and terrible, bright as the sun, with gods striding in the vanguard.” He shook his head wistfully.

Gods at war… Addas tried to picture it but all he could conjure up was a big mob with lots of torches. For the thousandth time since the Shattering, his mind stumbled over the idea.  

“What happened?”

“They lost.”

“What? How? They had gods with them.”

“The enemy had gods too. Not beautiful ones. Just terrible.”

“And after?”

Levi shrugged, gestured to the deep, blank sky, the dark lands beyond the light of their campfire. “It was all or nothing. They got nothing.”