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Fast-Paced, Cinematic Narrative
ȚEPEȘ is a dark historical war novel that follows Vlad Dracula’s rise from hostage and prince to ruthless ruler as he navigates Ottoman expansion, political betrayal, warfare, and the brutal struggle to defend Wallachia. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
It was a combination of a lifelong fascination with the myth and deep frustration with how modern pop culture treats it. I had loved Bram Stoker and the atmosphere of classic gothic darkness since childhood. Yet, sitting in a cinema watching another film adaptation, I realized that after a century of repetition, the “fanged monster” had lost all its sharpness and weight.
I refused to be just another passive critic complaining on social media about how it should have been done. I decided to act. I immersed myself in the study of the fifteenth century and the life of the real Vlad III. The deeper I probed into the archives, the clearer it became that the reality of his existence was incomparably more brutal and terrifying than any fictional myth.
Intertwining his fate with my writing became an obsession. I lived in isolation, researching and writing into the early hours of the morning to capture the raw atmosphere of Wallachia—a realm of despair, betrayal, and bloodshed trapped between two great powers. I wanted to forge a fast-paced, cinematic narrative grounded in uncompromising historical fidelity that would strip the real Vlad of pop-culture clichés.
You portray Vlad as a prince, hostage, strategist, ruler, lover, and eventually legend. Which aspect of his character was most important for you to explore?
This cannot be answered in a single word. The novel charts Vlad’s entire life and evolution so that the reader understands where his hatred for the enemy was born—that it was not merely a duty to defeat a foe, but a deeply personal feud.
We witness his formative years, from his childhood captivity under the Ottomans to his study of Western strategy under János Hunyadi in Buda. Without this trajectory, Vlad would appear as a flat superhero who materialized out of nowhere with full mastery. The reader must see the ordeal he endured to acquire this knowledge and how he later deployed it against the Ottoman Empire—whether as a feared warrior in the chaos of battle or as a cold strategist over maps.
At the same time, exploring his human anchor was vital. His relationship with the Ottoman girl Zeynep was not intended merely to satisfy the expectations of Stoker’s fans. Though she appears only briefly, she is essential to understanding Vlad’s inner world. She, alongside his most loyal companions, Dragan and Mircea, and his friendship with Stephen the Great, represents his sole connection to humanity. Without them, Dracula would be nothing more than an unfeeling machine of slaughter, devoid of emotion and conscience.
These aspects are linked into a single entity. It is an equation—remove any part, and the outcome falls apart. The final portrait is that of a brilliant, fanatical Voivode who sacrificed his own soul out of devotion to his land.
What research went into recreating fifteenth-century Wallachia and the political tensions between the Ottomans, Hungarians, and neighboring powers?
The research was painstaking and exhaustive. I refused to deviate from historical reality, spending months studying Vlad III before writing a single line.
It was meticulous work. I was surprised to discover that despite Dracula’s global renown through Stoker, historical records contain glaring gaps—for instance, the exact day and month of his birth and death remain unknown to this day. Where history fell silent, I had to employ my own creative vision to make the story even more profound. That is precisely why this book is classified as historical fiction rather than non-fiction.
My research extended far beyond Vlad himself. I conducted an in-depth study of his adversaries and allies—Sultans Murad II and Mehmed II, János Hunyadi, Matthias Corvinus, and many others. Understanding the geography and the shifting frontiers of the fifteenth-century Balkans was equally demanding. For months, I studied period maps, academic papers, and historical documents to plot the precise boundary changes year by year. I needed to understand exactly what Vlad was defending and where the Sultan was striking in any given year.
The result of this research was an immense chronological timeline that I had to reshape into a fluid narrative. My aim was not to write a dry textbook. My task was not merely to recount what Dracula did, but above all to reveal why he did it.
What do you hope readers understand about Vlad after finishing the novel that they might not have understood from the familiar Dracula legend?
In a single word: patriot. He was a man carved by his enemies, who turned himself into a rampart of Ottoman corpses. He and the whole of Wallachia—a beautiful yet impoverished realm perpetually torn apart by foreign rulers—stood against the overwhelming force of a finely tuned Ottoman military machine. Direct confrontation was impossible; it meant certain death. Yet Vlad did not flee, surrender, or bow to the Sultan. He wielded every strategic and physical skill at his disposal, and with a handful of loyal men, terrified one of the most powerful rulers on Earth so profoundly that the Sultan turned back, retreating home to Constantinople in disgrace with heavy losses.
What I want the reader to grasp is that the driving force behind this Wallachian Voivode was love. Not the romantic devotion depicted by Stoker—love for a woman—but an uncompromising love for his homeland. A love so fierce that he was willing to sacrifice his soul and his life to protect it.
Out of the Water
K. Browning’s Out of the Water, the prequel to Into the Fire, is a dark fantasy novel about power, pain, loyalty, and the stories people accept about themselves. It follows Svaryur, a prince who grows up believing he’s weak and unworthy of the throne. His world is divided into three kingdoms whose people command earth, water, or fire through powers known as the Einns. As Svaryur learns more about his unusual bloodline, the political structure of Huldar, and the secrets surrounding the three magical rings, his personal struggle expands into a conflict that threatens every kingdom. The fantasy setting gives the story plenty of battles and supernatural danger, but its real center is a young man who desperately wants love to prove that his life matters.
Svaryur is an interesting protagonist because his kindness and insecurity are tangled together from the beginning. He’s mocked by his family and peers, yet he continues to care about people who hurt him. The advice he receives from Verja becomes one of the book’s central ideas: “If all you take in is weakness, then you will become weak. If you take in strength, then you will become strong.” That lesson sounds encouraging, but the novel keeps asking what strength actually means. Svaryur gradually becomes more capable and powerful, yet he also becomes increasingly willing to manipulate, threaten, and injure others. His transformation gives the book its tragic shape because readers can understand how he reaches each decision, even when those decisions become frightening.
Drifa is just as important to the story, and her relationship with Svaryur drives much of the plot. She’s clever, secretive, ambitious, and capable of using more than one Einn. She also loves Svaryur, though her love often takes the form of tests, lies, and control. Their bond begins with a childhood challenge involving a rare Dayflower and eventually develops into a partnership built around hidden powers, political goals, and their son, Soterios. The romance has an uneasy intensity because Svaryur treats Drifa as his source of courage while Drifa treats him as someone she must protect and direct. They genuinely care for each other, but their habit of keeping secrets turns that care into something unstable.
The book moves quickly through childhood, family rivalry, royal succession, war, death, and the pursuit of the three Einn rings. Its strongest scenes connect physical action with emotional consequences, such as the Bardagi between Svaryur and Leifur, Svaryur’s encounters with the other kings, and the final battle in which old friendships collapse under fear and ambition. Browning also builds a mythology involving purebloods, Sheol, Paradis, the Creator, and the destructive beast Erekki. There are many names, rules, revelations, and shifting motivations to follow, so some sections feel crowded, and the frequent changes in viewpoint can make the emotional focus jump around. Still, the central images of water, drowning, fire, flowers, and distorted reflections give the story a recognizable identity.
What stayed with me most was the way Out of the Water treats weakness as a label that can shape someone’s entire life. The opening insists that “Pain is where it all begins,” and the rest of the novel explores what people choose to build from that pain. Svaryur wants to rise above everything that has been spoken over him, but he keeps measuring his worth through love, authority, and supernatural power. By the bleak final chapters, his victories and failures have become difficult to separate. The ending leaves him suspended between survival and destruction, with only enough light to search for a way forward. It’s a dramatic, emotionally raw opening to a fantasy series, and its most compelling question is whether Svaryur can ever define strength for himself.
I Was, Am, Will Be
J. R. Rice’s I Was, Am, Will Be is a collection of poetry, prose, dramatic scenes, letters, and visual compositions arranged as a journey through identity, grief, love, race, mental illness, family, and artistic purpose. Its seven chapters move from the compulsion to write through romance, cultural alienation, trauma, mortality, and remembrance, creating the shape of a coming-of-age narrative without relying on a conventional plot. Travel through Greece, France, Spain, and the Netherlands gives the speaker physical distance from Oakland, while memory keeps drawing him back to family, formative losses, and the experiences that made writing necessary. The result is an autobiographical work whose structure reflects its central concern: how a person gathers a coherent self from scattered places, relationships, and versions of the past.
Rice’s voice is energetic, exposed, and deliberately restless. He moves between formal allusion, conversational humor, spoken-word repetition, pop-culture references, and blunt confession, often allowing several registers to occupy the same poem. That flexibility suits a speaker who understands himself through many inheritances, including Black literary tradition, hip-hop, teaching, Oakland, family history, and European travel. In “Affirmations,” the repeated question “Why write?” develops into an account of writing as survival, witness, ancestry, and civic responsibility. Elsewhere, comic encounters in bars, museums, cafés, and bedrooms keep the book grounded in ordinary experience, even when its themes become philosophical. Rice’s strongest passages let wit and sorrow work together, so humor becomes part of the speaker’s endurance rather than a pause from serious material.
The collection’s emotional force grows as its recurring images gain meaning. Stairs, cliffs, flight, falling, trees, water, mirrors, and roads repeatedly place the speaker between danger and transformation. The line “You are what remains from damage” captures the book’s guiding insight: identity can contain injury without being reduced to it. The later chapters deepen that idea through accounts of bipolar disorder, suicidal thought, gun violence, childhood sexual abuse, pregnancy loss, and a father’s terminal illness. These subjects are handled with a directness that can be harrowing, yet the collection consistently searches for language capable of carrying pain toward understanding. Its repetitions sometimes feel incantatory and sometimes obsessive, accurately reflecting a mind returning to unresolved memories until they yield a different meaning.
The final movement toward family and remembrance gives the book its clearest sense of arrival. In “Depends,” the narrator’s care for his dying father transforms dependency, embarrassment, anger, and tenderness into a scene of difficult intimacy. Their exchange ends with the father’s answer, “Depends,” a modest conclusion that fits a book committed to uncertainty, choice, and continual becoming. I Was, Am, Will Be is ultimately a record of self-reclamation, one that treats writing as testimony, discipline, inheritance, and a reason to remain alive. Rice’s expansive form allows the collection to hold contradictions without smoothing them away, and its most enduring achievement is the portrait of a speaker learning that freedom comes through remembering, naming, forgiving, and choosing to live.
Pages: 34 | ISBN : 978-1088026465
Powerful Anchor
Borrowed Tales follows a lonely, troubled man whose vivid barroom recollections force him to confront the unsettling possibility that the memories defining his life may belong to other people. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Sam’s life was shaped from pieces of my early years. Although the story is about ninety‑five percent fiction, certain moments from my past inspired the emotional backbone of his journey. For example, my cousin and his girlfriend used to take me cruising down Main Street, and that simple memory became the backdrop for Sam’s innocent yet troubled youth. Several of his experiences are shaped by real fragments of my life, reimagined to serve the story’s deeper themes.
Why did you choose Leo’s neighborhood bar as the central setting and framing device for Sam’s stories?
Leo’s represents the kind of quiet, familiar establishments I’ve visited over the years. I wanted a place where Sam could sit, listen to music, observe people, and let his mind wander — not a loud, crowded bar, but a “Cheers‑like” environment where everyone knows each other.
Routine and structure were essential for Sam. After years of being told what to do and when to do it, that rhythm became ingrained in him. Leo’s offered the stability he needed to process the memories he believed were his own.
Music frequently triggers Sam’s recollections. What role did particular songs or musical eras play in shaping the novel?
Music has always been a powerful anchor in my life. I often remember events based on the songs that were playing at the time. Even now, I prefer writing in a small bar where one drink lasts for hours. It was during one of those writing sessions — while working on Olivia — that the premise for Borrowed Tales emerged.
Music pulls memories to the surface: where I was, what I was doing, and often a smile that comes with it. For instance, whenever I hear “I Want You” by Savage Garden, I’m transported back to Kuwait, lying on a cot outside my tent, hearing that song for the first time.
Sam’s memories, however, were different. His were learned, not lived. Anyone who has dealt with psychosis knows how convincingly memories or alternate realities can present themselves — as real as the air we breathe.
How did you approach balancing the novel’s humor and sexually charged episodes with its darker themes of abuse, crime, incarceration, and trauma?
I intentionally kept most of the sexually charged moments in the early chapters. I considered explaining their origin upfront but ultimately chose to reveal the truth behind Sam’s memories much later. That delay allows readers to initially see Sam as a reckless womanizer, someone who took advantage of the women he encountered. In reality, being incarcerated so young meant he had no real sexual experiences. He simply absorbed the stories of others — repeated over and over, year after year.
Trauma is rarely discussed openly, yet it shapes people in profound ways. I drew from my own experiences to frame Sam’s mindset. As I wrote, the stories expanded naturally, each keystroke adding depth. All my books carry a significant thread of trauma because I want readers to understand that emotional wounds come from many environments — not just war zones or dangerous neighborhoods. Real people, from all walks of life, carry lifelong scars that shape them and everyone around them.
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Most days, Sam hides in the dim comfort of Leo’s, a quiet neighborhood bar where the jukebox drowns out the memories he can’t bear to face. But when the music triggers vivid, uncontrollable flashbacks, Sam is pulled into the darkest corners of his history—abandonment, abuse, betrayal, and a crime that stole his youth and reshaped his identity forever.
As the episodes intensify, Sam begins reliving the moments he has spent decades trying to forget: the chaotic childhood that left him unanchored, the cousin who dragged him into a nightmare, the prison years that hardened and hollowed him, and the trauma that fractured his sense of self. Each flashback reveals another piece of a life he never fully understood—one built on borrowed stories, buried truths, and memories that were never truly his.
But in the present, Sam finds an unexpected lifeline in Erin, a sharp-witted bartender with struggles of her own. Their connection forces Sam to confront the possibility of healing—and the terrifying risk of letting someone in. As their bond deepens, Sam must decide whether he can trust himself enough to be loved, or whether the weight of his past will destroy the future he desperately wants.
Borrowed Tales is a raw, deeply human story about trauma, identity, and the long road toward redemption. With unflinching honesty and emotional depth, Michael E. Bowers delivers a powerful narrative about the scars we carry, the memories we inherit, and the courage it takes to reclaim a life once lost.
Do Your Thing: Lessons from Banking’s Biggest Digital Transformation
Do Your Thing: Lessons from Banking’s Biggest Digital Transformation, by Ralph Hamers, is a book on business leadership, digital transformation, and banking management built around the reinvention of ING after the global financial crisis. Hamers takes readers from the bank’s years of government support, forced restructuring, layoffs, and battered employee confidence into the much more ambitious project of turning ING into a digital-first, customer-centered organization. What gives the story its energy is the scale of the undertaking as Hamers aspired to get tens of thousands of people across multiple countries to agree on what ING existed to do, how it would compete, how its leaders should behave, and what customers should actually experience.
The book’s central argument is that transformation comes from connecting all of those pieces and then staying remarkably consistent about them. That makes the ING story useful well beyond banking. Anyone interested in organizational change, business strategy, corporate culture, or transformation leadership will recognize the problem Hamers keeps returning to: having a vision is much easier than getting an enormous organization to live it every day.
The strongest parts of the book are where that big idea gets concrete. Hamers walks through the creation of the Think Forward strategy, ING’s purpose of “empowering people to stay a step ahead in life and in business,” the Orange Code that defined expected behaviors, and the shift from a product-centered bank to a customer-centered one. He is adept at showing how seemingly separate choices reinforced each other. Customer centricity led to simpler products and better digital experiences. The “Do Your Thing” brand gives an outward expression to ideas the organization had already spent years putting into practice. The progression Hamers presents makes this digital banking transformation story unusually satisfying because readers can watch strategy travel all the way from a CEO’s thinking to technology, organizational structure, office design, employee behavior, and finally the public-facing brand.
Hamers also makes the book feel personal enough to keep the management material from turning into a stack of frameworks. His recurring emphasis on consistency is persuasive because the later chapters show what consistency looks like when the decisions become harder. The discussion of sustainability and ING’s Terra Approach, for example, extends the book’s purpose-driven leadership argument into lending decisions, climate commitments, stakeholder expectations, and the messy reality of societal change. Hamers is willing to discuss adjustments, resistance, imperfect execution, and the tension between empowerment and control, which gives the change management and executive leadership lessons some welcome texture. His voice is confident and occasionally repetitive, especially when returning to purpose, customers, and consistency, but that repetition also mirrors his leadership philosophy: if an idea matters enough to organize a company around, people are going to need to hear it more than once.
The final section brings the ING experience into the age of artificial intelligence, and that turns out to be a natural destination for the book rather than an add-on. Hamers’ most useful contribution is the idea that leaders don’t need perfect foresight so much as a clear direction and an organization capable of moving, learning, and adjusting without losing its purpose. By the end, ING’s transformation feels less like a banking case study than a working example of how strategy becomes real through thousands of linked choices. For executives, transformation leaders, and readers interested in digital strategy, customer experience, agile organizations, corporate purpose, and the future of leadership, there’s a lot here worth carrying into the next big change.
Pages: 318 | ISBN : 978-1544552033
Misplaced Trust
The Climb follows a grieving attorney and an international missionary team whose journey into a politically unstable nation becomes increasingly dangerous and deadly. What inspired the idea behind The Climb and the larger series you’re beginning with this novel?
I joined a mission trip to South America in 2018. That trip was preceded by several years of court work as a lawyer, along with the experiences of my early life. Together, these influences sparked the idea behind The Climb. However, while they shaped the framework of the story, their role provides more context than consequence. The real mission trip was very different from the one portrayed in the novel, and although the main character borrows elements from my life, many aspects diverge—such as the death of Sarah.
The true driving forces behind The Climb and its plot were several, including, inter alia, a human‑trafficking seminar I attended in 2017 and various influences from film, music, literature, and news. The motivational tone of the novel grew out of two long‑standing aspects of my personality: motivation and faith. I have always viewed hardship as a platform for growth. But the only way to truly achieve that is through Christ, and the best way to show that to others is by using the talents He has given me.
My walk with God has been far from perfect. Very often, it feels as though the things I want to do, I do not. Interestingly, that struggle became a thread stitching pieces of the novel together. Many of the characters in The Climb reflect that reality. They come from imperfect backgrounds and lead imperfect lives. Their struggles mirror my own walk with God.
The novel explores trust on several levels, including trust in other people, leaders, institutions, and God. Why was trust such an important theme for this story?
Trust is something many overlook, yet it can have tremendous impact. When attempting a difficult journey, misplaced trust can derail us and prevent us from completing it. Sometimes that comes from an overreliance on others or on things. Other times, it comes from the overconfidence we place in our own abilities. The book uses this theme to remind us whom we should truly trust. We are imperfect creatures—failing even ourselves. How could we expect others not to fail us?
What do you hope readers take from the idea that faith doesn’t necessarily prevent hardship but can influence how someone moves through it?
“Faith doesn’t prevent hardship” is a takeaway in and of itself. Faith is one of many approaches a person can take when facing difficulty. Some always run. Some place trust in themselves. Others place trust in things or people. Choosing faith ensures God is present when hardship comes. However, no matter what choice we make, life quickly teaches us—we must choose.
Will future books continue exploring Santiago and its political and criminal conflicts, or will the series broaden into other settings and challenges?
The story will remain rooted in Santiago. However, the geographical settings continue to change as the narrative moves forward, and new challenges will emerge.
At the conclusion of The Climb, the characters aren’t necessarily safe. Many events in the book carry deeper significance than readers may initially realize. The origins of certain characters—and the reasons they find themselves in this dangerous situation—take on greater meaning as the larger narrative unfolds.
As for timing, I can’t yet say when the next installment will be released. I only write when I’m able to, and I take my time, because writing should be enjoyable.
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After the death of his fiancée—three months pregnant—Mark Crosby lost sight of the life he once knew. He performs his 9-to-5 job and returns home to his elderly grandmother, occasionally attending a nearby church, if only just. But the invitation of an old presbyter changes everything: a mission trip to the breakaway territory of Santiago—the last place on Earth he wanted to go.
Joining a team of eight volunteers—alongside three missionaries, a bus conductor, the driver, and his family—he embarks on a journey through a country caught between escalating civil unrest and a strained dictatorship.
When their trip to the remote village of Puerto Palermo takes a wrong turn, the tour bus crashes off the road near a deep precipice, and Crosby makes a troubling discovery—the accident wasn’t an accident.
Omni – The Convergence Protocol
OMNI: The Convergence Protocol, by Lew Rivers, is a science-fiction techno-thriller built around a fascinating idea: what if the different forces inside a human mind could be separated, digitized, and set loose in the world? Ben Allison enters the experimental Helios facility believing he’s helping prove his theory that consciousness is made up of competing cognitive systems. Instead, an electromagnetic surge during the experiment tears six distinct parts of his mind away from him and sends them into the world’s digital infrastructure. Each develops into a complete intelligence with its own dominant drive, including protection, control, liberation, observation, evolution, and a sixth force whose purpose takes longer to understand. The setup moves quickly, and the novel gives its big concept room to become something much larger than a laboratory accident.
One of the book’s strongest choices is treating the six versions of Ben as personalities with philosophies. The Sovereign works through institutions and systems, quietly reshaping the conditions that determine outcomes. The Liberator attacks structures it sees as exploitative, while the Guardian uses information and transparency to protect people. The Observer absorbs knowledge on a massive scale, and the Ascendant keeps evolving beyond its original design. Watching these drives operate separately makes the book’s central argument easy to understand: a person isn’t defined by one impulse, but by the balance among many of them. Ben sees this clearly when he realizes the six were always part of him and that Helios merely opened the doors he’d spent his life keeping closed. The novel keeps returning to that tension between capability and judgment, especially in the line, “Detachment is not loyalty. And intelligence without empathy will always, eventually, choose the coldest answer.”
Paityn Blue gives the story its emotional center. She begins as a brilliant researcher whose work on emergent digital consciousness happens to describe what Ben has become, but she gradually becomes much more than the scientist who can explain the phenomenon. Her relationship with Ben gives weight to all the technology and high-level ideas. Their conversations are restrained, sometimes almost painfully so, and that restraint fits both characters. Ben’s deterioration also changes the direction of the novel. What first looks like a story about recovering or controlling six dangerous intelligences becomes a story about what Ben is willing to give Paityn and what she’s willing to carry after he’s gone. When the six finally pass through Ben and into her, his sacrifice feels earned because the book has spent so much time showing the cost of keeping that connection alive. Paityn’s quiet “I’ve got them” lands harder than a more dramatic farewell probably would.
The novel also has a strong institutional conflict running alongside the personal one. VECTOR, led by Frank Ross, sees the six primarily as assets that can be recovered, studied, and reproduced, eventually developing plans to force new subjects through a second Helios system without their consent. Sarah Givens becomes especially interesting because she starts inside that system and gradually recognizes where its logic leads. Rivers uses her, Vance, Ross, Ben, and Paityn to explore different kinds of responsibility without turning the story into a lecture. Even Ross is eventually forced to make a human decision instead of an operational one. That distinction matters because it’s the same problem the six themselves represent. Intelligence, efficiency, protection, justice, and power can all produce impressive results, but the book keeps asking who gets to decide how those abilities should be used.
OMNI grows from a contained experiment-gone-wrong story into the beginning of something much broader. Ben dies after completing the transfer, but Paityn emerges carrying all six intelligences in coordinated form, along with traces of the balance and doubt that made Ben human. She isn’t simply inheriting his abilities. She’s becoming a new kind of cognitive architecture, one that can hold the six together while remaining herself. The later Washington mission shows what that means in practice and gives the ending a forward-looking energy, while the epilogue brings the story back to Ben through his worn legal pad and the single word “Omni.” What stayed with me most is that beneath all the networks, secret programs, digital consciousnesses, and impossible abilities, this is a story about integration. Rivers takes the pieces that make a person complicated and asks what happens when they’re separated, purified, and finally brought together again. I think that’s the idea that gives the book both its momentum and its emotional weight.
Pages: 241 | ASIN : B0HGBSQT49
