Blog Archives
To Tell a Story
Out of the Water follows a prince who doubts his worth and must uncover the secrets of his bloodline and three magical rings as a growing conflict threatens the kingdoms of earth, water, and fire. What is the most rewarding aspect of writing a series?
To tell a story. Show how, through fictitious characters, people can change, and not always for the better. Choices bare consequences. Out of the Water is an excellent example of just that. You can learn what not to do when writing characters similar to Svaryur and Drifa.
How did you develop the Einns and the rules surrounding their magical powers?
Einn in Icelandic means one. The residents in Huldar usually only have one Einn. That’s where it started, with one magical power progressing into three separate Einns. Fire, Water, and Joro (in Old Norse for earth). Fire comes from the heart, Water from the mind, and Joro from the lungs. Einns have limits.
Svaryur’s character changes significantly throughout the novel. At what point did you realize how dark his transformation would become?
When he would use his own son in Into the Fire to get what Drifa wanted.
Svaryur never really did what he wanted, only Drifa.
Can you give us a glimpse into the next installment of The Huldar Chronicles? Where will it take readers?
The final Chronicle, End of Joro, is the ending. Aron’s great- grandson, Hakon has taken the stage. He will take readers on a journey of Hope. “For when we fall we must continue to rise.”
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I Like Nightmares
The Nightmare follows a young priestess as an ancient mage weaponizes her fears, forcing her to confront a corrupt religious order, buried truths, and the nightmares her choices may unleash. What were some sources that informed this novel’s development?
Some of it is just from my life, but things like Rush’s 2112 influence me in the background. It’s hard to say current events, but that can’t be denied. I want to show characters overcoming the past, the forces that be, the rich, whatever, and finding their own paths.
The novel treats nightmares not simply as supernatural attacks but as fears that influence characters’ choices. How did that idea shape the story and its title?
I like nightmares as a response to the raid on the Black Tower. It has the deviousness I expect the Black Mages to excel at. The desire to have an enemy create the environment in which they suffer. It leaves their hands, arguably, clean, and yet promotes their mystique. Since I’m delving into characters and their responses to stress, fear, love, and everything else, this is going to fail. In the end, even though the bad guys win, the characters cement their beliefs and push forward even stronger.
Kate discovers that the Code governing her society is built on lies, yet she wants reform without becoming another tyrant. What interested you about exploring that tension through her character?
You can’t tell by her fate, but I love Kate. She’s what every system wants. A young, vibrant person who believes and wants to believe. That’s why Haervan cuts her so much slack. She’s the perfect junior priest. Devoted. Knowledgeable. Vocal. The system, like most things, is at best a two-sided coin, and as she sees the other side, she has to reconcile that and still believe. I find her compelling. Kate’s belief, knowledge, and determination are what will drive a world to change.
The story combines intimate moments of friendship, romance, and family with gods, political upheaval, and epic battles. Why was it important to give ordinary relationships space within a large-scale fantasy story?
I like real people. It’s one of the genius parts about hobbits in all the Tolkien books. They aren’t heroes. They have lives and families. I like to show that people are people, and that makes them amazing. The solo hero stories have never interested me. I don’t like Superman-type characters. People have reasons they do things. One reason Mirsha has Kate suffer is so that T’az (a mercenary) will commit and go through hell to win. Would someone who fights for coin, even if they’re good, risk everything if the one person they loved didn’t die? So I ask myself while I’m writing what a character is doing, and more importantly, why. They could all fold up and fit in. It makes sense, and it is safe, but that why is always there. Once it comes to the front, change is going to happen.
To have people be real. Tangible. They have all the things we all have. Thoughts, doubts, love, rejection- all of it makes people who can stand in front of a charge of knights and not break. Those things are the why.
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As revolution ignites across the land, T’az must navigate impossible choices while wielding a mysterious magical sword that hungers for battle. Torn between conflicting loyalties and haunted by her own demons, she discovers that some bonds transcend death itself. With unlikely alliances forming between humans, mythical creatures, and forces beyond the grave, our heroes must uncover long-buried truths about their world’s forgotten history. But ancient powers are stirring, and sinister forces manipulate events from the shadows. In a realm where everything that once existed still endures, the fate of all may depend on understanding the deepest mysteries of the past—before the gathering darkness consumes everything they hold dear.
A Vision Of The Last Scene
Metamorphosis By Decree: The Beginning follows a young priestess chosen by her goddess to recover sacred tablets, forcing her to confront forbidden magic, buried history, and a religious establishment determined to preserve its power. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The Beginning was actually a dream or a vision of the last scene in the Emperor’s throne room. I had to write a story to get there. That was the last time that happened. In every other book, I have a beginning and struggle to find the end. Because I love characters and how they interact, overcome obstacles, and grow, I sometimes worry.
Kate’s faith in Mirsha remains strong even as her trust in the religious establishment collapses. What interested you about separating personal faith from institutional loyalty?
This is essentially my background. I grew up believing my parents’ religion. I’m an American, so as a kid in the seventies and eighties, we really bought into the propaganda. It turns out, nothing is really like that. I’ve served my country, worked for decades; none of it meant anything. So, it influences my characters. They have to find what’s real.
One of the things I love is the underdog. Not a fan of the hidden hero, secret jedi, or whatever. I like real people that do incredible things for love, or friendship. The sacrifices make sense to me.
The Black Tower connects magic, sacrifice, family betrayal, and generations of hidden history. How early in the writing process did you know what Verig, Theris, and the Tower would ultimately reveal?
The end of that book was the beginning. It made sense, and the world it existed in spun into being as I tried to figure out what I was writing down and why. I like thinking about the worlds from a character’s perspective. They wouldn’t know how big the world is. They wouldn’t know other things exist. They don’t have the internet and live in an isolated society. Discovery is fun.
Later in the Danagors, one of the characters convinces Mirsha to let her try again. The God isn’t going to start the whole world over, so Pelwin is sent to our world to try again. In that scenario, suddenly everything changes. She has the internet and an education. So, a very similar story becomes completely different because the world changes.
Kate, T’az, Hestal, Bernard, Bear, and Thervan gradually become a community of outsiders. How did you approach giving each member of such a large traveling party a distinct personal arc?
This is the key to everything in everything I write. All of the characters have stories. I’m fond of NPC’s. Building a world requires them, unfortunately. A book in which everyone’s story is told would be huge and probably boring. To make a group work, the dynamics have to work. Everyone has to give and compromise. At the same time, they need to find the lines they won’t cross. That’s the dynamic that interests me, and for me, that’s what drives a story. You can put characters into any situation. If you’ve built them and rounded them out, their reactions and motivations are a lot clearer.
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But as Kate’s small company faces undead horrors, soul-stealing demons, and creatures beyond imagination, she begins to suspect that her sacred quest may not be what it seems. The deeper they venture into the cursed lands, the more the foundations of everything she’s believed begin to crumble. With her companions dying around her and enemies closing in from all sides, Kate must discover not only the strength to survive the ultimate evil—but the courage to question everything she’s ever been taught about the gods, the Code, and the very nature of truth itself.
The Knight’s Squire
John J. Curta’s The Knight’s Squire is a coming-of-age fantasy built around knights, squires, tournaments, royal succession, hidden magic, and the messy gap between the stories people tell about heroes and the choices those heroes actually make. At the center is twelve-year-old Jory Turner, a talented but wounded young squire who wants desperately to live up to the reputation of his dead father. His knight and guardian, Sir Cley Woods, is famous, charming, and genuinely devoted to Jory, but he carries his own war trauma and makes compromises that force Jory to reconsider what honor really means. That relationship gives the novel its heart. Their conversations gradually move the idea of knighthood away from winning jousts and looking impressive and toward courage, honesty, judgment, and protecting other people. Cley eventually tells Jory that the Knights of the Realm are sworn to protect the kingdom, which neatly captures one of the book’s biggest ideas about loyalty and conscience.
The story gets wider as it goes, and Curta handles that expansion through several points of view. Prince James has to grow from an uncertain teenager surrounded by stronger personalities into someone capable of making decisions for an entire kingdom. Emily begins as a healer’s apprentice and discovers that she’s a Drasani with the rare ability to influence emotions and heal, while Aiden slowly develops from Jory’s mysterious new friend into one of the book’s most important wild cards. Magic also arrives gradually. By the time Marwyn explains Firecasters, Summoners, Windcallers, Dragontalkers, Dreamwalkers, and other surviving Drasani, the supernatural side of Terros feels like something buried beneath the official history instead of something pasted onto the setting. I especially liked how the battles change the younger characters. Jory, Theo, Emily, and even Cley learn that real violence has very little in common with tournament glory. Deaths matter, fear lingers, and Jory’s growing competence comes with memories he’d rather not have.
Readers of John Flanagan’s Ranger’s Apprentice series will probably recognize some of the appeal here. Both stories get a lot of mileage from a young protagonist learning practical skills under an experienced mentor, and both understand that training scenes can reveal character just as effectively as combat. Curta takes that basic mentor-and-student pleasure and places it inside a much broader political story. Jory may be the emotional anchor, but the succession struggle between Prince James and King Ivan, the competing regional lords, the Temple of the Four, the secret Knights of the Realm, and the reappearance of magic keep pulling the camera outward. That makes Terros feel lived in, especially because its politics affect farmers, healers, soldiers, servants, and children. One of the sharper moments comes when a farmer tells Jory that an army takes what it needs regardless of which side it serves, a small observation that says quite a bit about how ordinary people experience the grand causes knights fight over.
The Knight’s Squire turns Jory’s dream of becoming a knight into something much more complicated and much more interesting. He’s brave enough to face a Summoner who tempts him with the image of his dead father, loyal enough to ride into a collapsing battle to reach Cley, and still young enough to be hurt by jealousy, homesickness, fear, and questions about whether his mother loves him. The final chapters land hard because the story refuses to let battlefield courage guarantee a clean victory. Sir Cley is gravely wounded, Jory falls into the hands of his abusive stepfather, James escapes a disastrous betrayal, and Aiden is revealed as the son of the Pirate King after secretly helping the high priestess. Those revelations give the ending real momentum while also circling back to the book’s central question: who deserves to be called honorable when titles, bloodlines, legends, and loyalties can all be manipulated? The Knight’s Squire is an adventurous medieval fantasy, but its strongest quality is the way it makes growing up inseparable from learning that courage is less about becoming the hero from a song and more about deciding what kind of person you’ll be when the song no longer matches reality.
Pages: 367 | ASIN : B0GYLPQF1Z
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.
Sword and Sorcery
Drop follows a ruthless Fort Worth cop turned supernatural enforcer as he battles sorcerers, monsters, and shifting alliances in a hidden war that threatens to spill into the everyday world. What were some sources that informed this novel’s development?
My imagination. I also talked to several police officers to get information about police procedures. One of my degrees is a Bachelor of Science in Criminal Justice with a minor in police procedures. I live in Fort Worth, which gave me insight into the city, streets, and neighborhoods.
The combat scenes in Drop are described almost move by move; did your interest or experience in martial arts influence how you choreographed Jax’s fights?
I have always been a fan of martial arts and sword and sorcery. I have also taken Kung Fu lessons as a teenager.
Jax’s magical gauntlets allow him to summon different weapons depending on the situation. Where did that idea come from, and how do you decide which weapon he uses in a particular battle?
The idea of using different weapons kind of grew organically in the story. The original idea and his staple weapons are Dai Katana’s or Japanese short swords. A scene came about, and I remember watching the movie Ninja Assassin and loving the weapon scenes. The choice was made.
Drop features several competing factions and characters whose loyalties continually shift. How do you keep track of those alliances while plotting the larger supernatural conflict?
When I bring in a character, I have some idea of what their purpose is. So it is a matter of the character finding their way through the story to their conclusion. There are some characters I do not plan on dying, but it just happens that way. I also tried to play on their motives, like greed and power. At a certain point, a person reaches a plateau in their life and will either be happy there or want to move past their “master” kind of like Sith.
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Gritty, fast-paced, and unapologetically raw, DROP plunges readers deep into the underbelly of urban crime, where loyalty is tested, trust is deadly, and one wrong move can end everything. Perfect for fans of hard-edged police procedurals and modern crime thrillers that don’t flinch from the truth.
A Red Age
A Red Age by Sage Osterberg and Ulysses Kittilson is a sprawling piece of military science fiction, dystopian fiction, dark fantasy, and dinosaur fiction that treats its dinosaur civilization as a fully developed political and cultural world. The foreword makes that ambition explicit, presenting the novel as an attempt to expand what dinosaur stories can do, and the book follows through with governments, religions, propaganda, ancient histories, military bureaucracies, mass media, technology, class divisions, and generations of resentment. The opening assault on Juliobriga establishes the tone immediately: this is a violent, profane, frequently funny war story in which soldiers joke their way through sewage, gunfire, terrible decisions, and gruesome deaths. From there the story expands into a much larger conflict between the Coalition and the Alliance, with political leaders, soldiers, spies, royals, civilians, and prisoners all getting caught in the same machinery of war.
One of the strongest parts of this dystopian novel is its willingness to let the world feel messy. The Coalition and Alliance each have ideologies, grievances, heroes, monsters, competent people, fools, opportunists, and characters who genuinely believe they’re protecting civilization. Cartassius, in particular, gives the political side of the story some weight. His concern that victory achieved through atrocities will simply plant the seeds of the next war gets at one of the book’s central ideas: civilizations can become trapped inside the stories they tell about their enemies. Zamma approaches the same problem from another direction, questioning the endless cycle of violence while surrounded by a royal culture that treats warfare as inheritance. Meanwhile, characters such as Kuyucak, Thalsos, Botilda, Asgremis, Zorphax, Hassa, Akragos, Izmit, and others broaden the novel into something closer to an ensemble war epic. There’s a lot happening, but that density suits a world where political intrigue, religion, espionage, family loyalty, military ambition, and personal survival are constantly colliding.
The book’s personality comes from how readily it mixes horror with absurdity. Horrific combat can sit beside bureaucratic incompetence, vulgar arguments, terrible advertising, propaganda broadcasts, religious references, and jokes that arrive at the least dignified possible moment. That combination gives this dark sci-fi novel a distinctly satirical streak. Even when the stakes reach an almost apocalyptic scale, everyday stupidity keeps intruding. The effect is especially sharp near the climax, when the Nemesis weapon transforms military victory into catastrophe. A single strike wipes out a fleet and then produces consequences far beyond the triumphant moment its users imagined, turning soldiers from both armies into equally terrified creatures running from the resulting destruction. That sequence captures the novel’s larger view of war beautifully: technology, nationalism, faith, revenge, and ambition can dress violence in grand language, but eventually the violence becomes bigger than everyone who thought they controlled it.
By the end, A Red Age feels like the opening movement of a much larger dinosaur science fiction saga, and its cliffhanger embraces that serialized quality. Kuyucak’s final blood-pit sequence folds together several of the novel’s recurring interests: spectacle, propaganda, captivity, exhaustion, violence as entertainment, and the strange possibility of finding agency inside brutality. That sequence turns the gladiatorial spectacle into something unexpectedly bleak, giving Kuyucak’s storyline a darker emotional edge before the novel closes on a chaotic final note and the promise of Part 2: A Poisoned Sky. It’s a fitting ending for a book that keeps escalating its world while maintaining a rough, conversational sense of humor. Readers drawn to military science fiction, dystopian fantasy, and dinosaur fiction will find a strange and remarkably committed world here, one where prehistoric bodies carry rifles, argue about politics, worship gods, watch trashy entertainment, make catastrophic choices, and inherit the same old problems of power and violence.
Pages: 518 | ASIN : B0FVRXDNJ8
A Character’s Voice is Unique
Fangs for Hire follows a resistance fighter who, after being executed during WWII, is resurrected as a vampire and transforms personal tragedy into a lifelong quest for justice. What inspired you to combine wartime history with vampire fiction?
I am a history buff as well as a science buff, and I enjoy reading historical magazines, historical novels, and watching fascinating documentaries about World War II. I was inspired to write this novella by several influencing creative forces, such as the TV series Forever Knight, about a 13th-century vampire who became a 20th-century cop to save as many innocent humans as possible and redeem his past sins when he fed on the innocent and guilty alike. Another inspiration came from reading about the resistance against the Nazis in occupied Belarus, from 1941 to 1944. I thought: why not combine the dark fantasy and realism of real military conflict to tell a story of an ordinary teenage girl who fought for her country and was presented with a unique opportunity to strike at her enemies after her moral death? The result was Fangs for Hire, and I am very proud to be able to see this project from start to finish. Larisa Tokar is a unique character who is a survivor and a vampire with a human heart that is no longer beating.
Larisa balances confidence, compassion, and ruthlessness throughout the book. How did you approach creating her voice?
This is a very good and interesting question. A character’s voice is unique, and since Larisa is the main protagonist of the story, she has a unique voice and actions that define who she is. Born as an average human female with no special powers and no particular or unique talent, she nevertheless is an honest, kind, and compassionate person. The brutal Nazi invasion of her country and her desire to fight back against a brutal oppressor make her a person not only influenced by Soviet propaganda, but also a young woman who learns not only how to survive but also strikes at the enemy from a unique angle. She narrates the story with strong personal feelings based on her life experience. Her execution, death, and resurrection as a vampire alter her perspective about the war and the dark truth that was hidden from her. Born again as a vampire, with inhuman abilities that make her into a unique warrior, Larisa navigates through years in prison, during and after the war. She survives and adapts to her condition, and learns new skills to help those who deserve her love and respect. Larisa Tokar is a unique kind of time traveler.
The Urtama functions more like an international society than a traditional supernatural clan. How did that idea evolve?
Fangs for Hire is a novella that is related to my other vampire novels such as Beyond Sunlight, Eighteen Forever, Innocent Eyes, Heatseeker, and Before the Dawn. All of them feature a secret race of nightwalkers who call themselves Urtama. They are a very ancient species that have been living alongside mankind before the dawn of recorded history, stretching all the way back before the time of the last Great Ice Age. My idea about vampires came from the realization that, as a secret species, they had to remain in the shadows while adapting to the new times, as humanity had evolved from hunters and gatherers to farmers and eventually to city builders. Urtama represents a secret race of immortals who depend on human blood to survive, and therefore human lives are precious to them. And while I liked reading about supernatural clans and traditional vampire fiction, I imagined a different and secret world of vampires with their own rules and traditions and system of punishments for the crimes against humanity and their fellow immortals. No society can exist without rules and regulations, and Urtama has their own.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
I am currently working on a sword and sorcery story, which has evolved from a short story I wrote in my experimental science fiction and fantasy writing group in the year 2012. It will most likely be a novelette-length, but with a rich, dense, and hopefully interesting story about kingdoms, battles, knights, love, ambition, and ancient super weapons. This is a unique project, because I seldom work on fantasy tales involving warriors and magic. I hope to complete and present the next book for review sometime in the early Fall. For me, writing is a labor of love, and I want to make this story a unique tale that is not only about action, adventure and magic, but also a morality tale with values that remain true both in the real and magical realm. The best part is that my work schedule permits me two days per week to work on my novels, and each novel I write, I want to make it interesting and informative for my readers. Please stay tuned. A new book is coming!
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