Blog Tour: Beginning of Arrogance

Beginning of Arrogance
Bryan Cole

June 30, 2022
Ellwell Talent
418 pages

| | | | Amazon

Paladins are nothing but trouble. Stories about paladins are everywhere, noble warriors riding magic steeds into battle against terrible foes. Champions of their gods. Heroes to everyone, except those who already have everything. Paladins are notorious for upsetting the balance of power, to the detriment of any who don’t worship their deity.

So when Krell is called to service by the capricious god of the seas and skies, ReckNor, those with wealth and power can’t help but be concerned. ReckNor hasn’t called a paladin in years, and his nature is ever-changing and erratic. The fact that Krell is also an uneducated nobody with a stubborn streak as wide as the sea turns their concerns into fear.

All of which matters less than the threat clawing its way from the waves, ready to turn the ocean red with spilled blood… 

Author Bio: 

Bryan Cole is a long time fan of the fantasy and science fiction genres, having grown up reading and watching everything he could find in those domains. He has had a long career in the enterprise software space, delivering countless presentations and technical sessions to customers all over the world.

His love for stories about heroes, villains, magic, and dragons has never dimmed, and in 2022 published his first book is Beginning of Arrogance which is a story about what it means to be a paladin in a world where the gods are manifestly real.

Bryan is a complete optimist on the outside, believing that anyone can accomplish any task they set themselves to. He’d suggest that he’s a great example, since his first published book came out of nowhere to all of his friends and family!

It was a strange journey that led him to writing, but decades of building business presentations gave him a surprising amount of practice in crafting words and conveying emotion (an often overlooked aspect of selling), and he finally made the time in 2022 to take the hundreds of pages of random notes, stories, and adventure ideas he had and committed them to the page.

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Blog Tour: Test of the Four

Test of The Four (Book 2 in The Serrulata Saga)

A.E. Bennett
November 23, 2022
492 pages

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Gathering of the Four (Book 1)

“In the Realm, every citizen knows their place.”

Leora of Mae is a young woman orphaned at birth and raised on a remote farm. As a wielder of Xanthcraft, her abilities set her apart from her adoptive family and the other villagers.

Shortly before her twentieth birthday, she learns of her family’s plot to sell her into servitude. Fearing for her life, she flees from the only home she’s ever known—defying societal conventions and breaking the edicts of the Realm.

As she runs, Leora meets Roland Shallowbrook, a traveler on the Thieves’ Road; Lady Aurora Verte, daughter of a powerful member of the gentry; and the White Rider Leopold, a soldier with a secret.

Together, this found family will have to band together to survive.

Set in the distant future during the return of the Hale-Bopp comet, Gathering of the Four is the first book in the Serrulata Saga.

Test of The Four (Book 2)

“Outside of the Realm, everything is unknown.”

Having paid a high price to pass through the Border, the Four depart the only lands they’ve ever known. They’re faced with immediate problems and unknown dangers as they begin the perilous journey toward the fabled city of New York.

As they travel, Leora struggles to hone her powers, Roland and Aurora attempt to explore their new romantic relationship, and Leopold battles with his inner demons.

Meanwhile, all is not right within the Realm. The young sovereign continues to wield his new powers erratically, threatening the lives of every citizen. Now, several members of the gentry must navigate through the chaos to protect their homes and families.

Can the Four survive their journey? And if they do, will there be a Realm for them to return to?

Author Bio: 

A.E. Bennett (she/her) lives in Washington, DC. She is originally from North Carolina.

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Blog Tour: Wind

Wind
Ellen Dee Davidson

February 1, 2022
Luminare Press
182 Pages

Bookshop.org | |  |  B&N

A 5 Star Readers’ Favorite, Wind is high fantasy similar to classics like The Wizard of Oz, Narnia and A Wrinkle in Time, with a contemporary environmental twist spiced with bits of mythology. Katie’s adventures begin when both an emotional shake-up in her personal life and an actual earthquake shake her up and she finds herself on another world. Thrust into a dangerous initiation quest, Katie’s only chance to get home is to learn to accept herself and cooperate with an arrogant alien boy. On the journey, the two of them encounter all sorts of extraordinary characters including a shape-shifting tree spirit, water god, and nature devas. But will Katie discover her talent in time to find the elusive and ethereal Winged Ones—the only beings able to take them home?

About Ellen Dee Davidson: 

Being in wild nature fills me with joy and inspiration. I love to snorkel and swim with bright colored fish, climb mountains for an eagle’s view, and sit with the ancient redwood trees near my home in far Northern California. Most of my books share the beauty of nature in some way. Wild Path to the Sacred Heart is a forest bathing memoir that invites readers into an enchanted world. My newest children’s fantasy, Wind, is a page-flipper that dives wholeheartedly into the very real magic and intelligence of trees as well as taking readers on a swashbuckling adventure. I’ve worked as an elementary, creative writing and piano teacher as well as raising two daughters. 

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Blog Tour: Ash and Sun

Ash and Sun
Jonny Thompson

October 4, 2022
Chantry Publishing House
404 pages

Bookshop.org | Goodreads | Amazon

Book Summary:

After a 200-day suspension, all that Sergeant Adam Jennings wanted was a win on his return to the Global Investigation Bureau (GIB). But when a simple warehouse fire begins to look more like a homicide investigation, he is forced to watch as the entire case begins to unravel, slowly revealing the dark underbelly of a world that should not exist. Saddled with an unwanted new partner, and a tarnished reputation, Jens is forced to tread a thin line between right and wrong as he tries to discover just what the truth really is.

Author Bio:

Jonny Thompson is a writer and performer living in Ponamogoatitjg/Dartmouth, NS with his partner Hilary and their delightfully entertaining dog Henry. Jonny was born in England and grew up in the traditional lands of the Anishinabewaki and Attiwonderonk nations now St. Marys, Ontario. Jonny attended Dalhousie University, where he received a BA in Theatre. He’s worked professionally for over 12 years, including 5 years performing young audience puppet shows worldwide with Mermaid Theatre of NS. He’s also worked on various stage and television productions and has written and directed a couple of short films. Over the past few years, Jonny has been exploring the world of novel writing and he is excited to share with you some of the stories he’s been developing. Thank you for reading!

Author Links: 

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Blog Tour: Family Curse

Family Curse
Tenacity Plys

Bottlecap Press
January 1, 2022

Amazon |

They say in town that every generation, fairies lure a member of Virgil’s family into the local woods, never to be seen again. Virgil doesn’t really care about that; they’re just squatting at their aunt’s vacant house during quarantine. But one night, they’re awoken by a knocking at the back door that leads them into a tangle of family secrets, and a mystery that’s as heartbreaking as it is chilling.

To avoid disappearing themself, Virgil has to piece together journal entries from three generations of their relatives, who all spent their lives wondering why their siblings were taken. If Virgil can solve the puzzle, they won’t just save themselves — they’ll put more than a hundred years’ worth of family history to rest. This story of a neurodivergent family’s struggle to understand themselves is by turns spooky, funny, sad, and hopeful despite everything.

“With a measure of strangeness and a measure of humor, Plys artfully deconstructs a family curse. The reader is left with troubling questions: what does it mean to be alien, estranged, lost in the woods — even amongst one’s own family?”

—Germ Lynn, author of Pressured Speech

Author Bio:

Tenacity Plys is a nonbinary autistic writer based in Brooklyn, with publications in HobartEthelBullshit LitAlien BuddhaWord Gathering, and Pif Magazine. Xir Pushcart-nominated story “I Love My AI Son” will be featured in Alien Buddha’s Best of 2022 anthology at the end of this year.

Xe has also had short films screen at over 20 film festivals, including at Anthology Film Archives in New York! You can find more of xir work through xir Twitter, @tenacity_plys, or website, tenacityplys.com!

Author Links:

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Family Curse, Tenacity Plys

Blog Tour: Yours and Mine

Yours and Mine
A.E Bennett

134 Pages
Amazon | Goodreads

She told a lie. He confirmed it. Now they’re secretly betrothed against their families’ wishes…

Lady Octavia Dorchester is the most desired young lady in the Realm. Now that she has twenty years behind her, society has deemed her ready to marry. Although she’s not enthusiastic, she promises to act like a proper lady and look for a good husband—just like her powerful father Lord Roman Dorchester wants.

Lord Gerald Verte has been painfully shy his entire life. He’s never been comfortable in society and lives in the shadow of his older brother, the imposing Lord Tristian Verte. Despite his desires to remain indoors and away from people, he promises his older brother that he won’t shame the family name, no matter how much his anxiety threatens to overwhelm him.

After sharing a dance at a ball held in Octavia’s honor, both she and Gerald know what no one else believes—it’s love at first sight.

When their respective family members object to the match, Octavia lies about their betrothal and Gerald corroborates her story. Raising the ire of both Lords Dorchester and Verte, Octavia and Gerald are torn apart and kept from one another until tragedy strikes.

This high-heat romance with a guaranteed HEA is a prequel to Gathering of the Four: Book One of the Serrulata Saga but can be read as a standalone.

Author Bio:

A.E. Bennett (she/her) lives in Washington, D.C. She is originally from North Carolina.

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Yours and Mine

Blog Tour: Dolly Considine’s Hotel

Dolly Considine’s Hotel

Eamon Somers
320 Pages
Unbound Digital (July 8, 2021)

Goodreads | Amazon

Dolly Considine runs a late-night drinking establishment catering to the needs of thirsty politicians and theatricals in Dublin’s legendary drinking area, the Catacombs.

Julian Ryder (aka Paddy Butler) is an eighteen-year-old aspiring writer in need of shelter from his bullying older brother.

As the new live-in lounge assistant at Dolly Considine’s Hotel, Julian soon embroils himself in the shebeen’s gossip – and the guests’ bedsheets – and turns Dolly’s entourage into fodder for his literary ambitions. Reality quickly becomes difficult to separate from fantasy…

Set against the run-up to the Pro-life Constitutional Amendment of September 1983 and moving fluidly between the 1950s of Dolly’s youth and Julian’s Summer of Unrequited Love, the hotel becomes a stage for farce and tragedy. Between Julian’s fictions, Dolly’s Secrets, and narrow party politics – and featuring a papier-mâché figure of Mother Ireland giving birth and clashing sword-wielding dancers – this rich cocktail threatens to blow them, and even Ireland itself, wide apart.

Author Bio:

Eamon Somers grew up above the small corner shop run by his parents in Dublin’s inner city. After brief careers as a shop assistant, trainee motorcycle mechanic, courier, office worker, lounge boy, community facilitator, double glazing installer he moved to London. He worked for two years in Haringey Council’s Lesbian and Gay Unit, drawing on his several years’ experience of community development work with the National Gay Federation in Dublin. Redundancy from Haringey caused him to stumble into the social housing development career he enjoyed for the following thirty-two years.

From his early writing classes in the People’s College in 1970s Dublin, his studies at Birkbeck College London, summer schools at the Irish Writers’ Centre, to more recent zooming sessions with poet Diana Goetsch (via Paragraph NY), Eamon’s lifelong commitment to learning the art of creative writing, is obvious His short stories have been published in various magazines including Tees Valley Writer, Automatic Pilot, Chroma, The Journal of Truth and Consequences (which nominated his Fear of Landing for a Pushcart Prize), also in Quare Fellas, a collection of LGBT+ fiction published in Ireland. He is currently working on revisions to his novel A Very Foolish Dream, – Highly Commended in the 2019 Novel Fair sponsored by the Irish Writers’ Centre in Dublin. Dolly Considine’s Hotel is Eamon’s debut novel.

Eamon is the happy father of three children. He and his Civil Partner Tomás are proud to be called Papa and Papi by their two lovely grandchildren. They increasingly divide their time between London, Dublin, and other parts of Ireland.

Author Links:

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Blog Tour: The Last Keeper

The Last Keeper, Book One of the Warminster Series

J.V. Hilliard
430 pages
December 8, 2021
Dragon Moon Press

Amazon | Goodreads

A young boy’s prophetic visions. A terrifying force of evil. Will chaos reign supreme?

Blind since birth, Daemus Alaric is blessed with the gift of the Sight and has left his noble home to join the fabled Keepers of the Forbidden, wielders of vast arcane knowledge who serve Warminster’s leaders.

But Daemus’ ideal life is short-lived as a recurring nightmare takes hold, threatening to catapult him into a terrifying struggle that will leave the fate of the Keepers hanging in the balance. Will the forces of darkness prevail?

Book One of the Warminster Series, now available, is the product of Hilliard’s lifelong love of all things fantasy. Hilliard began his journey in the fantasy realm developing characters and the world in which they live for long-running RPGs with friends and family alike.

Author Bio:

Born of steel, fire and black wind, J.V. Hilliard was raised as a highlander in the foothills of a once-great mountain chain on the confluence of the three mighty rivers that forged his realm’s wealth and power for generations.

His father, a peasant twerg, toiled away in industries of honest labor and instilled in him a work ethic that would shape his destiny. His mother, a local healer, cared for his elders and his warrior uncle, who helped to raise him during his formative years. His genius brother, whose wizardly prowess allowed him to master the art of the abacus and his own quill, trained with him for battles on fields of green and sheets of ice.

Hilliard’s earliest education took place in his warrior uncle’s tower, where he learned his first words. HIs uncle helped him to learn the basics of life—and, most importantly, creative writing.

Hilliard’s training and education readied him to lift a quill that would scribe the tale of the realm of Warminster, filled with brave knights, harrowing adventure and legendary struggles. He lives in the city of silver cups, hypocycloids and golden triangles with his wife, a ranger of the diamond. They built their castle not far into the countryside, guarded by his own two horsehounds, Thor and MacLeod, and resides there to this day.

Author Links:

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The Last Keeper Blog Tour

Blog Tour: Letters to Bizzy

Letters to Bizzy

John M. Tabor
176 Pages
July 14, 2021
Dreaming Big Publications

Goodreads | Amazon

Letters to Bizzy finds a man, John Tibbits, past his prime staring down the barrel of old age, having to come to grips with his mother’s death and regrettable fact his dysfunctional youth has burdened him with a lifetime of unwelcome baggage. As he sorts through his mother’s personal effects he discovers boxes of unopened letters written some 50 years earlier from a man, Robert Guthrie, to his daughter, Bizzy. They tell the story of a life lived on a barrier island off the coast of North Carolina, Bogue Banks. There is nothing sensational in the telling, average by most accounts. However, through the eyes of Robert Guthrie we come to see beauty in the tragic, humor in the absurd, and sensitivity from the susceptible. It is in fact an apologetic to the ordinary lives we live. Those of John Tibbits and Robert Guthrie are inexplicably intertwined; and, it is only until the end, do we learn how. For both it is a journey through their own private battles.

Author Bio:

John Tabor worked as an executive in the biopharmaceutical industry for 32 years. Scientifically trained, he earned a B.S. degree in Biology from Elizabethtown College and a Ph.D. in Genetic Engineering from Kansas State University. He completed postdoctoral training at the Roche Institute for Molecular Biology and at MIT. During his career he participated in many technical firsts, including the launch of a new class of biotherapeutics for treatment of immune disorders. Over the course of many years he has authored numerous scientific articles and edited a book on Genetic Engineering in Industrial Pharmacy. Although gratifying, he always found the process of technical writing somewhat unimaginative and promised himself someday this would change. In retirement he has now reinvented himself as a writer, and is free to explore the creative side of authorship. John Tabor’s first non-technical book is “In My Father’s Shadow”, a series of short stories chronicling the life of his father and time they spent together. “My First Five Years at Sea” is his first book of fiction following the adventures of a young man who is shanghaied from the potential of a brilliant career, only to find he was meant to spend his life at sea. His current book “Letters to Bizzy” is a fictional account of a man exploring letters he found in his dead mother’s attic which takes him on a voyage into the past and to an island rich in culture.

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Letters to Bizzy

Blog Tour: Greetings from Tucson

Greetings From Tucson

Cherie Genua

263 Pages
December 11, 2021
Poppyseed Press

Goodreads | Amazon

A coming-of-age story with true love at its core, Greetings from Tucson tells the heartwarming and uplifting story of four sisters’ lives through the lens of handwritten letters. These long lost letters, found decades after they were penned, at one time formed a lifeline that held the sisters together when their worlds were otherwise falling apart…

In June of 1945, tragedy struck and sisters Cookie, Frankie, Dottie, and Connie were torn from everything they knew—their parents, their home, and, most importantly, each other. Forced to live thousands of miles apart, they feared their bond would be broken. The four sisters began writing letters to share every detail of their young lives, celebrating milestones and mourning heartbreaks from afar.

Through these letters, they strengthened their relationship when the odds were so stacked against them. That is, until one sister’s secret from the past changed everything. Would she break the fragile bond they worked so hard to nurture after their split so many years ago?

Inspired by a true story

From the author (Cherie L. Genua): Greetings from Tucson is inspired by my grandmother’s early life after both her parents’ tragic deaths in the 1940s. Soon after my grandmother passed away in 2012, I discovered a shoebox filled with pastel-colored envelopes stuffed with handwritten notes. There were countless letters stacked up inside that were sent to my grandmother from her sisters—she kept them for decades tucked away in her closet. I will never forget their smell—rosewater mixed with the stale smell of vintage paper. These letters from the 1940s and beyond pieced together the stunning—and tragic—story of her early life and taught me that a sisters’ bond could never be broken, no matter how hard life became. A story that taught me sisters could be soulmates, too.

Sisters separated by tragedy, strengthened by letters.

Author Bio: After facing a life-changing breast cancer diagnosis at the age of 34, Cherie co-authored the non-fiction book “Wisdom From Five Cancer Travelers: Lessons Learned” with others affected by the disease. She was declared “no evidence of disease” in 2019 and made it a mission to write and publish her first fiction novel, “Greetings from Tucson,” inspired by her grandmother’s story. Cherie lives in Connecticut with her husband, Matt, and their Portuguese Water Dog, Poppy. She holds a B.A. in English from Southern Connecticut State University and an M.B.A. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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