Tag Archives: sarbonn

The new site is up and running

Social Networking, Tales of Reagul, The Deck Const, Writing, , , , , , ,

I finally decided I needed to take my web site into the 21st century, and it definitely needed a push to illustrate that this is the site of a writer, not just a random web site that someone uses to make blog posts every now and then. One of the things I was aching to do was to build a page where you could find all of my currently released novels. There are officially 9 of them released, which includes:

Innocent Until Proven Guilty

Leader of the Losers

Thompson’s Bounty: A Ship Out of Time

The Ameriad: The Untold Founding of America By the Survivors of Troy

The Teddy Bear Conspiracy

Destiny

Deadly Deceptions

Darkened Passages

Absent Without Leave

All of the novels I have written under other names, I have decided not to include in my listing. I’m basically trying to have those names make a success on their own, so we’ll see how they do without the star power of my own name to propel them forward. Yeah, that’s a joke, but anyhoo.

Some of the nice features I was able to implement with the new site included a lot better access to social networking areas that I’m tied to. Before, it was just kind of random. Now, the icons for the specific sites are at the top of the page, which means being a lot easier to link that way.

The other feature that is kind of nice is that the menu bar at the top also allows me to emphasize some of my works in progress. I’ve been wanting to share the map for Reagul for quite some time, and this offers just the opportunity to do that. I’ll be including a lot more information on that property and the Deck Const in the near future. I’m really excited about both story lines, and I hope others are, too, especially when they start to see some of the stuff that’s going to be coming out of those lines.

It took me nearly the entire day (aside from teaching) to get this all configured. There’s still more work to do, but at least it’s finally on a good footing for future innovations.

Let me know what you think.

Dealing with multiple languages in fiction

A Season of Kings, Tales of Reagul, Writing, , , , , , , , , , ,
In my many space travels as a legospaceman, I never ran into a civilization that didn't speak lego
In my many space travels as a legospaceman, I never ran into a civilization that didn’t speak lego

I came across one of those little struggles that I didn’t anticipate while writing A Season of Kings. For those who have been following the story line of the first book of the epic, The Tales of Reagul, it involves several villages from Roman times that are transplanted onto the planet Reagul. A part of the story line is that previous civilizations have been transplanted to this planet earlier than Rome, so there are hints of people from Sumer, Egypt and many other civilizations of earlier history.

One of the first encounters involves Sarbonn, as the young man Spurias, who comes across some of these people. But it dawned on me that someone from Sumer would be speaking Sumerian, not Latin or some derivation of local Roman languages. So, I’m stuck with that old Star Trek problem of “how do people who have never met in their history actually communicate with each other?” Unlike Star Trek, there’s no actual “universal communicator” that everyone is carrying around with them, which means I either have to establish some communication process created by the original aliens (and some back story as to why they’d use something like that any way), or I have to figure out some way to develop a class of people in their societies that would actually be able to translate. Of course, I could go with the old Star Trek method of just assuming everyone speaks English and figure no one will care either way, but that just seems like such an easy cop out (even Star Trek had to eventually explain this situation to its viewers because people don’t allow “yeah, just let it happen” to provide them with justification.

So, I’m analyzing the different ways I can deal with this situation.

The Realm of Reagul

A Season of Kings, Self-Publishing, Tales of Reagul, The Emperor of Reagul, The War of the Wizards, Writing, , , , , , , , ,
Reagul2
The original concept map for Reagul

The Realm of Reagul

 One of the longest projects I’ve ever worked on has been a world-building one called Reagul. I originally conceived of the land of Reagul in a computer game I designed back in the early days of computer games. It was called Prisoner of Z’anth, which involved an American soldier during the Vietnam War who comes across a mysterious artifact in the jungle that points to a sinister organization working behind the scenes of the war. As he battles his way through enemies, he comes to a portal they are protecting that takes him to the land of Z’anth, a realm completely in Earth’s middle ages but filled with dragons and strange creatures, as well as humans who know nothing of Earth. The story in Z’anth opens up to a revelation that this land was once linked with Earth many years ago, and that an alien race may have been responsible for why all of these people are on this planet. The game itself concludes with a final battle against an evil sorcerer who wishes to control everything around him and is now intrigued to discover there’s a world (Earth) he has yet to conquer.

 A few years later, I created another game called Lessons in Death, which took place in the year 3000, when Earth has been taken over by an emperor who seeks to subjugate the known universe. The peace-loving Eden System comes under attack, and a young female ensign from Eden named Laura begins a quest to destroy the emperor and the empire. It starts out as a space battle and then becomes a medieval sword and sorcery tale on a planet that comes to be known as Reagul. As you might suspect, Reagul is none other than the original Z’anth.

 This game eventually became my novel Destiny, which is basically the introduction to the Tales of Reagul, whish strangely begins 3000 years after the saga actually begins in the first series of the Tales of Reagul. Let me explain.

 During the early days of the Roman Empire, an alien race of beings called the Minions takes a large group of Roman citizens from different locations across the empire and moves them to the planet Reagul. As you start to discover, this is not the first time they have done this to human civilizations, having done this with the Egyptians before and the Greeks soon after. They have also transplanted creatures from other planets, running experiments to see how different species interact with each other.

 At some point, the Minions are called home to fight a war that has been taking place in their home solar system. Realizing they must leave soon, they train a young man in their ways, basically giving him the knowledge of a civilization that is thousands of years ahead of anything ever seen before. His new knowledge makes him so powerful, he becomes the first wizard/sorcerer of Reagul, and his name is Sarbonn.  After the Minions leave, Sarbonn attempts to continue their work of protecting the planet, but he also starts to discover that he’s not the first one they’ve trained, as he begins to discover hints of something referred to as the Dark One, a former trainee who has become so powerful that he has gone insane and seeks to destroy all life through a process of chaos and destruction.

 But Sarbonn, oblivious to this future danger, trains two young sorcerers who become his “children”. Over the years, all is fine, and the kingdoms of Reagul begin to grow with the usual sorts of skirmishes that happen when humans try to create civilizations in different places but are close enough to influence one another. Then the process begins to fall apart.

 One of Sarbonn’s “children” decides that because he is so powerful he should be ruling mankind instead of serving it, so he begins a war of aggression that eventually leads to him becoming the emperor of Reagul. Finally, Sarbonn and his other son must confront this upstart, which leads to a cataclysm like none ever seen before.

 Meanwhile, the shadow of the Dark One continues to spread its tentacles, planning and waiting for the right moment to strike.

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The first novel will be released later next month, and it’s called A Season of Kings. Later this month, the first teaser will be published, which is called The Beast of Begmire, which tells the story of a mysterious sorceress who comes in battle with the Dark One some time after the events of the first three books.

 

 

 

 

Beast of Begmire - High Resolution

The Countdown to Being Solo Is Around the Corner

A Season of Kings, Self-Publishing, Tales of Reagul, The Deck Const, The Emperor of Reagul, The War of the Wizards, Writing, , , , , , , , ,

I think I mentioned that I decided to quit my job a few weeks ago. I put in my notice, and I have a little over two weeks left. A couple of days, I almost quit on the same day I was working, but I’ve perservered, and my last date of work will be December 24th, Christmas Eve. There’s no significance to that day, but that will be my last day of work.

So far, no other jobs have lined themselves up for me. And I’m anticipating that it’s probably not going to happen either. This means I really need to make it as a writer, or I’m going to starve to death. Simple as that. I won’t even get unemployment benefits. I kind of screwed myself on this one, but I’m trying to move forward with a positive disposition, no matter how many dark thoughts keep overwhelming me about this decision and its process as its being carried out.

Monday, I have a release for one of my new novels, The Teddy Bear Conspiracy.

theteddybearconspiracy2a

I ran a 2 month contest on Goodreads for this book, and nearly 600 requested a copy of it. I am giving away 10 copies. There’s still a few more days left in the contest, but I’ve given up hyping the contest. Check one of the older posts, or just go to Goodreads if you’re interested in that. I also listed a giveaway of The Ameriad through Library Thing, which I did this morning, and it has about a month before it will complete its giveaway process. I don’t have an immediate link to that one, but you can definitely find it if you just go to Library Thing’s site and search for it under giveaways.

But anxiety is definitely beginning to emerge for me because so far this month, I haven’t sold a single book on Amazon. I’ve sold a few through Barnes & Noble and Kobo, but Amazon, which is usually the one that does the bulk of the selling, has been dead cold for me this month so far. That is not a comforting feeling. Remember what I was saying about starving? Hunger pains are already starting to emerge, and I’m not even at the no food stage yet.

After the Teddy Bear Conspiracy goes live, my next project involves a romance series I’m writing with a female writing friend of mine, and then I’ll be heading for a “sometime in January” release of the first book of the Tales of Reagul series, A Season of Kings. Actually, it’s not really the first book, as Destiny was the first book, but I did something a little strange with this series that not too many other writers do with a series. The first book, Destiny, starts 3000 years after the Tales of Reagul series begins, which kind of makes it an interesting universe for someone following the saga. To explain:

During the period of the Roman Empire, a small group of villages were snatched up by an alien civilization and placed onto a planet called Reagul, where an experiment was being conducted to see how civilizations handle in different environments (the original Rome being the control group, and Reagul being the experiment group). One of the citizens of the new Reagul is a young man who eventually learns all of the alien technology (to be the shepherd of this planet) and immediately after he learns everything, the aliens are called back to their home system to fight a war that is obliterating their people. The young man becomes the prominent wizard of Reagul, as everyone sees his technology as magic, and with such knowledge, it practically is. This begins the Tales of Reagul. 3000 years later, which is about 1000 years in our future, the human empire has spread across the stars, and a coloony comes under attack from the empire. A survivor of the assault leads a mission to destroy the empire by killing the emperor, which brings her to the planet Reagul, where it is discovered that her abilities (the reason she was chosen for the mission) rival those of the wizards of Reagul, indicating a tie between her planet and the strange alien race that contacted them years before (obviously being the same aliens who started the experiment with Reagul in the first place). That loater story is Destiny.

As you can see, it’s kind of complicated, but it’s a great, fun story. The first of that story (aside from Destiny) is slated for release in January.

The next project is a sequel to Thompson’s Bounty: A Ship Out of Time, my time travel adventure involving pirates and the Coast Guard. The new adventure will take Thompson and his crew into the Greek and Roman eras. That should be a lot of fun to write (and hopefully, read). People have been asking for a sequel to this novel for years now, so I finally started plotting it out.

The other distant project is my Deck Const series, which received a bit of fame from a series of short stories that I published back in the 1990s in some of the pulp magazines of that time. They were often referred to as The Soldier stories, and there was always a hint of something called The Deck Const in every one of them. I’ve finally finished the first draft of three novels that I’m reworkiing for publication. It’s a dystopian suspense series of the last soldier who is trying to rebuild civilization while on the quest to find a mysterious talisman only known as The Deck Const.

That’s kind of an update for now. Not sure if anyone even reads these updates any more, but just in case this is being read by soldiers from the future who are in search of the elusive Deck Const, let this be your clue that it exists and perhaps you are one step closer to finding it and rebuilding civilization again. Until then, sorry life kind of sucks for you right now, but dystopian societies can be that way.

The Craft of Creating a World That Doesn’t Exist Yet

A Season of Kings, Tales of Reagul, Writing, , , , , , ,

One of the few joys of being a writer, especially a science fiction/fantasy writer, is being able to craft an entirely new world. When I first started writing, one of the mistakes I used to make was just to create a generic world that seemed like it could have been any place and then kind of hope that people would gravitate to it like Middle Earth or some brilliantly constructed world like the ones you might read in a series like the Wheel of Time. Unfortunately, it took me some time to realize that it doesn’t do your story a whole lot of good if the land you create is generic and unreal. Unfortunately, it took me numerous stories to start to realize that it needed more than just a generic compass heading.

So, fast-forward a few years later, and one of the worlds I have been constructing for over a decade now is one called Reagul, which for a history lesson is a land that was terra-formed by an alien race and survivors of the Roman Empire were transplanted onto the planet in some elaborate experiment of social species interactions. In this land, magic exists in the guise of advanced science, taught by the founders themselves, and the people who grow up on this planet have knowledge of Earth, but over time begin to talk about Earth as more of a legend than something real.

But to do this, I needed an actual land mass that might make sense. So, years ago, this was the first drawing I created that was supposed to represent the main continent:

Reagul2

It was originally a pencil drawing, and it served as the ground work for a novel I wrote called Destiny, which was a revisit to the land of Reagul 3000 years after the inhabitants founded the civilization there, which if you equate it to our time line, means that it takes place about one thousand years in our future.

Over the last decade, I’ve been wanting to write the story of that land that occupied that 3000 years that I hadn’t yet discussed. So I started with a time line, and slowly incorporated a rudimentary outline to explain what happened over time. This was the birth of Sarbonn, the first great wizard of Reagul (and not ironically, the name of this particular web site where my blog is hosted). Over the years, I’ve written numerous short stories about Sarbonn so that he has become my one great story that kept being told over and over with more and more flesh each time he was revisited.

But the story of Reagul still hadn’t been told. And thus, I created The Tales of Reagul, which was a 400 page novel that built the foundation for where the first three hundred years of history might take place. And then a few years ago, I realized that even that story was more of an outline, which has propelled me to begin writing the trilogy that will fill in the gaps that this first story so desperately needed. In the next few months, the first novel of this trilogy will be released, called A Season of Kings.

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As part of this project, I went through and started to flesh out more map-oriented information:

Reagul1

My latest addition to the project is to hire a cartographer who I hope can turn my weak attempt at a map into something solid, something that gives Reagul the respect it so deserves. I will keep you informed on the progress of this, as it has to happen before the first novel is completed.