Since posting this, I've removed my books from Amazon, and am moving them to Project Gutenberg Self-Publishing Press. They're all pdf ebooks, all free, and always will be.
See my entry Ebooks Update for links to all of my free ebooks.
Shade mammoths, iron buffalo, and dodos; honeyberries, lightning pines, and mistle…
It's 1840 in the United States, but a different country from the one we know. Magic has been known for tens of thousands of years, and the only reason the colonies freed themselves from British domination is that Pennsylvania Rifles outrange the tyrannical power of Mastery.
The colonies haven't gotten far into the interior yet; a different man from Thomas Jefferson was born in this different world, no one sent a Lewis or Clark to cross the continent, and any such expedition would have had to fight their way through undervines and dust wolves and more.
Zebulon Japheth Wright finds himself in a pivotal position. Even though he grew up just another hunter-farmer, he knows about yet another danger: society's suspicion of people who might be witches, especially slave liberators, gets those people attacked.
What Wright will do with the power he finds he has, how he will use it in a society of individuals that distrusts individual power, and how his use of it will shape both him and his society, underlies a tale of magic, exploration and adventure.
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I'll explain in a minute how this novel came to be, since it's pertinent. Meanwhile, do I wish I hadn't let this one sit the way I did, because underlying the adventure is the issue of personal power, because of course that's what magic is. #Metoo, BLM…this novel is more timely now than ever before, and I wish I'd put it out a year ago. But better late…
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The original draft of this novel started in October 2011, and got to novella length by June 2012. At which point I realized that, despite an immense amount of world-building, I'd made a fundamental error as far as story was concerned, and so what would have been my second novel got put aside.
Flash-forward to May 2018, when I decided to tackle this again. I fixed my world-building mistake (witches no longer require familiars), and started over. I got a draft I was happy with done in November…at which point Department G seized my imagination, and this got put aside again.
We get to this year, and pretty much all summer covid blues had me not wanting to write…but willing to revise.
All of which is a long-winded explanation for how I can put a novel out only two months after my last one. No, I can't write one that fast (or at least I never have), and, no, I didn't slap together something slipshod. But if I take time off from writing, I've got stuff stockpiled. And if I need to take that time off, well, that's why I have a stockpile.
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The ebook ($.99) and trade paperback ($7.49) are both available; I'll put the ebook on sale for free in a couple of weeks, and will announce it in the blog.