Category Archives: Polaris

On the prana users.

Book 3 of The Polaris Chronicles is out!

knives-of-the-ring-for-website

Knives of The Ring is now available (ebook and paperback) on Amazon. Click here to order!

Kingslayer and battle-mage Taki Natalis now fights for the empire that conquered his homeland. It’s not a question of loyalty: it’s a choice between kill or be killed.

Battered by defeats on the Ursalan campaign, Taki and his squadmates must race against time to find a legendary, ancient fortress suspended in the heavens. But their nemesis, the Sanctissimus Rex, desires it too and will stop at nothing to harness the unimaginable power waiting within.

Mighty foes, unhinged commanders, and malevolent fortune stand in the way, but the lives of millions hang in the balance.

We had actually intended for The Polaris Chronicles to be a trilogy, but realized that to both take the story full-circle and also end the individual books at good stopping points, we’d need to go for four. Would our series be a tetralogy or quadrilogy? Anyone who knows the answer, let us know!

For the upcoming holiday season, we although thought it important to get our act together and make sure people could buy paperbacks if they wanted, so we started that even earlier and ended up that you could order a paperback before the electronic copy. Make sure to leave us reviews on Amazon and Goodreads if you like Knives!

So, when can you expect to see the concluding volume go on sale? All we can say is sometime in 2017, and then it’s time to start another series, beginning with Watcher.  Never fear, though. We plan on releasing another spinoff/continuation soon, this time about a certain redheaded, foul-mouthed fan of things that go bang.

Prince of Maladies is out on Amazon! (yay for spinoffs!)

Prince of Maladies Cover

Prince of Maladies is now available on Amazon!

The Imperium’s deadliest warriors are also its most despised, for they are descendants of demons. In his wisdom, the Padishah binds these tainted men and women to his service for the greater good.

Aslatiel and Lucatiel are poisoned by the same blood. When sibling rivalry plunges them into the depths of the prison school Sheol, only love will keep them alive til graduation.

Sometimes, a story’s antagonists end up getting just as much interest as the actual protagonists, as many of our readers have told us! Quite a few people wanted to know more about the mysterious and tormented sibling pair who gave Taki and his band of misfits all sorts of hell. So, just for you, we wrote this spinoff. Chronologically, it’s actually a prequel to Guns of the Temple, even though the work is listed as the third entry in the Polaris Chronicles.

Right now, Prince of Maladies will be offered solely in e-book format, but if there’s enough interest, we may be able to produce print copies in the future. But for that to  happen, we need to know, and you can let us know through your reviews on Amazon and Goodreads!

The sequel’s here!

Swords of the Imperium for website

Tirefire the Lesser can’t seem to catch a break. Their country’s been taken over, Taki’s an honest-to-God kingslayer, no one’s changed their unit name, and the unit mascot’s still nowhere to be seen. So what else can possibly go wrong? Swords of the Imperium has the answers:

The Imperium continues its march over the remains of the Argead Dominion toward its next prize: Ursala, ruled by the Sanctissimus Rex and his thousand bloodthirsty daughters.

Taki and his squad, Tirefire the Lesser, must now fight alongside their former foes. But joining the Padishah’s army is riskier than facing the chopping block for a regicide like Taki.

On the warpath in a land of revenant knights and cannibal damsels, the squad faces its greatest challenges yet, and not everyone will make it out alive.

We’re happy to announce that Swords comes out on September 9th, 2016 on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited! And also because we got our act together more for this release, paperback copies will be available much, much sooner this time!

You don’t have to wait, though, if you’re on this page. Until September 8th, Erica and I are giving our free Advance Review Copies to those who sign up for our mailing list. All we ask in return is an honest review on Amazon/Goodreads when the book comes out!

Click here for your free advance copy of Swords of the Imperium.

And for those of you who can’t wait for yet another book of the Polaris Chronicles, wait ’til October. Lucatiel isn’t called the Prince of Maladies for nothing…

Guns of the Temple promotional use resized

The book is out! (And now you can review it!)

Guns of the Temple is available on Amazon! Right now, you can buy the book for Kindle, and we anticipate that print versions will be available within a week or two. That’s right, PRINT versions (for those of you who love the feeling of something physical…I know I do!).

buy4Click above to buy and leave reviews!

Also, for our wonderful advance reviewers, this is the time to start leaving your reviews! If you downloaded an advance copy through our recent giveaway, please make sure to mention that you received a free copy of the book.

Thanks so much for helping us with this launch! We truly appreciate it, and look forward to writing more for your entertainment!

Guns of the Temple Release

GUNS OF THE TEMPLE LOGO

 

Is finally about to release!

After nearly 3 years in the making, Guns of the Temple will finally be on sale August 5th, 2016, and will be available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited!

 

The Argead Dominion is the last holdout against the Imperial Padishah’s brutal westward expansion. An aging arsenal of decaying tanks and antique rifles lets Argead forces scrape by, but true victories are won by the Polaris: elite battle-mages enslaved for the world-ending sins of their ancestors.

Taki is an ambitious Polaris stuck with the dregs of his kind in a squad named Tirefire the Lesser. Though career suicide might be bearable in the right company, his new companions are anything but. The sniper despises him, the man-at-arms is profoundly depressed, and his beautiful captain has a penchant for beating her underlings.

As the invading horde draws closer, this squad of defectives must band together despite the long odds against them. But with Imperial assassins out for their blood and treachery from within their own ranks, survival will come with a high price. 

 

Now, if you want to read and review our book before everyone else, we invite you to become one of our advance reviewers!

Advance reviewers can download and enjoy a free copy of the book right now! What we ask is that on release day, August 5th, 2016, please leave your honest review on Amazon.com on this book’s page.

Don’t worry about the length of your review. Some people write walls of text, and some write a few words; it’s all good. Basically, if you enjoyed the product, want to see more, and would ever recommend it to a friend, a review is the best way to tell everyone else. If you find any typographical or grammatical errors, or if you don’t enjoy the book, please email us. Your feedback helps us improve!

To get the link for the book download, please sign up for our mailing list using the form below!

 

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Bublishing shenanigans

One of the things that we are creating is a series of novels based on a science fiction universe we’ve dreamed up and added to over the last few years.  For a long time, we were both part of a forum RPG site based loosely off a shounen manga series whose main conceit was “special people with special powers living in post-apocalyptia.”  The latter part may not actually be true, but that was certainly our take on it.  Blimps and radios coexisting with mud huts and feudal systems of government tend to leave that impression.

Something that we discovered we both liked was the opportunity to develop the history and plotline of the nation our characters inhabited.  Strangely, no one had really sought to do that, and when we wrote down our theories about who was in charge and why (often while soured on whiskey and given to claims), people started believing us.  Though it was fun to do, we wanted to create something more, and something we could truly call our own.

There are two novels in process so far, both co-written though started separately.  Erica actually started writing hers first during NaNoWriMo in 2013 and Bryan churned his out during the last months of his post-residency fellowship.  Set in the same universe, they’re companion books, with Bryan’s taking place almost 50 years later than Erica’s.  So what are these books about?

Eight hundred years after a spectacular collision of superhuman megalomania and nuclear weapons, the Middle Ages are back with a twist.  Feudal armies clash with not only pike and sword, but also rusting Abrams tanks and fearsome bioelectric magic.  Cast by young battle-mages enslaved by the debts of their ancestors, prana is the rarest and deadliest weapon on the battlefield.

That’s actually an excerpt from an early query, and although it probably didn’t work well for a literary agent query letter (due to being kind of an infodump) it’s a nice summary of what this universe is about.  Now, imagine this rifle-and-sorcery setting with a dysfunctional group of mages resentfully led by a woman whose goal in life is to have fun no matter who dies, fighting against the elite forces of a world-conquering empire of leftists who may actually be the “good guys,” and you have the setup for Guns of the Temple.

Bryan is in the process of querying agents.  And as we’ll cover in another post, the process of querying literary agents opened our eyes to a part of modern culture and business we never knew existed.  But that’s for later.