Damon Alan's Blog, page 4
April 12, 2018
Sooooo, I was busy?
Haha… I’m terrible at making excuses. It’s been a long time since I posted a new blog post, but here I am.
And I was busy.
The Dragons of Dunkirk is published, and doing reasonably well. My best release yet.
Secrets of Axum is finished in first draft, I’m doing a once-over edit now, and am probably going to be ordering a proof for my editor either later today or tomorrow. I write pretty clean to start with, so editing goes fast for me. My word-beater then finds the things I missed.
If this all goes as planned, Secrets could be in the Amazon store by the end of the month.
I’m up early today (for me) to get my editing done. I’m halfway through and liking the results.
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March 19, 2018
Pre-Release: The Dragons of Dunkirk
The Dragons of Dunkirk is awaiting approval from Amazon for pre-release. That should take a day. The release is on the 29th, when the book will be available for all.
The year is 1940 on Earth.
It’s the Year of Joining on Aerth.
Two worlds are set to collide thanks to the German Reich and their occult research program. WWII is just starting. The Germans are rolling through France and the British are planning to evacuate from Dunkirk. A few of the French Generals are already in Paris considering the quickest and least dangerous path to surrender.
Then it all changes.
The Germans open up a gate to Aerth over Rotterdam and it doesn’t go as they plan. Aerth’s armies, under guidance of the human wizard Hagirr, march into our world to take it from us.
Soon the war as we know it is over, and the Germans and the Allies are scrambling for solutions to this new problem. A truce is called between the Axis and Allied powers, but nobody told our dead. The dead of WWI rise up to fight on the side of Aerth, and all any living soldier on either side can ask for is to make it to tomorrow.
If you love WWII and Fantasy, you’ll love this mashup. It’s unlike anything else out there right now.
Expect more in the coming months as the Worlds at War Series progresses through the technological development of WWII, the political treachery of the Nazis, and the resolve of a free people to stay free regardless of what enemy seeks to oppress them.
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March 8, 2018
Mountain of Authors
It’s been a good year so far. The Dragons of Dunkirk is written and edited, I just need to update the master file and get it uploaded.
I’ve been accepted to Authors Alley at GenCon and Denver Comic Con.
Yesterday I got an email stating that I was invited to participate in the Mountain of Authors event here locally.
If 2018 keeps going as it has been, I’m going to have a movie deal by next year. 
March 3, 2018
Write Your Heart Out.
Tomorrow at 1pm MST is Pikes Peak Writers free conference preview, called Write Your Heart Out. I hope to see as many friends and authors I can there. I’ll be there early to help with set up if anyone else wants to join me in helping out.
Stuff that isn’t about tomorrow.
February 8, 2018
Gen Con 2018
Hey, everyone. Some news.
I will be on Author’s Avenue at Gen Con this year. I just got my acceptance letter yesterday. How cool is that?
Gen Con, if you’re not familiar, is the premier gaming convention in America, and probably the world. 50,000 plus attendees every year, and the market area where massively cool stuff is for sale is probably as big a couple of city blocks. The Indianapolis Convention Center is one of the best I’ve ever seen.
So if you’re at Gen Con, come look me up in the author’s area and say high. I won’t even pressure you to buy a book. But if you do, I’ll sign it.
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January 23, 2018
The Secrets of Axum
I may have mentioned here before that I like to get the cover done for a book prior to writing most of it.
That is the case for book #2 in my fantasy series I’ve started, titled The Secrets of Axum.
Axum is a town in Ethiopia, and used to be an important city in the Abyssinian empire. But there is one thing there that is very important to the world I’m creating: The Ark of the Covenant. Well, according to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, anyway. They say they have the Ark. And promised to reveal it a few years back, only to change their minds. It’s not important that it’s there, at least not for my story. What’s important is that the mythology of the Ark is such that it could be there.
The location is one of the secrets of Axum.
I’m 5,000 words in for the second book.
Book 1 should be here tomorrow in proof form, then it will be gone over with a magnifying glass for the next few weeks. Then set up for pre-order.
Here is the cover for Book 2. Sorry to keep you waiting. 
January 10, 2018
Dragons. Dunkirk. Cool.
Not sure if I mentioned it here, but I am working on a novel that is a fantasy/WWII mashup called the Dragons of Dunkirk.
A few things.
I am really enjoying looking up WWII history for this book.
I am loving the idea. Not many books mash these two topics together. Can I hit a niche market? We’ll see.
It’s just fun.
I have 34,000 words written, the goal is about 55-60K with a plan to write a series that covers the alternate historical timeline of the Germans, the Allies, and the fantasy world armies fighting it out for control of Europe (and more).
Here is the Createspace cover I made. Unlike my Space Opera, I’m planning on having full book covers for this series. Here is the first.
The Dragons of Dunkirk
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December 23, 2017
The Holidays…
It’s been a busy December, and the kids are out of school. That makes writing anything hard, including the blog.
I’ll get back on 2-4 posts a month in January, I’m sure.
For now here’s a rough idea of what I want the cover for book 8 to look like. Those of you familiar with the Dark Seas series know exactly what’s going on here.
I still have some work to do on the Obedi, but I really like the Hive cruiser and the cloud of nanites the Obedi is drawing from it. Of course someone will have to pay the price of this tasty harvest. The Hive won’t go down quietly.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone, I’ll talk to you in the next year.
November 29, 2017
A Nest or a Tomb?
There are several reasons I’m hugely advocating for colonies off Earth. The asteroid threat. The plague threat. Nuclear war. Coronal Mass Ejection.
And supervolcanoes. Supervolcanoes are classified on the Volcanic Explosivity Index as VEI 8. We had a VEI 7 event almost 2 centuries ago at Tambora. The year that erupted was known as the year without a summer because the sunlight couldn’t reach the ground to warm our planet. Our entire planet. Now imagine a VEI 8 event. You get it. The VEI is a logarithmic scale, which means a VEI 8 is at least 10x as powerful in volume of ejecta. At least 1000 cubic kilometers of material are blown into the atmosphere in a VEI 8 event. The last one was Toba, 74,000 years ago.
Toba is gigantic. And could blow again. The same can be said for Yellowstone. Or Campi Flegrei.
It’s said that when Toba last erupted it pushed homo sapiens sapiens to the brink of extinction. As few as 1,000 to 10,000 human breeding pairs may have survived.
And that could happen again, at a time we do not know or are able to predict.
If Toba happened today, the cost would be our civilization. But the disaster would be worse because of a few things that didn’t exist 70,000 years ago.
Our nuclear power plants would melt down if nobody shut them down properly in the chaos that would follow a supervolcanic eruption. That would contaminate huge areas of the planet for tens of thousands of years just like Chernobyl. Keep in mind that only one of the several reactors at Chernobyl melted down. On top of that, with nobody to maintain them, the cooling ponds that house the nuclear waste at nuclear power plants would go dry, and the material in those ponds would then burn, sending plumes of radioactive material out into the world in voluminous quantities.
This doesn’t even address all the chemical plants that would release their toxic waste into the world without caretakers. Or the infectious disease labs. Or the fire risks in the cities with only a small scavenging population trying to cling to life.
Imagine if we’d had the foresight to spread the risk. A lunar civilization. A Martian civilization. A Titan civilization.
Ganymede. Callisto. Europa. Ceres. Vesta. Pallas. Triton. Pluto and Charon. Sedna.
We’ve been to Titan. We can tame it.
The more we spread, the faster we leave the nest, the greater the chance we, and our children, survive into the future. I can imagine Earth as our nest, and us as fledglings who need to leave to really secure a safe and prosperous future.
Ceres, with exposed water ice and salt. Water is the key to space colonization.
I can imagine a future solar system with billions and billions of souls, but none on Earth. Earth is a tomb world where the Siberian traps happened again and the planet became unusable as a home for civilization.
We need to think long term for the survival of our species and make the investment needed to see that happen. The Moon is nearby, and offers shelter in the form of lava tubes. They are real, and we should use them. It’s geologically dead now. At least if we build there, it’s close and less expensive. And gives us that first step toward a truly immortal species that has slipped the grips of any one extinction event.
The roof of this lava tube on the Moon collapsed. It’s how we know they exist.
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