John R. Phythyon Jr.'s Blog, page 14

Culture of Hatred Leads to Violence

“Can’t we all just get along?” Rodney King famously said after riots in L.A. following the acquittal of the officers charged with beating him.

Unfortunately, the answer seems to be an emphatic, “No!”

Police in riot gear clashed with protestors in Ferguson, Missouri last night. Tensions ran high as cops with assault rifles trained them on what had been a peaceful protest. Then rocks were thrown. So were Molotov Cocktails. So the police responded with tear gas and smoke bombs.

Heavily armed cops arrested two reporters — one from the Washington Post, one from the Huffington Post. Scenes that resembled the unrest in Ukraine or the recent ground war in Gaza, played out in a St. Louis suburb.

We’re all stunned. We’re horrified.

We shouldn’t be.

I don’t offer political commentary often, but I feel compelled to speak up here. The way we’ve been behaving towards each other in the last 15 years or so has brought us to this sad point.

The dominant theme in American civil discourse these days is hatred. We all hate someone. Some of us hate blacks. Some of us hate Hispanics. Some of us hate whites. Some hate the poor. Some hate the rich. Some hate liberals. Some hate conservatives. Some of us hate Muslims or Jews or Christians or atheists.

But we all hate.We’ve created a culture of hatred.

We define ourselves not as Americans but as whatever sub-group to which we belong. And we define everyone else as The Other. We see other people with differing ideologies as The Enemy. We ourselves are the only True Americans. The Others are wrecking what our forefathers fought so hard to establish. So we hate them.

You see the expression of this culture in Congress. Tea Party Republicans and their Moderate counterparts hurl stones at each other for control of the GOP’s destiny. Both throw rhetorical bombs at Democrats, who return the fire with relish. When the president tries to get around Congress’s self-imposed gridlock, Republicans sue and Democrats hurl epithets in response. both parties want to mobilize they base, so they engender hatred of The Other.

You see the expression of this culture in the media. Fox News and MSNBC trot out a parade of conservative and liberal pundits respectively, whose job is not to offer insight and expertise on issues but rather to paint the other party as evil. They engender hatred of The Other.

You see the expression of this culture on the internet as conservative and liberal blogs report news with the most strident slant possible. You see it as people on Facebook forward memes they haven’t fact-checked that make outrageous claims against The Other. The comments sections are filled with vitriol.

You see hatred on street corners, hear it in church pulpits, and read it in letters to the editor of your local newspaper.

Everyone hates someone. Everyone knows that The Other is responsible for what ails us. And we will believe in The Other’s culpability for these sins despite any facts to the contrary.

We can’t have a civil discussion about racism or politics or faith or education. We can’t all get along.

This has to stop. We can’t keep treating each other like this. We have to change this culture. When we hate, disagreements escalate to violence. People get shot. Frustrated communities riot. Police are forced to go from protectors to oppressors.

This collective insanity that is gripping us drives us to hate each other. It drives us to hate ourselves.

This isn’t the America I was raised to believe in. It isn’t an America I want to live in. I want the ideal I was raised on — America is the Land of Opportunity, a nation of great prosperity and happiness.

But there is no opportunity when we are consumed with debilitating hatred. When we are convinced everyone is The Enemy, we cease to have friends.

This is where we’re going in America today. We shouldn’t be surprised by what happened in Ferguson last night. We’ve been racing towards this level of insanity for years.

It’s time to stop. It’s time to reach and out and try to understand each other. It’s time to agree to disagree when we can’t bridge the gap.

And it’s time to stop hating, to stop loathing, to stop trying to hurt those who are different from us.

We can be better than this. We have to be.

 

Filed under: Current Events Tagged: Ferguson, hate, politics, Racism, riots

New Draft of Memoir Takes on a Life of Its Own

Last week, I finished the latest draft of the first installment of my memoir. The rewrite went well, but something interesting happened along the way.

The previous draft was just under 4000 words. I had planned to add to it, increasing the word count by about 2000-4000. First, I thought the story needed a little expanding — there were lots of opportunities for more detail. Second, I want readers to feel it is a good value. Since I’ll be selling the whole thing as a series of short works, I want people to feel each installment is a bargain.

As I always do for fiction, I sat down with my notebook and a pencil and mapped out the structure of the piece, making plans on how to build the manuscript to an amusing climax. I had the prior draft in front of me, marked up with edits on what needed cutting, what needed expansion, and ideas for how to get more detail in. Then I sat at my computer the next day and began the rewrite.

That’s when something interesting happened.

I was supposed to start working from the original manuscript, making changes and adding things in. But right from the get-go, I started writing a completely new draft.

Part of that was by design. I had resolved to write a new beginning; I didn’t like the way the original began.

But I just kept writing and writing and writing. Instead of importing old material and working it over, I kept it in front of me as a guide but otherwise wrote a completely new document.

By the time I was done, the new draft was nearly 12,000 words, and only about 1000 of them were from the prior version. In a very real way, it’s a completely different book.

Of course, it’s still the same story. It still recounts how I snuck out of my parents’ house one night when I was eight years old, dressed as a superhero determined to fight crime. It still chronicles my inspiration from Clifford B. Hicks’s Alvin Fernald, Superweasel.

But it has more depth now. It discusses the world of the 1970’s as perceived by a child obsessed with superheroes. It’s more than an amusing story from my youth. It’s a time capsule.

I think that’s what memoirs are supposed to be. They tell the stories of individual people while placing them in some sort of cultural or historical context.

I’m really pleased with how this one is turning out. I’ll be rewriting again this week.

Can’t way to see how many of my original words I keep.

Filed under: Memoir, Writing Tagged: John Phyhyon, memoirs, writing

Writing a Memoir a Strange and Fascinating Experience

In case you missed my announcement last week, I’m writing a memoir. It’s kind of a strange idea, given that I’m no one famous. I have not held national or statewide office, I have not been a movie, TV, or rock star.

I also am not one of those people who lived through something extraordinary. I am not a survivor of abuse of any kind. I wasn’t present at any amazing historic event, nor did I survive a catastrophe of some sort.

I’m really just a middle-aged white guy living in the Midwest. What about my life makes it memoir-worthy?

Well, I had a pretty good childhood. As a brainy kid with an overactive imagination, I managed to get into all sorts of adventures, real and imagined. And since I am not above self-deprecating humor, I believe my childhood contains good fodder for people looking for a laugh in their daily reading.

But it’s been an odd experience. I am largely a fiction writer by trade. All of my books to date have been novels and short stories. I make up stories about other people.

Memoirs are similar to novels in that they tell stories in a narrative format. But the stories are supposed to be true. They’re not quite nonfiction, and they’re not quite novels.

My approach to chronicling my early life has been less biography and more humorous essay. I fell in love with the personal essay in college, and I’ve adapted the form to tell my own story in a memoir.

Because of this format (and for commercial reasons), I’ve elected to publish the memoir not as a single book, but as a series of interconnected shorter works. Each installment will be on a different aspect of my childhood, and you won’t have to read previous installments to enjoy any of the subsequent ones. When I’m finished I’ll collect them all into a single volume. The entire series will fall under the title, True-Life Adventures. Each will be outrageous but completely true.

The first, which I plan to publish in November, is called Secret Identity: My True-Life Adventure as a Superhero. It concerns an incident when I was eight, when I snuck out of the house after bedtime dressed up in a Superman costume with the intent of battling evil. Yeah, I was that obsessed with superheroes, and I was that crazy.

The interesting thing about writing this piece has been the details that don’t have anything to do with me. To be sure, it’s my story. But to tell it in the format I’ve chosen, I’ve focused on things that aren’t necessarily about me. I’ve digressed multiple times on the pop cultural impact of superheroes — the shows that were on TV (or on repeats) in the 1970’s, the comic books and their approach to heroic archetypes, the general preposterousness of a secret identity. I’ve also discussed the culture of the 70’s as a whole.

These aspects of the memoir take up many, many more words than actually telling my story. It might sound extraneous, but I think I’m writing about more than the events of my childhood. I’m telling the story of how an eight-year-old perceived the world. We are all products of our environments, and the world I grew up in made it possible for me to think my outrageous ideas were reasonable. It is the story of the suburbs of the American Midwest as much as it is a true-life tale of boy with an overactive imagination.

It’s too early in the process to really evaluate whether I’m putting too much of this detail into the book or not. I’ll have to read the whole thing when it’s finished before I can decide whether I need to make cuts.

But I’ve found it fascinating and strange, not just remembering this single event from my childhood, but in reminiscing about the time period and how a kid saw it. Secret Identity: My True-Life Adventure as a Superhero is about more than the memories of a kid growing up in 1970’s Wisconsin. It’s about the impact the heroic concept has on us and how it causes us to dream and sometimes to act.

Filed under: Memoir, Writing Tagged: 1970s, memoirs, superheroes, writing

Back-to-School Sale on Modern Fairy Tales

It’s back-to-school time, so I’m having a sale on my books set on my modern fairy tales — retelling classic stories but setting them in contemporary high schools. Just the thing to get your brain oriented back towards Homecoming, trigonometry, and that popular kid you really hated.

Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale is selling for just 99 cents for your Kindle this week. Starting today and running through next Thursday, you can get the story of Rory Bellin — a senior and editor-in-chief of the school newspaper at Lawrence High School. She wishes people would focus on what’s important for once, but LHS is fielding its best football team in a generation and has a real chance to regain its past glory. When the new English teacher gives Rory a ring of three wishes, though, she decides she’s going to rearrange everyone’s priorities. There’s just one little catch — to get what she really wants might cost her her soul!

Set in my former hometown of Lawrence, Kansas at my daughter’s high school!

Click here to download Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale for just 99 cents.

The sale on “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” is even better. It’s regularly 99 cents, so the only way to mark it down was to offer it free! Yep, you can get the short story that start my bent towards retelling the classics for nothing starting today and running through Tuesday next. In this one, Beth Shipman has been a coma for two years. Her father put her in it to protect her purity. Her mother is determined to get her back. The only way to wake her is through True Love’s First Kiss, and Beth’s mother think she has the perfect boy in mind. But her husband has other ideas, and he’ll stop at nothing to keep his daughter pristine and perfect.

Click here to download “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” for free for your Kindle!

Two books for a buck? Can you find a better back-to-sale? Sure they’re not trendy fashions, but let’s face it: Everyone looks good reading a book.

Filed under: Beauty & the Beast, Sleeping Beauty Tagged: Beauty and the Beast, free, John Phythyon, Kindle, Sleeping Beauty

High Endurance Required to be an Indie Author

Being a writer — particularly an independent author — requires a lot of important skills. You need to be able to drink a lot of coffee, overcome a crushing sense of self-doubt on a regular basis, overcome a debilitating sense of your own greatness on a regular basis, be comfortable with your spouse making more money than you, and maybe you want to be clever at stringing words together in engaging stories.

But there’s something else. You also need endurance. One day, perhaps, I’ll have Stephen King-like success, where I can churn out a book a year and make millions in the first few months without a whole lot of promotional effort.

Until then, my life as an author is roughly akin to running three marathons  that begin and end at different times but that all overlap. I’m not always in maximum motion, but I’m never at rest.

Consider:

The second draft of GHOST OF A CHANCE is now in editing.

Yesterday, I finished the second draft of Ghost of a Chance, the fourth Wolf Dasher novel. The sense of relief was tremendous. I finished the first draft two weeks ago (after months of writing) and then read and rewrote the book in the space of a fortnight. I have been so buried in that manuscript, it’s been difficult to think about anything else.

Ghost of a Chance is now with my editor. She’ll read it and mark it up and send it back to me for a third draft. If she is on schedule, I’ll have the book back in another two weeks.

In the meantime, I can’t just sit idly (much as I’d really like to). I’m submitting an older short story for a collection to be published in October on a horror theme. The good news is the story is written and edited. There shouldn’t be too much work involved. The bad news is I last worked on it three-and-a-half years ago. I’ve grown as a writer since then, so I’m betting I’ll want to clean up some of the prose. I’m also guessing that it is dated, since it is set in the present and the world and technology have changed. My bet is it’ll need some tech-tweaking.

I’m printing a draft of that story today and will be reading, editing, and rewriting it this week, so that it will be in the best possible shape for acceptance.

I’m also making a change to my business plan for 2014. I had originally planned to publish the third installment in my Modern Fairy Tales series, The Secret Thief, in the fourth quarter of this year. But as it often does, the market has changed.

As you may have read, Amazon.com unveiled its Kindle Unlimited program, allowing subscribers to pay a monthly fee to download and read as many books as they like. Essentially, Amazon is copying other subscription services like Scribd and Oyster to try to create a Netflix for eBooks. We indies have discussed this new service extensively (as we are wont to do), and I agree with many of my colleagues that this is going to be a boon for shorter works.

The nice thing about being an indie author is you can adapt quickly to changes in the market. I had planned to write a memoir next year that I would publish in installments. Because the memoir is written as a series of interconnected humorous essays, it seemed to me it was worth experimenting with publishing it in pieces and then collecting the whole thing.

With the launch of Kindle Unlimited, I’m now convinced it is indeed a viable publishing model, and I want to catch the early wave of the new program if at all possible. I’ve therefore shifted my publication schedule to accommodate this.

In late September/early October, I’ll release Ghost of a Chance. In November, I’ll publish the first installment of the memoir, and in December, I’ll release the second. January will see the publication of The Secret Thief, while February features Part 3 of the memoir.

That’s an aggressive schedule, but the works are either all short or, in the case of The Secret Thief, already have a first draft written. Fourth- and first quarter are good months for publishing, so heavily loading them with new books works in my favor (in theory).

But that means I’m running those three marathons. I’ll be stacking projects so that I always have something I am writing or rewriting, and my editor is going to have a manuscript in front of her on a regular basis for most of the rest of the year. Hopefully, she won’t kill me.

Endurance is a key trait for the independent author. Without it, I won’t have a chance of pulling this off and capitalizing on the market opportunity in front of me.

Of course, it’s possible another important trait of an indie author is insanity. The coming weeks and months will demonstrate whether that’s true.

Filed under: e-Publishing, Ghost of a Chance, Writing Tagged: Ghost of a Chance, indie publishing, John Phythyon, Kindle Unlimited, writing

Homecoming

This has easily been one of the strangest summers of my life. Moving to Ohio has been hard enough. But we couldn’t do things the ordinary way. We spent our first week in the Buckeye State staying with one of Jill’s coworkers before we could get into the house. Hitches in the paperwork caused our stuff to be delivered four days after we moved in. My stepchildren spent three weeks with their dad before the move and are back there now after only a couple weeks with us. And my daughter is spending summer with her mom.

Needless to say, things have been a little abnormal.

But today, my daughter is on her way here for a visit. Aside from pictures, she hasn’t seen the house or her school or new hometown. Some time this afternoon, she’ll be setting foot on Ohio soil for the first time since a 2005 trip to Cincinnati.

And I’m really excited.

I have missed her terribly. That’s probably not very surprising. Fathers miss their little girls whenever they are apart. Having her be in another state for so long increases my desire to see her, even though I’m pleased we saved her some of the stress of the move process.

And of course, she regards this whole relocation with considerable suspicion. She is a teenager, and therefore doesn’t see a lot of profit in having to make new friends and learn to fit into a new social setting and not being able to see her mom as much. She is likely to hold me at arm’s length while she is visiting this week, while poo-poohing everything cool I try to show her.

But I’m still excited.

She’s my daughter. I’m very proud of her. She makes me happy. Even while she’s infuriating me. I haven’t seen her since Father’s Day, and I miss her.

So I’m pretty excited today.

My baby girl is coming home, even if it’s only for a brief visit. I’ll be spending time getting the place spiffed up for her.

She deserves a proper homecoming.

 

Filed under: Uncategorized

Old Notebook Fond Reminder of Early Writing Dreams

Most of the time, unpacking after a move is a tedious process. There is a seemingly never-ending supply of boxes you have to go through and decide what happens to the stuff inside. Over the past few weeks, I have found myself wondering why some of the things I’ve pulled out of boxes came with us.

But there is an occasional piece of treasure — a moment where you find something that makes you stop working and delight in the (re)discovery.

I had such a moment last week, when I was unpacking my new office. There were a number of boxes labeled, “Old Writing” or “Archives.” Much of that stuff had not been gone through since I packed it up to leave my apartment in December of 2011.

In one of these, I came across an old, red, Mead notebook from 1983. Written in blue, Bic pen on the cover was, “Calibot’s Revenge  –John Phythyon”. Inside, handwritten in the same blue ink, was the manuscript for my first novel.

I don’t mean the first novel I ever published. I mean the first one I’d ever written — stem to stern — meticulously hand-scribed when I was 15 years old.

I didn’t bother to open it. I know how bad the material inside is. I saw no reason to torture myself with the evidence of my untrained pen.

But this dreck did eventually become something grand. The handwritten manuscript preserved in that notebook was the genesis for last year’s The Sword and the Sorcerer. It may have taken 30 years to transform that first draft into something worthy of publication, but I feel as though SatS is my best novel to date, and given that it is essentially a love letter to my wife, its humble origins are all the more remarkable.

I can still recall the focus and the desire I felt as I labored away, literally penning the tale of a wizard’s son getting a magical, flaming sword so he could avenge his father’s murder at the hands of an alleged friend. I remember looking towards the future, when Calibot’s Revenge would be the first novel I published — launching my career as an author before I even graduated from high school.

I remember finding the notebook in 1991, when I moved to Kansas for graduate school and being deeply embarrassed at how bad it was. And I recall thinking that, despite how terrible the writing and themes were, that the seed of a really good adventure story were buried in there. I just needed to water them.

It took awhile. It took 22 more years and about eight drafts. but I managed it. I turned this laughable revenge story inspired by a D&D campaign into a fine piece of literature.

And so, despite the facts that I have no need for this artifact of my infancy as an author and that I would be mortified if anyone ever read it (assuming the chicken scratchings of a left-handed teenager with poor penmanship could be deciphered), I did not consign it to the garbage. I kept it in a drawer with other pieces of bad writing from my early years learning the craft. Some of them I hope to mine in similar fashion to Calibot’s Revenge. I believe the germ of a good book is in there, waiting to be teased out.

I won’t let anyone read these embarrassing pieces of developmental writing. But I keep them anyway as a fond reminder both of my innocence as an artist and of the important concept that a good idea isn’t enough.  Writing, after all, is a craft.

***

You can’t read the original manuscript of Calibot’s Revenge, but the book it became, The Sword and the Sorcerer, is available through all major e-retailers. One dollar of the eBook sales and two dollars of the print sales benefit Freedom to Marry, the national campaign to win marriage equality nationwide.

Click here to purchase The Sword and the Sorcerer from Amazon.com.

Click here to purchase The Sword and the Sorcerer from Smashwords.com.

Click here to purchase a print version of The Sword and the Sorcerer.

Filed under: The Sword and the Sorcerer, Writing Tagged: John Phythyon, The Sword and the Sorcerer, writing

Reading my First Drafts Always Inspires Fear

I’ve been facing fear the last few days. As of this writing, I’ve read 28 chapters of my latest book, Ghost of a Chance.

No, it’s not out yet. I’m reading the first draft. I finished writing it last Friday, and now I’m reading it and making notes so I can start the second draft.

What’s so scary about that? Well, I’m an author, which means not only am I filled with enough arrogance to believe someone would want to read what I write, I’m also consumed with self-doubt about the quality of my stories. It’s a weird life being a creative. The roller coaster ride of pride and loathing is dizzying.

The first draft is one of the worst parts of the process for me. It takes me two months or more to pen a novel. Ghost of a Chance came in at almost 127,000 words — the longest book I’ve ever written, meaning it took even longer to write. It’s 51 chapters long (at the moment), and I didn’t write more than one a day. And there were numerous days in there I didn’t work. (I take weekends off whenever possible, and I moved cross-country in the middle of this process as well as published a different book.)

In other words, it’s been a long time since I started this novel, so I don’t exactly remember what happens. Reading the first draft of one of my books is always an educational experience for me. I have to remember what I did, and I have to see if it all fits together properly.

As you can see, there is some suckiness I need to edit out before publishing.

That’s where the fear and self-doubt really come in. I often discover continuity errors, and I always worry that the book doesn’t really do what I wanted it to. I mean, what if it sucks?

They usually don’t, fortunately, and the reason I write multiple drafts is so I can edit the suckiness out before publishing. I like to believe I succeed at that.

But it’s always daunting reading that first draft. It’s always a fearsome prospect delving into my work looking for mistakes — expecting it to suck.

The good news is I haven’t encountered a sucky book so far in my reading of Ghost of a Chance. I was a little worried because the plot is complicated, there are multiple story lines, and there is giant mystery that requires a lot of research and investigation — not always the most pulse-pounding prose.

But 28 chapters in, I’ve gotten caught up in it. I’m finding it exciting, interesting, and well paced. Given that I know how it ends, I interpret that as a good thing. If I can entertain myself despite my knowing the story, it stands to reason I can hook readers.

Of course, there are still sucky parts that have to be edited out. There are continuity errors. And with 23 chapters left, it’s entirely possible the whole thing could fall apart into a giant heap of dreck.

So I’m not satisfied. I’m wary. The self-loathing part of my author’s brain is hyper-alert for any sign I’ve totally wasted the last several months penning this thing.

But I’m excited too. I like where it’s going. I can’t wait to finish reading it.

Then I’ll start rewriting it. After all, I still have to edit out the suckiness.

Filed under: Ghost of a Chance, Writing Tagged: Ghost of a Chance, John Phythyon, writing

Conquering Fear: New Computer Means Learning a New OS

Saying goodbye is always hard. One hates giving up the familiar and the comfortable.

Starting something new is just as difficult. As humans, even the bravest of us fears the unknown. And learning can be hard. What if the new thing isn’t as easy or intuitive as the old?

So it was with great sadness and trepidation that I bought a new computer this past weekend. I really wasn’t in the market for one. I had other needs, desires and plans.

But unfortunately, the old one was dying a slow, ignominious death. Like a strong man hobbled by terminal cancer, my old laptop had gone from the best computer I’d ever owned to a major liability to my career.

Periodically, the USB ports and the speakers would stop working. The only way to solve this problem was to do a hard restart while Windows was trying to load, so it would launch and run Startup Repair.

The frequency of this issue was increasing, and sometimes I would have to run Startup Repair more than once to resolve it. I’d been putting off buying a new machine, because it really isn’t a convenient time for the expense, and I’ve heard Windows 8 is a lot harder — less intuitive — to navigate than its predecessors. Motivated by fear, I resisted change.

But last week, as I was preparing to write the final chapter of Ghost of Chance, the machine crashed, and I wasn’t able to repair it. Moreover, it was running really hot, making me think the problem was caused by a malfunctioning fan. Five years old and two years out of warranty, my computer was telling me it was time to move on.

I couldn’t get all the features on the new machine I wanted. I wanted a detachable screen, so I could use it as a tablet, but you can’t get those on machines that also have full-size keyboards. I also needed to make sure I had enough ports to plug in my external mouse and keyboard. I am a writer after all, and I need to sit in a comfortable workstation, so I can type.

The new computer.

But I did get one with a lot of neat features including being able to bend the monitor completely backwards, so I can use it as a (large and a little heavy) tablet. I’d heard Windows 8 doesn’t work well without a touchscreen, so I  made sure to get one of those.

And I’ve found Win8 to be a lot more intuitive than I was led to believe. I spent the afternoon loading data and programs, and it didn’t take me long to learn how to toggle between the new screen with its apps and the traditional desktop environment. Maybe it’s because I’ve been using a smartphone for two years now and am therefore acclimated to the way that technology works, but Windows 8 was not the fearsome monster I was told it was. I’m actually kind of liking it.

So it seems the Summer of 2014 is one of transition for me. Not only have I relocated from Kansas to Ohio, I’m moving on to a new computer and operating system. I’m facing the Brave New World mostly unafraid.

I salute my old machine. It was a really good computer — the best I’d owned prior to this one — and I got five years of use out of it, which is an eternity for a tech device.

I just wish it had been six.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: computer, Windows 8

STATE OF GRACE and ROSES ARE WHITE on sale for 99 cents!

Starting today, two of my Wolf Dasher novels are on sale for just 99 cents! Yep. You can get the original Wolf Dasher thriller, State of Grace, and Wolf”s latest adventure, Roses Are White, for just a dollar each. Two books for two bucks. Is there a better deal than that?

Click on the links below to pick up your copies!

State of Grace

Murder in a broken land . . .

When his friend and colleague is murdered in Alfar, magical land of elves, Wolf Dasher faces the toughest mission of his career. He must find out who did it and bring the killer to justice. The clues all point to Alfar’s ambassador – but he was out of the country when the crime occurred.

Undercover and out of his depth, Wolf soon finds himself caught in a deadly web of assassination, betrayal, and zealotry. Religious extremists, a mad general, and a megalomaniac with a messiah complex all wrestle for control of the elf nation’s destiny.

Pursued by a sadistic killer and blocked by politicians only interested in their own agendas, Wolf races against time to uncover a conspiracy that threatens to kill thousands of elves in a devastating act of terrorism, plunge Alfar into war, and alter the balance of power forever.

State of Grace is the first in a series of fantasy-thriller mash-up novels, blending magic, super-spies, and politics in an exciting brew of action and adventure. From the chilling opening scene to the pulse-pounding climax, State of Grace takes the best elements of an espionage thriller and a swords-and-sorcery epic and weaves them into a world both familiar and fantastic.

Click here to buy State of Grace for just 99 cents for your Kindle!

Roses Are White

Death is a white rose. . . .

Dexter Rose, the world’s greatest assassin, has come to Alfar.

His mission: Topple the coalition government.

His plan: Three perfect murders, culminating with President Spellbinder herself.

His method: Magic – to disguise himself as anyone and to petrify the victim before the kill.

Only one man has all the right skills to go head to head with the infamous killer and defeat him before he can complete his gruesome assignment. In a land of elves and magic, it will take a human Shadow to stop Dexter Rose before it’s too late.

But Wolf Dasher is recalled to Urland, and his true love, May Honeyflower, isn’t convinced his replacement can prevent Rose from accomplishing his grisly goals. She’ll have to find a way to keep Wolf in Alfar for one more mission . . . and by her side forever.

As the killer closes in on his final quarry, is even Wolf Dasher good enough to stop an assassin who’s never failed? And if he can’t, what will be the cost?

Roses Are White is the third book in the exciting Wolf Dasher series. Following the action of State of Grace and Red Dragon Five, this fantasy-thriller mash-up blends super-spy action with magic and elves in an electric brew that will keep you turning pages. Love and bigotry, loss and redemption, sacrifice and savagery all collide in a pulse-pounding tale you won’t want to put down. Read it as a standalone novel or as the third installment in a series both fresh and familiar.

Click here to buy Roses Are White for just 99 cents for your Kindle!

Filed under: Roses Are White, State of Grace Tagged: John Phythyon, Kindle, Roses Are White, State of Grace, Wolf Dasher