The Blogger Book Fair: Featuring Alan Zendell

Welcome to yet another day of the Blogger Book Fair! Before we dive into meeting our latest author, make sure you enter the giveaway for an eBook copy of Lichgates (Grimoire Trilogy #1) and vote for Lichgates and your other favorite books over at the Blogger Book Fair Awards!

 
About Alan Zendell

Alan Zendell spent more than forty years as a scientist, aerospace engineer, software consultant, database developer, and government analyst. He spent two years working on the first manned lunar mission, then moved on to a variety of near-Earth satellite projects, and Pentagon support for anti-ballistic missile systems. As the aerospace industry became more oriented toward the military, he applied his skill set to health care and social service systems, and ultimately branched out into software and database consulting.

No matter what he did to earn a living, he never lost his fascination with science fiction and speculating about the future. He always wrote a lot, but it was generally really boring stuff like proposals and technical papers, reports, business letters, and policy memoranda. But trapped inside him all that time were stories he wanted to tell and ideas he wanted to share, so with encouragement and cajoling from a loving baby sister he plunged into fiction.

He has written several short pieces in a variety of genres and completed five novel manuscripts, three of which have three of which have found their way into print and e-books. “Wednesday’s Child” is hard science fiction with a different twist on time travel; “The Portal” is a science-fiction love story set in a dystopian twenty-second century America; and “Critical Focus” is a contemporary political novel that addresses the major issues facing present-day America. But regardless of the story lines and subject matter, his writing is about more than aliens and technical marvels. He creates strong, three-dimensional characters a reader can care about, because it’s people and the way they live and feel that are important. It’s the things they believe in and how much they’re willing to invest to preserve them that make a story worth telling. It’s convincing interactions and well-researched credible plots that make a story worth reading.

Alan has three novels currently listed on Goodreads, including sample chapters.

 
About Wednesday’s Child

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Dylan Brice is living his days out of order, but it hasn’t always been that way. One Tuesday evening in July, he went to sleep expecting tomorrow to be Wednesday, but when he woke up the next morning it was Thursday instead. A frightening and confusing day ensued with Dylan trying to figure out whether he was losing his mind or the victim of some cosmic prank.

If struggling to come to terms with his new reality on his surreal Thursday wasn’t enough of an ordeal, late in the afternoon, just as his anxiety was finally beginning to subside, a voice from the past he’d hoped never to hear again added a terrifying new dimension to his situation. Dylan had once been a warrior in the battle against nuclear terrorism. A sleeper since the months following nine-eleven, he has suddenly been activated to help combat a new, deadly threat. His nerves in a shambles, he finally drops off to sleep hoping he’ll wake up to find Thursday was a dream.

When, after his harrowing Thursday, he awakens on the Wednesday morning he thought he’d missed, he doesn’t know what to believe. He cannot believe Thursday’s events were coincidental. He must be living his days out of order for a reason — some powerful, unknown entity has cast him in a role he never asked for, and everything he holds dear may be at stake. He “knows” he will continue to live Thursdays before Wednesdays until he figures out how to use the unique perspective that gives him to avert a disaster that may be global in scope.

Wednesday’s Child addresses the expected, complex issues of causality paradoxes and free will, but it doesn’t forget about characters and relationships. It portrays marriage as a loving and mutually respectful partnership that strengthens both partners in the face of stress and adversity, and it forces the characters to undergo a measure of soul-searching concerning forces and events that lie beyond our understanding of the universe.

Grab Your Copy

Amazon (US) | Goodreads

 

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Critical Focus

Jamie Williams has fought against corruption, war, and oppression all his life.  A former campus radical, he publishes the newsletter, Uncommon Sense.  Middle age has banked some of his fire, but not his values.  And it has taught him that if he wants his voice to be heard, it has to be reasoned and balanced.

Perceived by both the media and many within his administration as weak and indecisive, President Marshall Thornberry has yet to find his public voice.  He knows he’s in the Oval Office only because the powerful right wing of his party selected him as a face that people would find acceptable, and it is they who’ve wielded the power during his first two years in office.

A fragile economy exacerbated by corporate greed, unchecked militarism, terrorism, and out-of-control energy prices, has left millions of Americans feeling powerless and disenfranchised.  A new Internal Security Agency is eroding civil liberties, and there are rumors of a secret military initiative in Africa.  And behind the scenes, a sinister cabal of conspirators within the administration led by a paranoid Attorney General has devised a scheme to misrepresent public sentiment and manipulate the President even further.

With an uncanny nose for trouble, Jamie perceives that big changes are afoot and Uncommon Sense is needed more than ever.  His newsletter has a loyal following, but it’s growing too slowly to make a difference.  Americans needed to hear his voice…if only there were a way to reach them.

Grab Your Copy

Amazon (US) | Goodreads

 

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The Portal

Harry Middleton is born in an America staggered by a century of decline, a time of medical and technological marvels beyond the reach of most people in a shattered economy. Pessimism and despair have replaced optimism and hope.  A desperate government has bet the future on space, but the lunar and Martian colonies haven’t provided the hoped-for salvation.  Despite an angry, disillusioned public, the first star mission will soon be launched.

Harry is a special child, smart and precocious, his only confidante an embittered grandfather.  When the old man dies, Harry is lost until he meets Lorrie.  At thirteen, they bond, certain they’ll escape to the stars together, but a year later, she disappears, and Harry is desolate.

With help from his friend Carlos, Harry begins a quest to find her, but quickly learns how powerless he is.  With the police lacking the resources to help, Harry and Carlos must depend on themselves and each other.  An unlikely duo, Harry is an academic prodigy while Carlos is a stud athlete.  Realizing that school and baseball are their tickets out of the morass they’re caught in, they inspire each other to greatness in both.

Harry has a college sweetheart, but with Lorrie’s memory haunting him, the relationship is doomed.  He gains celebrity and wealth, but the thing Harry wants most, finding and saving Lorrie from whatever fate took her from him remains beyond his reach.  And always, in the background, are the deteriorating state of the country and the star missions…and of course, the Portal.

The Portal is both classic science fiction and a novel of undying love.  If An Affair to Remember were set a hundred years from now, in an America that spent the twenty-first century squandering its greatness, it might look like The Portal.

Grab Your Copy

Amazon (US) | Goodreads