The Apprenticeship of Rick Geisler

by R.W. Byrum

Rick Geisler was just another average student at the University of Maryland when he enrolled in Professor Mallory's course, Superstition in World History. Rick was expecting the course to be nothing more than an entertaining elective. However, the professor proved to be an undercover wizard using his class as a tool for recruiting the particularly worthy to be his apprentices. When a seemingly innocuous test proved that Rick possessed latent talent for magic, he along with another student, Ursula Chen, were approached by the professor and offered the chance of a lifetime, the opportunity to study magic under him as his newest apprentices. If Rick accepts he will be offered more than just the chance to learn magic. He will be offered to opportunity to find a direction in his life and perhaps even love. But these opportunities will come at the price of forever altering his worldview as well as himself.

360 pages, Paperback

Published October 25, 2015

About the author

I have been writing for 15 years now. At first I was pursuing writing only as a hobby. For the first 4 years I wrote fan fiction. Ultimately, I found playing in other people's sandboxes far too limiting. Therefore, I began to write original fiction.

I began my first novel in 2004 and it took me two years to complete it. I submitted the novel to both literary agents and publishers but I had no success in getting it published.

Early in 2007 I wrote a series of short stories which I submitted to magazines. I thought that if I could get some publication credits this would help me land an agent for my novel.

When this didn't work, I alternated between idleness and working on other writing projects. At the end of 2014 I resumed work on my second novel and completed it early in December.

In May of 2015 I began writing The Theology of a Heretic. I realized that the only realistic chance I would have of getting this book published would be to publish it myself.

Since then I have completely abandoned the publishing establishment and resolved to self publish all of my work

Reviews

[Carla · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked the plot of the story and the characters were quite interesting as well. However, I believe this book (or at least the copy I received from the author, which I won in a Goodreads giveaway) needs some editing, as there are some typos and little mistakes. Another thing I didn't like were the very factual descriptions of locations and roads, which were quite dense and boring at times. Despite all of these things, I really liked the story and I would reccommend it to people who like books about wizards and witches.