Tol, the famous walled City of Masks, is preparing to celebrate the Festival of New Faces, and tourists from all around come to visit. In the midst of the excitement, the queen has been assassinated and a young tourist who just wants to put off a life decision or two will end up on the hook for it. Hounded by the vengeful captain of the city guard and a mysterious shadowy stalker, she’ll need all the help she can get. She’ll have to settle for the vagrant-by-choice Sproutt and a woman who may well be the assassin everyone seeks.
My name is Sean Arthur Cox. I’ve slef-published one book so far, New Tricks, which you can find on Amazon.com with some pretty solid reviews, though not many because I’m terrible at promotion and juggling. Juggling has nothing to do with book publication in a literal sense, but I figure while I’m talking about things I need to practice more, I should throw that one in there so I don’t forget.
This book is set in the same world as New Tricks, the Twelve Realms, a fantasy setting with, as you may have guessed, twelve distinct realms, Each surrounded entirely by mountains and accessible to one another only by large winding passages through the Mountains called Gates. I intend to set a story in each of the Twelve Realms as a way to play with different tropes, tomes, and themes within the fantasy genre.
Whereas New Tricks was a humorous homage to the fantasy genre, this one is a little more serious, more thriller than tickler. As for where I got the idea, I honestly don’t remember. I used to talk a lot of walks several years ago, and this was one of the story ideas that came to me at the time. The first draft was written back in 2013, I think, and I was going to put a lot more work into it before I put it up on here (try to get it into a nearly publishable format), but here’s the good news for you! Inkshares and The Nerdist/Geek & Sundry launched their Fantasy contest. I said I’d enter the next contest for which I had a completed draft, and here I am, not even 30 days into launching a pre-order campaign for another book I was prepping for publication when this happened. Looks like I’m doing two campaigns at once. But that means because this book still needs a good bit of shaping, there’s a good bit of room for your ideas to help shape the final product. I’ll post chapters, slowly but surely, and your reader feedback will help change it into its final form. Together we form the cocoon that will turn this wriggly caterpillar of a draft into a butterfly of a book!
Go ahead and read the first chapter. Tell me what you think! Let’s get a discussion going! See you at the finish line!