The following should be considered a Public Service Announcement because reading the following novels will help the public be happier, more in tune with the universe, and gain insight into problems that will manifest themselves in the future.
This announcement is also intended to serve as holiday shopping advice to ease efforts to please the discerning readers in your family.
The Dream Land Trilogy
An eloquently efficient epic of interdimensional intrigue and world
domination by a pair of high school sweethearts, filled with twisted humor
(think double-helix), some steampunk pathos, a patina of psychological thriller
(imagine a police procedural gone bad), passionate romance (tears will be shed!),
graphic violence (de rigueur in battles scenes with a cast of millions), and
the inevitability of quirky conundrums of time and space.
How far would you go to save the love of your life? Through a doorway to another world?
The Dream Land I "Long Distance Voyager"
Sebastian, that quiet
tax examiner at the corner desk in the IRS service center, carries a dark
secret: once upon a time he and his high school sweetheart Gina found a rip in
the universe and stepped through it to a strange world of magical beauty.
Far from being a Disney-esque playground, the world of Ghoupallesz bursts with
cosmopolitan elegance, alien perversions, and political strife. Gina, the
adventurous one, falls in love with the adventurous possibilities. Not
Sebastian; always practical, he insists they return to Earth. Gina refuses so
he goes back alone, vowing never to return. Yet he finds himself drawn back
repeatedly--he calls it “research”--and often crosses paths with Gina.
Sometimes he saves her, sometimes she saves him, forever soul mates.
Now years later, life on Earth hasn’t gone well for Sebastian. Then the
headaches revisit him, with flashes of memories from Ghoupallesz. Gina is in
trouble again, he senses, and he must, as always, save her. Meanwhile, a pair
of too-curious IRS co-workers have accidently overdosed on the Elixir of Love
he brought back on his last trip and the antidote exists only on Ghoupallesz.
With these co-workers in tow, Sebastian returns through the interdimensional
portal, fearing it may be his final adventure. He must gather his old comrades
from the war, cross the towering Zet mountains, and free Gina from the Zetin warlord’s
castle before her execution. Perhaps then she will stay with him.
But are his adventures to the other side real? Or are they just the dreams of a
psychotic killer? That’s what the police want to know when Sebastian returns
without his co-workers.
Kindle- http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AH1V78Q
Paper- http://www.amazon.com/dp/1939296226
UK:
Kindle- http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00AH1V78Q
Paperback- http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1939296226
Australia:
Kindle- http://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B00AH1V78Q
Canada:
Kindle- http://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00AH1V78Q
The Dream Land II "Dreams of Future's Past"
After his adventures
in Book I, Sebastian Talbot (a.k.a. Set-d’Elous, legendary warrior and
Sekuatean cavalry captain) has exiled himself to a desolate island, content to
laze away the days writing his memoir. Until the emissary from Queen Tammy
arrives with a mission he cannot refuse. Tammy, the IRS clerk he took to
Ghoupallesz along with Michael in Book I, wants him to go fetch her son who she
left on Earth. How could she return for him? She married the King of Aivana.
That mission raises
desperate questions for Sebastian: If he can go back and forth through these
interdimensional doorways and arrive in different time periods, perhaps he can
do something to prevent the big war he fought through, the war that destroyed
his family and millions of others. So he returns to his Ghoupalle wife, Zaura. While
on patrol duty, he comes upon a young poetess he knows will become the rebel
leader who helps overthrow the monarchy and causes the wars.
Meanwhile, back on
Earth in another timeline, Sebastian awakens from a coma and is helped in his
recovery by Dr. Toni Franck. An affair develops—just as his opportunity for
escape comes along. Later, as Sebastian/Set escorts teams of mercenaries back
and forth to conduct their history-changing business, he tries to meet up with
Toni again only to realize the police are still in pursuing him. Desperate to
see her, he arranges a meeting only to have a SWAT team show up, cornering him.
Can he escape through an interdimensional doorway this time?
Paper- http://www.amazon.com/dp/1939296269
UK:
Kindle- http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00D94Y06O
Paperback- http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1939296269
Australia:
Kindle- http://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B00D94Y06O
Canada:
Kindle- http://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00D94Y06O
The Dream Land III "Diaspora"
Set-d’Elous (a.k.a. Sebastian Talbot) finds
himself paralyzed and mute, tormented daily by the mocking spirit of the evil
Empress—his wife. His only hope is to be rescued, but all his fellow Voyagers
have been blown to other places, some back to Earth. They awaken to a world
they had left and now cannot comprehend. Tammy’s son, Chucker, awakens in the jungle,
however, and in his years there realizes what went wrong in his team’s
assassination attempt on the Emperor of Sekuate: they shot the wrong guy.
Feeling guilty, Chucker tracks Set-d’Elous to
Earth, where he is locked up in a prison hospital, let out once a month for a
day with Dr. Toni Franck, his former psychiatrist now wife. With the aid of a
retired cop, Chucker must rescue Sebastian in order to counter the rise of a
violent prophet’s cult back on Ghoupallesz. Only a final battle will decide the
truth—a truth that permeates the next few centuries....
Legend tells of a comet that will cleanse the
world, and governments realize it is near. Fortunately, Jinetta-d’Elous (a.k.a.
Gina Parton, Interdimensional Voyager), a struggling mother of two, comes
forward to offer assistance. Leading the aerospace commission, she tries to
drive forward Ghoupallean technology from airships to interstellar spacecraft
in the time remaining. However, success has its price and as the clock counts
down, Gina must rescue her daughter from the evil Overlord and secure seats
aboard the last spacecraft departing before the comet strikes.
Kindle- http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GVJGP9E
Paper- http://www.amazon.com/dp/1939296277
UK:
Kindle- http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00GVJGP9E
Paperback- http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1939296277
Australia:
Kindle- http://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B00GVJGP9E
Canada:
Kindle- http://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00GVJGP9E
For additional information, check the Dream-o-pedia page, an index page of links to everything you want to know about the Dream Land.
in association with
*On a personal note, I really enjoy writing stories, especially those where I have free rein to plunge into fantastic worlds, as with the Dream Land trilogy. Since overcoming some medical issues, the desire to share this story was reawakened. Before that moment, Book I sat finished and Book II was started--then left on a dusty shelf deep inside my computer for almost ten years as I lived my life. With an encouraging kickoff via the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, I was able to climb into the saddle again (metaphors and all) and finished Book II. Then in 2013 I was able to ride the Muses through a hard six-week writing marathon that became the bulk of Book III. So I'm excited to have this trilogy complete, and I offer it now to those who enjoy quirky, weird, otherworldly, science-fiction, epic steampunkish stories of normal people doing things they probably shouldn't and regretting their actions, forced to fight both the environment around them as well as within them. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed writing these books. Thanks!
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(C) Copyright 2010-2013 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog.
Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.
So into #NaNoWriMo I dove with an opening scene and some notes of how it proceeds leftover from junior high school. I started off at a good pace, then that day job and its attendant duties reared its ugly head as I knew it would. I struggled to add a few paragraphs between classes. I worked in the evenings to cobble a few pages more. Weekends were all writing time. Suddenly I was hooked on the story and the writing became an obsession. 
Originally, I was setting the story on the same world that I used for THE DREAM LAND Trilogy but in its NaNoWriMo incarnation, I made it an entirely new world, a warm, lush, vibrant planet where the indigenous intelligent life runs around half naked. Too bad for our mild-mannered hero Toog that he is taken to a cold, frozen wasteland to labor with a menagerie of beings taken from many different worlds or kept in a frosty stone-walled prison cell until he is needed--or that he must hide in a chilly cave after he escapes the prison and the work camp. Now how will he get off the planet to return home to his family? 
