Empires Falling, Stand Alone Short Stories

Each short story in the series so far are stand-alone stories. Yes, they do connect to other stories in the future, but they all exist separate from the whole. These stories are designed to show the reader glimpses into the world of Empires Falling. I believe that it will take a minimum of twelve stories to prepare a reader for this grand story.

    I could have put them together in a novel or stretched them into a series of short novels, but the one thing that you will learn about me as this goes on is that I do not believe in wasting pages. I feel that far too many epic fantasy novels are padded. I have read a few novels in the two hundred thousand word range and thought that a best edit of forty to sixty thousand words would have made a much better book. I think that even the holy grail of fantasy novels these days, the Game of Thrones series of books are a little thicker than they have to be. I love the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Those books were quick reads even though they were long because they maintained a tight focus of core characters. The moral of Lord of the Rings is that even the smallest person can change the world, not the smallest fifty three man football team with a few talking trees along for the ride can talk an evil wizard to death.

    Epic Fantasy can be amazing if done well, but the biggest obstacle to reaching the broadest audience possible is the text book feel of some of the better novels in the field. I hope to overcome some of this by delivering stories in the eight to fourteen thousand word range to build an audience for my larger works.
    At the moment there are four short stories in the series available for purchase online. I hope that you guys will check all of them out and recommend them to others.
If you were to ask me which story is the best written, I would say The First Port in the Storm. The cool part of this is that since they are all stand alone stories you can read one and enjoy it without reading the others.

Thank you for visiting my site. Remember the name Empires Falling and I look forward to having you guys along for the full journey.

Publishing, The Land of the Khan

Today I have just published the second story in the series of shorts that have been written to support the novels. The short (almost 6,000 words) is titled The Land of the Khan and it features two of my favorite characters in the Empires Falling Universe; Kiylah and Zed. I know some much about the future of these character and their part to play in the over all story. I could have named the second book in the three book Trilogy Kiylah and in a way I did since her name translates Fire Serpent. About The Land of the Khan, you can find it at B&N, Amazon and iTunes for the low price of .99 cents. Click here

Add caption

I am going to show you guys the cover of the second book in the series for the next thirty days because I really want someone to see it. If you want to know about the cover for book one in the series I have not decided on the art work yet.

There is a great deal of magic and supernatural elements to be revealed in the next two shorts stories. The good news about the next one to be released in the series of stories is that it will be free of charge. I will post where it will be published soon.

I have to say that writing a fantasy epic has been a life long dream of mine. Characters that make up one of the three Empires have been with me for over twenty years. It took the idea of telling a
story that affect an entire world that sort of allowed me to bring those characters to life again.

If I can talk about one of the strongest influences on my story telling style I would say that it has to be the amazing sci-fi series Babylon 5. That show and its writer J. Michael showed me how to tell a story where the characters grew and changed over time. How motives and ambitions are altered by circumstances. No matter how complex a plot you can come up with or vast a canvas you can create it will always come down to characters and how they drive the story. Keeping in mind always that no character is absolutely good or evil. That humans, no matter what drives them, believe on some level that they are all the heroes of their own life story.

Thank you for visiting this Blog. Please take a moment to share this post and to tell someone about Empires Falling and if you only read on of the stories I would strongly suggest Land of the Khan. That is the one that I like to read over and over again. Editing over a thousand words out of it was the hardest edit of my life.

Empires Falling, Cover Art

The first of the three novels in the series is still months away from being published. I have complete control over when the short stories are published, but the novels are still being edited. If I had to offer a guess I would say that the first book will be out in all possible formats before December first. Missing the holiday season with any product is not a good thing. 


Right now I am looking over the first of the possible book covers. In the end I will be the one to make the final choice of covers.  The problem with posting the covers now would be that they would act as spoilers for a few of the short stories coming online soon. 

Here is a portion of the cover for the second book.

I can say this much about the story as a whole, it will show a health respect for magic and the supernatural. Readers, I hope, will be reminded of Arthur and his Knights of the Round table at times. Those amazing stories were firmly grounded in reality, but managed to introduce magic and the supernatural without breaking away from that reality. 

I have hinted at in previous post and will go over again that this is going to be a world of three empires that are fated to clash. Empires that will resemble those that existed at different times on our world.
The Western Empire mirrors the Roman Empire and it like Rome will depend heavily on its armed forces. They trust to the sword more than magic.  The Eastern Empire mirrors in some ways that of ancient China and feudal Japan. Myths and legends are part of everyday life. The island empires, the empire of the wilderness. The Empire of those called Lurkers resemble the Vikings and the Goths. They seem like barbarians to outsiders, but have laws and rules of conduct that are sometimes move civilized than those of the other kingdoms. The Lurkers depend upon magic and worship of ancient gods more than the other Empires. They are most likely to die willing in battle in the name of their gods or by the urging of their priest. In their society the high priest is almost equal to an Emperor.

Okay that is it for this post. I would like you to share this site on Stumbleupon and visit our facebook page by  clicking here.