Griswold-Ford, Valerie

Dragon Moon Press follows its highly successful title, The Complete Guide to Writing Fantasy, with a second volume of advice, examples, and resources dedicated to helping you create your own epic fantasy adventure.

The Complete Guide to Writing Fantasy offers something for writers of all levels, providing advice and detailed instruction for creating a believable fantasy world. The novice author will find the book invaluable for its sage advice, while already published fantasy authors will find the book enjoyable for its well written style and wealth of reference material. Advice on world building, religions, food, fighting & weaponry, and much more, will help transform the mundane into an epic fantasy story.

The Universe is Balanced. That tenet is taught to every Mage and Lord ever born. Light Magic, Earth Magic and Shadow Magic mingle on Earth, with portals to the Dawn Lands and the Shadow Lands dotted around it. Elemental Lords, spirits of magic, walk the Lands and interbreed with humans to produce Mages. The Council of Nine, made up of three Lords from each sphere, watches over the Balance and makes certain that no one tips the Balance in the wrong direction. If that happens, the StarChild will summon the Four Horsemen to Cleanse the world, and reset the Balance. Or at least, that s the way it has always worked before. Twenty-three years ago, a wealthy businessman started a series of illegal experiments with the assistance of two Elemental Lords. Combining cutting-edge technology and ancient magical spells, they took Light Magic and Shadow Magic and bound it into three unborn children. Unfortunately for them, the breeders carrying the children escaped into the night before the spells could be finished. Nikki Jeffries is a normal young woman searching for two things: the identity of her birth parents and the truth behind haunted houses. What she finds is another world entirely: a world of magic and mystery that she is swept into. Now, she must master her new-found powers and combat an ancient enemy of the Balance, or the Walls between the Worlds will crumble, and everything will fall to Madness. (eBook for $2.99; Print Book for $19.95)

Earth is a Balanced Land – Shadow Magic and Light Magic interweave to form a world where magic is known of, but not well. Most of the population figures that magic is some form of technological trick – a misconception the Council of Nine encourages. Earth is also the meeting place for the other Lands – the Shadow Lands and the Dawn Lands both have enclaves scattered about its surface, keeping all the Lands in Balance. Shadow Lords, Earth Lords and Dawn Lords – all work to keep the Balance steady. Or that’s the rumor. In actuality, the Shadow Lord Andreas is working to disrupt the Balance, shift it towards him so that all the Lands fall into Shadow, giving him more power than anyone ever imagined. However, the Starchild stands poised to take it all away – to stand against her, he and the Dawn Lord Kymara are attempting to breed super soldiers, an army of Shadow-born warriors that will lead him to victory. But something goes wrong. The experiments are destroyed, and the first set of his soldiers disappears into the darkness, carried in the wombs of the two breeders they had. Now, twenty-three years later, Andreas is set to try again, with new breeders and a new companion by his side. And yet, once again, there are those who have come to stop him, most notably Nikki Jeffries, a young woman with a shadowed past and an uncertain future. Now the clock is ticking. If Nikki and her friends cannot stop Andreas from completing his experiments, the Council of Nine and the Starchild will have no choice but to reset the Balance utterly, wiping out everything and starting anew. But with the rumor running that the Four Horsemen have already been summoned and unleashed on the Earth, will they have time to stop him, before chaos envelops them all?

We are, we are Pirates! Pirates and magic. Tall ships and dark rum intermingle with spells and romance in this collection of short stories of nautical derring-do guaranteed to send chills and thrills down your spine. Join the crew, and push off to worlds unknown. Just be warned... thar be pirates in them thar waters. With tales by: Gail Z. Martin * BA Collins * Danny Birt * James R. Stratton * Laurel Anne Hill * MJ Blehart * Tera Fulbright * Davey Beauchamp * Michael A. Ventrella * Danielle Ackley-McPhail * Stuart Jaffe and Misty Massey Interior art by Bryan Prindiville