Hi there, folks.
I’m glad some of you have looked at the website. I’m sure some have gone around to look at Man From The East on Kindle, too, and just decided not to buy it yet. I understand. A novel is an investment in a little bit of money and a lot more time to read. You want to know that you’ll get a good return for both.
This novel won’t change the world, and reading it won’t make you a better person, or even a better dancer. I don’t have a lesson to impart, nor anything ineffable to relate. All I want to do is entertain you; make a dull day a little more interesting, a sleepless night a little more bearable. Give you a chuckle, make you blink and ask ‘WTF?’, let you empathize with someone who shares your humanity even if it’s in a place far, far removed from what you know. I don’t know who first said ‘ ‘Adventure’ is defined as someone having a bad day on the other side of the world’, but if it’s true then Kamalgin Amadari is certainly up to his neck in it.
I’m not much on casting characters as heroes or villains, anti-heroes or protagonists or antagonists. They have roles, and while some remain mostly positive and others often negative, my characters end up acting according to how they respond to the given situation according to their motivations. No one wakes up in the morning saying ‘I’m an extremely bad person! I’m gonna be a villain today!’ – especially not the villains. Nevertheless, evil remains in our world, and in Amadari’s world too. Sometimes it’s because good men do nothing – hmm, sounds like a good title for a novel . . .
Then again, the world – ours and Amadari’s alike – abounds with loathsome people, some of whom seek or already have power over us. Some of the most intense struggles in human existence revolve around how we deal with them, or concern lessons learned the hard way when we don’t deal with them properly (or at all). No adventure story is complete without telling how the protagonist deals with other people, especially ones he doesn’t like and can’t shoot . . .
Most protagonists are simple people in complicated situations, or complicated people in simple situations. I get to write both, sometimes in the same story. What we think of as the real world never seems so cut and dried, at least at the time it’s happening. We have to try to decide what we’re going to do and what will happen because of our actions on the fly, without the benefit of hindsight. I try to capture that uncertainty, both on the part of the protagonists and the antagonists alike, with neither of them knowing how things will work out.
Pick up Man From The East on Kindle. Let me know how I did, either by leaving a review there or one here. I welcome all constructive criticism, even if you didn’t like the story.
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