Category: Books

Sword and Chant is a fantasy novel by Blair MacGregor.  It is the second novel I have read out of my indie novel bundle, so I paid a little less than a dollar for it. Was it worth it at this lower price?  Yes, but it was not my favorite book.

The book is about a young girl Shala who was raised as Kennem that finds out she is in the line of the Swords.  The Swords’ job is to hold off the banished Calligar god The Chant.  The land is on the brink of war between Calligar and Kennem because The Chant’s people The Exiles hide among the Kennem, and the Calligar want to root them out.  This obviously causes conflict because she now has to side with Calligar, but she mistrusts them.

The author did a wonderful job creating the land, the gods, and the magic system for this book.  It seems like a place that actually exists and that is wonderful, but it is also a book where nothing fun happens, and no one is happy is except for The Chant when people die.  It is just depressing, so it was hard to get through. It may have just been that I was in the wrong mood to read this book, but for me I always like it when at least someone smiles, sometimes.  When there is nothing but gloom then books start to drag for me.

If you are looking for an incredibly detailed world to visit then this is a decent book to try, but for me it was just too depressing to completely enjoy, but it is good to see an indie author writing her books, and getting them out there and in to a lot of hands, and I wish her the best.

So I have been writing a book for awhile, but so far I only have three chapters done, so I am leaving it up to you a little bit to see if I should keep going.  It is a light comedy/fantasy book that was inspired by a D&D campaign my buddy Andy Brim created, so if I get rich I will owe Andy a pittance.

The main reason for writing this book was to have fun, and because every fantasy book I read takes itself way to seriously.  They are all depressing, or think that they should be quoted like Shakespeare.

I am thinking of changing the hero’s name since so far it is named after me, so it is Shmee, but he is becoming less like me and more like his own person, so I think I will need to change the name at some point, but I can’t think of one I like (I guess I like myself to much).

I have read through it quite a few times, and every time I still find errors and typos, so I am sure you will too, so sorry for that in advance, but I hope you like it anyway!

Click the link below for the PDF.

**Update 12-21-2015: The new copy of the book can be found here.

 

 

Good Omens is a book that was written in 1990, by Neil Gaiman, writer of the Sandman comic book series, and Terry Pratchett, writer of the Discworld books.  The book has won critical acclaim and has sold quite well.  But the important question is whether I liked it or not, and I am glad to say that I did.

The book is about an Angle, Aziraphale, and a Demon, Crawly, that decide to try and stop the apocalypse, so they set out to bring up Adam the Antichrist properly, so that when he is old enough he won’t do what he was born to do, and destroy the world.  There is also a fun subplot about the four horsemen: War, Famine, Pollution (Pestilence retired), and Death.

For those of you who have read Terry Pratchett books you will instantly pick up on this being one of his novels.  The zany off the wall style, and all the random footnotes that you can’t wait to read, and added in to the mix is quite a bit of Neil Gaiman’s style and what seems like effortless character building that all his books are known for.  I very rarely laugh out loud while reading books, but it was common occurrence while reading this book.  Its one weakness is that it gets a little sacrilegious here and there.

It is a shame they never got to write their follow up novel, and with Pratchett having Alzheimer’s disease, they probably will not get too.  Good Omens is a funny book written by two of England’s best living writers.  If you want a good laugh then this book is for you.