Blue Scream of Jeff: Tears of the Phoenix

Showing posts with label Tears of the Phoenix. Show all posts

Sunday, February 16, 2025

New Beginnings

My new book which will be published on
Amazon.com on Feb 28.

A few years ago, I stopped writing this blog to focus on finishing writing a story that I’ve been working on in some form or another for the past 40 years.

Well, I finally finished it at the end of 2023 and spent most, if not all of, last year editing it and getting it ready for publication.

Initially I was going to release it in January to coincide with the start of the New Year. But, as the saying goes, even “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”

You see, right around the time I was finishing my book, our dog, Merlin, passed away unexpectedly from a very aggressive form of canine cancer. Of course, Mrs. Blue Scream and I were devastated and I thought he’d be our last dog. Then in December, a new dog, Shadow, came into our life and while he’s a super chill Lab, he’s turned our lives upside-down and just about everything ground to a halt while we worked to get him adjusted to his new fur-ever home. (It’s still a work in progress).

Then just when things were beginning to settle down again, my mom got sick and a few weeks later, she passed away. My mom was my first and often toughest editor, and I know she would have been thrilled to see her baby-boy’s first novel get published. So despite still feeling sad, I vowed to continue my journey in her honor.

It’s been a long road to get here, but I’m glad I made the trip. And as we move further into 2025, I’m looking forward to a new and better beginning with my remaining family, my new dog and my publishing career….

Sunday, October 31, 2021

Sneak Peak at my new book, Tears of Phoenix

Welcome to the world of Phoenix, a desert planet in orbit of a red dwarf star, it's it's inhabitants call Fornax

Over the last two months, I’ve told you a bit about the novel I it has taken me half my life to finish, Tears of the Phoenix, and while it still needs to be thoroughly edited, I’m anxious to share it with the world.

That’s why I decided to publish the prologue from it, which takes place in the distant past, but whose events sets the whole story in motion.

So, without any future ado, here it is. Let me know what you think of it in the comments below:

PREFACE: Betrayal

“Who are you to betray the prophecy?! To betray G-d?! To betray me!”

Three women knelt before the angry king. They wore tattered white robes with red sashes, their hands bound behind their backs, their bald heads bowed.

The woman on the left, the eldest of the three, looked up, hatred turning her eyes a deep red. “The Tears of The Phoenix are too powerful for any one man to possess,” she spat.

The king back-handed her across the face, hard. “I will have none of that witch!” he said. “Do you take me for a fool? Do you think I would not have taken precautions against your powers?” he asked nodding to two women standing behind him, their eyes glowing red from beneath their hooded white robes. “For far too long we have been ruled by you Tyrs and your constant rivalries! All you have brought us is war after bloody war. I am so near to ending at that…”

He turned to face the woman in the center.

“Morwyn, my wife! How could you of all people betray me?” he half sobbed. “How could you lead this rebellion against me when it was you who first foresaw that I would find and unite all eight Tears and with them our people under one banner?”

“You mean unite them under one tyrant!” the third woman hissed. Her small narrow eyes, flat nose and thin mouth twisted into a bitter expression.

“Jethric…” Morwyn said softly. “My sisters and I were just trying to do our g-d’s will. The Great Phoenix split The Tears for a reason. It knew their power would be too much of a temptation! Look at you, husband. Your desire to find the final three Tears has clouded your mind. Can you not see you do not need them? You were so very close to victory. Had it not been for your lust to complete the set, you would have already achieved your goal! The Tears changed you, Jethric. They have driven you mad!” she wept now. “The rebellion was the only way we could protect our people! We had no choice!”

“Of course you had a choice!” he yelled, taking her chin in his hand. “You could have trusted me! Please, tell me where they are and all will be forgiven.” Tears filled his eyes now.

“I am sorry,” Morwyn whispered, looking into the face of a man she no longer knew. “I cannot.”

Jethric released his wife’s face, stepped back and drew an ornate sword he wore on his side. With a single quick thrust, he plunged it into each woman’s chest. His expression was strangely blank as he watched a crimson pool slowly ooze from beneath the bodies and run in streams down the seams in the stone floor. For a long time he didn’t move or speak. Finally, he turned to his castellan. “Bury them,” he ordered, his voice flat, emotionless.

“Sir? You mean burn them? Traitors or not, they are – were – Tyrs.”

“They were nothing!” Jethric growled, some life creeping back into his voice. “They never existed. I am erasing them from history.”

The castellan’s jaw dropped in horror as he realized what his king was asking. He just didn’t want them dead. He wanted them annihilated. Burying them would trap their souls in their bodies forever. He was wiping them from existence for all of time.

“Sir…” he hesitated.

“Do as I ordered castellan, or your body will join theirs.”

The castellan shivered, nodded once and ordered the bodies removed. The king turned from the carnage in front of him and walked over to a nearby window, and just stared out into the desert.

“The price of betrayal,” he muttered when the castellan joined him a moment later. “I will fulfill the prophecy and unite our people. Then all this bloodshed can finally end.”

“And what of the eight Tears?”

“It is my destiny to unite them too.”

A white mist began to swirl around the men, who suddenly seemed to be receding, though they were not moving. Soon they were completely obscured. Then through the fog emerged two balls of flame. They burned through the mist, finally transforming into a set of glowing red eyes.

“Never forget what they did to us, Malise. Never forget.”

“Yes mother,” Malise said.

Thursday, September 30, 2021

Presenting my novel: Tears of the Phoenix

Last month I mentioned that I’d finally finished writing a novel I’ve been working on for nearly 40 years but never mentioned the title nor what it was about.

That was on purpose. You see I wanted to whet your appetite and build suspense this month’s big reveal.

Okay. Not really.

I just wanted to give myself a topic for this month’s post.

So now that I’ve done that, I’m finally ready to tell you what my epic-in-the-making is about.

As you can see from the preliminary cover pictured above, it’s called “Tears of the Phoenix” and it’s what I’d like to think of as space opera grounded in reality. I call it this because I tried to make the characters, settings and situations feel so familiar and plausible that all the space opera tropes just fade into the background.

I was inspired to do this by stories like George RR Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series which read like a history text on medieval Europe if medieval Europe just happened to feature dragons and magic, or some of the Marvel movies such as “Captain America: The First Avenger,” which was really ’40s-era World War II flick that just happened to be about a superhero or “Ant-Man” which was really a heist film in the vein of the “Ocean's 11” or “The Italian Job” rather than another superhero origin story.

Whether I succeeded in doing this will be up to you, but here’s the back-of-the book synopsis:

After a chance meeting with a shy, young graduate student at a prestigious Upstate New York university, medical student Dawn Amanda finds herself drawn into a galactic civil war between two alien factions racing to find and control eight crystals which hold the power of creation itself.
But she soon finds that she is no innocent bystander to events she thought beyond her control and soon realizes that she is an integral player in a crusade whose outcome will determine the fate of both their races.

Let me know in the comments below if this blub would make you want to pick up the book or if you like the cover.