Mike Phillips on Goblins, a Guest Post

This is the third of a three post series on Mike Phillips' book. 

The World Below 

by Mike Phillips

Guest Post:Heroes and Villains

Hello everyone, and thank you for reading my guest post. My name is Mike Phillips and my new book is The World Below. I have been asked to talk about some of the more interesting characters in the book.

Writing about goblins was a riot! Goblins live on the fringes of human society. They make their homes in junk yards, abandoned buildings, sewer systems, and anywhere else people try to avoid. Once they find a likely spot, the get to work. Goblins are clever with tools and machinery. They will use and repurpose anything they can get their hands on, so many of their dwellings look like they were designed by frat-boys. Not always the best of neighbors, goblins have to take security seriously. They construct elaborate pitfalls to keep themselves safe from enemies like collapsing tunnels, pongee pits, and mechanical traps.

Goblins, like their human counterparts, each have a unique personality. They live in what they call crews, a sort of family, a lot like college dorm-mates. Each goblin has a special skill. One might be a bully (a most desirable skill in the goblin world). Another might be crafty at making traps. Some use sorcery or poison. Others are good at machinery. Some just eat a lot (another desirable skill). Goblins, in general, have a loose sense of morality. If it doesn’t hurt another member of the crew, with the obvious exception of fighting, then it’s usually okay. Fighting is always acceptable behavior, though if an enemy is around, a goblin is expected to stop fighting the other crew member and start fighting the enemy. Common sense rules like that are the cornerstone of goblin society.

That brings us to the topic of goblin social structure. Goblin society is feudal. They organize in crews, bound by familial ties or friendship. These associations are loosely formed, and if a goblin wants to go it alone, no one holds a grudge. A crew may have two or three leaders at a time. It is not unusual for goblins to disagree, so sometimes they have no real leader at all. Though they fight with each other like crazy, but they are deeply loyal in times of trouble and would do anything for the other members of their crew. No female goblins appear in The World Below, but that is a topic for another time.                      

Thank you so much for joining me. I hope you enjoy The World Below. Please visit me at mikephillipsfantasy.com.

General Information:                                                                                     

Title:                                        The World Below

Author:                                    Mike Phillips

Author Website:                      http://mikephillipsfantasy.com

Print ISBN:                             978-1-61572-886-2

Digital ISBN:                          978-1-61572-885-5    

Amazon Link: 

DamnationBooks Link           Damnation Books Coupon Code:       50worldbelow

Synopsis:                                                                                                          

In ancient times, magical creatures inhabited the earth. They lived on mountaintops, in trees, at the bottom of lakes and rivers. But that was long ago, before the human race declared war on the creatures they feared and hated. Now the enchanted peoples are all but gone. Those few that remain fear being stretched out on an examination table in some secret, governmental facility. The only place they can hide from the ever increasing number of satellites and smart phones is in the World Below.

Mitch Hardy is going through a hard time in his life. In his early twenties, he was working his way through college when he suffered an accident that left him flat broke and physically deformed. When Mitch decides to make a fresh start in a new town, things start looking up. He finds a place to live, a decent job, good friends. He even meets a nice girl. Unknown to Mitch, his new girlfriend is one of the Elder Race, what some call the Faerie Folk. Mitch doesn’t know that Elizabeth is looking for a father she never knew. The key to finding him is somehow tied up with the mysterious Blade of Caro. Desperate, she steals the Blade from its protector, the despotic ruler of the World Below, the Dragon of Worms, Baron Finkbeiner. When Elizabeth is kidnapped by the Baron, Mitch is pulled into a world or magic and monsters he never imagined.

This book may have been received free of charge from a publisher or a publicist. That will NEVER have a bearing on my recommendations.

Mike Phillips on Heroes and Villains a Guest Post

This is the second of a three post series on Mike Phillips' book. 

Mike Phillips

The World Below 

by Mike Phillips

Guest Post:Heroes and Villains

Hello everyone, and thank you for reading my guest post. My name is Mike Phillips and my new book is The World Below. I have been asked to talk about a few of the characters in the novel, so I thought it might be interesting to discuss the major players, the heroes and the villains. Our hero is Mitch Hardy, just an average guy trying to work his way through college and make something out of himself. While working in a foundry, he suffers a terrible accident. A chain snaps on a crucible of iron and he is burned over half his body. He survives, but with no family and few friends, he struggles to put his life back together. On the advice of a friend, he decides to move to a new town to start his life over. That is where he meets Elizabeth. She is more than she seems, and soon Mitch is pulled into a world of magic and mystery he never dreamed of. Lady Elizabeth is looking for a father she never knew. Finding him is somehow tied up with the Blade of Caro. She steals the Blade from its keeper, the despotic ruler of the World Below, Baron Finkbeiner, and sets into motion a series of events that brings Mitch into a place where magical creatures still exist. That brings us to the despotic rule or the World Below, Dragon of Worms, Baron Finbeiner. He is an ancient creature, very secretive about his abilities, hiding his true face from even the citizens of the World Below. As the story begins, the Blade of Caro is stolen from the Baron. It is the only weapon known to be able to destroy him. It turns out that that the Blade was taken by Lady Elizabeth, the Baron’s most hated enemy. Unable to recover the blade on his own, the Baron tricks a sorcerer, Jason Hume, into helping him get the Blade of Caro back. Jason Hume is an interesting guy. He has magical talent, amongst which is the ability to cast lightning bolts. That makes him a formidable opponent, and he likes to throw his weight around. At the beginning of the novel, Baron Finkbeiner tricks Jason into helping him against Lady Elizabeth by kidnapping his sister. As they work together, Jason begins to see how good it is to have someone as powerful as the Baron by his side. Before long, Jason gives into temptation, and begins to see what spoils he can find for himself. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope you enjoy The World Below. Please visit me at mikephillipsfantasy.com.

General Information:                                                                                     

Title:                                        The World Below

Author:                                    Mike Phillips

Author Website:                      http://mikephillipsfantasy.com

Print ISBN:                             978-1-61572-886-2

Digital ISBN:                          978-1-61572-885-5    

Amazon Link: 

DamnationBooks Link           Damnation Books Coupon Code:       50worldbelow

Synopsis:                                                                                                          

In ancient times, magical creatures inhabited the earth. They lived on mountaintops, in trees, at the bottom of lakes and rivers. But that was long ago, before the human race declared war on the creatures they feared and hated. Now the enchanted peoples are all but gone. Those few that remain fear being stretched out on an examination table in some secret, governmental facility. The only place they can hide from the ever increasing number of satellites and smart phones is in the World Below.

Mitch Hardy is going through a hard time in his life. In his early twenties, he was working his way through college when he suffered an accident that left him flat broke and physically deformed. When Mitch decides to make a fresh start in a new town, things start looking up. He finds a place to live, a decent job, good friends. He even meets a nice girl. Unknown to Mitch, his new girlfriend is one of the Elder Race, what some call the Faerie Folk. Mitch doesn’t know that Elizabeth is looking for a father she never knew. The key to finding him is somehow tied up with the mysterious Blade of Caro. Desperate, she steals the Blade from its protector, the despotic ruler of the World Below, the Dragon of Worms, Baron Finkbeiner. When Elizabeth is kidnapped by the Baron, Mitch is pulled into a world or magic and monsters he never imagined.

This book may have been received free of charge from a publisher or a publicist. That will NEVER have a bearing on my recommendations.

Featured Author Mike Phillips

I am a self published author.  When I get contacted by other new authors I like to help out when I can.  Mike asked me if I would review his book, I agreed but also told him my plate is really full at the moment so the review won't be done immediately.  However I did see what looked like a promising book so I offered to give him some space here to let others know about his books.  His first post give an interesting insight to his very likeable personality. 

Mike Phillips

The World Below 

by Mike Phillips

Guest Post:   Pet Duck  

Hello everyone, and thank you for reading my guest post. My name is Mike Phillips and my new book is The World Below. I was asked to share a little something about my personal life. I know lots of you have pets, so I thought I’d talk about that. I grew up on a farm in West Michigan. We grew most of our own food and heated our house with wood, and even made our own furniture. For me, the best part of growing up on a farm was the animals. In addition to the livestock, we always had a dog and an abundance of barn cats. My absolute favorite, however, was my pet duck, Peeper. The poor thing didn’t get off to a good start. I remember that the mother and father duck had a nest of eggs, and we knew that it was about time for them to hatch. I had gone into the barn just before bed and been rewarded with the sound of little duck voices. Well, I didn’t want to disturb their momma, so I let them be and came back excited the next morning. What I found was a tragedy. A weasel had come in the night. Mother and father duck and about three ducklings lay dead on the ground. The dog caught up with weasel. It too met an unfortunate end. I was sick and in tears as I looked at it all, but heard a little voice behind me. A single duckling was left. I took it inside and raised it under a light bulb. All the while, I “peeped” at her so she would feel at home. That was a mistake, because even as an adult, Peeper never quite learned to quack just right.  Thank you so much for joining me. I hope you enjoy The World Below. Please visit me at mikephillipsfantasy.com.

General Information:                                                                                     

Title:                                        The World Below

Author:                                    Mike Phillips

Author Website:                      http://mikephillipsfantasy.com

Print ISBN:                             978-1-61572-886-2

Digital ISBN:                          978-1-61572-885-5    

Amazon Link: 

DamnationBooks Link           Damnation Books Coupon Code:       50worldbelow

Synopsis:                                                                                                          

In ancient times, magical creatures inhabited the earth. They lived on mountaintops, in trees, at the bottom of lakes and rivers. But that was long ago, before the human race declared war on the creatures they feared and hated. Now the enchanted peoples are all but gone. Those few that remain fear being stretched out on an examination table in some secret, governmental facility. The only place they can hide from the ever increasing number of satellites and smart phones is in the World Below.

Mitch Hardy is going through a hard time in his life. In his early twenties, he was working his way through college when he suffered an accident that left him flat broke and physically deformed. When Mitch decides to make a fresh start in a new town, things start looking up. He finds a place to live, a decent job, good friends. He even meets a nice girl. Unknown to Mitch, his new girlfriend is one of the Elder Race, what some call the Faerie Folk. Mitch doesn’t know that Elizabeth is looking for a father she never knew. The key to finding him is somehow tied up with the mysterious Blade of Caro. Desperate, she steals the Blade from its protector, the despotic ruler of the World Below, the Dragon of Worms, Baron Finkbeiner. When Elizabeth is kidnapped by the Baron, Mitch is pulled into a world or magic and monsters he never imagined.

This book may have been received free of charge from a publisher or a publicist. That will NEVER have a bearing on my recommendations.

Free Books SILVER SKIN and COLD IRON, Book 2 and Book 1 by D.L. McDermott

Free Books  SILVER SKIN and COLD IRON, Book 2 and Book 1 by D.L. McDermott

Book 1

Book 2

SILVER SKIN, the second book in D.L. McDermott’s sexy paranormal series, comes out Monday, April 14^th. To celebrate the publication,  you are offered promo codes for free downloads of both SILVER SKIN and COLD IRON (Book 1) for a limited time.

Helene Whitney has been losing time. Not losing track of time—but finding whole blank spaces, hours, in her day she can’t account for. A year ago she would have written it off as overwork and exhaustion, but that was before she found out about the Good Neighbors, the Fair Folk, the Beautiful People, the Fae. 

Ancient, immortal, tricksy, and cruel, these creatures out of myth and legend rule the Irish enclaves of South Boston and Charlestown, and one of them has been using magic to abduct and control Helene for hours every day. That’s because the collection at her museum contains ancient objects of Fae power, and the Fae want access to this magic for their own ends. Now, Helene’s only hope of escaping this unknown assailant lies with the Fae sorcerer Miach MacCecht, a man she knows she can never trust—and who may prove impossible to resist.

D.L. McDermott is an author and screenwriter whose credits include episodes of the animated series Tron: Uprising. Her short fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Albedo One. The director of several award-winning short films, her most recent project, The Night Caller, aired on WNET Channel 13 and was featured on Ain’t It Cool News. She is married with one cat and divides her time between Los Angeles and Salem.

If you are interested in these two exciting free eBooks fill out the form below. I will forward all names and email addresses to the publicist for these books.  They will send you the promo codes directly. 

This book may have been received free of charge from a publisher or a publicist. That will NEVER have a bearing on my recommendations.

Seventh Star Press Signs Anderson O’Donnell

Seventh Star Press is proud to announce that Anderson O’Donnell is coming aboard with his highly-acclaimed dystopian/noir novel Kingdom and future books featuring Tiber City!   See my review of Kingdom.

Kingdom will be released as a second edition by Seventh Star Press during the summer of 2014, with future Tiber City novels to follow!  It will be issued in trade paperback in all eBook formats.

 Kingdom became an indie book sensation in 2012, when Kirkus Reviews made it one of their top 25 Indie Books of 2012, saying this about the novel: “A taut, brilliantly conceived thriller with impeccable pacing bursting with ideas…For fans of noir-laden science fiction in the vein of Philip K. Dick that is in equal measures suspenseful, gripping, darkly funny and philosophically challenging.”

Kingdom takes the reader into a secret laboratory hidden under the desert, where a covert bioengineering project—codename “Exodus”—has discovered the gene responsible for the human soul.

Somewhere in the neon sprawl outside the nation’s collapsing economic core, a group of renegade monks are on the verge of uncovering a secret that has eluded mankind for centuries.

In a glittering tower high above the urban decay, an ascendant U.S. Senator is found dead—an apparent, yet inexplicable, suicide.

And in the streets below, a young man races through an ultra modern metropolis on the verge of a violent revolution….closing in on the terrible truth behind Exodus—and one man’s dark vision for the future of mankind.

Welcome to Tiber City.

Obsessed with Dystopian/noir fiction, the Clash, and his two sons, Anderson O’Donnell holds an undergraduate degree in English from the College of the Holy Cross. He has studied creative writing extensively with biopunk genre master Jack O’Connell and poet Robert Cording, whose work influenced Kingdom’s high/low culture dynamic. Anderson lives in Washington, DC, with his family.

This book may have been received free of charge from a publisher or a publicist. That will NEVER have a bearing on my recommendations.

Spectral Delivery (A Road Ghosts Story) FREE 4/11/14 and a few more days!

Meet Enid, a pizza delivery trainee who's stuck riding along with ghost-geek Brett on Valentine's Day night. Her boyfriend begs her to try to get off early, but things get weirder and weirder as she and Brett find paranormal activity at every stop. Fascinated, Enid finds herself pulled into Brett's shadowy world as they race to get hot pizza to their final destination, and see that love is a tie that binds spirits long after death. 

Spectral Delivery is a Road Ghosts Story, part of the world that includes the Road Ghost Trilogy books such as Four 'til Late and Sinking Down.

Pick up a free paranormal thriller today with Eric Garrison's Spectal Delivery, a Road Ghosts tale, absolutely free on Kindle, Kobo, and iBooks. If you enjoy it, check out Four 'Til Late and Sinking Down, the first 2 books of the Road Ghosts Trilogy! 
Get it Here FREE!

This book may have been received free of charge from a publisher or a publicist. That will NEVER have a bearing on my recommendations.

Doom Angel (Angelkiller Triad Book 3) by H. David Blalock - Trailer

Dragon Weather by Lawrence Watt-Evans

This is book one of the Obsidian Chronicles.   It starts with a bang and keeps moving at a fast pace.   A totalitarian government may be being manipulated by a secret society.   The dragons are all dead or are they.   A young boy finds out the hard way and his life is dedicated to finding justice.

Arlian grows from a child to an adult through the course of the book.   The deprivations he faces are all character building and determines who he is and the challenges he must face.   He has unusual teachers, to say the least.  

His monochrome ideas of justice begin to mutate as he deals his own justice to those who have tormented him and those around him.   You can see a character shift that results from the experiences he has that alter his monomaniacal viewpoint.   In that way it is a coming of age story as well as a fantasy adventure.

I look forward to reading the ensuing volumes in the trilogy.

I recommend it.

web site:  http://www.watt-evans.com/

This book may have been received free of charge from a publisher or a publicist. That will NEVER have a bearing on my recommendations.

Peace Warrior by Steven L. Hawk

Sergeant Grant Justice was the best soldier his commander had ever met.  Sacrificed for a political goal he met a cruel demise or did he?   Centuries later Grant Justice lived up to his name.

An implacable enemy foe invades the peaceable kingdom and stagnation and fear result.  The author carries the political correct movement to a all together too reasonable (or unreasonable) conclusion.   A less than subtle commentary on the down side of the PC movement, the book has a reasonable plot and good execution.   The main protagonist is the stereotypical sergeant that some of us have actually met.  He  embodied the attributes we all want to see in our fighting men.  

The extra large foe was a little too stupid to believe but then complacency is hardly limited to fiction, just read the news. 

A good action/adventure, I hope to read the sequels.

web site:  http://www.stevehawk.com/

This book may have been received free of charge from a publisher or a publicist. That will NEVER have a bearing on my recommendations.