BLOOD BROTHERS: Escape To Creeporiaby Dean C. Moore~~~~~~~~~~~~~BLURB:
Fraternal twins are separated from birth, and raised to be assassins. They were never meant to meet. But even when kept apart, they’re just too powerful. Their paranormal abilities cease to be an advantage when they can no longer be controlled. So they are scheduled for cancellation.
Their paths cross before they can be taken out. It is only then that they discover the true depths of their betrayal. Not only are they stronger when they’re together, they’re half-breeds, sired by an all-powerful warlock.
The question is, are they strong enough even together to take him on now that he’s coming for them?
They have an ace up their sleeves they are not aware of. Drawn to the same kind of women, they find themselves married to a pair of sorceresses whose magical abilities are only now surfacing.
But one encounter with dear old dad is all it takes for them to realize, they’re still the underdogs
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From the back of the book:
“The series is called Blood Brothers, but this adventure is really a family affair: the brothers, their partners, children and even their old man in a starring role as the villain. Think Disney's Incredibles, but in a violent and bizarre fantasy world.” Rob May, Dragon Killer
“With incredibly detailed world building and action scenes, this story seems like it would make a phenomenal film or TV series.
Moore pulls out all the stops with dragons, telekinesis, shapeshifters and insurmountable odds in this battle of good versus evil - and a villain who just won't lay down and die.” Demelza Carlton, Ocean’s Gift
“When you read a Dean C. Moore novel, you can expect rich, original characters, witty dialogue and unexpected plot turns. Blood Brothers doesn't disappoint.”
Excerpt :
Jared Rawlings fought to keep up with his wife Ellen, the predatory animal that was the real him threatening to break free of the placid, domesticated creature on the surface that held him prisoner.
They made their way to the latest stall, past the body odors and the dust kicked up in the dirt road by the relentless march of harried shoppers. The Moroccan marketplace was teaming with life; not all of it for sale, at least on this side of the display tables.
Ellen's eyes darted to the curios, his to the latest constellation of attackers. Whoever had sent the first one after him had abandoned subtle and understated methods.
One fez-wearing assailant, in the window two stories up, aimed his rifle at him. Another assassin, lurking in the shadows the booth over, reached for a Yemeni Janbiya under his vest.
Jared picked up a frying pan, and deflected the bullet from the shooter at the man with the short curved-blade dagger the booth over. The gunfire and ricocheting sounds were swallowed up in the mayhem of the marketplace.
He gazed at the back of the frying pan—with nary a scratch—impressed. Thrusting the pan before Ellen, he said, “I like this one.”
Having missed what was going on with him entirely, she pointed to the miniature brewer and the Arabic coffee. “A few shots of that are what you need.” Addressing the peddler, she said, “I swear, he sleepwalks through life.”
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
I write sci-fi, fantasy, action-adventures and thrillers, or some combination thereof—usually with a strong vein of dark humor. Though, my works are dramas first; the humor is there to take the edge off as with the Raiders of the Lost Ark, Transformers, and Jurassic Park franchises.
I wrote screenplays for a while, and while enjoying them, I found them a bit confining. After a while you just need the extra page count to flesh out characters better and do additional world building, especially when considering doing anything epic in scope. I also took a run at future forecasting and trend tracking, being as I always had my head in the future, things like Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. I also relished this, and can certainly see myself releasing a few titles accordingly in the nonfiction area. But since delving into novels, short and long, I’ve definitely found my home and my voice. For the first time I feel the restraints have been taken off of my imagination. I suppose all mediums have their limits, so I may end up doing a mix of things, but I suspect I will continue to spend most of my time with novels. Series add an additional dimension, allowing for even more depth and development both in the character and world building departments. But I remain at heart a divergent thinker, so, no surprise, I seem to have more series going than follow up installments at this point. That too may change over time; we’ll see. Until then, it may be best to just think of these books as one-offs if you’re fond of my writing style and some of the themes I work with.
My current catalog of twelve books represents a little over five years' worth of work. I'm currently averaging a couple books annually. Of my existing franchises with multiple installments, The Hundred Year Clone books can be read in any order, while the 5 books of Renaissance 2.0 must be read in sequence as they form part of a singular story arc (much as with A Game of Thrones.)
I live in the country where I breed bluebirds, which are endangered in these parts, as my small contribution to restoring nature's balance. When I'm not writing, or researching my next book, I may also be found socializing with friends, or working in my organic garden.
Did you do any kind of research to determine the details of your characters’ lives / lifestyles?
I find that this is inevitable when writing any kind of book, even with fantasy and sci-fi, where technically one ought to be able to get by just fine with a powerhouse imagination. But writers (the good ones anyway) are always writing themselves and their heroes into tight corners they then have to get out of. And usually that requires more smarts and more knowledge than you had going into the situation, and more ability to pull things out of a hat. Thankfully, I don’t have to be quite as smart as my heroes, because I have Google. I also have a private library of several thousand books.
In the case of Blood Brothers, there’s a strong paranormal element. We have characters moving energy through their chakras and energy bodies that allows them to move things telekinetically, or to teleport. I didn’t want to just have them be able to do these things without having some understanding of how they could do it in theory. As outlandish as that sounds there have been many documented cases over the millennia of saints, sages, Zen masters, and Shaolin monks who boasted any number of paranormal abilities. Furthermore, recent studies in psychobiology suggests that if the belief is strong enough and the mind sufficiently concentrated and focused, we can do the miraculous, whether that’s healing from cancer, or violating some of the “laws” of the natural world which may just boil down to self-limiting ideas we’ve yet to flush out of our minds.
If you want to get into the how-tos of the man into superman scenarios in any detail and depth, you’ll have to read my The Hundred Year Clones sagas, and Renaissance 2.0. The former is like “Starwars for adults” as one reviewer put it. Though in my case, I take some pains to describe “the force” and how it works. But if you’re more into living vicariously through people with paranormal abilities and are less concerned about how they do what they do, then check out my shorter titles, of which Blood Brothers is one. Here too, though, don’t be surprised if I sneak in some esoteric wisdom when you least expect it.
Who inspire you?
I wrote screenplays for some years before tackling my first novel. While there’s a Zen to screenwriting that’s quite beautiful in all its minimalism, it’s also extremely confining creatively. The very limited word count and the need to keep the action moving makes it difficult to work with deep subject matter that requires a bit more thought, or to tackle more epic tales, and more compelling 3-D characters. So when I finally set myself free, I may have overreacted, and didn’t just write a novel, but what has to be one of the biggest books out there (Renaissance 2.0). That’s when I started reading people who also write big, thick novels with a thousand plus page counts. And that’s when I ran into Peter F. Hamilton and became a huge fan. I think his The Naked God might actually be one or two words longer than my Renaissance 2.0, God forbid. I might have to go and add a longer quote at the beginning to secure my hall of fame status.
When it comes to fantasy, I’m rather partial to Terry Goodkind (love him too), and was also a huge fan of the Legend of the Seeker TV franchise that ran for two seasons. When Disney refused to continue with the series I immediately put myself into therapy. I didn’t think I could detox on my own.
Do you have strange writing habits?
I’m a binge writer the way some people are binge drinkers. I’ll write in excess and to the exclusion of all else until I have two or three titles finished before circling back to edit them. I have to-do lists going back twenty years because honestly, what’s worth interrupting the writing for, exactly? Sadly, the downside of this is sometimes strange people come knocking at my door and I suddenly realize, hmm, maybe I should have paid that bill, or run that errand, or fixed the car when the flashing light said, “service now!”
Where did you grow up?
I was born and grew up as a kid in Trinidad, an island in the Caribbean. It was a magical place to spend a childhood. Maybe that’s why I’m so partial to the fantasy genre to this day. I had a pet squirrel once that I carried with me wherever I went, a not too uncommon practice in the islands, though a bit strange by American standards. I remember my dad climbing coconut trees with a machete and me playing catch with the coconut at the bottom. There were talking parrots on the patio and colorful birds all around which sang arias—no kidding—not the short brown-colored short-tweet birds we settle for on the mainland.
I underwent culture shock coming to the U.S. (me too, me too) as Trinidadians are a very touch-feely people, and they talk inches from your face ( I had a friend from Haiti that clam that they are" too tight") . Americans have a very different sense of personal space, needless to say, and you touch someone here (imagine how it was for my 7 yo boy who didn't know English on his first year here), and it means something totally different.
When I was a kid, I think three nights out of seven we were at someone’s house party. I guess Trinidadians are a festive people that do a lot of entertaining. That’s a rare occurrence in the U.S. and perhaps limited to the rich, if it happens with that frequency at all.
Ironically, I have my head more in the future than the past, writing mostly sci-fi and fantasy, otherwise I might well delve into my rich childhood memories for any number of exotic Robin Crusoe style stories. Maybe as a tribute and thanks to my parents for having the foresight to have me there, I will yet do that.
Did any real-life political incidents or maneuvering make it into the book?
I worked in the soul-sucking corporate world for some time where plotting and scheming is unrivaled; even the Borgias (for fans of the Showtime TV series) have nothing on these people. It doesn’t matter how high up or low down you are in the company, the fierce dedication to getting over on the next guy for those few advancement positions that come up is enough to take your breath away.
I doubt my complex webs of political intrigue would be half as believable in my stories had I not underwent proper boot camp training first. So ironically, I owe them a big debt of thanks.
And as to Shakespeare’s, “All the world’s a stage” – I had no idea he was a corporate type himself or that they had corporations in those days. Too bad I didn’t aspire to becoming an actor instead of a writer; I might well be able to parlay my past in corporate America to beat DiCaprio at his own game. So yeah, figuring out how to do end runs around people that are always smarter (at least when it comes to manipulating others) and more networked than you are goes to the heart of many of my stories, regardless of the genre. Because that’s very much the plight of the little guy today.
How did you get into writing?
I can remember deciding to be a writer when I was sixteen. It would be some decades later before I actually published my first book. What was the hold up? After much soul searching, I’ve determined there really is no one answer. But the chief culprits are clearer to me now. First off, I was living in the Bay Area at the time and going to Cal Berkeley. As the Chinese say, “May you live in interesting times.” I think possibly that’s one of their curses disguised to look like a blessing, as with “May you get everything you wish for.”
Life was just too enthralling in that part of the world; I met far too many cool people, became overly engrossed in their lives and the wild adventures that accompanied them. As a consequence, if I was more the type of writer to write from experience rather than imagination, I would still not come up short, owing to a rich past of getting lost down one path or another. My meetings with remarkable men and women would continue for many years as would my travels up and down the West Coast (I was as enamored by the natural beauty as by the people.) In so much as they say you have to have genuinely lived first before you can write, I can’t say that the time was truly wasted.
Most writers, I hear, don’t settle into disciplined writing until they hit their 40s. I console myself with that statistic. Certainly when I was younger I lacked the self-restraint to finish whatever I started. I did write sporadically, but editing the rough drafts was never as much fun as chasing after the latest, greatest idea and story. I also wrote when the mood possessed me, rather than in any structured manner, meaning months or years would go by before I picked up the pen again. But with time came maturity and discipline. If I could go back and do it again, I’d make sure to write at least one book a year even during my teens, twenties, and thirties. Not doing that is definitely my biggest regret. But anyone who’s witnessed my output since then would have to admit I’m making up for lost time.
What is your favorite quote?
“Even God finds it hard to love and to be wise at the same time.” I think a lot of my characters struggle with just that dichotomy. My heroes are always in over their heads and they must figure out just how much their relationships, and love in general, can further their aims with catching the bad guy, and how much it can thwart it. They say when we love we release oxytocin, a brain chemical that literally grows the brain. So it’s not so farfetched to consider that success in difficult relationships might bode well for success with facing the various other dilemmas our hero and heroine confront in the story.
What sacrifices have you had to make to be a writer?
Lol, too many. I refer to the countless odd jobs I’ve worked to pay the bills along the way as the “wage slave” years. We need a society that encourages people to follow their dreams and that empowers them to do so at every turn, as opposed to thwarting them. Otherwise we risk wasting lives and minds. These are concerns that you can expect to surface at various points in my writing, if you read between the lines well enough. Not sure how much of that I can stuff into fiction, though; some of that might have to take the form of nonfiction.
How did you come up with the title? Names?
My titles heading into a book are almost always provisional. Rarely do they stay the same by the time I get to the end of the book. Because until the adventure is complete, I really don’t know what word or words best encapsulates the soul and essence of the story. Maybe if I was one of those people who did the whole book in their heads before committing it to paper, the way Mozart wrote his symphonies. But beyond steering a course with the compass, I won’t know what kind of seas I’m heading into until I face the empty page. And I’m always a changed person at the end of the story for all that I’ve experienced within it, hopefully wiser. So I guess it makes sense to settle on a title from that more enlightened mind-set rather than letting the older, more naïve me, decide.
What’s the worst job you’ve had?
I bused dishes in a pizza restaurant one time as a means of paying my way through college. After long hours of working with the hot water pressure hoses needed to scrub the pots, I’d come home smelling of pizza. And it seemed no amount of showering could get the smell off me. Worse, there was never a moment to slack. All writers are slackers and dreamers by nature. My best odd jobs were, by contrast, the ones with the most downtime that allowed me to get lost in my head, and, of course, to contrive my next story.
Thank you Dean I enjoy to have you on my blog!
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