The Anvil of Dust and Stars (Dark Seas Series Book 1)

by Damon Alan

  damon@damonalan.com

  Yes. I just gave you my direct author email. You can email me and let me know if you liked the book. Or if you loved it. I'll struggle to lift my head from my desk tomorrow if you hated it, but I will take your message to heart and work to improve. If you must leave a negative review on Amazon, I won't dispute you. I will embrace you as someone who has made an effort to make me better. But I'd still prefer the email. Depending on the volume, of course, I'll try to respond to each one. Believe me, I'm sitting here hoping that volume is a problem.

  One more note. Just to illustrate the highs and lows of learning to write. I was at RMFW, the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Conference in Denver in 2013. An agent who shall remain nameless was reading first pages to a room full of people. Pages submitted from the audience. Mine was in the pile, and she pulled it out. Read a bit.

  She said, “Oh, that's a fantastic first line.”

  In the one second between the word “line” and the words from her mouth that followed, my soul soared. My stomach clenched and did somersaults. My mind started thinking, “What the hell am I going to be like as a famous person?”

  But she kept talking. What magnificent thing did she say next? “Then it's followed by all these other words.”

  I'm pretty sure my jaw hit my knees. I probably drooled on my shirt. I'm thinking my thoughts went from “This woman is brilliant!” to “This woman is clueless!” in about two femtoseconds.

  Turns out she was spot on. Those words she liked are embedded in this novel, although far from being the first lines anymore. I hope the words she didn't like are gone. I didn't keep track, actually, but I am pretty sure the fifty rewrites I've done on this killed those words.

  Thank you for buying my book. I hope you become a fan. I hope to write one or two books a year for the next two or three decades. If you bought this book in 2015, and I do as I hope, you'll have been there at the beginning.

  Welcome aboard. Please strap into your grav couches, we're about to light the torches.