Inkshares – Page 3 – The Warbler Books

Draftshares: Science Fiction

May 30, 2016 No Comments

Greetings, friend of the Warbler! There’s a fun thing going on in the Inkshares community this week, wherein projects in the “draft” phase are being highlighted. I’m joining in this endeavor, and throughout the week you’ll see a few posts showcasing some of the exciting drafts on the platform. Today’s focus is Science Fiction. Part of the philosophy of Draftshares is to offer feedback on these drafts, so check out these drafts and let the authors know what you think One: I’d be remiss not to mention my own draft in the science fiction genre. A little boy in Gaza and a little girl in Sderot share a single consciousness. Military experiments, corporate greed, and religious extremism will permeate this novel. The Seventh Aspect: A compassionate alien scientist must prove humans are worthy of learning the truth about God – or be forced to exterminate us. The Cora Chronicles: Genesis:

Featured Author: Elayna Mae Darcy

May 23, 2016 No Comments

Happy Monday to you, friend of the Warbler! We start of the week by featured Elayna Mae Darcy, whose book, They are the Last, is currently funding on Inkshares. I want to find a single piece of the summary to point out as awesome, but I can’t beat Elayna at her own game. Take a look at her fantastic synopsis and tell me, with a straight face, that you don’t want to read this book. You can find Elayna on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and read more about her book at theyarethelast.com. About They are the Last: Piper Anderson thinks she’s alone in the world: she is forgotten and left to lose herself at Edgemont, a juvenile detention center seeking to jolt the humanity from its children, leaving them as emotionless – but obedient – shades of their former selves. All hope seems lost. Until Kath, her godmother who mysteriously disappeared years before,

Featured Author: Jonathan Dital

May 13, 2016 1 Comment

Today’s featured author, Jonathan Dital, is another author originally from Israel on Inkshares, something that makes me exceedingly happy to see. His book, And the Wolf Shall Dwell, sounds like an excellent and action-packed spy novel. Go ahead and check it out on Inkshares! About And the Wolf Shall Dwell: John is a regular Joe, a foreigner working in the city of London, like many others. On a cold London morning, in a train station, a man bumps into him and later finds his death. This incident thrusts him into a world of espionage, politics and Jihadi terrorism, and sets him in an adventure which he did not choose. A spy thriller as such, the novel is more than just action, but also a dive into the world of International Politics. Aiding a retired MI6 agent, Adam Grey, John finds himself unraveling a political scheme that ranges out of the scope of his

Asteroid Made of Dragons – G. Derek Adams

April 20, 2016 3 Comments

It is obvious that G. Derek Adams, author of Asteroid Made of Dragons, understands the trappings and tropes of fantasy backwards and forwards. It is also obvious that he has tremendous love for the genre because (and in spite) of its cheesier clichés and frequent absurdities. I’m not getting down on fantasy here. Long time readers of the Warbler know that I, too, love fantasy well, even if my interest waned of late. Adams’s book was the perfect supplement to A Crucible of Souls—a book that took itself very seriously—in reinvigorating my love of fantasy. Asteroid Made of Dragons is a self-aware, funny, and action-packed novel that is basically a Dungeons and Dragons adventure in delicious prose. It is absurd and delightful, with a great cast of characters, fun set pieces, and suffused with a larger-than-fantasy-life essence that punctuates every page of the book. It also happens to be the third book

Featured Author: Peter Ryan

April 15, 2016 1 Comment

Periodically, a book will come around that deserves some additional attention. While this one is not in the Geek & Sundry competition, it’s got eleven days remaining in its campaign. Time being of the essence, I felt it prudent to weave it in with this batch of featured author posts. Take a look at Peter Ryan‘s Sync City. About Sync City: Armed, surly and vulgar. Jack Trevayne is humanity’s best hope for the future. Just don’t tell him. Sync City is the first part of the Sync City cycle, a story set on Earth in a dystopian past, present and future. Jack Trevayne is a Keeper, a blunt, no-nonsense enforcer for a group of pacifist post-humans known as the Deacons. Jack’s responsibilities, with the help of his sentient motorbike and sometimes partner Vic, are to keep the timelines clean and protect humanity by killing the War Clans and the Scythers. He also doesn’t mind

An Unattractive Vampire – Jim McDoniel

March 29, 2016 No Comments

Now that the past few (very busy) weeks are behind me, I can focus on reviewing Jim McDoniel’s An Unattractive Vampire, which I finished a few weeks ago. It’s the second of three winners from Inkshares’s Sword and Laser contest—the first being The Life Engineered—and is a pleasure to read. An Unattractive Vampire is a humorous swing of the pendulum, a witty response to a zeitgeist flooded with angsty teenage vampires who are no longer monstrous, no longer the stuff of horror. It is a guffaw in the face of the “sexy vampire” that boldly states, “you think that’s a vampire?! THIS is a vampire!” And yet, there is angst, and kitsch, and a healthy number overly-sexualized teenage vampires in An Unattractive Vampire. And it all serves to move along an active, interesting, quickly-paced plot that rewards the reader greatly. It follows an unlikely trio, orphaned siblings, the older sister—a

The Life Engineered – JF Dubeau

March 1, 2016 No Comments

It takes courage-and perhaps audacity-to come out swinging, and I’d say JF Dubeau‘s debut novel, The Life Engineered, throws a few powerful punches that make his a book worth giving your undivided attention. In many ways, The Life Engineered is archetypical, but in other ways, it represents a novel approach to a classic medium: robot-focused science fiction. The Life Engineered, one of the Inkshares / Sword and Laser contest winners, is available today, at the end of a long and interesting road. Because of its publication through Inkshares, readers have had unprecedented access to information about the writing and publication process, and knowing Dubeau’s state of mind put some additional weight behind moments in the novel. But, as I’m learning in a wonderful book called Reading Like a Writer, it is important to look at the words themselves, rather than the extraneous meta-data of the circumstances surrounding their origin. So I

Featured Author: Zack Jordan

February 28, 2016 No Comments

Zack Jordan’s entry in the Inkshares/Nerdist space opera contest, The Life Interstellar, looks like one hellofa novel. His reader updates are wonderful, and the pitch is outstanding. I can’t wait to read this one. About the book: The Life Interstellar is a rip-roaring, unapologetic space opera. It’s set in a crowded galaxy at some undetermined point in the future where the Humans, sadly, have been exterminated. No one seems to know what happened to them, a fact which only adds to their mystique. What kind of intelligence could wipe out four trillion beings in a single Galactic year and yet make each death look like an accident? From novas to starship crashes to an isolated escalator incident on Braka IV, what made the Humans so special–or so frightening–that they warranted such treatment? This is how legends are born. Humans have been the boogeymen of the galaxy for hundreds of years

Featured Author: Christina Feindel

February 23, 2016 1 Comment

Christina Feindel’s The Revenant, another competitor for the glory of a top spot in the Inkshares/Nerdist contest, features the badass heroine we’ve all been dying to read. About the book: With its advanced weaponry, the Revenant was supposed to turn the tide of the war… but went missing instead. Ten years later, the Federation’s hold on the three suns is firmly cemented and corrupt in every way, and any Separatist hopes or dreams seem to have gone the way of Old Earth and its dinosaurs. Grayson Delamere was still a child when the war ended and she doesn’t much care why it was fought in the first place. In the vac, most lives are short and brutal with or without the Federation’s interference. She’s worked hard to keep her head low, making her living as a mechanic on any ship that’d have her… and covering her tracks well any time that ship happened to

Featured Author: Michael Haase

February 22, 2016 No Comments

Today The Warbler features Michael Haase, whose book, The Madness of Mr. Butler, looks like an interesting pseudo-Galilean tale in an absolutely fascinating setting. Read selected entries from Mr. Butler’s journal that he kept prior to the events chronicled in the novel at The Diary of Mr. Butler. About the book: The Madness of Mr. Butler is a satirical space opera packed with adventure, mystery, and drama. Swiftly alternating between character perspectives, the novel has an aggressive pace that keeps the reader locked into the story. Mr. Butler is packed with sharp turns around every corner that will drive you to read more and more until you’ve finished the entire book, reflecting on how it made you think, laugh, and wonder the entire time. The story follows Thaddeus Butler, a man thought to be insane because he is the only person who believes his world is round and floating through space. One evening, Mr. Butler

Review Archive