Today I am very excited to welcome Dan Antion to Fiction Favorites. Dan is a blogging buddy with one of the most successful blogs, No Facilities. He also chairs the Thursday Door Prompt and has been very supportive of fellow writers and bloggers. His posts are always filled with fascinating photos and stories and are always worth a visit. Now Dan has taken his writing talent in a new direction. He has written three books and is in the process of launching the first. This is where I come in. I invited Dan to talk about the first titled Knuckleheads. I am just now reading it and can say it is entertaining. So here’s Dan to tell you all about it.
We are wrapping up the launch tour of Knuckleheads, my debut novel and the first book in the Dreamer’s Alliance series. I can’t think of a better place to end this tour than John Howell’s blog. I have been coming here for years; I read everything that John posts and I’ve never been disappointed.
Batting in the clean-up position, I asked John if there were any questions that I hadn’t already answered. Amazingly, there was one that shocked me:
“I think I would like to know what caused you to embark on writing novels. You have been an active blogger, and then you decided to sit down and write three books. These were done without a lot of fanfare, and I’m curious as to what was the trigger that made you write them?”
That’s a great question, John.
I have wanted to write a novel since I was in fifth grade. I even tried when I was in my twenties, but that’s a tragic story. Blogging gave me a chance to write and be seen/read. I started with a technical blog. I always included a small story in those posts. One day I realized other people liked those stories, and I liked writing them better than the technical stuff.
When I began blogging at No Facilities, I bounced around, but my goal was to become a better writer and to try writing something besides speeches, Annual Reports, the Company Brochure, and PowerPoint slides for myself and others to present.
I was still hoping to be able to write a longer story, but I simply couldn’t find the time while I was still employed. Cheryl Pennington encouraged me to use my Saturday bar post as a place to practice writing fiction. John may not remember this, but he encouraged me to work at writing better dialog. Suddenly, I found that I was having to inform and remind people that those posts are fiction – as is John Howell’s Bourbon.
The story that is Book 2 in the series was the story I wanted to tell. It was an idea that I had been toying with for years – a story about the power of thought – a topic in which I am interested. I retired in November 2019, and I started writing that story in February 2020.
While writing that novel, I reached a point where I was about to start including some of that fanfare you spoke of in my blog posts. Then I realized that there was a follow-up story – a sequel. That’s also when the backstory became important. When I was struggling with how to work the backstory into the book, Teagan Geneviene suggested writing it as a separate story. Suddenly, despite not knowing anything about writing one book, I had a trilogy in progress.
I’ll be honest. I backed away from the fanfare at that point because I wasn’t sure I could do this, and I had no idea how long it would take. People advised me not to publish any book in the series until they were all complete. That was good advice, but they weren’t all complete until early this spring.
I like the three stories I’ve written. Beta readers like the stories. I’m calling this the Dreamer’s Alliance series because there is at least one more story after that sequel. There also might be a story that precedes Knuckleheads – a bit of an origin story. Those are goals for 2023. Maybe I’ll offer some fanfare about those.
Thanks again for inviting me to spend some time at your place, John, and thanks for encouraging me and for sharing your name with David’s favorite bourbon.
Series Blurb
The Dreamer’s Alliance series chronicles the challenges and dangers faced by two men who have been gifted with paranormal abilities. From their struggles to understand and control these powers through their battle with the attempts of corrupt authorities to exploit them.
Knuckleheads Blurb
Zach and Billy didn’t ask for the paranormal powers that were beyond their capacity to understand or control. Zach, interacting with his lucid dreams, and Billy, “gifted “with shadowy glimpses of the future struggle to make sense of the world around them. Adults in authority in the nineteen sixties have no time for what they consider mental outliers of the baby boom. The boys are institutionalized, marginalized, and ignored. Zach’s father learns of the challenges they face as children and knows the dangers they will face as adults. With no way to comprehend how these boys perceive and move within their world, he must find a way to guide them.
Knuckleheads Links
The universal purchase links are embedded in the text below, but if they don’t work, the URL is below each one.
Author page: https://www.amazon.com/Daniel-Antion/e/B0B2MZJKJP/
Author Bio
Dan Antion was born outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He grew up and attended college in the area around western Pennsylvania. Dan has written and published the popular No Facilities blog since 2011. A lifelong interest in writing became a reality after he retired from a successful 42-year-long career in information management.
Knuckleheads, published in June 2022, is the first book in the Dreamer’s Alliance Series. This story introduces the main characters in this series, which the next two books will follow in late summer and early winter 2022.
Dan lives in Connecticut with his wife, a few pets, and all the wildlife they can feed.
