I am pleased to welcome Dana Marton to Intrigue and Delight for the second time. She is guest blogging here today, and introducing her new epic fantasy book, The Third Scroll.
Is There a Right Time to Quit?
You know how people say you can achieve anything if you put
your mind to it? I don’t believe in that. I know for a fact that I could never
be an opera singer or a professional athlete. Thank God, I have no desire to
become either of those things. Because I have a confession, I’m not the type of
person who knows when to quit.
“If at first you don’t
succeed, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it,” said
W.C. FIELDS, and I think he was one smart cookie.
I could have saved a lot of grief, not to mention time and
money, if I’d followed his advice over the years. There are a great many things
I regret not quitting a lot sooner than I had: a job that was so stressful it
made my stomach bleed, medical treatments that nearly killed me, etc. But the
thing I can never regret is not giving up on books. For authors, our stories
are our children. We carry them in our hearts and minds for months and months,
if not years and years, and when they’re finally born, they are part of us,
carry our DNA.
I can honestly say that my slight stubborn streak has caused
a fair amount of grief in my life over the years, but it does pay off now and
then. If it wasn’t for that, The Third Scroll, my epic fantasy, would have
never seen the light of day. I wrote this book 10 years ago. Everybody loved
it, but nobody wanted to publish it. “It straddles the line between fantasy and
romance,” they said. “Booksellers won’t know where to shelf it.”
Made no sense to me. As a reader, I want a great story and
an absorbing reading experience. I’m hoping other readers feel the same,
because after ten years, the book is finally getting published. I’ve published
close to 30 novels since finishing The Third Scroll, some of them even won
awards and were translated into a dozen languages to be sold all over the
world, but I’ve never been as nervous about a release as this one. This story
really is my special baby, a project close to my heart.
Maybe because it’s a woman’s journey to find her true worth
and her true heart and to save the people she loves. Sold into slavery, Tera, a
budding healer, is thrust into the savage realm of barbarian warlords, the same
realm which claimed her mother years ago. She must avoid the displeasure of her
warrior lord and survive the cruelties of the concubines, even as war threatens
on the horizon.
Yet a greater danger looms when she catches the eye of the
most powerful lord of the land and he takes her for his Pleasure Hall. Tera
struggles to escape, while searching for the secret behind her mother’s death.
But what she discovers challenges everything she believes in. A path set long
ago beckons. A path that could lead to triumph, or the destruction of her
world.
So what about you? Do you think anything is possible? What is
the one goal, one dream that you will never quit?
Dana
It should be available on May 1st for at Amazon for Kindle, B&N for Nook, and at Smashwords for all other ebook formats.
