Hello,
Today I’m hosting a book Blog Tour – Alora’s Tear Volume 1 – Fragments.
Here’s some info about the book.
Alora’s Tear, Volume I: Fragments
There is no magic in Vladvir…
Tucked away in a quiet valley, the community of Tolarenz offers a refuge and safe haven for its people, keeping persecution at bay. One young citizen—Askon son of Teral—is destined to lead them, but first he must leave them behind: one final mission, in service of the king.
In the north, leering nightmare creatures known as the Norill gather. Their armor is bone and skin; their weapons are black and crude and cold. They strike in the night, allies to the darkness. It is to them Askon marches, his men a bulwark against the threat.
For there is no magic in Vladvir.
What Askon finds when he arrives seems impossible: smoke and fire, death and defeat, and all around a suffocating sense of dread. The Norill seek something they call ‘the Stone of Mountain,’ but in the half-remembered stories from Askon’s childhood, it was always ‘Alora’s Tear’: a gem with powers great and terrible. A gem that cannot exist.
Unless there is magic in Vladvir…
The first trilogy is complete and all three books are available from the places below. The other titles are;
Volume II, The Elf and the Arrow
Volume III, The Voice like Water
Barham Ink iBooks Amazon Nook Kobo
I’m always interested in the lives writers lead behind the stories they write. In case you do too, here’s a little bit about Nathan Barham.
📖Nathan spends most of his working days with the students of Genesee Junior-Senior High School in Genesee, Idaho. Whether it’s essay structure, a classic literary work, or the occasional impromptu dance routine, he strives to keep students interested in the fun and the fundamentals of the English language.
When he’s not teaching, he wears a number of hats, though the one that says “Dad” is the most careworn and cherished (it says “Husband” on the back). It hangs on a hook in a house where music is a constant and all the computers say “Apple” somewhere on their aluminium facades. From time to time it is said that he ventures into the mysterious realm called outside, though the occasion is rare and almost exclusively upon request by son or daughter. 📖
Want to learn more? Check out Nathan’s Author Links
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Nathan was kind enough to share some of his writer’s advice with us too. Here’s what he had to say about inspiration.
“Write to capture lightning in the largest bottle you can find. Write to collect the filings from the endless turning grindstone. Write to describe the workings of the world and all its ten-thousand thousand things. Write to explain the twisting of one elegantly green blade of grass. Write to know one person who no person has ever met. Write to know every person who’s ever been met. Write to know yesterday and today and tomorrow and times that never were nor will ever be.
Write for everything.
How can we say what drives us to scribble and click until a story appears? For each of us the motivation differs. For some, the living world of the imagination is a drug, a high borne of seeing the unseen and knowing the unknown. Others revel in the power of creating, making a world, directing the stream of a person’s life, the political machinations of a kingdom, the geology of a planet, or the forkings of a shrub’s branches as it struggles from the darkness to the light.
Still others feed on the endless organizings and orderings required to construct a story, while others enjoy narrative structures as an architect enjoys an archway, a pillar, a domed ceiling. And, whether we bury our treasures, keeping them from prying eyes, writing “just for ourselves” or shout from the rooftops, pressing pages into hands eager and reluctant alike, in the end there is a story for the world to share.
A story that did not exist before, no matter our influences or even direct emulations. Each work is a world on the page which we give to those around us, whether we mean for them to ever find it or not. That is not for us to decide, whether our work will be found, or shared. Once it is on the page, it is the world’s, though they may never discover it.
And if they don’t, what a shame! For within those characters and blades of grass and thundering storms, within those magical artifacts and technical marvels, those pastoral farmlands and dark urban alleys is a tapestry of personhood unique and complex, thoughtful and deliberate, feral and wild, demure and discreet.
Within that story, is you and me and all of us.
For those who only read and do not write, I encourage you to dip your toes into our waters starting with the top of your head. If you love stories enough to be a reader, there is a book, a poem, a narrative within you, waiting to be unearthed, washed, cut, and polished (and probably polished again—and again). Such gems could be glittering diamond, deep sapphire, fiery opal, or a wonderfully whorled glossy river stone. But no matter the market value, rarely is only one gemstone found in the mine.
Chances are, once you have extracted the first, the lure of venturing back will be irresistible, intoxicating, magnetic. Don’t fight this force. It is futile to try. And foolish. For in the days before the days before, far away from smartphones and websites, from streaming video and computer generated images, a magnet was magic, inexplicable and powerful, not to be ignored.
So when the magic tugs at your heart, follow it.”
Thanks Nathan! Make sure you check out the rest of the blog tour this book’s on. And don’t forget to give the book a read.
