LHOSA Sojourner 📗

Several years ago, my oldest son Daniel suggested we build a fantasy world he could use to create Dungeons and Dragons adventures for his friends. He was interested in more than a bare-bones framework, and soon we were deep into speculations about the geography and mythological back-story of our new world.

At the time, a few years had passed since I had self-published my first novel, The Sword of God, and I was searching for my next project. I knew that I didn’t want to write another political thriller, yet still felt that my only hope of developing any kind of audience was in genre fiction of some kind. The nearly unlimited opportunities in fantasy fiction seemed ideal: I could explore characters and ideas to my heart’s content, as long as I framed it in some sort of familiar structure. Slowly, as I worked on the new world, a story began to form.

Soon enough, my path and Daniel’s diverged. I had no interest in fan-fiction, and he needed to remain faithful to the constraints of the D&D game. A few years before, I had sketched out some ideas exploring how religion and myth would be reborn in a post-apocalyptic world. LHOSA provided the ideal opportunity to flesh out those ideas.

It seems to be a requirement that fantasy novels be told as trilogies (or with even more volumes). As *Christopher Booker said, things seem to happen in threes. LHOSA is no different. This first volume, Sojourner, is primarily the story of a single individual, a coming-of-age story. Our hero finds he had unexpected and even extraordinary opportunities and abilities. Unfortunately, his uniqueness leads him to increasingly feel as if there is no good place for him in the world. As one would expect in an epic fantasy, the consequences of this will lead to world-changing events in books two and three.

If you are looking for a story full of dwarves, trolls, magical schools, sword fights, or dragons, this is not the book for you. And if you are seeking the next ultimate battle against the evil overlord, you will be disappointed. The real battle between good and evil occur inside each of us. Choices we make, even when we think they right at the time, can have profound and unforseen consequences in the future. The epic adventure may reach out and capture the most unassuming of us at any time. If this sounds like your kind of story, then I encourage you to read LHOSA Sojourner.  I predict you will love it.

*Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories.  Bloomsbury, 2004