"Nuru" is for sale online

I'm proud to announce the release of my first novel, "Nuru."

I've been working on this project off and on for the last four years, interrupted periodically by new jobs, moving, and life in general. Self-publishing your first novel is a learning experience and I hope to share some of what I learned about the process over the next few weeks. Either way, this was a big step for me and I hope everyone enjoys the book.

It's a fantasy novel that follows the title character, Nuru. A teenager in a band of nomadic herders, his peaceful life is interrupted following an attack by a force of monstrous creatures out of legend. Finding himself alone in a hostile world, he has to navigate through remorseless cutthroats, scheming politicians, and mysterious forces marshaling in the darkness.

I wanted to create an adventure story. Something fast paced, but rich in lore. I wanted something readers could see clearly in their head with likable interesting characters. Whether I succeeded, I leave up to readers.

Like a lot of what I am writing there is a big focus on the concepts of good and evil, but I tried to find the human beings balanced between the two. Another big focus in the story is on loss and trauma as well as how they deal with it. The story focuses mostly on young people who have dealt with issues people twice their age would struggle with. There's a coming of age element that I hope people can relate to. We all have baggage, some of us more than others.

I approached the novel as a traditional fantasy story, but instead of building the world of the characters around the traditional pseudo-European model with castles and knights and fae creatures, I built it around traditional African culture and folklore. While I am hardly the first author to do so, it is still a very underutilized (yet incredibly rich) source of inspiration. Although it is a fictional world that stands apart on its own, my mental approach was asking what would have been happening on the other side of the world when Frodo was trying to destroy the One Ring or the Seven Kingdoms were fighting over the Iron Throne. What kind of stories could be told in these other lands with these other peoples?

The original drive for the idea came from discussions I was having online. I've always been a bit of an apologist when it came to the focus on traditional European culture in traditional fantasy; at least to an extent. I would argue that if the culture was supposed be inspired by western European cultures, it would make sense the people in the stories would be modeled after those in the same region. However, the question I kept hearing was "okay, then where are all the fantasy stories inspired by other parts of the world?"

And they were absolutely right. I needed to widen my horizons and I started to look at why fantasy as a genre seems to maintain so many of the same tropes from series to series to series.

What people often forget is that all of modern fantasy can be traced back to J.R.R. Tolkien, and one of the things Tolkien was trying to do with the Lord of the Rings and his other writings on Middle Earth was create a sort of alternate mythology for Britain. That's one of the reason there's so much Celtic and Norse influence in the cultures of Middle Earth. This fits with the world he was building and it made sense for the story he was telling.

However, the problem was that people who were influenced by Tolkien hewed too close to this approach so nearly all of what would become known as the fantasy genre was stuck on this pseudo-European medieval culture for a long time. While a few writers bravely broke away from this model, most were happy enough to keep writing about dwarves and elves and knights in shining armor. And don't get me wrong, I love dwarves and elves and knights in shining armor. I love "The Lord of the Rings" and "A Song of Ice and Fire" and "The Wheel of Time." But while I love taking inspiration from such creations, I wanted to try something different - and something that pulled me out of my comfort zone. I didn't want to make a new "Lord of the Rings," because I never could. I'm not going to out-Tolkien Tolkien. I can only be me, and that meant finding my own voice and that meant doing something different than the things I had read.

So, I ended up with "Nuru." It's intended as the first in a series; a series of how many I will have to wait and see. Although I do have an overarching outline for where it will go, how long it takes to get there is still to be determined.

It can currently be purchase at the Kindle Store on Amazon and can be found at: https://cutt.ly/xrxcNXH

A paperback release will take place in the next few weeks.

I hope you enjoy the book and I hope it is an enriching to readers as it was for me as a writer.

Eamon