Recommendation: C.T. Avis’ Inquisitor Damulis Series

I'm not the only one doing stuff out here in the wild wild web, and every so often I'll give a Recommendation of something you should read, see or do. Recommendations like this...

I live in a small town, but that doesn’t mean I’m the only writer in town. Hell, I’m not even the only writer interested in nontraditional mysteries in town.

Beating me to the punch with a few different titles is C.T. Avis (I like to imagine the “C.T.” stands for “Clydesdale Tyrannous”) with his Inquisitor Damulis series. This highly inventive and entertaining series follows the exploits of Damulis, a Shaolin-esque monk-turned- hard-boiled investigator working cases in a medieval kingdom. Put a better way, Avis’ series takes the pulpiness of a wise-cracking gumshoe and sets it loose in all the fantasy of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. 

Avis clearly has a blast writing these, and they’re a blast to read. 

He just released the third book, The Wizard’s Shield, a month or so ago, but you should start with the first book in the series, Ironedge. Why? Because you should always start at the beginning. What kind of monster are you? 

These are fun, genre-blurring reads, the kind of stories that remind you that books can be fun. Go check 'em out.

You can buy all of C.T. Avis’ books – available on paperbackand Kindle – and follow him at Amazon.com.

 

Write On: Write to the Music

There was a writing exercise my favorite teacher in high school would occasionally have us do (this was back in the pre-Common Core [TM] days, when teachers had some freedom with their curriculum). He would play a piece of instrumental music and have us write to the music. I don’t mean write to the beat – though I suppose one could have done that. And I don’t mean listening to music to help capture a tone, as I described the other week. I mean we would listen to a piece of music and write in a stream of consciousness. You could write in prose or fragments, a narrative or just a scene, where ever the music took you.

This exercise was something I’d all but forgotten about until it came time to write a particular sequence in my story. I don’t know how it came to mind, and I don’t know how this particular song came to mind (I don’t get the Led out much these days), but for the particular scene I had in mind, it was perfect. 

Have you ever done any stream of consciousness writing to a piece of music? Where does your mind go when listening to this song? Let me know in the comments below.