Get ready for a great new blog tour taking place from April 14-21 celebrating two new releases from award-winning author Stephen Zimmer!
This blog tour spotlights the latest Rayden Valkyrie Tale, Darkness Enthroned, and the latest Ragnar Stormbringer Tale, The Awakening! Readers of fantasy, heroic fantasy, sword and sorcery, dark fantasy, and action-driven tales will love these adventures featuring two iconic protagonists!
This blog tour features new posts, top ten lists, and reviews!
About the author: Stephen Zimmer is an award-winning author and filmmaker based out of Lexington Kentucky. His works include the Rayden Valkyrie Tales (Sword and Sorcery), The Ragnar Stormbringer Tales (Sword and Sorcery) the Rising Dawn Saga (Cross Genre), the Fires in Eden Series (Epic Fantasy), the Hellscapes short story collections (Horror), the Chronicles of Ave short story collections (Fantasy), the Harvey and Solomon Tales (Steampunk), and the Faraway Saga (YA Dystopian/Cross-Genre).
Stephen’s visual work includes the feature film Shadows Light, shorts films such as The Sirens and Swordbearer, and the Rayden Valkyrie: Saga of a Lionheart TV Pilot.
Stephen is a proud Kentucky Colonel who also enjoys the realms of music, martial arts, good bourbons, and spending time with family.
Book Synopsis for Darkness Enthroned: In the heart of a frigid northern winter, Rayden Valkyrie takes refuge in the lands of the Sarvan people when a mounted column of Attun warriors is seen passing along the outskirts of their territory heading west.
Far from their steppe domain in the east, the Attun warriors are journeying into a remote, unpopulated wilderness, drawing great alarm from the Sarvans about their purpose. Learning of the situation, Rayden joins with a band of warriors from the area’s villages to investigate.
Following the tracks of the Attun warriors, they are led to the base of an enormous, ancient burial mound, where the trail vanishes abruptly. A mystery looms, and Rayden seeks to discover the nature of the burial mound and the reason why the Attuns have traveled so far from their homelands to enter it.
Darkness Enthroned is a stand-alone adventure that is part of the Rayden Valkyrie Tales.
Book Synopsis for The Awakening: Following the end of a brutal war, Ragnar Stormbringer travels across the sea channel to the west with the warrior Thorsalla to visit her brother’s new settlement in the fertile lands of Ulstara.
Coming upon a scene of total devastation, they find no bodies, but there are a large number of strange tracks heading in one direction and signs of a few survivors in another.
Ragnar will soon discover that some mysteries are the gateways to even greater ones.
The Awakening is a stand-alone adventure that is part of the Ragnar Stormbringer Tales.
Guest Post
The Inspiration
Behind Darkness Enthroned and The Awakening, and the Hardest Part About Writing
Them.
First, I will take a look at Darkness Enthroned, which is
one of the stand-alone adventures that is part of the Rayden Valkyrie
Tales. For this particular story, I
wanted to show Rayden in a wintry, snow-filled adventure. She hails from northern lands, but, so far,
most of the tales that I have written so far involving her have been in
temperate to desert settings (from the Dark Sun Dawn Trilogy to the other,
currently available, Rayden Valkyrie Tales like Across Desert Plains and Blood
of a Queen.)
Of course, over the course of her life journey, Rayden has
had a lot of adventures in far northern lands, and I saw this as a good
opportunity to bring one to the reader. So, for this tale, I had her sheltering
with a tribe of warriors inspired by the early pagan, Slavic tribes that
inhabited the forests of what is now Russia and the Ukraine.
I also have a fascination with large, ancient burial mounds
and the kinds of tales and myths that surround them. Couple this with my deep interest in Nephilim
lore, and I had the foundation for a plot that would work well in a remote
wilderness gripped in the depths of winter.
For The Awakening, I was very interested to tell a Ragnar
story set in a Celtic-inspired setting.
I had a great experience writing Depths of Night, which is set in lands
inspired by the Picts and their culture, but for this one I wanted to draw more
from ancient Ireland for my setting the culture found within it.
This kind of lore is rich with possibilities, from great
warrior champions, to dark magick and the supernatural, to sacred stone
formations and Druidic practices, and I brought all of these elements to bear
in the plot, setting, and characters of The Awakening. From Necromancy, to the undead, to banshees
and more, there was plenty to test Ragnar’s mettle and skill with. The nature of the kings of ancient Ireland
also gave me some good ground for the plot and setting, it led to the planting
of seeds for future stories.
The hardest part about writing both The Awakening and
Darkness Enthroned centers upon one primary area: the places of the stories
within the context of the life stories of each of these heroic characters. I have to give a lot of thought to where they
are placed in the timelines of Rayden’s and Ragnar’s lives, in relation to what
comes before and what follows these individual adventures.
For example, with The Awakening, there are elements in an
earlier adventure of Ragnar’s chronicled in Tears in the Snow that foreshadow
this adventure, and also another one that comes between the two that I have not
yet written and had published. Tears in
the Snow and The Awakening can both be read as stand-alone tales, but as they,
and the yet-to-be-written story in between them, tell parts of Ragnar’s life, I
have to keep a lot of things in mind when writing them. Making sure that everything fits in the right
places within the chronology of Ragnar’s life is, definitely, the most
difficult part of the process, and it is the same challenge with the Rayden
stories.
It is my hope that this has given you some insights into the
particular inspirations behind these two stories, and the aspect I find the
most challenging in writing them, and I invite you to join Rayden Valkyrie and
Ragnar Stormbringer on their adventures through these tales!
Author Links:
Website: www.stephenzimmer.com
Tour Schedule and Activities
4/14 Writer Groupie www.writergroupie.net Guest Post
4/14 Armed with A Book www.armedwithabook.com Review
4/14 The Book Junkie Reads https://thebookjunkiereadspromos.blogspot.com Top Ten's List
4/15 Jazzy Book Reviews https://www.jazzybookreviews.com/ Guest Post
4/16 Bowen Greenwood www.bowengreenwood.com Review
4/16 Armed with A Book www.armedwithabook.com Review
4/17 The Horror Tree https://www.horrortree.com Guest Post
4/18 Book Lover's Boudoir https://thebookloversboudoir.wordpress.com/ Review
4/19 Sapphyria's Books https://saphsbooks.blogspot.com/ Review
4/20 Marian Allen, Author Lady www.marianallen.com Top-Tens List
4/21 Amazing Gaming Productions Blog https://www.minds.com/MakeGamesGreatAgain/blogs Review
Links for Darkness Enthroned:
Kindle Version: https://www.amazon.com/Darkness-Enthroned-Rayden-Valkyrie-Tales-ebook/dp/B08R6HF3MF/
Barnes and Noble Link: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/darkness-enthroned-stephen-zimmer/1138511678?ean=2940162709091
Links for The Awakening:
Kindle Version: https://www.amazon.com/Awakening-Ragnar-Stormbringer-Tale-Tales-ebook/dp/B08W2CFYVX/Barnes and Noble Link: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-awakening-stephen-zimmer/1138858478?ean=2940162362692
thank you for hosting me today!
ReplyDeleteYou're very welcome! :)
Delete