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Wanted: A Superhero to Save the World by Bryan Davis // spotlight, interview, giveaways

Tracey Dyck 10 Comments

As promised, I’m coming to you today with a super special post–and yes, it’s related to superheroes! Bryan Davis, one of my favorite authors ever, has just released his new middle-grade novel called Wanted–A Superhero to Save the World. I’m excited to get my hands on this fun-looking tale in the near future. In the meantime, I have the privilege of participating in the blog tour! Read on for a peek at the book, an interview with Bryan himself, and details about two super (ahem, pun intended) giveaways.


Eddie Hertz is smart, real smart. He has to be. What other twelve-year-old patrols the streets of Nirvana alone, hoping to foil the schemes of the evil Mephisto? Since Eddie is small for his age, he trusts in his Batman-style gadgets belt and acrobatic skills as well as lots of experience, like knowing how to swing across dark alleys without being seen.

Eddie has a dream, to become like Damocles, Nirvana’s great superhero. To make that dream come true, Eddie invented a device that is supposed to give him superpowers, but using it on himself is dangerous, maybe even fatal. He doesn’t have the nerve to try it.

When Mephisto unleashes an earthquake machine on the city, Eddie gets a surprising teammate — his quirky eight-year-old sister, Samantha, who comes up with an unexpected way to help Eddie in the frantic battle to prevent the biggest earthquake of all.

Since Damocles has lost his ability to help in physical form, Eddie and Samantha are the only hope for Nirvana and the world.

(Available on Amazon)

Interview with Bryan Davis

Tracey: Most of your books are Young Adult. Did you encounter any challenges while venturing into Middle Grade territory?

Bryan: The biggest issue for me was reader targeting. I looked over some current middle-grade offerings and found that they spanned quite a range with regard to simplicity versus complexity in both story and vocabulary, also in the level of seriousness versus silliness.

Because of this wide range, I decided to imagine my characters and write what felt right based on my own experiences with seven children. The story includes a blend of seriousness and quirkiness, and the vocabulary will stretch some readers, though I hope the context will allow them to figure out the words.

Tracey: What might attract some of your YA readers to Wanted, despite the fact it’s labelled below their age group?

Bryan: My YA readers will recognize my usual desire to portray sacrificial heroism and the growth of relationships. There are enough situations and dynamics that only older readers will truly understand, which makes it an intriguing read for YA as well as middle-grade readers. I think older readers will also enjoy the humor.

Tracey: I’ve been hearing great reviews from YA friends already! Considering this is a superhero story, I have to ask: do you prefer Marvel or DC?

Bryan: Frankly, I don’t like either superhero universe, with the exception of Captain America, though I have heard they are trying to take even him to the dark side.
Tracey: Who is your favorite superhero in your preferred franchise?

Bryan: As I mentioned above, I like Captain America. I always enjoy a hero who is virtuous and sacrificial while still being caring and kind.

Tracey: Amen to that. What’s the best novel you’ve read this year?

Bryan: I read Till We Have Faces for the fifth time. I have a hard time finding recent novels that I enjoy, so I often go back and reread novels I know I will like.

Tracey: As a writer, where do you get your inspiration?

Bryan: I get inspiration from dreams, my children, everyday life, and other stories. Several of my novels had their origin in dreams, including Raising Dragons, I Know Why the Angels Dance, and Let the Ghosts Speak. Regarding other stories, whenever someone else’s story really hits me hard, I analyze it to see what creates the impact. I don’t want to copy the story at all. I just want to know what gives it that punch in the gut. What aspect reaches the heart? When I figure it out, I try to do the same in my story without copying the other story’s device.
Tracey: Writing being a form of self-expression, many authors put parts of their own personality, quirks, or struggles into their characters. You may or may not have done this, but regardless—which of your characters is the most like you?

Bryan: From Dragons in our Midst, Professor Hamilton reflects my analytical side, Jared Bannister reveals my fatherly side, and a trio of females, Bonnie Silver, Sapphira, and Acacia display my spiritual ideals. Last but not least, from Tales of Starlight, Adrian Masters lives out my chivalry principles.

Tracey: Ah, SIX of my favorite characters! What’s one mistake you see young writers consistently make, and could you share some advice on how to avoid/correct it?

Bryan: The most common mistake I see is in how they develop the characters and story world early on. Some jump right into the intense action before developing the characters and story world, which disconnects readers since they don’t know the characters well enough to care about them during the action.

Some young writers dump loads of information about the back story without progressing the main story at all. I see that problem most often with dialogue dumping, that is, having two or more characters talking for several paragraphs, thereby revealing past events. Yet, nothing really happens except for dialogue and maybe a smattering of interior monologue.

The best approach is to give the main character something to do, a goal to achieve no matter how small, then have that character go about the business of getting it done while giving readers clues regarding the back story and the story-world’s environment in a natural way.

Tracey: What was the most enjoyable part of writing Wanted?

Bryan: I enjoyed the blend of seriousness and quirkiness. There are many light-hearted moments to provide comic relief. At the same time our heroes have to suffer through quite a few dangerous sequences while growing in their relationship to each other. The combination of fun and thought-provoking events was a pleasure to write.

Tracey: I can’t wait to read it! What are you working on next?

Bryan: I am working on a young adult space adventure tentatively entitled Search for the Astral Dragon. It’s about Megan Willis, a 12-year-old girl who, through a series of strange events, becomes a military space cruiser’s mechanic. Her parents were arrested for space piracy, and Megan was allowed freedom as long as she served under the military ship’s captain. This captain takes her on a mission to find his kidnapped son. She learns later that this captain had ulterior motives for bringing her along, to become bait to draw the kidnappers out from hiding. Yet, the deeper she digs into the secrets, the more she learns how dark the motivations of both the captain and the kidnappers are.

I am also trying to find a publisher for Let the Ghosts Speak, an adult novel that is a combination of historical thriller and supernatural intrigue.

Tracey: I’m definitely looking forward to both of those. Thanks for the great interview!

About the Author

Bryan Davis is the author of the Dragons in Our Midst, Oracles of Fire, Children of the Bard, the Reapers Trilogy, Dragons of Starlight, Tales of Starlight, and the Time Echoes Trilogy, fantasy/science fiction/dystopian novels for youth and adults. His first novel, Raising Dragons, was released in July of 2004, and several books in that series have hit various bestseller lists, including Eye of the Oracle, which hit number one on the CBA Young Adult best-seller list in January of 2007.

Bryan was born in 1958 and grew up in the eastern U.S. From the time he taught himself how to read before school age, through his seminary years and beyond, he has demonstrated a passion for the written word, reading and writing in many disciplines and genres, including theology, fiction, devotionals, poetry, and humor.

Bryan is a graduate of the University of Florida (B.S. in Industrial Engineering). In high school, he was valedictorian of his class and won various academic awards. He was also a member of the National Honor Society and voted Most Likely to Succeed.

Bryan and his wife, Susie, work together as an author/editor team to create his imaginative tales.

Here are some places you’ll find this superhero-in-disguise lurking about. Go stalk him and say hello!

Giveaways

By now you must be chomping at the bit to get a copy of Wanted, am I right? Right! The generous author is hosting not one, but TWO giveaways/contests!

#1

Prize: Winner’s choice of any Bryan Davis book, plus a Wanted: A Superhero to Save the World t-shirt and bookmark.
How to enter: It’s a simple Rafflecopter drawing. a Rafflecopter giveaway

#2

Grand Prize: All the items from #1, PLUS a complete Bryan Davis series of the winner’s choice OR a $50 Amazon gift card.
How to enter: This one requires your involvement! Every participating blog has hidden a number in their post. So your job, hero, should you choose to accept it, is to read every post, add all the numbers up, and enter that sum into the giveaway form:
a Rafflecopter giveaway
There’s a lot of great bloggers in this tour–you may want to give them a follow as well!
Speaking of which, you’ll find the full list of participating blogs at The Author’s Chair right HERE.

Are you looking forward to reading Wanted as much as I am? (Or maybe you’ve read it already!) Who’s your favorite superhero? Remember, as soon as you’re done here, head on over to the list of blogs and start adding those numbers! 🙂

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Author Spotlight: Bryan Davis

Tracey Dyck 16 Comments

Last summer I posted my first Author Spotlight, in which I flailed about Ted Dekker. Has it really been over a year since that spotlight post? It’s high time for another, this one on another of my top favorite authors of all time . . .

Bryan Davis! (Link leads to author website. Check out his Facebook, Twitter, and especially his awesomely helpful blog, The Writer’s Chair.) With 28 books published and more to come, he’s a fantastic author with masterful skill.
C.S. Lewis introduced me to fantasy, and Wayne Thomas Batson beckoned me into modern YA fantasy, but Bryan Davis locked me into that genre for good. I received Raising Dragons on my thirteenth birthday, and the Dragons in Our Midst storyworld was a place I lived throughout my teenage years. It feels like Billy, Bonnie, Walter, Ashley, and many other beloved characters are my friends. They took me on such a wild ride, and taught me so much.

Billy Bannister taught me to fight with truth as my sword and faith as my shield.

Bonnie Silver exemplified trust in God and a steadfast purity.

Walter Foley made me laugh.
Ashley Stalworth showed me how to surrender.
Sapphira Adi was a picture of longsuffering.
These books showed me what a true hero looks like. It isn’t perfection, not an absence of doubts or a lack of failings. They question, they make mistakes, but they press on anyway. They hold fast to the good, the true, and the beautiful, even when it’s incredibly hard. Characters like these give me something to aspire to.
And come on, humans with dragon traits like wings or fiery breath or danger sensing? How cool is that? Dragon slayers, weapons like Excalibur and candlestones, legends of King Arthur, multiple dimensions, flying demons, Nephilim, epic battles . . . This is really fun stuff, guys. (I mean terrible. A lot of that is awful for the main characters. But undeniably fun for us, right?)
Another thing in which Bryan Davis excels is complex plots driven by complex motivations. (And he’s not an outliner! How does he do it?!) Twists and turns and revelations are a given in any of his books.
Anyway, I’ve been focusing primarily on Dragons in Our Midst, but that’s only four books. Before I carry on to other series, I do want to mention the reading order, because it may be confusing for new readers who aren’t sure where to start. DIOM is followed by two more four-book series, Oracles of Fire and Children of the Bard. Here’s how to read them.
Dragons in Our Midst
1. Raising Dragons
2. The Candlestone
3. Circles of Seven
4. Tears of a Dragon
Oracles of Fire
1. Eye of the Oracle
2. Enoch’s Ghost
3. Last of the Nephilim
4. The Bones of Makaidos
Children of the Bard
1. Song of the Ovulum
2. From the Mouth of Elijah
3. The Seventh Door
4. Omega Dragon
There. Aren’t I benevolent? Now, DIOM and Co. are what people usually think of when they hear the name Bryan Davis, and as amazing as those books are, they shouldn’t outshine the rest of his equally amazing novels.
There’s the YA tetralogy Dragons of Starlight and its companion trilogy geared for adults, Tales of Starlight. These take place on a couple different worlds–one in which brothers Jason and Adrian Masters live, and the other where dragons have enslaved humans. Both Masters brothers wind up on different quests to release the slaves, and it’s intriguing to see how their stories intertwine but can still be read separately. Once again, Bryan Davis delivers an epic tale with heart, humor, and conviction.
There’s the more mainstream dystopian Reapers trilogy, (Reapers and Beyond the Gateway are published, but the third has yet to be released). Unfortunately I haven’t read these yet, but I love the concept of these Reapers escorting souls to a gateway to the afterlife, and discovering that something shady is going on.
There’s the Echoes from the Edge trilogy (consisting of Beyond the Reflection’s Edge, Eternity’s Edge, and Nightmare’s Edge). It’s so mind-bending you have to read the books close together, or else you may lose track of things. It gets complicated to have three versions of each character, some alive, others dead, and mostly all worldhopping–but it’s SO FUN. A creepy villain, awesome mirrors and violins and cameras . . . This trilogy is seriously underrated. It’s currently out of print, but Bryan Davis has been revising them for republication with different titles.
There’s a standalone novel, I Know Why the Angels Dance, which takes a thoughtful and heartrending look at death, grief, and hope. There’s a children’s book, Beelzebed (another I have yet to read), that takes place during DIOM character Walter Foley’s childhood. There’s even a couple of nonfiction books. Oh, and if you like graphic novels, Raising Dragons has been turned into one, and it’s very fun.

Basically? Go read them all.

Although his craft has grown since his first book, you can count on several things in each and every Bryan Davis work you pick up: deep characters, strong faith elements, awesmazing plots (awesome + amazing = awesmazing, you guys, get with the program), and quite often dragons. And we all know how much I adore dragons.
This author has hugely impacted me as a reader and as a writer. I’ve had the chance to meet him in person,* and the faith he proclaims in stories, he also lives out in the real world. If you’ve been longing for more dragons in your life (correct answer: you have been), I highly recommend his books. And even if dragons aren’t your thing, but music or dystopians are–there’s some of that, too.
*My family actually had him, Mrs. Davis, and two of their daughters over for supper when they were on a book tour. We had great conversations, he signed all my books, and I got the chance to go over some edits on my work (from both Mr. and Mrs. Davis) in person. It was one of the best days of my life.

taken September 2012 // this pic turned out blurry for some reason


His books are the perfect illustration of this quote:

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” -Alburt Camus

By taking us to other worlds, he shows the truth of good and evil, of hope persisting in the midst of doubt, of  love spanning time and heartbreak and bottomless rifts. Maybe it sounds sappy, but his stories are truly an inspiration to me.

And now I’ll stop talking, because “Too much information can make your brain choke.”

Have you read any of Bryan Davis’s books? Do you have a favorite book or character of his? And if you’re new to this author, do any of the abovementioned novels pique your interest?

P.S. This is my 101st post! Crazy!

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Author Spotlight – Ted Dekker

Tracey Dyck 29 Comments

Ted Dekker, Christian  mystery/thriller/fantasy author, has published over 40 books in the last 15 years. (I’ve read 27 of them so far!) With 10 million copies sold worldwide, methinks this guy knows what he’s doing.

First off, I can’t tell you how much his novels have impacted me as a writer and as a person. Every single book is not one story, but two. First he arrests your attention with a gripping plot and fascinating characters–that’s the surface story, and it’s always strong enough to stand on its own.

But then partway through, you realize that a second story is unfolding beneath the first. I can’t remember reading a Dekker book that didn’t give me at least one “aha” moment. This underlying tale is the one that pulls you to a different vantage point, where you can rediscover something you’ve always known and find refreshment in the new angle. Or, more often than not, it’s the tale that hits your heart like a train, blasting apart some piece of your world and leaving you to sort through the fragments and put them back together the way they were meant to be.

Yes. His books have been that life-changing. Some have even gone so far as to impact how I think, and I find myself using some of his images and terms in the way I relate to God, myself, and the world.

See, Dekker is anything but conventional. If you’re expecting one of his books to fit a certain mold, he simply walks right past it and shows you something else. At times, that ‘something else’ is downright strange, I’ll admit. Boneman’s Daughters kept me up at night. When my dad and I went through a bedtime stories kick a few years back–for old time’s sake, you understand–House, coauthored with Frank Peretti, had a similar effect on me. Showdown, among others, left me looking a bit like this.

And shall we just say that I occasionally wonder about Dekker’s sanity, because of the disconcerting depth of his psychotic characters. Just kidding . . . sort of. 😉

If you’re wondering at this point if the strangeness is worth picking up a Dekker book, I say “yes” and “maybe” at the same time. They’re not for the faint of heart; many of them contain dark portions. But if you’re willing to step into a vivid, wild adventure, do. Because the darkness serves a purpose. In this interview*, Ted says, “All of my stories take someone through a dark valley . . . to discover the light beyond.” All of his characters come to the end of themselves, to a place of surrender. And it is there they find truth.

Redemption.

Freedom.

There is always light at the end, and it shines far more gloriously than it would have without the valley journey.

*I only watched the first half of this interview, because the second half dealt with books I haven’t read yet. Supposedly there are no spoilers, but I’m not risking it! Anyway, the first half was really good.

So. Recommendations? I’m glad you asked! I first read the Circle Series (Black, Red, White, and Green, which is Book 0 and can actually be read first or last). I think it’s a great starting point. Fantasy/real world crossover, beautiful allegory, thrilling plot, devious bad guys. If you enjoy those four books, there are other series connected to this one, mainly: The Paradise Novels (Showdown, Sinner, and Saint); and the YA series called The Lost Books (Chosen, Infidel, Renegade, Chaos, Lunatic, and Elyon–you’ll notice the beginning letters spell circle). I’ve found some hidden connections to this storyworld in other novels as well, but these are the main books.

Another series I highly recommend is one he coauthored with Tosca Lee: the Books of Mortals trilogy. Dystopian with a medieval fantasy flavor, more stunning allegory, and a flat-out amazing premise. Basically, no one feels any emotion except for fear, which is deemed the only emotion necessary to survival. Of course there’s a tantalizing “until . . .” tacked onto that, because certain characters stumble upon a means to reawaken themselves and–that’s all I’ll say for now. Seriously. Go read them now.

If an entire series is too daunting to get into, he’s written a number of excellent standalones. Thr3e is mind-blowing.

I’d say his books are normally upper YA to adult, so if you’re younger than 16, tread with caution. (If I remember correctly, I read Black when I was 14 or 15, which seems quite young to me now.)

Tell me, questers: have you read any Dekker? What did you think? Any favorites, or is his style just not for you? If you haven’t read anything of his yet, feel free to ask questions! There’s nothing a bookworm likes better than to share the wealth of yummy tomes with her fellow bookworms.

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