Two Years With Master Quan

“Did you have it planned this way all along?” The Editress asked when she finished her work on Boone 7, Novel 15, Two Years With Master Quan.

Planned? I plot, yes. I think about the lives of my characters, where they came from, where they are and where they’ll go. I think about how they get there and why. Then I write novels for readers who like to think as well.

Boone’s first and last adventure takes place before all her others, as an origin story that explored the questions to which I needed the answers. We met her at her worst, and say goodbye to her here on the threshold of the life she envisioned, pursued, and afterward endured.

Along the way, I learned to love her just a little more, and by its end pitied her as youthful enthusiasm sets her on a path to what Jon Anthony’s ancient Arab poet declared to be The Anvil of the Craftsman. It’s already been called her best yet. See what you think, and then let me know. Today it is in effective full release.

Here’s the blurb:

“It is 2004. After earning a PhD in Physiology, academic prodigy Rebecca Boone Hildebrandt, drawn to Vietnam by her lust for adventure, nears completion of another two-year course of study. Here, her instructor is a master of martial arts and former wartime-era associate of her father.

After drug traffickers expanding their operations force a confrontation with the righteous old man, operatives of the West draw him into another covert war. Thrust from a study of martial arts into their most serious application, Boone joins a face-off against a hardened criminal organization backed by local communist beneficiaries.

In their frustration, an opposition seeking to prevail proves desperate enough to kidnap an honored patriarch of his village. Boone, one French DGSE asset, and an agent of the American CIA stand as the last hope for his release from the center of a trap set just for them.”

– Kindle – Apple – Nook – Kobo – paperback –

Choose to love always. -DA

GOTR Big List of Links

Boone6/Novel12 is in full release! As promised, below are the places online where you can find Boone and Ritter’s latest adventure. Just like always, links to my catalog on major retail venues locate on the sidebar to the right.

Kindle (and trade paperback) – Apple – Nook – Kobo – Scribd

Thanks for reading, and Choose to Love. -DA

Ghosts of the Republic

What if both sides stopped caring about rules?

I wrote the initial draft of Novel12/Boone6 Ghosts of the Republic five years ago. This was during the end of the Obama administration, when a biased media was putting forth every effort in convincing the country that Hillary Clinton would be our next president.

Things change, don’t they? The ever-comforting fact is that more important things stay just as they are. Human nature is one of them, and that’s how my novels, addressing essential and universal questions as they do, seem to stay relevant over a wonderfully lengthy period of time.

Here we are at the end of another February. We first saw Boone on Leap Day, in what was set as 2012. She was in Terry Bradley’s office, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). She was dressed to the nines, catty, and drinking on duty. Despite everything in her poor first impressions, there was an underlying element of unlimited potential. Over the course of her character arc, she more than any other figure has fulfilled my catalogue.

In a sense, all my novels to date comprise parts of Sean’s File. He is in his backstory, throughout Jon’s Trilogy, and appears in every episode of Boone’s File as well. The man, in fact, appears in every novel I’ve written save one. Boone will return for her backstory retrospective, God willing, in my final release perhaps next year. Two titles in Sean’s File are queued for production before we get there.

For now, Ghosts of the Republic closes a number of character arcs for antagonists and protagonists admirable and despicable as their life choices warrant. I won’t expound on the mission of the novel here — better you discover that for yourself — more than I have in the afterword. Suffice it to say the title explores relevant themes in a way that makes me glad I could publish the thing before real life paralleled the story line.

Here’s the blurb:

“Homicides of prominent figures spike inside the Beltway, and D.C. is on edge.

Presented with an ultimatum from the Director of National Intelligence to find their killers or shoulder the blame, Peter McAllen’s people devote themselves to a singularly vital mission. Interested parties range from Congressional inquisitors to agents of a spiteful liberal news media determined to ferret out InterLynk’s every past move and present ally. None of them are helping.

Boone, Daniel Sean Ritter, and their allies navigate an alarming scenario. If prime movers are using threats to political stability in the world’s last superpower to institute a constitutional crisis, who can they trust?

Approx. 85,000 words / 325 pp print length”

GOTR is going live everywhere as I write this. I will post its Big List of Links once they are available.

Thank you. Choose to love. -DA

Setting Boone Free

James Bond? Boone never heard of her. An award-winning lead title, Absinthe and Chocolate is now a free download from most retail venues! Released as a risk-free read in mid-month, the first of five titles in Boone’s File is enjoying success on Amazon and elsewhere. Find out why, and help spread the word!

Get Boone where ebooks come alive:  Amazon – Apple – Nook – Kobo

A Garden in Russia

Boone’s fifth novel is now in full release. “Thank you” to the many fans, helpers, and readers whose enthusiasm also makes my catalog what it is.

Her latest begins moments after the conclusion of her fourth, Meat for the Lion, and largely concerns itself with the events surrounding the resulting constitutional crisis in the Russian Republic. Along the way, nearly all of my surviving characters—Boone, Terry Bradley, Daniel Sean Ritter, Thalia Kebauet, Deborah Vosse, Yael Levin, and Jon and Mary Anthony—either play a role or make an appearance, as do others old and new. Epic, excellent, and already described elsewhere as a work wherein “the emotions never stop,” I’m simply delighted with the result.

Here’s the blurb:

“Spring brings changes: for Boone, the joy of an expectant mother. Both the U.S. and the Russian Federation see tumultuous presidencies reach unexpected ends; in Moscow, the cause is death at the hands of an InterLynk associate.

Washington political operatives seek to shore up a legacy of failure in order to preserve their party’s viability. In Russia, a resurgent movement exploits political turmoil to propose governance in the style of the last century’s Cold War. To those ends, all pursue a family on the run in the Mediterranean: loved ones whose safety is critical to ensure an assassin’s testimony.

Thrust into an international, unavoidable contest of deadly professionals, Boone’s challenge is to summon her faith and overcome fears inhibiting decisive action. Justice, integrity of governance, and the narrative of history in two countries await the outcome.

Approx. 91,500 words / 329 pp. print length”

Choose to love. -DA

Kindle – trade paperback – Apple – Nook – Kobo – Scribd

Reading Boone

Leading into next month’s release of Boone’s fifth and epic title, A Garden in Russia, I have the opportunity to hand off the forum to a pair of her biggest fans, Rebecca Johnson and Claire O’Sullivan. Ladies, the floor is yours:

Rebecca: Firstly, thank you, Dale, for allowing us to guest post on your page. Claire O’Sullivan and I are here to nag Dale Amidei about his newest book discuss Dale Amidei’s first female heroine in his Boone series of espionage thrillers, a sort of international/ political Tales from the Dark Side. Dale writes complex, powerful novels that pull his characters into unthinkable situations, which is why I have temporarily given up paranormal fiction in favor of devouring his books.

Claire: Readers and writers alike, no matter their preferred genre, would find Dale’s geopolitical intrigue novels exemplary.

Rebecca: That’s some mighty highfalutin language there, but I think you’re absolutely right.

Claire: All I’m saying is that, as primarily a romance reader, I find his books a delicious departure from my usual reads, just like you do.

Rebecca: Can’t argue with you there … but about Boone: How do you relate to her character?

Claire: I think she’s a bad-arse, and I mean that in the “holy-crap-if-she-was-real” sense (and maybe she is). I wouldn’t want to get on her bad side. Respect her, yes. Mess with her, no way. I would actually like to be Boone. What about you? How do you see her?

Rebecca: Well, you know, every woman has those days when everything jells, right? The makeup and hair work, the clothes fit perfectly, the job rolls on smooth wheels. Then there’s the rest of the time, when the mirror and the closet are your enemies, and the job develops a square wheel and just clunks along, and the kids track dog poop all through the house ten minutes before the party. Those kinds of issues are hiccups in the greater scheme of things, I know, but they seem like disasters at the time. 

And then there’s Dr. Rebecca Boone Hildebrandt’s world. She’s an intel operative who deals in—how to say it?—correcting political situations detrimental to independence and freedom. She takes on the jobs no one in the real world wants to think about. Her profession involves stealth, constant situational awareness, and occasionally sudden death: both other people’s and possibly her own. She has to be good at what she does, just to survive. Dog poop on the floor is the least of her worries.  And yet, even with her youth and strength, she is full of flaws and desires. She has the same soul shadows and asks the same questions we all do: “What have I become? Did I ever have a choice?”

Claire:  I’ve read all four of Dale’s Boone’s File novels, and I’m waiting for the fifth one, A Garden in Russia. Taken together, they chronicle Boone’s journey from a flawed, confused enforcer of justice to a clear-headed confident woman who manages to reconcile her profession with her soul. She’s a cool, aloof bad-girl trigger mama in the first book, truly someone you’d not want to disrespect. But she changes as each novel unravels another of her protective layers, and she begins to thaw into something more human and fragile.

Rebecca: Exactly! And I think the title of the first Boone book, Absinthe and Chocolate, describes her perfectly. Chocolate represents everything Boone is: rich, lush, exquisite, and extreme.  Absinthe, nicknamed the “Green Fairy,” symbolized a changing social order in 19^th-century Paris, a new generation of free thinkers and transformative ideas. The Green Fairy was also the embodiment of rebellion, especially female rebellion. Boone is nothing if not transformative and rebellious.

Claire: Well, you’re just chock full of weird information. But why am I not surprised? Dale’s first book hooked me into the series. It really showed Boone’s skills as well as her flaws. But in the second book, The Bonus Pool, Boone learns from a persecuted Chinese Christian pastor how to find peace in her life, and that we all “go from darkness into the Light.” Dale is a master at crafting Boone’s reflections on the old man’s words, as she moves from her internal conflict toward peace.

That starts the ball rolling for Boone. By the end of the third and fourth books (One Last Scent of Jasmine and Meat for the Lion), she’s moved away from her despair and doubt, and into a more clear-headed sense of her purpose in life.

Rebecca: Seeing her transformation made me want to say, “Maybe I can do that, too. In my own way I can be better, if I remember that every move is always from the darkness toward the Light.” In these days of turmoil both here and abroad, that’s a good way to think, not only for Boone but for the rest of us who are still cleaning up the dog poop.

Claire: But regarding the writing—you know, Dale writes so well that there are days I wonder why I even bother. And did you ever ask yourself, how does he know so much?

Rebecca: After reading his novels with all those Special Ops and gun-related details, do you really want to ask that question?

Claire: Well, maybe no. But I do enjoy his books, because they’re not just complex in terms of characters and storylines. They address the human condition, whether it’s Boone or another character discoursing on current global and political issues. And in Boone’s case, he manages to hold up a mirror to her soul, so that she—and we—can see her heart laid bare.

‘For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.’
-Paul of Tarsus (or 1 Corinthians 13:12)

I feel like I know her better now.

Rebecca: Well enough to mess with her?

Claire: You think you’re so funny. .. 

Rebecca Johnson was born and raised in the southern United States, mostly in North Carolina with brief relocations to South Carolina and Virginia. She is by education a medical technologist, graduating with honors from N.C. State and UNC-Chapel Hill, and by preference a calligrapher, needlework designer, and graphic artist. She writes paranormal romances by night when no one is watching, and hides her manuscripts under quilting and needlepoint projects during the day. In her spare time she beta-reads for other writers, searching for nitpicking errors. She believes that God’s purpose for her life is to cause as much trouble for as many people as she possibly can, and she spends at least part of each day fulfilling that purpose. 

Claire O’Sullivan was raised in corn and cow country in the Midwest where she learned the nuances of ‘moo’ to PhD level (piled higher and deeper). She attended the University of Wisconsin at River Falls (aka Moo U) with a major in psychology, and changed minors every other week. She left Moo U and attended Lutheran Bible Institute and obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Biblical studies. She has fiddled with writing forever, and currently has several crime/romances in the works, including a comedy noir. She’s pretty sure that Rebecca is indeed fulfilling her purpose by tormenting her daily… er, helping Claire endeavor to write.

Thank you, ladies. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Boone’s novels may be found on the sidebar:
Amazon – Apple – Nook – Kobo
and other places where ebooks come alive.

Choose to love, -DA

*****

In long-awaited production news, the fifth title of my Boone’s File series, A Garden in Russia, has emerged from production editing and is preparing to publish next month. As always, the date will be announced on Facebook and via Twitter. Her Big List of Links will appear here once all retail outlets spin up.

TYP Full Release Links

A followup to my previous post: Novel10/Sean4, The Yemeni Package is here, there, and everywhere you’re likely to look. As promised, here are the links:

Amazon Kindle
Amazon trade paperback
iTunes
Nook
Kobo
Smashwords
Scribd

 

As always, I appreciate your support, your reads, and especially your reviews. Those last, especially, will never stop helping me.

Choose to Love, -DA

*****

In production news, Novel11/Boone5, A Garden in Russia, is undergoing continuity and fact checking via Content Edit prior to the heavy lifting of production editing, which will to take place through the spring and summer. More info is available by visiting my In The Works page.

Ends and Beginnings

Ends and beginnings. They are the stuff of December.

One year ends, and another begins. Perennially it is a time of fresh starts, new plans, and renewed contemplation provided by the short days and cozy nights of the winter quarter.

These twelve days of the Christmas season find Novel10/Sean4 The Yemeni Package in the last stages of editing, with external proofreading to take place as the first order of business in 2018. Ritter’s fourth should follow by the end of January, if we are so blessed. As ever, one project ends and another begins.

Ritter’s story documents the building of a remarkable man, whose appearance in each of  my novels marks him as the singular character to do so. Ends and beginnings mark his life as they do everyone’s. His story, like ours—and Jon Anthony’s, and Boone’s in their own titles for that matter—concerns itself as much with the people who contribute to the main character’s life as it is about the protagonist of any particular title.

Where does Daniel Sean Ritter fit into the catalog? Ritter is goal-oriented where Jon is contemplative. Ritter’s emotions are tightly held against the flood that sometimes releases from Boone. His strength, dominant physically, matches the other two sometimes and lags in other measures. It is his whole, his balance, that makes the man indispensable.

Mick returns in Sean’s fourth title as his mentor, Blade again as his pragmatic balance, and General Peter McAllen as ever to broaden his perspective and apply the leverage of his talents where the beam between good and evil tips most effectively. You’ll meet Samir Ibrahim, an apostate Muslim scholar upon his conversion to Christianity, and one with his own agenda in pursuing the target of the adventure.

And … Thalia. A case officer tasked with the retrieval of a known terrorist by a marginally resolute National Command Authority, Thalia Kebauet is a woman who can only be adequately described after the fact. Ritter to this day is unlikely to disagree, and that is what can be said of her for the time being.

Ends and beginnings. There is perhaps one more episode of Sean’s File in the catalog timeline between The Yemeni Package, which takes place largely in 1999,  and the 2006 pre-Surge setting of The Anvil of the Craftsman. If undertaken, it would be supplemental, not necessary. Worthwhile and necessary are not dependent attributes, though, in any but the most austere life.

Ritter’s back-story leads the chronology of my novels, with Jon’s Trilogy set in the middle as my common character universe merges into Boone’s File. Those episodes are, as I discovered along the way, all parts of the same tale taking place across three series, each in its respective decade.

All of our lives proceed in similar fashions. We too have our contributing characters, because none of us do any of this alone. One encounters them in chapters and titles while self-designating the most significant markers of one’s own timeline. Let us, as did Ben Franklin, credit its plot structure to our Author and Finisher.

Life lived well is a work of reality rather than fiction. Moment after moment is presented as part of the Whole to build we who pay attention or bless us, but never to break us. We who believe are made of God’s stuff and cannot be undone. That we exit the timeline after our designated interval marks only an end and another beginning. It will be wonderful for the faithful and horrid for the unadvocated, respective to each resultant and individual destination.

Our burden ends, you see, where His sufficiency begins. Mark your milestones and lessons along the way toward a successful conclusion and in the great hope revealed in the first Christmas season, for the appearance of Jesus is His Father’s testimony that the least life is far too precious a treasure to live accidentally. Ritter, in embracing his Pararescue Creed’s maxim, That Others May Live, says as much with his heroics.

You and I and Sean are characters each in the other’s story, and for that I am thankful. If my writing helps you along your way, so much the better. I hope to learn it was so, once we meet in endless better and brighter days.

Choose to love, -DA

*****

In production news, next month’s Vae Obscurum will be the go-live announcement for Daniel Sean Ritter’s fourth title, The Yemeni Package, God willing. Now is a great time to begin the novels of Sean’s File.

Boone’s fourth is available!

Actions have consequences, some of which are predictable … and some not. In Boone’s fourth novel, complications arising out of her covert history interfere with an attempt to start a new life.

Following simultaneous attacks in Washington and Moscow, Boone and her allies learn of what was thought to be an extinct breed of predator: Vedro Krovi (VAY-dro KROWV-yi), a company of Russian mercenaries unleashed by patrons uncomprehending of the level of commitment and ruthlessness they have unwittingly engaged.

This, while Deborah Vosse—the premier investigative journalist for her left-leaning ForwardNews network—is prompted by the murder of a colleague to examine the relationship between heads of state and the shadowy figures of international intelligence. Connections never intended for public knowledge begin to unveil those who covertly enabled or interdicted the agendas of masters or enemies.

The plot develops into Boone’s largest challenge to date, with everything she holds dear, including her beckoning life and freedom, at risk on multiple fronts.

Here’s the blurb:

“Boone, now a former covert operative, looks forward to a fulfilling marriage, new career, and brighter days. Investigative journalism by one of her country’s most prominent news personalities, however, begins to unravel a thread of actualities thought to have been classified out of existence. Actions once undertaken in the national interest threaten her new life.

When not only Boone’s people but the servants of the ill-intended and powerful are targeted for elimination, the result is an undeclared war between the keepers and the kept. Forced back into a high-stakes game against international players, she will need to call on all her resources in order to defend those whom she loves against two of the world’s most powerful men … and sins of her past.

Approx. 92,370 wds./ 323 pp. print length”

Boone’s Big List of Links:
Kindle – iTunes – Nook – Kobo – Smashwords – Scribd

Trade paperbacks at Amazon and CreateSpace!

As always, your contributions toward signal boost in spreading the word are appreciated. Read. Rock. Review. Recruit. Repeat.

Choose to love, -DA

*****

In more production news, Ritter’s fourth title, The Yemeni Package, has entered Content Edit in preparation for an anticipated first quarter 2018 release.

Your Part of the Story

Or is it You’re Part of the Story? Either sense is correct. Interconnectedness is a vital aspect of the human experience, and without an appreciation of the precept, we would each develop into someone far below our potential.

You, however, are my readers. I’m not content to leave you there.

Many worthwhile things can be accomplished on an individual level, and some of those in no way else. Even the most independent achievement, however, is the culmination of capability fostered by affecting influences. Those are the drops and rivulets contributing to the flow of who we are and what we do … for better or worse.

Likewise, each event in the past contributes its part to the composition of the current scene. Frank Capra did a better than adequate job of illustrating totality in It’s a Wonderful Life, so I won’t bother to recap his conclusions here. It’s a pity, though, that sometimes this essential realization drops while reading fiction when we so wholeheartedly embrace it watching that film. I sometimes wonder if its absence also contributes to a less-than-sufficient grasp of history generally, much less the problems this can cause with dedicating attention to a novel.

I mention every so often how much I dislike encountering formulaic fiction. Emphases vary between plot-driven and character-driven structure such as mine. One won’t find action leading the way in a Dale Amidei novel, for the same reason that unanticipated, out-of-context conduct in real life generates confusion and anxiety in its witnesses. The ideal here is removed from pulpy exploits and steeped in substance instead, and the distinction sometimes requires the accumulation of momentum in defining a character’s situation.

Structure, done from farther out than a singular or first-person perspective, sometimes requires this. I’ve never written under the latter restriction, much preferring the weave of multiple points of view I encountered in my best formative reading. Reading first was a process that stretched across four decades before attempting my own serious novel, one that ran somewhere past thirty consecutive five-stars on Amazon and once was, by one website’s weighting, the second highest-rated fiction title in the Kindle store.

Character-driven fiction requires an investment on the part of the reader in the imaginary folk he or she is encountering. Its dividend must be paid by the author, but this takes time. It also, sometimes unfortunately, requires depositing a span of attention nearly every aspect of modern life seems intent on degrading. No one, if you’ve not noticed, ever dies in a Dale Amidei Chapter One. In Chapter Two and following all bets are off … but by then you will at least have an inkling of what’s happening and why.

What and Why, now that Boone is about to appear in her fourth novel, both play a vital role in her latest adventure. The interconnectedness to which I alluded in beginning this post is coming full circle; the cascading implications of fulfilled duty in her previous title, One Last Scent of Jasmine, extends from Washington to Moscow as two of the world’s most powerful men turn to ruthless pragmatism in seeking to distance themselves from their moral culpabilities.

Boone’s fourth is now set to appear on June 28, 2017. I hope you’ll be coming along on a trip not to be missed, whether you jumped into my interconnected character universe through Jon’s Trilogy, or Sean’s File, or with Boone’s debut in Absinthe and Chocolate. She and I need your reads, your reviews, and your help in boosting my signal on social media. You’re part of this story, and once it’s finished, I promise that Boone’s will remain part of you. To produce a novel that shakes the blessed earth is my prime motivation of course, but also to go forward with you from then on. Afterward, both of us will hopefully fulfill the clear vision of our Craftsman within the remainder of what He intends.

You do your part. I’ll do mine.

Choose to Love, -DA

*****

In production news, as mentioned above, Boone’s fourth novel, Meat for the Lion, is progressing through its final quality assurance steps before publishing later this month. Once retail pages are live, her Big List of Links will appear here as a separate post.