Friday, January 23, 2015

Dynasty Z... Egypt's mysterious age where a young king must battle the demigods (Mythic Egypt fiction)


Dynasty Zero. A primordial clash of humans, gods and demon demigods.

A young demigod boy Nemes, a future unifier of pharaonic Egypt, also known to history as Narmer, lived on the fault line between deity and humanity. It was a time of the gods and demigods, when the throne of the god Horus shook and the weak hands of men stretched out to catch the crown and seize the scepter of Egypt.

The demon demigods did not stand by, but seized the moment to strike.

Monday, January 19, 2015

Why were these 8 people chosen to road-test VIRTUAL ETERNITY, a mysterious ancient Egypt simulation?

On Amazon Kindle




Eight very different people are chosen to road test ‘VIRTUAL ETERNITY’, an ancient Egyptian virtual reality simulator housed in a complex on the estate of tech billionaire Brandon Viking, a lifelong lover of Egypt’s past.

Each wears a tag – Sage, Robber, Scribe, Prophetess, Gamer, Soldier, Priest, and Neophyte. They must race through the twelve hours and zones of the ancient Egyptian underworld night to reach the end of the journey before dawn, but only if they can survive hideous dangers along the way.
Then, shockingly, a journeyer is killed... really killed, it seems.
They are in a race against time and a struggle against the guardians and monsters of the underworld as well as against each other.
Enthralling adventure novella that hits the ground running.
‘VIRTUAL ETERNITY – A journey through ancient Egypt’s underworld' - shocking reality, or deadly Virtual Reality?

Friday, January 9, 2015

UPDATE: "The monkey of ancient Egypt on my back" - an adventure thriller author enthralled for life

Photo: one of my early trips to Egypt – and that monkey on my back.

After being immersed in dreams of ancient Egypt since I was a child, it’s difficult to get the ancient Egypt monkey off my back.

I've written a small library of Egyptian adventure fiction titles:- The Smiting Texts, The Hathor Holocaust, The Ibis Apocalypse, Rising of the Nile Gods, Egypt Eyes, The Forbidden Glyphs and The God Dig (the Anson Hunter alternative Egyptologist series).

Then there are my stand-alone works like The Egyptian Mythology Murders, The Delta Dilemma, The Ra Virus, Aeon Jump:Ancient Egypt and Vengeance of the Mummy God.

(Not to mention my children’s ancient Egypt titles.)

He who drinks from the Nile waters of inspiration will always return – to paraphrase a saying.

I start to look back at my earliest writing influences – Rider Haggard, Mika Waltari, Ernest Hemingway, C.S. Forester, Alistair Maclean, Ian Fleming, to name a few.

They stuck to the knitting, with few exceptions. (Should I too? I always said that a writer should be allowed his subject.)

I look back at an unusual and nomadic life lived in Central and Southern Africa, and now in Australia.


I feel I am engaged in a kind of archaeology of my past in a search for inspiration. Will I keep on turning up Egyptian artefacts?

I’ll keep digging. Maybe something different will gleam down there in the next layer…
My first published story was actually a spy short story,  appearing in The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine New York, in the same issue as an Ian Fleming story and so of course, instead of embarking on a career writing spy novels, I became an adman, copywriter and Creative Director in a slew of multi-national advertising agencies, while I flirted on the side with my first loves of fiction writing and ancient Egyptian history.

(My best known advertising campaigns were ‘Natural Gas - The Living Flame’ for AGL and ‘Cancer is a word, not a sentence’ for the Australian Cancer Society.) 

I didn't rush things and thirty years later published 13 children’s novels in a period of about four years, seven of them Egypt-based, the rest Australian fantasy adventures.
 
Then came my first adult novel, an archaeological thriller The Smiting Texts and 7 novels in the series as well as the stand alone books.

One thing is a constant.

I am addicted to escapism.

Today I am on the road with my wife Brenda and a dog Anubis, writing fiction as I explore in a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van RV and I still keep my advertising skills sharp by writing occasional freelance advertising appeals for several causes and charities.


For fiction "that grabs hold of you and won't let go, even after you turn the last page" - see these titles on Amazon Kindle
or here on my blog






UPDATE 2023: Egypt is clearly something I can't shake - my collection of titles today

Thursday, January 1, 2015

Can we assume that the movie #ExodusGods&Kings got the pharaoh right (at least) with Rameses Il?


Did Ridley Scott finger the right pharaoh in Rameses the Great?























"Some academics have tried to muddy the waters of the Nile and disputed Christian tradition that Rameses II was the Pharaoh of the Exodus, who defied Moses and refused to let the Hebrews go. This, no doubt, is their agnostic reflex at work. Rameses The Great in the role of the titanic villain is just too auspicious and biblically corroborative for them. They’d prefer a lesser pharaoh, which would have the effect of discrediting scripture and reducing the scale of the drama.

"But the identification of Rameses has never been satisfactorily disproved. The fingers of Rameses are all over this affair and his identification goes back to The Book of Exodus and receives further confirmation by Eusebius of Caesarea, father of church history.

"I contend: if the pharaoh of Exodus looked like Rameses the Great and behaved like Rameses (he press ganged the work force into building a new city in the Delta called Raamses, as the Bible tells us) and felt like Rameses (he was a megalomaniac who was not going to be pushed around by anyone, including Jawveh) then he probably was Rameses..."
Excerpt from the novel The Ibis Apocalypse
NOTE: As the leading Rameses scholar Ken Kitchen points out, Moses made appeals to pharaoh on a daily basis - and that could only have been to Rameses II at his Delta city of Pi-Rameses (in the vicinity of the Israelite's region of Goshen).