The Showers of Blessings

My friends and visitors, I’m delighted to have a fellow blogger and an author, Dan Antion, as my guest today. I met Dan years ago at Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS) Challenge. Dan writes about his gathering at his virtual bar for SoCS. Occasionally, he invites guests to his bar party. In fact, he invited Robbie Cheadle and me over on April 20, 2022. It was a wild party with 330 comments. Robbie and I had a blast with Dan and his friends at the bar.

Dan is good at many things. I’m impressed with his woodworking, photography, and technology skills. You must visit his blog to find out more about him.

The most exciting thing of all, we’re celebrating Dan’s new release, Knuckleheads, Book 1 in the Dreamer’s Alliance Series. I’ll let him tell you more about his intriguing Paranormal Fantasy and Speculative Fiction.

Thank you, Miriam, for inviting me to be your guest, and thank you for the graphic support you provided to help me with this book launch. You have been more than kind, and I deeply appreciate what you have done.

As you mentioned, Knuckleheads is Book 1 in a series, but I didn’t start out writing a series. My original plan was to write the story that is told in the second book. As I was writing that book, I reached a point where I saw the opportunity to create a sequel. I discussed this with Teagan Geneviene, who was helping me get started. As I was discussing how the paranormal abilities the two main characters possess emerged during childhood, she suggested that perhaps I should also write that story.

This story is told by Zachary Livingston Amstead to his adult daughter on the day after his retirement party. The other books in the series begin shortly after Zach shares this story with Abbie.

That story begins when Zach and William Ignatius Terrance are in fourth grade. They are experiencing the emergence of their paranormal abilities. Billy sees the future in a limited way. He sees events that are going to happen in his life, and to a lesser degree, things that are going to happen to Zach. Meanwhile, Zach is beginning to be able to participate in the lucid dreams he has had for as long as he can remember.

Both boys struggle with these abilities. They don’t understand what’s happening to them, and they are having a difficult time controlling these powers. Both boys get into trouble, and both are helped by Zach’s father as they try to “get ahead of the situation,” as Zach’s dad puts it on numerous occasions.

The boys grew up outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and many of my regular blog readers will recognize elements from the setting as those described in various blog posts after my visits to that city. While the setting is similar in many ways to my surroundings growing up, the book is not my story. I drew on my experience, mainly because it was easier than researching another.

So far, the book has been getting good reviews, and I’ve gotten some very nice comments from people who are reading it. The few people who have read the other books in the series (they are all complete, but the 2^nd and 3^rd books are still being edited) have said that they were glad to have read Knuckleheads first.

Series Blurb

The Dreamer’s Alliance series chronicles the challenges and dangers faced by two men who have been gifted with paranormal abilities. From their struggles to understand and control these powers through their battle with the attempts of corrupt authorities to exploit them.

Knuckleheads Blurb

Zach and Billy didn’t ask for the paranormal powers that were beyond their capacity to understand or control. Zach, interacting with his lucid dreams, and Billy, “gifted “with shadowy glimpses of the future struggle to make sense of the world around them. Adults in authority in the nineteen sixties have no time for what they considered mental outliers of the baby-boom. The boys are institutionalized, marginalized, and ignored.  Zach’s father learns of the challenges they face as children and knows the dangers they will face as adults. With no way to comprehend how these boys perceive and move within their world, he must find a way to guide them. 

Purchase Links

Amazon Links Kindle Paperback

Author Bio

Dan Antion was born outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He grew up and attended college in the area around western Pennsylvania. Dan has written and published the popular No Facilities blog since 2011. A lifelong interest in writing became a reality after he retired from a successful 42-year-long career in information management.

Knuckleheads, published in June 2022, is the first book in the Dreamer’s Alliance Series. This story introduces the main characters in this series, which the next two books will follow in the late summer and early winter of 2022.

Dan lives in Connecticut with his wife, a few pets, and all the wildlife they can feed.

Contact Dan at:

Website/Blog

Amazon Author Page

Twitter

Facebook

~ ~ ~

It’s delightful to learn more about your book Knuckleheads, Dan. I look forward to seeing Book 2 and Book 3 of The Dreamer’s Alliance series.

Again, thank you for inviting me to talk a little bit about Knuckleheads, and for all your assistance with the graphics I’ve used in marketing the book.

.

Thank you for stopping by to celebrate the new release with Dan.

I welcome you to share your thoughts.

.

.

.