Welcome to the Blog Tour & Giveaway for Quest of Fire: Shadows at Nightfall by Brett Armstrong, hosted by JustRead Publicity Tours! Keep reading for my Q&A with Brett!
SHADOWS AT NIGHTFALL
Series: Quest of Fire #3
Author: Brett Armstrong
Publisher: Scrivenings Press
Release Date: September 2021
Genre: Christian Epic Fantasy
The shadows of Jason’s past have caught him. Having stepped into the Quest of Fire, Jason is pursued by a league of assassins formed of pure darkness. To his horror he discovers these creatures also were contracted to eliminate Anargen and his friends as they sought to understand the Tower of Light’s oracle. To unravel the mystery of who wants him dead and how he fits into the ages old quest, Jason must travel the lengths of the Lowlands. In the Ziljafu deserts a secret awaits him that will shake him to his core. He’ll have to move fast and cling fiercely to hope, as Anargen’s story twists down a bleak path to almost certain failure.
The creatures of darkness in the Lowlands have long waited for men to spurn the High King’s laws. With few concerned for the light and everything falling apart around them, Jason and Anargen will face the shadows of night’s falling as their world hangs in the balance.
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Hi, Brett! Welcome back to the blog!
Brett: Apples for eating, because I really like crunchy fruits and veggies but oranges for juice drinking. There isn’t much that helps soothe a sore throat more than a glass of orange juice.
Carrie: And orange juice is packed with great vitamins (even though I’m sadly allergic to it)
Brett: My little boy obligates me to say dogs, because he loves them. He even has a shirt that my wife made him that says “Got Dogs?” because every time we go out he asks people if they have one. Though, ironically, we have a cat we adopted when we realized it was a stray and wasn’t getting the medical care it needed for an injured ear.
Carrie: that’s so cute about your little boy!
Brett: My wife obligates me to choose Hallmark Channel. I generally watch things that interest her in the evenings, though she also gives the things I like a go and we shoot for meeting in the middle whenever possible.
Carrie: an excellent compromise 🙂
Brett: I love both, but I can live without audiobooks as a writer, but music is so hugely inspirational to me for capturing the tone and feel of a scene and helping me to put it to words, I have to have it.
Carrie: I have to have music too – I don’t care for audiobooks as a general rule. But music is always playing while I blog or do work for JustRead.
Q: Around here I like to say that reading is my superpower. If YOU had a superpower, what would it be?
Brett: For better or worse, I would say over-analyzing things is my superpower. I have a tendency to look at situations from a dozen different angles. It can be helpful at times, like for my day job working with infectious disease data. Other times it can be kind of a hinderance, like say when my wife asks me what I want for dinner or where we should go together. She would prefer a decisive answer but I get a little frozen up trying to find the perfect answer, which usually results in no answer. For writing it can be helpful with world-building, because it’s so multifaceted it can be easy to lose track of aspects of the story world or put incongruous elements or ideas into it if you don’t look at it from a variety of angles.
Carrie: My husband is the same way! It’s definitely a superpower, like you said for better or worse lol
Q: Which books are “on your nightstand”?
Brett: As it happens, I have several books literally on my nightstand. There are two study Bibles, one the newer CSB translation study Bible and the other an Apologetics study Bible. A friend inspired me to pursue a reasoned defense of the faith and since I enjoy learning math, history, languages, science, and theology it seems like a good place to put my energy. With it is Unger’s Commentary on the Old Testament. Also on the nightstand is a well-perused collection of all seven Chronicles of Narnia books, a Green Lantern comic a friend from work insisted I should read, several middle grade/YA books my wife bought me to read (it helps me with writing for those audiences), and a little homemade book my son gave me for father’s day when he was four. I keep them there perennially, because each of them is special to me and what I most want on hand for restless nights.
Carrie: I love the variety – what a great stack of books!
Q: Writing spaces are as diverse as authors and books. Where is your favorite space to write?
Brett: I suppose I have the diverse writing spaces covered. I feel like I do my writing everywhere I go. I’ve written at work, while driving, while brushing my teeth at night, at restaurants, anywhere and everywhere that the story comes alive and catches my attention strongly enough that I feel like I have to jot it down. For driving and other situations I have to wait of course, but I tend to run through important or complicated scenes several times before I actually start writing them. The feeling of finding just the right fit for a scene is so great that it doesn’t matter so much to me where I am physically so long as my imagination is firmly fixed in the story’s world.
Carrie: that kinda matches how/where I read haha – ‘everywhere I go’ 🙂
Q: Some authors like to hide little things in their stories. Is there anything you have hidden in Shadows at Nightfall?
Brett:There are a number of easter egg type quotes in the book that are homages to other stories I’ve liked. The most fun hidden nugget is a shoutout to the artist who inks the artwork in the book. He’s an entomologist by day so he likes to perform scientific “studies” on the creatures I ask him to include in the book’s artwork. He wrote up a fun mock biology text entry on the boggart in Quest of Fire: Succession so there’s an excerpt from that fake biology book in Shadows at Nightfall at a rather key pivot point for the story set in that world’s Modern Era.
Carrie: oh that’s fun!
Q: What is one of your favorite quotes from Shadows at Nightfall & why do you love it?
Brett: Interspersed throughout the book are journal entries from the protagonist of the Middle Era, Anargen. His journals are what the Modern Era protagonist Jason is reading and every so often the journal entries give me the freedom to say things a little more bluntly, so I really like:
“The more we see of the world, the more I wonder how we could ever go about imagining it to be wholly full of decency and ease. There are things in this world that would deeply unsettle us. But perhaps that is why we don’t look. No one wants to see what waits within the shadows.”
Which I think is true of our world. There are bad things, but most of the time we try not to see or think about them. Among them is how harsh the persecutions are for Christians in some countries. As believers we’re called to pray for those suffering as though we are suffering with them. (Hebrews 13:3) I wish I would do a better job of seeing them, because their stories are heartbreaking when you hear them and also incredible and encouraging. I can’t change their situation directly, but if my stories lead others to join in praying for them then we’re as a body following a command in Scripture and lifting them up before God Who cares for us deeply and has no limits.
Carrie: Amen ♥
Thank you so much for taking time to talk with me! 🙂 Before we say goodbye for today, tell us what‘s coming up next for you.
Brett: I have two novellas in the works that are set for release next year in September and October. The first is the next Quest of Fire book that pairs with the most recent novel release Shadows at Nightfall. I’m tentatively calling it Quest of Fire: Devastation. In Shadows at Nightfall one of the main characters go off on his own and you don’t get to see what happened with him. The novella answers that question, gives more context to the schemes going on sets up the series for the next novel which I’m also working on.
The other novella is going to be part of a collection or maybe it would be better to call it a collaborative novel I’m doing with two other writers, Erin Howard and C. Kevin Thompson. It’s a story of three college students who make a strange discovery and are each transported to different worlds. There they face everything from what angelic creatures at war to a sinister plot involving an all-seeing AI to a fantastical kingdom awaiting help from an outsider. Each story is in a way about what it means to go home. We’re calling it The Near Distant. My story is the AI one and is letting me explore an alien civilization that is a “utopia” of innovations millennia ahead of ours and yet the character who arrives there, Tyler, is miserable and after a decade stuck there gives up. But the story is a bit like the Biblical book of Esther in that he is in the right place and of the right nature to be what that world needs when the AI handling all of the civilization’s interstellar travel is highjacked for nefarious purposes.
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(2) winners will receive a $10 Amazon gift card, print copy of Shadows at Nightfall, and Quest of Fire digital exclusives (map, theme music, and digital making of the direnoir poster)!
Be sure to check out each stop on the tour for more chances to win. Full tour schedule linked below. Giveaway will begin at midnight September 20, 2021 and last through 11:59 PM EST on September 27, 2021. Winner will be notified within 2 weeks of close of the giveaway and given 48 hours to respond or risk forfeiture of prize. US only. Void where prohibited by law or logistics.
Giveaway is subject to the policies found here.
This giveaway is hosted by JustRead Tours, not RimSP
Follow along at JustRead Tours for a full list of stops!
What about you? What makes you want to read Shadows at Nightfall by Brett Armstrong?
Sounds really good.
Sounds like a good book.
A great book to read on a cold rainy day! I’ll need some snacks to munch on, since the description sounds intriguing,
yes!!
Thanks for the chance to win!
Captivating, fascinating and unique story.
Great interview! Thank you!
Sounds good
Looks like interesting books.
Thanks for the contest.
The cover is super interesting.
yes!