Romanian tribute

[Shish-kabob-Forrest]

While waiting for TWAA to come out on paperback, I just want to remind you guys that while I am sure you will find it more then worthy of the title of the first "real Dracula" novel, it's really not the grand finale. The Romanians deserve a great deal of honor in their history and I intend to give it to them as best as possible.

As I have pointed out before, the prequel: The Shield of Christendom will undoubtedly be a far more spectacular and more touching story. Right now, I am sure most of you guys only care about reading a historical novel about "the real Dracula" but by the time you are done reading it, I am sure you will have changed your mind and be disparate to learn more about Janos Hunyadi. TBH, I found the two books to be opposites in many ways. TWAA starts out all colorful but gets dark and gloomy really quick where "The Shield of Christendom" starts out very bitter and dark but quickly turns very colorful. A simple google search will turn out allot of good and bad things about the man. The truth is, while he DID do some things that would be seen as bad and mean by most people in our day and age, given what he had to work with, he did his best. The best of evidence suggests that he was LITERALLY both God fearing and loving.

I am not very far in to this book but I have already had tearful moments and come to wish I had known some of these people personally. It is very hard to see how any of the Hunyadi's or their close servents could have gotten along with Vladislav III. They were so much the opposite. When I first started on TWAA years ago, I just wanted to make a true story about Vlad the Impaler. Then it evolved in to a mission to expose the Ottoman war and only in the last year did it take a sacred turn. In that sense, while it IS part of my effort to honor the Balkan warriors who saved Europe, it is too late to truly make it "THEIR" story, but rather a subject to bring their history to light. If the Romanian people have any one man to be proud of, it's Janos Hunyadi. Furthermore, as a man who dealt much more up close and personal with his people and voluntary dedication to a noble cause their is no better ground to build a good story around the Romanian people.

I did make a major mistake in TWAA and that is that I made a rule to not give any made up names. All named people in the story were real people. As result, the story endured some serious lacking of character though I think you guys will agree that it is a spectacular story and does a good job of putting life behind documented history in spite of that.

Unless a whole lot of Romanian people come to me and protest otherwise, I will not use this rule in "The Shield of Christendom" though made up names and characters will have highly limited roles (the Janissaries father near the end of Chapter 4 of TWAA is a rare example of this amount of involvement. The bottom line is that I am working to produce a story that goes over the concept of overly focusing on leaders and stretches much more in to the realm of citizen soldiers.

Once again, I know that most of you don't care about any of this but by the time you are done reading TWAA, you will. Like with Lord of the Rings: The fellowship of the Ring, this story leaves you begging to learn more about Janos Hunyadi, Friar Giovanni of Capistrano and the crusaders who fought along side them. So far, The Shield of Christendom is a story that makes you want to jump in to the story and serve along side them. It's a story that makes you want to do good and it will change the way you look at Romania and it's people forever.

[Vlad]

Hardly wait for the first AUTHOGRAPHED ISSUE.

Keep us posted.

[Shish-kabob-Forrest]

I am just waiting for it to come out now. How much more time it will be before the release is out of my hands.

[Shish-kabob-Forrest]

BTW.

The pre-release is coming out any day. The complete release will still be a while. The pre-release will be basically the same thing as the final release, it just won't have a bar code, ISBN etc.