This week’s interview is with Kerry Tolan, who’s been in epublishing since 2000! And he’s willing to share those 10 years of experience with us.

Kerry Tolan’s latest release is Rogue Dancer:

The last time Mikial’s civilization turned on a savior, they were destroyed. Now Mikial is faced with repeating a disastrous history or defying it. Her people thought the humans had left for good. She believed otherwise. They were both wrong.

Not everyone is eager to embrace a leader with mixed blood who promises to reunite her divided race. To some, Mikial is a mistake that needs correcting. To others, she is the answer to a growing threat from beyond her world. Mikial must find a way to prove her legitimacy, even if it means resurrecting an ancient horror in lands laid to waste by a civil war she is desperate not to repeat. What she finds in the ruins of Min Saja will not be the salvation she expects.

Rogue Dancer continues the story of Mikial Haran, bringing with it all the traditions and strife of an alien people facing the challenges of first contact.

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This week we’ve got something slightly different: Alison Whetton was involved in a self-publishing venture that began in the 90s, but it wasn’t a novel. No, she published a role play game.

Parents leave their offspring to do as they please, defending the evil that results, as they wish not their own to be recognised or blamed. They give nothing and take constantly, uncaring of those they take from, for they believe they are owed – perhaps they should think of the sick and the dying whose money they steal.

Doctors help those they can to live, even when life is pain, for they cannot do otherwise. Were the pain inflicted by another the victim’s suffering would soon end, yet when it is disease or injury who are the tormentors, the doctors must be their accomplices.

Above this, in steel and glass towers, corporate knights duel with diamond pens in a war of words, striving to rule a fantasy world of stocks and bonds and numbers. Each day another triumph, another victim, but no one keeps the crown for long, or is remembered by those who succeed them. Corporations, like dinosaurs, tear and strike at one another in the insane pointless dance of trade, healing setbacks in moments. Until at last one falls and the others tear it apart and subsume it, while lesser companies fight for the scraps, and asset-strippers scavenge what they can.

There are those out there, not merely part of one world, but of them all, seeking a living in the shadows inside the steel spires, unnoticed by the corporations they are part of, fearing the half seen darkness on the streets around them. In the day they work as they live, in the night return to their homes and watch their television and pretend that everything is alright and that there was nothing they could do if it was not.

The good among them fight for others’ rights. They comfort a few and in places their work endures for a few moments and makes others feel happier with the lie that nothing is wrong. Most will not act – yet do not think of themselves as evil. They are happy in their lives and blind to the shadow at the edge of vision and if on occasion they feel sorrow or unease, they do not know for what it is they grieve.

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