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Thursday, January 5, 2017

The Adventures of Grant Scotland by Dan McClure - Book Series Tour - MULTIPLE Books - MULTIPLE Book on Sale - Guest Post - Giveaway - Enter Daily!


Hey lovelies! It gives me great pleasure today to host Dan McClure and his new books, “The Adventures of Grant Scotland”!  For other stops on his Goddess Fish Promotions Book Tour, please click on the banner above or any of the images in this post – except the Available at Amazon picture.

Be sure to make it to the end of this post to enter to win a $50 Amazon or Barnes and Noble Gift Card!  Also, come back daily to interact with Dan and to increase your chances of winning!

These books are ALL on sale throughout the month of January!  See below for the exciting Kindle Countdown Sale Dates and for more details.

Thanks for stopping by!  Wishing you lots of luck in this fabulous giveaway!

   


   

The Adventures of Grant Scotland
by Dan McClure

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GENRE: Fantasy

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BLURBS:


Spy for a Dead Empire
(Adventures of Grant Scotland, Book One)

AELFA, THE GRAND CAPITAL of the once mighty Aelfan Empire, has fallen. Barbarian war parties and nomadic tribes harass the retreating and broken legions that once overawed them. All that stands against them now is the city of Zyren, the last bastion of Aelfan rule.

Acting as a spy for Zyren is Grant Scotland, a man leading a double life because his own had been taken away from him by the very people he serves. An unwilling recruit into the business of clandestine missions and deceit, he searches for anything real to cling to as the world around him devolves into insanity. And when an old friend shows up asking him to help save his family by delivering a mysterious book to a shadowy figure, Grant's two lives collide and he is thrust into an even stranger world than he had known; one where ancient magic is wielded by deadly players who compete against one another for a prize greater than simply the rotting carcass of a dead empire.


Spy for a Troubled King
(Adventures of Grant Scotland, Book Two)

AMONG THE ASHES of the mighty Aelfan Empire, the House of Gregyan seeks to forge a new kingdom—one where both Huthan and Aelfan alike can prosper. But old prejudices and ancient traditions and an exiled enemy threaten the peace. Caught between compassion for his home and allegiance to his fallen empire, Grant Scotland finds himself trapped in the turbulent machinations of enemies and friends. As he works to uncover mysteries about his father’s treachery and confront new threats to his future, he moves perilously close to revealing his identity and losing everything.


Spy for a Wayward Daughter
(Adventures of Grant Scotland, Book Three)

AS THE GREGYANS MARCH TO WAR and his handler takes a trip to Zyren, Grant Scotland, spy errant of the Aelfan Empire, gets ready to pursue a lead on finding a man who might be able to tell him the truth about his father's treason. Old friends, new enemies and hidden dangers soon confront him on his quest, but when he enters the dark world of another family's intrigue, he finds that not even the frontiers of the Aelfan Empire are far enough away to escape the dangers of fortune and fate.


The Unlikely Spy
(Adventures of Grant Scotland, Volume One)

The Adventures of Grant Scotland series is an entertaining mix of fantasy, mystery and espionage featuring a hero whose many faults provide almost as much challenge to him as the formidable obstacles he must face as he attempts to impose sanity upon a world rapidly descending into chaos. Collected in this volume are the first three books in the series: Spy for a Dead Empire, Spy for a Troubled King and Spy for a Wayward Daughter.


Spy for a Greedy Villain
(Adventures of Grant Scotland, Book Four)

RACIAL TENSIONS IN AELFA simmer and threaten to boil over when the harbormaster is found dead and the Huthan oppressors threaten to crack down in the Lower Docks. As Grant Scotland finds more questions than answers in the journals of Berthul Magnussen about his father’s treachery, he is drawn into a murder investigation, a kidnapping plot and the nefarious machinations of the city’s biggest crime lord—Mr. Quinn. In order to stop Quinn’s plans and save the city from being thrown into open revolt, Grant prepares to take his biggest gamble yet.

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EXCERPT FOUR:

Spy for a Greedy Villain
(Adventures of Grant Scotland, Book Four)

I gave him a brief recap of my espionage activities over the past few months, which included reports on the growth and temperament of the One God followers, the coming and going of any Huthan notables and the operations of Doogan and Quinn. At last I followed up with a summary of the harbormaster investigation and finished with the discovery of a ghost in the Lower Docks.

“There’s no such things as ghosts, Scotland.”

“I know, but I haven’t worked up a better nickname for him yet.”

“I’m sure you’ll think of something. I have every confidence in your ability to accomplish inane tasks of trivial importance.”

“Everybody has to be good at something.”

“And while your limited mental capabilities will no doubt be severely taxed in that endeavor, I’ll do some checking into what could make a man entirely concealed in plain sight.”

“You mean invisible. You can just say invisible.”

“Were I interested in being as lacking in attention to details as you, I could use the word invisible, but luckily for the both of us I am not. Complete invisibility is impossible. Not even the greatest Aelfan wizards were ever able to accomplish such a feat. But, there are several ways a man can remain unnoticed. Take me for instance. For the eleventh time in a row you failed to spot me before I spotted you.”

“How am I not surprised you’ve been keeping score? At any rate, he didn’t sneak up on me, I’m telling you I looked right through him.”

“Except his boots. Unless in addition to invisibility you also believe in the existence of a sentient pair of boots?”

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GUEST POST:

Regarding Grant Scotland

First let me say that I have no idea where story ideas come from or what inspires me to write. I can’t speak for every author out there, but I know I’ve heard others say the same thing. We have no clue why or how characters and dialog and plots creep into our heads, even when we’re doing things as mundane as making some eggs, but they do. That being said, I can tell you exactly where I get my ideas from.

Bear with me. As with life, hopefully everything will make sense by the end, but probably not.

The origin of the name is pretty simple, although the exact eureka moment wasn’t saved for posterity. Maybe it doesn’t stick in my memory because it came together fairly simply. My middle name is Grant. I knew I wanted to use that either as my nom de plume or as a character name. I was leaning in the direction of the latter, but at some point in time while I was thinking about USA’s Burn Notice, I remembered Bruce Campbell once had a show called “The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.” After that, the character’s name and the series name just locked into place.

As near as I can tell, the actual character traits of Grant Scotland first began forming in my mind somewhere in 2009 and 2010. The first thing I knew about him was that he would be a Philip Marlowe kind of character, except one with more problems and less talent. I was at a pretty low point in my life and it’s possible I wanted my protagonist to be just as hard-luck as me. It’s romantic to think that I wanted to write my way out of my own situation, but that isn’t how it happened at all.

Over the next couple of years, I kept wondering about him and started focusing my reading habits around the kind of man I was imagining. I spent a lot of time with Dashiell Hammet’s Miles Archer, Robert Parker’s Spenser, Glen Cook’s Garrett and, of course, Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe. The noir detective motif isn’t an uncommon one, so there was some other source material as well, but those were the biggies.

At some point in time I realized just how overdone such characters are and decided mine wouldn’t be a detective – well, not a professional, anyway. I think it was about that time that I decided I’d throw a spin on the noir detective theme and make him a spy. I wasn’t up on my espionage reading, so I began digging into some LeCarre and Fleming and… meh. Wasn’t too impressed. I wanted gadgets and disguises, not drawn-out suspense. I wanted Sydney Bristow from Alias. I wanted movie-theatre James Bond or TV Michael Westen. The last one especially appealed to me because of the theme in Burn Notice of a spy with no country, no organization and almost no friends. You couldn’t get much more hard luck than that!

If you look carefully, you’ll notice I pay homage to Burn Notice with an occasional “When you’re a spy…” opening to a paragraph describing something Grant’s doing or planning. I couldn’t resist.

So I had Grant fleshed out pretty nicely. This was somewhere in 2011 or 2012, maybe? All in my head, at this point, by the way. There wasn’t anything to write. How could there be? I still had no world for Grant to inhabit. No plot for him to unravel. I knew I wanted to write fantasy, because it’s a very flexible genre for a new writer and it’s always been one of my favorites. That was when I decided to re-read Glen Cook’s Garrett, P.I. novels. The best way for a writer to start is to imitate the writers he admires. So, I treated it like an exercise and began taking notes on Cook’s books as if I was intending to write them myself. As I did that, I also began to sort out the things I liked and the things I didn’t.

I’ll cover Grant Scotland’s world in another post, because I have a fair number of thoughts about fantasy world building, as do most fantasy writers, I’m sure. For now, I’ll just say I wanted his world to be as close to our own Dark Ages as possible, to emphasize the hard-luck theme. Once that was decided and once I had diagramed a couple of Cook’s plots – which I definitely recommend doing for any aspiring author – then I knew I was ready to start writing stories of my own.

So did I make it clear at all about the where and how of inspiration? Does it make sense? Probably not, right? It doesn’t make sense to me, either. All I can say is, there’s some kind of thing that started banging around in my head one day. I don’t know what to call it and I don’t know how it does what it does. I just know that it’s still going. I hope it never stops, because it seems like the longer it bangs around, the more ideas it picks up and sticks together. Or maybe it just knocks them into a place where I can stick them together. I don’t know. That’s about the best I can come up with.

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AUTHOR BIO:


Writing stories infused with the smoky charisma of classic film noir mixed with the pulse-pounding excitement of adventure fantasy and the cagey class of suspenseful espionage, Dan McClure brought the best parts of all of our most cherished pulp together and added his own signature brand of wit. He currently lives, writes and works in and around beautiful and historic Arlington, Massachusetts.

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KINDLE COUNTDOWN SALE DATES:

Spy for a Greedy Villain
(Adventures of Grant Scotland, Book Four):
Kindle Countdown Deal
1/4 - 1/7 @ $0.99
1/7 - 1/11 @ $1.99

Spy for a Dead Empire
(Adventures of Grant Scotland, Book One):
Kindle Countdown Deal
1/11 - 1/14 @ $0.99
1/14 - 1/18 @ $1.99

Spy for a Troubled King
(Adventures of Grant Scotland, Book Two):
Kindle Countdown Deal
1/18 - 1/21 @ $0.99
1/21 - 1/25 @ $1.99

Spy for a Wayward Daughter
(Adventures of Grant Scotland, Book Three):
Kindle Countdown Deal
1/25 - 1/28 @ $0.99
1/28 - 2/1 @ $1.99

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AMAZON 4–PACK BUY LINK:

  The Adventures of Grant Scotland
Books 1 – 4



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SPY FOR A DEAD EMPIRE (ADVENTURES OF GRANT SCOTLAND, BOOK 1) – BUY LINKS:

Amazon:

Barnes and Noble:

Goodreads:

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SPY FOR A TROUBLED KING (ADVENTURES OF GRANT SCOTLAND, BOOK 2) – BUY LINKS:

Amazon:

Barnes and Noble:

Goodreads:

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SPY FOR A WAYWARD DAUGHTER (ADVENTURES OF GRANT SCOTLAND, BOOK 3) – BUY LINKS:

Amazon:

Barnes and Noble:

Goodreads:

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SPY FOR A GREEDY VILLAIN (ADVENTURES OF GRANT SCOTLAND, BOOK 4) – BUY LINKS:

Amazon:

Barnes and Noble:

Goodreads:

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THE ADVENTURES OF GRANT SCOTLAND, VOLUME 1: THE UNLIKELY SPY – BUY LINKS:

Amazon:

Barnes and Noble:

Kobo:

Goodreads:

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GIVEAWAY INFO:

Dan will be awarding a $50 Amazon or Barnes and Noble Gift Card to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter during the tour.


**This post contains affiliate links and if clicked and a purchase made I may receive a small commission to help support this blog.  This does not cost you anything, it just helps pay for all those awesome giveaways on here.**

This contest is sponsored by a third party. Fabulous and Brunette is a registered host of Goddess Fish Promotions.  Prizes are given away by the sponsors and not Fabulous and Brunette. The featured author and Goddess Fish Promotions are solely responsible for the giveaway prize.

8 comments:

  1. Congrats on the tour and thanks for the chance to win :)

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  2. Congrats on the new book releases! I love Scotland. I grew up in England and miss the U.K. Such a beautiful area. ;)

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  3. Thanks for featuring my books. Good luck on the giveaway everyone!

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  4. The series looks intriguing!

    --Trix

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  5. these books sounds awesome! I can't wait to read them!

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  6. Sounds like an excellent series - thanks for sharing :)

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  7. What books are you looking to read in 2017? Thanks for the giveaway. I hope that I win. Bernie W BWallace1980(at)hotmail(d0t)com

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  8. Wow, I'd really love to read these!

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