“It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?”
—J.R.R. Tolkien
We asked readers to sound off in a brief survey, and here’s what they said.
• When asked why they read fiction, it was to escape, leave their troubles behind, indulge imagination, gain knowledge, and just have fun. But by far the most common response was to escape into another world and time, from Minas Tirith to the battle bridge of Kirov.
• Readers enjoying military fiction said they liked a mix of land action and naval battles. Their favorite eras were WWI & WWII, modern conflicts, and then the Age of Imperialism and the US Civil War. I was pleased to see that most of those responded said they wanted to see another novel featuring Kirov in either a modern or historical setting. For me that was akin to Samwise Gamgee’s remark about the great stories never ending. As my characters intervene in the history, they struggle with the same question Samwise asked: How could the world ever go back to the way it was?
I’ll soon have two new books for you to continue exploring these questions. Watch this space for more on these books. I do want to hear from more of you about your reading interest. It will be an important factor to determine my writing projects. The survey will stay on for another week. If you have not already, please spend 3-5 minutes taking it. Voice your opinion, and get it heard.
|  | | Please Note
I've moved my novel Field of Glory out of the Kirov Series and into the Keyholder's series. It's really in both, but Amazon makes me choose one or the other. So the three books in the Keyholders Series are now:
Field of Glory
Zulu Hour
The Devil Ship
And these books can be read in any order. |
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