My typewriter monkeys and I are excited to announce that The Trials of Lance Eliot, my debut novel, is now available as a paperback!

(Well, I’m excited. My typewriter monkeys really don’t care.)

When I was a child, I wanted to write a book—a tangible, ink-and-paper novel that could sit on a bookshelf with The Hobbit and The Chronicles of Narnia and The Wind in the Willows. My novel was published a few months ago as an e-book for Nook and Kindle devices, but I really wanted to see it released as an old-fashioned book. Thanks to my publisher’s patience and expertise, The Trials of Lance Eliot has finally become a proper novel.

Many years ago, I decided to write a fantasy. I wanted the hero to be an average person who stumbled into another world, but I faced a perplexing challenge. How could the hero move from one world to another? I didn’t want him to blunder through a wardrobe or a looking-glass or something else that has already been done.

At last it occurred to me that magicians are always summoning things from one place to another. The Pevensie children are transported from their world into Narnia in C.S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian, and Aladdin invokes a couple of genies from who-knows-where in the Middle Eastern folk tale.

It made me wonder: What if the magician summoned the wrong person?

With that, more than six years ago, a story began that would grow into The Trials of Lance Eliot, the first chapter of The Eliot Papers.

In the novel, Lance Eliot, a timid college student, is snatched up by magic and thrown into another world by a mage who mistook him for Lancelot, the legendary knight of Camelot. Now stranded, Lance must embark upon journey to return home, meeting heroes and scoundrels (and possibly a dragon or two) along the way, and becoming—much to his own surprise—a hero.

For more than a quarter of my life, The Trials of Lance Eliot and The Eliot Papers have been my greatest passion as a writer. I’m extremely excited to share Lance’s story as an old-fashioned paperback, and I hope you’ll consider checking it out!