Publishing a book is a bit like planting and growing a tree. It starts with a seed, a small (but incredibly powerful) distant dream that holds so much promise. With love, and with patience, the seed is planted and the sapling grows. Before you know it, the trunk and branches are reaching out, feeling for purpose, and the author, in the book’s springtime, breathes life into the blossoming flowers.In full summer, the fruits of labour are sweet, and the book ripens. Then comes the autumn of editing. The author watches his wild ideas and eccentric language fall like leaves to the ground. A cold winter of uncertainty sets in before the book is published: how will it be received? And then, pregnant with hope, spring comes once more, and new seedlings are planted.
The Wewelsburg Covenant started as a dream I quit my job for. It was a chance I was willing to take, and when I submitted my book for The Citizen book prize in 2009, I was confident that it was a story that would entertain people, and fortunately, I was right in the sense that hundreds of people voted in favour of my book's synopsis, and The Wewelsburg Covenant took home the honours of winner of The Citizen book prize 2009.
It has been a while in the making. The detailed research and writing took just under a year, and it has been a long journey, but finally the day has arrived to push the big red button - the one that says 'print', or in this case 'publish to Kindle'.
The Wewelsburg Covenant is available on the Kindle platform, for all devices, including PC, iPhone, iPad, Kindle of course, and Android devices (see a full list here of devices you can read Kindle books on). The print book will also be available on Amazon (through Createspace) shortly.
If anything, visit the book's product page on Amazon to try a sample. There are at least 10 free chapters to read. I hope you will enjoy what you read, and if you happen to, kindly share it with anyone you think might be interested, or write a review, and email me if you have any comments, I'd love to hear from you (wewelsburgcovenant at gmail dot com).
Clive Cussler covers are epic. Simple, clean and evocative, these covers for me are the kind that inspire you to buy the print version of a book even though it's more expensive than the Kindle version.
And Cussler's new novel, The Kingdom, is no different. With backgrounded Himalaya, snow and dark skies, the book puts you in comfortable-read mode even before you've cracked the spine.
I haven't read any Cussler before. Mostly, aside from the cover, I was drawn to this book by its interest and link in/to the kingdom of Lo Manthang (spelled Monthang in the book but I'll stick to Manthang) in Nepal.
By way of disclaimer, and like any writer would do, I was drawn to read Cussler's exploration of this mystical part of Nepal, because it is also forms the backdrop for crucial scenes in my own upcoming novel.
We are after all as Westerners, it seems, possessed with the idea of a secret Asian kingdom, variously known as Shangri-la or Shamballah, and The Kingdom of Lo in Nepal is one of the best settings to vent this Western Shangri-la fantasy.
The Kingdom starts with a bang. Dakhal, a Sentinel, protector of a magical artefact called the Golden Man, is pursued by evil forces trying to lay siege to the Golden Man. He skillfully throws his attackers off and presumably holes up in a cave, protecting the Golden Man, lost to posterity.
Fast forward to present day. Husband and wife adventure- and hero-team Sam and Remi Fargo are contacted by tycoon and all-round baddie Charles King to find his father who has gone missing in Nepal several years. The couple, used to hunting for treasures and historical artifacts, agree to take on the case. In reality, King is hoping to set them on a goose chase that he hopes will yield the Golden Man, for his own purposes.
Their search leads them to Kathmandu, having discovered a secret Devanagari (an ancient script of India and Nepal) parchment which they have translated by a local professional.
The Fargos will follow a set of clues that lead them to Tibet, Nepal, China, Venice and Siberia to uncover the secrets behind not only the ancient Golden Man legend, but also Charles King's nefarious business dealings.
The race leads to Shangri-la, an ancient complex overgrown with jungle, where they must battle King's wife and two diehard twin children to ensure that King doesn't lay hands on the mysterious artefact.
Along the way, Sam and Remi's characteristic humour and domesticity to approaching life-threatening situations is lighthearted and colourful.
I enjoyed this novel overall, not least because of its Lo Manthang setting, but also for the racy plot and diverse characters: evil where they need to be but not overly stereotypical or flat, and good characters who aren't too saintly, offset by quirkiness.
All round, a light, easy and enjoyable, well-researched read soaked in adventure. Four out of five stars.
Share your thoughts with me on the cover design of my upcoming novel The Wewelsburg Covenant
Getting the cover right for my up-coming novel, The Wewelsburg Covenant (available in October/November this year through Amazon.com), was always going to be a tough one.
Some of the crucial elements involved were:
1. The cover had to be dark. It had to be broody, as my book deals with the rise of the Fourth Reich while at the same time reaching back in history to throw the spotlight on some of the most bizarre bits of non-fiction you'll ever read: Himmler's knights of the round table, a secret order of Nazis who practised dark magic and, of course, Himmler's belief in and pursuit of the Holy Grail. If the Holy Grail is what the Nazi legend said it was, i.e. that it was a stone of unsurpassed power that could re-awaken the ancient Norse gods like Odin and Fanrir to help the Nazis win World War II, how could the cover of my new novel which deals with all of this and more afford not to be dark?
2. The cover had to be mass-market and striking in appeal. Your very first impressions of a cover are crucial. In the first split seconds that your eye dances over the cover: does it immediately say 'buy me', or is your reaction rather luke-warm?
3. Very important, does the book's cover appeal to the intended audience and match the content of the novel? My book needed to shout: 'conspiracy and/or mass-market fiction', even while ringing true of a dark, brooding plot line based on quite a bit of historical research. The use of symbols - the Nazi party Iron Eagle and the Black Sun behind it - give the subtle impression that evil is afoot, some disquiet lurks in the secret crypt of Wewelsburg Castle, the Fourth Reich is on the rise ...
Now I'd like to ask you ... Read the book's blurb below, look at the cover and tell me - send me a message on Facebook, Tweet me, email me, or post a comment below - tell me what you think ... Does this cover work?
I really like it and I hope you will too.
Regards John Braun
In 1944, with the Allied armies closing in on all fronts, Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler set up a secret organisation to continue the Nazi cause, the persecution of Jews. From Renaissance-era Wewelsburg Castle twelve knights undertake a covenant and swear lifelong loyalty to the Nazi way. After the war, a Nazi front company, Trevellian Enterprises, is set up in Argentina with war loot deposited in Swiss Bank accounts ...
It is 2012. Armed with nuclear weapons, columns of genetically perfect Aryan warriors and a powerful fleet of submarines primed to attack Israel, the Fourth Reich is on the brink of resurrection.
Director of Operations of Israel’s intelligence service Ben Hariri learns through a double agent that Führer James Trevellian is about to travel to Moscow. He sends in two Mossad assassins with turbulent pasts, alluring Anna Leoniv and troubled Agent Fox. Anna’s mission is not to kill but to woo Trevellian ‘by any means necessary’. But Trevellian is in Russia on a more sinister mission, searching for an occult object of unsurpassed power.
The attack date is set: 21 December 2012. Trevellian is on the eve of victory, but he has inconceivably fallen in love with a Jewess, and he learns an earth-shattering secret that sends him spiralling in turmoil to make a final decision between destruction and love that will decide the fate of the world.
To say that the history that forms the basis of my new novel The Wewelsburg Covenant is bizarre, would be an understatement.
While researching my book I often stopped and wondered: ‘Is this the work of the over-active imaginations of sensationalist historians?’
Did Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and - technically sane - set up a secret council of knights fashioned on King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table? Did the Nazi high command genuinely believe in the ancient myth of the Holy Grail? And were Aryan Germans, according to the Nazi belief, the direct descendants of god-like Norse beings who came from a sunken continent called Atlantis?
The period leading up to, including, and shortly after the Second World War was, after all, a time whenthe world, heady with the intoxicating ranting of a madman, teetered on the precipice of madness and fell into a hellish six-year nightmare. The cogs of time seemed to turn backwards, and civilisation – foremost among it an advanced industrial European nation and its people – was plunged back into the dark ages.
In part (other parts to follow on the blog shortly) here is some of the historical background for The Wewelsburg Covenant.
An Aryan fairytale ...
Once upon a time there was a continent in the north Atlantic sea where divine beings lived in a thriving civilisation called Atlantis. Descendents of the gods, the mystical beings of Atlantis were like giants. They were beautiful beyond compare, possessed superhuman strength, and were wizened ancient nature spirits who whispered in the babbling brooks, rustled in the auburn autumn leaves of the forest floor and breathed heat into ferocious fires.
But there soon came a time when the Jötunns – for so were they called – were overcome with vice and greed, and Atlantis was engulfed by colossal tidal waves of such ferocious force that the Atlanteans could do nothing to save themselves. Much misery and despair followed, as the Atlanteans drowned. The continent sunk into a sleeping sea and was forgotten by Time.
All but a few Atlanteans died. A handful fled by boat in time to escape the floods. They travelled the oceans for many months, in an immense boat, and finally floated close to land in the shadow of the imposing crests of the mighty Himalayas.
They lived and thrived off the land once more, populating the earth with what were to become the ancestors of the Indo-European people. But as the centuries passed, the mystical creatures mixed with non-giants, and their bloodline was corrupted, save for a last strand of people, descendants of the gods themselves according to the Nazi theory: German Aryans.
Warrior priests of the Third Reich
The fairytale above once held credence among a group of people who ruled a country that was to be transformed into the most formidable death machine the world had ever seen. Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS and in effect Nazi Germany’s Number Two, called the race of giants in the Nordic folk legend the ‘Atlantic Master Race’.
The Nazis of Germany truly believed that, as Aryans – tall, muscular, blond, blue-eyed, and with an innate capability for leadership – they were the last remaining direct descendants of mystical Atlanteans who had been put on earth by the Norse god Odin himself.
The Nazi propaganda machine went to work to use the myth to bolster their ostracism of Jews. They held that the bloodline of the Jötunns was steadily corrupted by weaker races, known as untermenschen – more specifically, Jews – throughout the centuries, reducing the giants in magnificence to human form, albeit with latent traces of their once-mighty appearance.
German historian Hans F.K. Günther had claimed once that the Aryans had conquered much of Asia around 2000 BCE, and the Nazis would even make the outrageous claim that Gautama Buddha was Aryan. It is a fact that Himmler travelled, during war time, with pages from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gītā, in honour of a presumed Indo-European ancestry.
The Nazis soon began searching for proof to bolster their racial theories. Himmler, head of the SS by 1929, and Richard Walther Darré – made Obergruppenführer(the second-highest SS rank beneath Himmler) by 1934 and the man who would later be the man charged with determining the ‘racial fitness’ of Himmler’s SS recruits – established the Ahnenerbe, a society dedicated to German ancestral and cultural study.
Known officially as the ‘study society for primordial intellectual history, German Ancestral Heritage, registered society’, the Ahnenerbe was tasked with proving the Atlantic Master Race theory. As early as the 1930s, expeditions were undertaken to the Himalayas, where Nazi German scientists and explorers carried out tests on Tibetans, searching for biological ‘Aryan’ traits – narrow foreheads, long limbs and ‘angular features’ (see Himmler's Crusade by Christopher Hale.)
As the War rippled across Europe, the Ahnenerbe would begin to murder Tibetans and use their bodies in extensive ‘scientific research’.
Back home in Nazi Germany, the Ahnenerbe would soon carry out some of the most inhumane experiments on Jewish prisoners. In Dachau concentration camp, Jews were placed in freezing cold water to see how long they would live. The results of the bizarre experiment were used to determine how long German Luftwaffe pilots would have to survive before being rescued, if they were shot down over icy seas.
Ahnenerbe expeditions also focused on Aryan artistic heritage, producing scientifically or theoretically motivated reasons for the superiority of German music and art over that of other races. (The altarpiece of Veit Stoss at St Mary’s Church, in Kraków Poland, for example, was deemed the artistic work of Aryans, and as a result it was looted and taken to Nuremberg Castle for further study.)
But the Nazi belief was not only that the history of the Aryan race was a struggle for racial superiority over untermenschen, but also that the Atlantic Master Race could be restored through selective breeding. Himmler established the Lebensborn – the ‘Fountain of Life’ – programme in 1935.
SS men were used as breeding stock to sire the next generation of German super-warriors. Between 1935 and 1945, 11 000 babies would be ‘manufactured’ under this programme. If SS men proved to be infertile, virile SS officers would be used for ‘stud duty’. 200 000 Polish children espousing Aryan traits were snatched from that country and raised in Lebensborn homes where they were groomed in Aryan ways.
Himmler saw his SS troops as the reincarnation of the mighty Teutonic Knights, believed to be the Nazis’ Germanic forefathers. He would once affirm this to his troops: ‘Never forget, we are a knightly order, from which one cannot withdraw, to which one is recruited by blood, and within which one remains body and soul.’ [See 'Nazis: The Occult Conspiracy' (documentary) and 'The Occult History of the Third Reich' (documentary).]
Watch the first part of 'Nazis: The Occult Conspiracy' ...
As the Germans occupied territories across Europe during the Second World War, SS men would receive tracts of lands, feudal estates, which they would lord over and raise families on to sire Aryan warriors. SS training schools were set up in castles across Germany, where the SS were inducted into the ways of ‘warrior priests’.
One such training school was set up at Wewelsburg Castle, located in North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany, which would later become Himmler’s spiritual home for the knights of the Third Reich.
Southeast tower of Wewelsburg Castle in North Rhine-Westphalia, Heinrich Himmler's 'Camelot'. Photo by 'PeterXIII' on Flickr (see http://www.flickr.com/photos/53271626@N05/)
Here you’ll find the latest information on my up-coming debut novel, The Wewelsburg Covenant, which is due for release in October 2011. If you have any questions for me, please email me.
Here’s the book’s provisional blurb:
In 1944, with the Allied armies closing in on all fronts, Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler set up a secret organisation to continue the Nazi cause; the persecution of Jews.
From Renaissance-era Wewelsburg Castle twelve knights undertake the Wewelsburg Covenant. After the war, a front company, Trevellian Enterprises, is set up in Argentina with Nazi war loot deposited in Swiss Bank accounts.
It is 2012 ... Armed with nuclear weapons, columns of genetically perfect Aryan warriors and a powerful fleet of submarines primed to attack Israel, the Fourth Reich is on the brink of resurrection.
Director of Operations of Israel’s intelligence service Ben Hariri learns through a double agent that Führer James Trevellian is about to travel to Moscow. He sends in two Mossad assassins with turbulent pasts, alluring Anna Leoniv and troubled Agent Fox. Anna’s mission is not to kill but to woo Trevellian ‘by any means necessary’. But Trevellian is in Russia on a more sinister mission, searching for an occult object of unsurpassed power.
The attack date is set: 21 December 2012. Trevellian is on the eve of victory, but he has inconceivably fallen in love with a Jewess, and he learns an earth-shattering secret that sends him spiraling in turmoil to make a final decision between destruction and love.
My intention with this book is entertain. The Wewelsburg Covenant is filled with intrigue, suspense, twists and turns in plot and passion, but is largely based on historical fact. It will appeal to those who enjoy reading Frederick Forsyth, Wilbur Smith, Tom Clancy and Harry Patterson novels.
You can now follow me on Twitter: @BraunJohn or email me by clicking here.
