Wattpad Wonder Wandering

John Bergin's Sorcerer (The Dark Shore)

"A reader recently recommended your story Radix to me and I wanted to reach out to you from Wattpad, the world's largest community of readers and writers."

That's the opening line of the email from Wattpad that invited me to post one of my novels on their website. One reader's rapport with Radix hooked me up with the Wattpad Writer Partner Program -- and now the first book in my dark fantasy series The Dominions of Irth is a feature title at Wattpad.

That means the entire novel, The Dark Shore, is available for free during the next six months!

I wrote The Dominions of Irth over thirty-three months, 1995-97. My American publisher made an editorial decision to publish those three novels under a pen name, Adam Lee. In the UK, the same books appeared with my own name. The series found a lot of readers, I think because the setting is an exotic intersection of science fiction and fantasy: The planet Irth exists at the very beginning of time, in the first Planck instant after the Big Bang, embedded in the nascent contours of primordial spacetime. 

Then my American publisher got subsumed into a corporation, which released many of their midlist authors including myself. These titles went out of print. And I didn’t look at them again for fifteen years. Revising them as ebooks returned me to Irth, that world before all other worlds — at the instant of the Big Bang.

In this cosmos of pure light, the worlds of the Bright Shore appear. Among them is Irth. And upon Irth, in a world of wizards, witch queens, and magic, destiny casts shadows into the Gulf and onto the Dark Shore, a universe of blacker magic and deeper mysteries — the greatest of which is Earth.

That’s the copy I wrote for the ebook edition of The Dark Shore. You can read that novel for free now at Wattpad.

And let me know what you think. Rewriting that series took six months! The intervening fifteen years changed me as a writer. I hear text differently now when I read.

While The Dark Shore is up, I’m going to wonder wander at Wattpad, reading science fiction and fantasy works posted there. And I hope to make notes here of the fictions I encounter that fill me with their dreadful joy.