A Quest through Winter Sleep

by David Vining

A young woman wakes up to discover her father murdered and her mother missing. What follows is a harrowing journey through a richly imagined world of dying magic and ancient religions.Hidden from the truth because of a veiled family secret, Fanny Mayer finds herself in a world she never knew, a place that is only now beginning to rebuild twenty years after a bloody and savage civil war. Rifts still run deep, and she must navigate through a long series of pitfalls, traps, and catastrophes in her search for the woman who gave her life and the men who took her.

354 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 20, 2013

About the author

I am a fiction writer living in the Carolinas.

Writing is a passion of mine, and I'll never stop. I'm always striving to tell another story that speaks to me in new and interesting ways, and my milieu seems to have becomes historical fiction with a fantasy bent.

I love the feeling of being dropped into a lived-in world with its own rules and following a character who has to navigate them. That can be the far flung future like a Gene Wolfe novel or the distant, forgotten past like a Conan adventure from Robert E. Howard. That can even be a biography of a real man long since dead like James Madison. In fact, it was through the reading of Irving Brant's six-volume biography of Madison that I discovered The Battle of Lake Erie, the small corner of the War of 1812 that I used as the basis for my first published novel.

It was another biography of another president, one about George Washington, that led me to discover the real-life tale of America's first president where he almost died on a mission for the Virginia colonial governor at 21 years old before the French and Indian War. It took me a while to figure out that I needed to add a monster into the action to give it that extra oomph I needed to actually write about it, though.

I continue to write where I feel like going, from historical fiction to historical fantasy to horror to even a spy thriller. I like all kinds of stories, and I feel no real need to limit my own output into just one kind. Even reading Shusaku Endo gives me ideas of stories to tell in Shogunate Japan.

So, follow me on some adventures through time, bending the rules of reality, and always with a clear-eyed focus on the people we use as vessels into these worlds.