About the Book
Title: Lost on a Page
Author: David E. Sharp
Genre: Fantasy / Science Fiction
Some genres were never meant to cross.
Joe Slade is a detective with a hot lead and a warm gun. He no longer believes in happy-ever-afters, but his faith in plot twists is devout. Good thing.
He is about to discover the biggest twist of all.
Joe Slade is not real.
He is a character in a series of mystery novels. And when he discovers all his pain has been in the name of book sales, there will be hell to pay. Vowing revenge on his author, he will set off for the World Where the Books Are Written. The road will take him through genres foreign and treacherous: High Fantasy, Bodice-Ripping Romance, Intergalactic Sci-Fi, and others even more awful and terrifying.
But what if this new life is about more than just living? And will Joe still come out on top when all the rules have changed?
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Excerpt
She leads me down an aisle of books. The aisles are short. I sneer at a tacky paperback entitled The Marquis’s Mistress by Lyla Birdsong that sits crooked on the shelf. The marquis, as pictured on the cover, seems to have difficulty buttoning his shirt all the way, and a perpetual breeze blows through his curly dark hair. The strawberry haired mistress hangs off him in a still frame of passion, her breasts barely contained by her bodice. As we walk, the woman in indigo whispers something under her breath.
“All worlds, connected by words
All words, connecting to worlds,
From the dawning of time
Through the end of all days,
Bring us to the Nexus of Words.”
I snort at the ridiculousness of it. It doesn’t even rhyme. Call me old fashioned, but when I hear ominous, occult mantras, I at least expect them to rhyme. I am jarred from my thoughts when we pass a copy of The Marquis’s Mistress by Lyla Birdsong sitting crooked on the shelf. Does the world truly need two copies?
The air is stale and soupy. Guess these old buildings don’t have much ventilation. I feel a tingling in the fillings of my teeth. An electric hum fills the air. My head throbs too, which shouldn’t surprise me since I got ambushed in an alley some hours ago. But there’s something odd about it. Like each throb propels lingering echoes through my skull.
Now I consider we have been walking long enough that we should have come to the end of this short aisle twice over, but we haven’t even made it halfway yet. I look behind me. The front of the bookstore seems farther away than it should be. I look in front of me again. The row of shelves goes on for about fifteen feet. We are still walking at a normal pace. After several
steps, the row of shelves continues to stretch out about fifteen feet in front of us. I look to my left. The marquis’s mistress can barely contain her unbridled passion.
I stop. The air is hard to breathe. My head is reeling. The floor keeps changing directions on me. “Just give me a minute, fellas. I seem to be having a nervous breakdown.”
~~~
Author Bio
David E. Sharp is a noisy librarian. He is fond of theatre and got his start in writing by producing original plays in his hometown. He has also published short stories in various anthologies. David is a member of the Northern Colorado Writers and frequently contributes to their blog. He lives in Greeley, Colorado with his wife and family.
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Lost on a Page won the 2021 Maxy Award for the Fantasy/Sci-Fi Category
Lost on a Page recently received a score of 4.6 on IndieReader.
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