Of Staves and Sigmas

by Geoffrey Verdegast

Overview

Can a lifetime of nightmarish visions and other-worldly hallucinations prepare you for an actual world-hop to a realm where your very survival depends on what you can recall from those psychic excursions? Just ask James Wagner, a man whose earthly life from childhood was a tumult of one phantasmagoric episode after another. These outlandish visions, intensifying in capacity and duration over the years, soon make him a danger to himself and others -- so much that, at age twenty-eight, he admits himself to a psychiatric institute for safeguarding and remedy. Initially diagnosed with an undocumented mental illness, his symptomatology is found to be so inconsistent with diagnosable statistical medicine that even the specialists are perplexed. Wagner is subjected to endless batteries of tests and cutting-edge drug therapies, none of which yields even a glimmer of promise. Is he a clever manipulator? Or is his condition truly the first of its kind? Then it happens: a symptom that medical science cannot explain, a manifestation that modern physics simply doesn't allow. Next, a mysterious faith healer with esoteric knowledge arrives at the facility in the eleventh hour, claiming to know Wagner, claiming to possess insight on his affliction. Yet, before the assembled specialists can begin to address the impossible, Wagner's malady peaks, overtaking and finally eclipsing his coherent, corporeal life, whisking him bodily into a bold, new reality and onto a bold, new sphere -- a draconian world of crudity and coarseness, of war and slavery, of lethal humanoid enemies and enlistable allies and maybe a little hope. But in order to exist, the uprooted Wagner must hide his true origin and adopt the customs and penchants of the mediaevalesque society into which he's been cast. And, amid his bewilderment, if he can only recall and unriddle the secrets hidden within his former visionscapes, maybe he can help to ransom this new realm from its own evils.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940011187803
Publisher:	Geoffrey Verdegast
Publication date:	01/09/2011
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	948 KB

About the Author

For those of you who don't know me (and there are millions) I'm Geoff Verdegast--politically incorrect social misfit, greasy-handed backyard mechanic, cranky eschewer of ubiquitous handheld communication devices, and half-starved author of the literary fantasy novel, "OF STAVES AND SIGMAS." I'm also a pseudo-talented charcoal and scratch-board artist (see OSAS's 1st & 2nd edition covers), an amateur photographer, and a self-trained hobo who specializes in aimless roadside wandering, sleeping under bridges, hopping freight trains, and stealing fresh-baked pies from window sills.

Since I'm well-aware--and have been told sundry times--that a large percentage of readers won't even consider taking a gander at the first installment of an uncompleted series, I've refrained from going all-out on the John and Jane Q. Public marketing of OSAS. Instead, I've been working dilligently (okay, maybe not so dilligently) on Book Two ("OF QUESTS AND QUANDARIES")--and eventually Book Three--in hopes of one day being able to rope in a few of said most stubbornly persnickety hold-outs with the long-laboured lure of a finished product. At this rate, however, I might have to rejigger my aim toward the toddler demographic, since I'm guessing that they'll be adults by the time I wrap this long-winded epic up. And me? I'll be looking like Rip Van Winkle by then. And in the poor house.

But you, gentle reader, can change that! Simply take pity on this cynical old Philistine and check out Book One anyway. If you're a bit literary, a bit adventurous, a bit into dynamic characterisation, and aren't one bit scared of being challenged, step right up and see to what length I'll go to entertain and enchant and provoke you. And who knows, I might even make myself sound all sagely and respectable in the process.