Lugan Vision Quest - Up For Pre-Order!

Sometimes, things take on a life of their own.

Ecko’s story started in 1991, with a random page of notes outlining a ‘bikers on horseback’ concept I called the Banned. Ecko himself, originally named Oxy, exploded into the fantasy world after a little too much ‘What if?’ role-playing, and a lot of crashing various realities, one into another, just to see what would happen.

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In the spring of 2015, when I finished the last round of edits on Ecko Endgame, I cried my heart out. Fourteen years is a long time to have a story in your mind – characters, voices, concepts – and it still had so many things to explore.

The most powerful of these was the tale of Fhaveon and the Valiembor family, just waiting to be picked back up. There were other tales, too, things that carried immediately forwards from the end of Ecko’s war: Jayr and her Golden Age, the ‘Monkey’s Paw’ that was the Reiders, the Sayers and the kyntora, Vaimourne and the Varchinde, Lugan and Jhari, and the story of Xenok.

All of them were always there, tuning and turning and turning in the back of my mind. All I had to do was link them together.

I started Vision Quest in the summer of 2017, while my son was away for the holidays. Over the following six years, these concepts and ideas steadily spread, blending into a new narrative. The writing’s been a slow process, partially because I had to keep putting it to down to make up the stuff that, y’know, pays the bills, and partially because the tale grew in a (suitably) fractal fashion. The more Lugan moved through it, the more everything came into detail and focus, and the more I had to write.

It also became my blanket fort, inevitably, the place of love and familiarity to which I kept returning. Oddly (or perhaps not) this has made it very difficult to finish. And then you have the edits, and the proof-reads, and the cover art, and the guinea pigs (particularly big thank you to Marc-Anthony Taylor), and buying the new machine so I could actually use Kindle Create, and ticking all those admin boxes that finally made that project real.

But, we’re done. A novel that’s not only a throwback to a world I couldn’t leave behind, but that’s also my homage to portal fantasies everywhere, and to the classic ‘quest’ adventures of my youth.

And to Lugan himself, originally created by created by Bones, and who dates back even further than Ecko does.

Pre-order here.

Needless to say, this is a passion project, and NO AI whatsoever has been used in this book.

More about my adventures in self-publishing later, but for now, if you’d like to read the first trilogy, they’re Ecko Rising, Ecko Burning, and Ecko Endgame. The beginning is a slow burn (and Ecko does like to say FUCK), but they’re absolutely worth it.

You can also read Lugan without having read ECKO first.

Danie’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.