Hey all, Robin here. I'm going to try to do a regular post from time to time to highlight authors that I think might be worth your time (given you enjoy the types of books that Michael writes).
Today, I was on Goodreads, and I saw a reader that had highlighted a few lines from an author I adore. His name is Nathan Lowell, and he's an incredibly talented author and very unusual. His Solar Clipper tales are a great example of "cozy" before "cozy" became a thing. He wrote and published them in 2007 (around the same time as Michael's debut). We even helped him publish some of his books back in the day.
The Solar Clipper series is science fiction and about a young man on a fairly unimportant ship, and the best thing about the first book is when he makes coffee. I kid you not. Nathan can take a simple task like brewing an art. There are no alien attacks, or planets being exploded by an evil empire, just excellent slice of life that I throughly enjoyed.
Since 2007, Nathan has continued writing, and continued to break molds. His first fantasy tale (at least the first one I know of) was about an older woman as a main character - not a sword-wielding hero or a enigmatic wizard just an old woman on a pilgrimage to find herbs and medicinal plants before settling down to write her magnum opus.
Nathan is a binge writer. He sits down at a typewriter and the words just pour out of him. It's not uncommon for him to write 10,000 words in a sitting - and that's an amazing amount. Michael is pretty proficient but he generally does 1,000 - 2,000 words per writing session. Back in the day when self-publishing was just a few writers we used to call that "doing a Lowell" or "pulling off a Lowell."
Anyway I've considered Nathan's work to be extremely easy to read - clean, crisp, even somewhat simple, but in the best possible way. Which brings me back to the quote I saw a reader highlight. Here it is:
She smiled. It was not a pretty smile. It did not make her weather worn face light up. The bones of the earth were her teeth, her breath was the wind, the fires of the earth were alight in her eyes, and her blood pumped with the strength of the sea.
I found it quite poetic, and yet the style was still very much "Nathan." Anyway, if you are ever looking for something while you are waiting for the next Sullivan work to be released try giving Nathan Lowell's books a try. I think you'll find yourself like me, smiling just thinking about them even eighteen years later.
