Dragon(e) Baby Gone Reports from the Department of Intangible Assets Book One by Robert Gainey - Detective Fantasy - Overworked. Underfunded. Outgunned. Sometimes the greater good needs a little help from a lesser evil.
Reports from the Department of Intangible Assets
Book One
by Robert Gainey
Genre: Detective Fantasy
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
Date of Publication: June 28, 2021
ISBN:978-1-5092-3658-9 Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-5092-3659-6 Digital
ASIN: B095GNZJCN
Number of pages: 254
Word Count: 69,377
Cover Artist: Debbie Taylor
Overworked. Underfunded. Outgunned. Sometimes the greater good needs a little help from a lesser evil.
“Dragon is hard to overcome, yet one shall try.”
– Nowe Ateny, Polish Encyclopedia, 1745
Diane Morris is part of the thin line separating a happy, mundane world from all of the horrors of the anomalous. Her federal agency is underfunded, understaffed, and misunderstood, and she’d rather transfer to the boring safety of Logistics than remain a field agent.
When a troupe of international thieves make off with a pair of dragon eggs, Diane has no choice but to ally with a demon against the forces looking to leave her city a smoldering crater.
Facing down rogue wizards, fiery elementals, and crazed gunmen, it’s a race against time to get the precious cargo back before the dragon wakes up and unleashes hell.
Welcome to JB’s Bookworms with Brandy Mulder, please tell us about your newest book.
Dragon(e) Baby Gone follows Diane Morris, Special Agent with the Department of Intangible Assets, as she attempts to track down a pair of stolen dragon eggs before their terrible broodmother wakes up to discover their absence. Diane is a veteran field agent who’s ready to make the transfer to a more peaceful assignment but just can’t seem to catch a break. Her agency is neglected, unappreciated and underfunded. For Diane, the idea of backup is a fairy tale. Alone, she faces down rogue wizards, fiery elementals and reckless mercenaries. With no other choice, Diane finds herself unhappily allied with a malevolent entity known only as Archades. She’ll need all the help she can get just to make it through the weekend, and she’s not even making overtime.
Writing isn’t easy. What was the most difficult thing you dealt with when writing Dragon(e) Baby Gone?
At some point, it’s time to hit save and stop writing. For Dragon(e) Baby Gone, I wanted to write something that was more concise than a lot of my other projects, which meant saving a lot of ideas for other installments in the series. I have a tendency to want to keep going, to dig deeper into the details or to add new conflicts and characters, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will improve this story. Diane and, to a lesser extent, the Department of Intangible Assets have a lot of background, a lot of history, to convey, but this wasn’t the time to do that.
Tell us a little bit about your writing career.
Oh boy. “Writing career” is a pretty grandiose term for one guy banging away on a keyboard for twenty years. Let’s see…well, in college I had a short story published in the Kudzu Review, which is Florida State University’s literary magazine. “Mercy” was a story about a young man making a difficult decision about a cat and was well received, but after that life took me in a different direction. I joined the fire department as a full-time career, which was a wonderful decision, and I continued to write for myself as an enthusiastic hobby.
They say Hind-sight is 20/20. If you could give advice to the writer you were the first time you sat down to write, what would it be?
Don’t be afraid to start over. Don’t be afraid to scrap something entirely and approach it from another direction. Save early, save often, and then backup those saves because you’re going to have some catastrophic data loss and that’s not going to be fun. Oh, and this is less advice about writing and more advice to thirteen year old me: don’t worry. You’re going to make it.
What was your most difficult scene to write?
Without getting too deep into spoilers, there’s a scene in the book that involves a dragon. Going into the book, I wanted dragons to be presented in a very specific way. I didn’t want them to be humanized, or to seem like something attainable or even understandable. I wanted a dragon to come across the way I’d always imagined. Terrible. Awesome. Something barely comprehensible by the mortal mind. Writing the scene with Ziraxariz, the Broodmother, was something I must have done five or six times.
Are themes a big part of your stories, or not so much?
I think themes come together as the story gains cohesion. I’m not overly concerned with sticking to any specific theme, that’s just never been my style. What I want is a consistent tone and to let the reader draw their own conclusions on what the themes may or may not have been. I’m sure we’ve all read something where our own interpretations ended up being vastly different from someone else’s. It’s part of the magic of literature that we all kind of bring our own theme to the table.
What are you working on now?
I’ve been working on the sequel to Dragon(e) Baby Gone, continuing Diane’s contentious career within the Department of Intangible Assets. I’m in the process of doing some final edits for the sequel, with a working title of Witches Get Stitches. I couldn’t say when it may be available right now, but I’d like to think sometime in 2022.
Is there a release date planned?
Dragon(e) Baby Gone had a worldwide release date of June 28, 2021. With nothing else in the pipeline, that’s pretty much all the news I have.
Who is your favorite character from your own stories, and why?
I have a sci-fi adventure series I’ve worked on for a long time called Gestalt, where supertech conglomerates have developed their own personal armies of manufactured humans. The protagonist of the series is D, an escaped science project who decides to take up the mantle of superhero in a world that doesn’t really need someone in that position. D is motivated almost solely by a fear of boredom, and despite his many character flaws such as laziness, temperamental nature, and selfishness, deep down he actually wants to be a better person. I’ve always found him to be a fun, interesting character to write, often because he isn’t a perfect person.
Most writers were readers as children. What was your favorite book in grade school?
I was bonkers for Animorphs. Up until recently, I still had every one of them in a box in the attic. It blew my little mind the scope of these adventures, and I was a huge nerd for animals so naturally I loved the cover designs. I think every birthday and Christmas for several years was essentially just Animorphs.
What are your plans for future projects?
I think for the foreseeable future, I plan to work on Reports from the Department of Intangible Assets. I’m having a blast writing about the impoverished clandestine activities of Diane Morris and her colleagues, and it gives me a chance to explore some urban fantasy settings that I haven’t played around with. I have a few other novels that I continue to polish, and of course there’s always the zombie novel, but all of that is pretty much backburner stuff for now.
Is there anything you would like to add before we finish?
I’m grateful for the opportunity to be here, and I appreciate the fun questions. I’m always happy to talk with anyone who has any questions, comments or witty insults, so send them my way.
It was our pleasure. You heard him folks. Send those questions to the comments section, or connect with Robert on his blog or social media listed below.
Good luck with Dragon(e) Baby Gone, and thank you for being with us today.
Excerpt
I guess there’s always been a Department of Intangible Assets, in some way or another, since humanity first banded together against the dark. Ancient orders of knights, sects of religions, monasteries and their like had been the first real organizations determined to hold off the things that bled into our world from other realities. Great and epic individuals did a lot of work in the past, though more often than not mere pawns as one ultra-powerful being played against another. Gilgamesh. Solomon. Miyamoto Musashi for a while even worked as a kind of Japanese defender against the supernatural. Things must have been easier back then. If somebody had a problem with a corpse rising from the ground and eating people, or with creatures slinking out of the mountains and taking children, they could talk openly about it, and people would fit it neatly into whatever cultural narrative they had. No press releases concerning carbon monoxide leaks, no awkward local police trying to stutter their way through an ogre rampage by blaming gang violence and drugs. If you were a 17th Century farmer in the Tajima Province of Japan and tengu started picking off your village one by one, Musashi would come by one day, cut down all those dark spirits, and then leave. You’d replant your fields, mourn your losses, and tell warning stories about warding off evil. And, probably, pay him whatever he wanted.Modern times gave way to a general idea that reason and logic were enough to stop something from dragging you into the sewers and wearing your skin to protect itself from daylight. It’s easy to see why: it doesn’t happen to a lot of people, therefore it must not happen. I see it all the time, people who say things like “I’ve never seen a ghost, so they must not exist.”
Oh yeah? Because if spirits did exist, they’d all be tripping over their ghost dicks to haunt you? Do you understand the preternatural forces that conspire, the circumstances that line up, to create any kind of ghost? Let alone one that shows up in your room at night and moans about revenge or betrayal or rattles some chains and teaches you a valuable lesson about being selfish?
“Well, there’s no such thing as Bigfoot. All those pictures are super blurry and grainy,” they say, their voices nasally and snobby, like all the knowledge of the world is pumped directly into their tiny brains through their tiny phones. I don’t care to get into whether or not any of the literally thousands of kinds of entities that flit in and out of forests would like to be called “Bigfoot,” but just because you haven’t left your couch in twenty years doesn’t mean there’s not something out there you don’t understand. Go stand out in a remote Colorado forest one night.
Turn off your phone, open your eyes and ears, and wait. When you feel those eyes watching, and when you know, deep in that primitive monkey brain, way, way down inside, that there’s more than just the animals you have names for sharing that clearing with you, then you can call me to tell me that there’s no such thing as Bigfoot. That is, if you live to turn your phone back on again.
About the Author:
Robert Gainey is a born and raised Floridian, despite his best efforts. While enrolled at Florida State University and studying English (a language spoken on a small island near Europe), Robert began volunteering for the campus medical response team, opening up a great new passion in his life. Following graduation, he pursued further training through paramedic and firefighting programs, going on to become a full time professional firefighter in the State of Florida. He currently lives and works in Northeast Florida with his wife and dogs, who make sure he gets walked regularly. Robert writes near-fetched fantasy novels inspired by the madness and courage found in everyday events.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RNGainey
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/robertngainey/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/robert.gainey
Thanks for having me here today! Had a lot of fun with these questions, love the blog.
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