“Get in,” this book says. “We’re going on a mission.”
The reader is the hero — the “Ink Drinker” — in the new indie illustrated novel “The Clerk and the Ink Drinker in the Outer Lands Mission” by N.G. Swett
“The Clerk” and the “Ink Drinker” fall under a powerful primordial island’s spell and crash land in the sea. They swim, surf, tumble and crawl ashore to an island suspended in time.
They must complete the mission and find a bridge back to base. But the mission isn’t clear, the bridge isn’t built yet, and neighbors along the proposed route have a deeper story to tell. Following signs, raw instinct and each other, the odyssey transforms the duo into heroes. They find a bridge to the future, but it’s not what they expect.
“With writing a novel, you can look up and find many lonely years have passed,” said author N.G. Swett. “I basically enlist the reader to be the ‘Ink Drinker,’ a primary character needed to get the book to the finish line. They’re near the top of my acknowledgements at the back of the book.”
“The project took much longer than expected. I don’t know what I expected really since I had no experience of writing a novel before. At one of the later stages of editing it, I thought some company would be nice for the narrator, the ‘Clerk,’ so I added the ‘Ink Drinker’ as co-pilot on a mission,” said Swett. “When you write fiction, you can do whatever you want.”
“Necessity was the mother of invention,” said Swett. It’s a novel that feels like an active mission, or what IndieReader calls “a cataclysmic adventure.” (Read full IndieReader book review here.)
Swett wrote the Clerk and the Ink Drinker characters so a reader — most any reader — could see themself and find common ground and feelings beyond gender or background, a kind of civil camaraderie. “That was tricky. That’s where the idea for the Odyssey Rescue Group (the Org) came in as a different kind of entity, one that might be found after some self help research deep on the internet,” Swett said.
The ‘Ink Drinker’ art cards
In recognition and gratitude to all the Ink Drinkers out there, especially those willing to brave debut novels of unknown authors (there should be an ‘Ink Drinker’ monument somewhere), Swett is making a series of original mini art cards dedicated to readers for the 4seasonshelf Project.