Father Turns Bedtime Stories for His Children into Fantasy Novel "The Tales of Dreamside"

Author J. Daniel Batt has taken his children’s bedtime stories and crafted an adventure-filled fantasy novel from them. The book, Keaghan in the Tales of Dreamside, tells the story of a young boy that discovers a world full of strange creatures inside his own home. Keaghan must journey through Dreamside, a strange world of twisting hallways, a labyrinth just beyond the walls of every home. Keaghan will discover that he is the Boy at the End and the only one capable of saving the world of Dream from the invading Cra-gin and their horde of ravaging Tomsi.

J. Daniel Batt describes the creation of Keaghan in the Tales of Dreamside: “We’ve long had a tradition of nightly bedtime stories. We quickly gave up reading from story books and instead, I’d come up with different stories each night with my children as the heroes. The stories became serialized ending each evening in a cliff-hanger. Finally, after a few years, my family encouraged me to write the stories down. I originally wrote it as a simple three chapter book. Then I started receiving requests for the rest of the story. What was just a few pages turned into an entire novel.”

Batt was an English teacher and has a passion for teaching children the love of reading. He says, “My son isn’t as an avid reader as the rest of the family. He often struggles to find books that would interest him at his reading level. So, my desire was to take some of the elements that are found in older fantasy works and put them in a book that was at his reading level. It is an intense book. It’s meant to be! I kept looking for something that would grab my son’s attention from cover to cover and finally decided I’d have to write it myself.”

Keaghan in the Tales of Dreamside was written for children between third and sixth grades but Batt says he’s had many adults e-mail saying they “absolutely loved reading it themselves.” Industry-leader Kirkus Reviews describes Keaghan in the Tales of Dreamside: “This is a phenomenally imaginative series, with a strong, relatable child protagonist, collected in this handsome, beautifully illustrated edition. It can also be appealingly dark, with eerie fairy-tale motifs . . . overall, an original, entertaining YA fantasy.”

The book is now available in audio book format from Audible.com, iTunes, and Amazon.com. The audio version is narrated by Mike Pyrc. Pyrc is a well-known Michigan sports announcer who works as a video editor and voice-over artist for Dow Chemical. Batt was very impressed with Pyrc’s work. Batt says: “He had sent over the first few chapters and I started listening to them in my car. My boys and me found ourselves sitting in our driveway waiting to see what happened next, completely enthralled with Mike’s storytelling. And I wrote the book! Mike completely captured the spirit of the book and brought the characters to life in a way that was beyond my greatest expectations. Several auditions came in through ACX but none compared to Mike’s work!”

The book is also available in print and in ebook from Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Apple iBooks, Kobo, and Smashwords.

For more information, please contact J. Daniel Batt at (916) 674-2288 or email press@storyjitsu.com

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