Dabir & Asim

The adventures of Dabir and Asim, also known as The Chronicles of Sword and Sand, are partly collected in three volumes, one of which (The Waters of Eternity) is only available in an e-edition.

In order, they are The Desert of Souls, The Waters of Eternity (mostly), and The Bones of the Old Ones. I write mostly because chronologically one of the stories included in The Waters of Eternity actually takes place after The Bones of the Old Ones, although the order isn’t especially important.

Additional stories featuring the Arabian historical fantasy swashbuckler/occult investigator duo have since appeared in a few other places, and as soon as I write a few more I’ll put them into a collection. Apart from the following, almost all other published stories are gathered in either The Waters of Eternity, or told over the course of The Desert of Souls.

  1. “The Serpent’s Heart,” Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters, 2014.
  2. “The Black Lion,” Skelos #2, 2-17.
  3. “Instrument of Vengeance,” published in Heroic Fiction Quarterly issue 45. With art by my first-born child, Darian Vincent Jones.
  4. “The Dream Horn,” Forthcoming from Rogue Blades Press.
  5. “The Dragon Planet,” Available for preorder in the anthology Of Gods and Globes 2.
  6. “The Palace in the Moonlight,” Forthcoming from Lightspeed magazine.
  7. “Asim’s Last Day,” a short story existing only in a notebook. I really ought to get around to typing that one in…
  8. “An Audience with the King,” one of my very first published short stories, and the embryonic appearance of Dabir and Asim. It’s pretty goofy. Maybe I’ll publish it as an appendix to one of their collections some day.
  9. “The Flame and the Bottle” was published in Heroic Fiction Quarterly, issue 54.
  10. “Brother of the Sword” was published in the ZNB collection When Worlds Collide.

Additionally, the story “The Sword and the Djinn” is an excerpt from the unfinished third novel-length adventure of Dabir and Asim, The Maiden’s Eye, although neither character appears in the tale. It’s also an unofficial (and unauthorized) addition to the Gray Maiden cycle of stories by Arthur D. Howden Smith. It can be found in the anthology Guilds & Glaives, 2018.

From time to time I receive requests or even demands to write more Dabir and Asim short stories and novels. Some of these come from my wife and son. I fully plan to complete at least one more Dabir and Asim novel and I will keep drafting their shorter adventures. In an ideal world I would finish the full cycle of 8-10 books I had planned, but we shall see how much time I have and how much interest the world really has in their full exploits…

It’s a little easier to find time to draft short stories about them. I’ve thumbnails, outlines, and even partial drafts of a dozen more, some of which are probably short novels. And of course I had thumbnail plans for the rest of the book series. So there’s a great deal I could do in that vein yet. I love writing from Asim’s point of view; his voice comes very easily still whenever he has a story that needs telling.