Nicholas Quick, a boy with special powers, discovers a magical world with not only a North and South Pole, but also an East and West Pole in Ryan Muldowney’s new middle grade novel “Nicholas Quick and the Man from the Chaos Dimension.”
The BYU-Idaho art professor published the book under the pen name, H L Romquist.
On the H L Romquist website, the author is a declared “cake-wrestling enthusiast.”
While Muldowney does not claim to be a “cake-wrestler” himself, he is a lover of art, especially in the forms of painting, drawing and writing.
Muldowney teaches painting and drawing classes at BYU-Idaho and has written a number of books, including “Not Art,” which he co-authored with Jacob Muldowney, and picture books, such as “The Approved Inter-Universal, Pan-Dimensional, Omni-Galactic, Alphabetical Guide to the Cosmos for Beginning Space Explorers,” which he both wrote and illustrated.
Now, he is working on a follow-up book for “Nicholas Quick and the Man from the Chaos Dimension,” which he hopes to make into a trilogy, much like a three-act play, he said.
The book is seven years in the making. Muldowney said his love for writing motivates him to continue creating.
“Writing is extremely hard. It’s arduous. It takes years to develop your craft. It takes years to finish projects sometimes, and sometimes it takes years to land those projects with the publisher, and so you have to have enough fuel in the take to do it for its own sake,” he said.
The author has written serious books in the past, however, he intends this book to serve as a source of entertainment and comedy.
“This is an unashamed, unabashed bit of pure entertainment, but [I’m] hoping that it’s clever enough, that it’s layered enough, that it’s complex enough, that you can laugh, that you can sort of cry and that you can feel tension when the characters are in danger, sorrow or when bad things happen to them,” Muldowney said.
You can buy “Nicholas Quick and the Man from the Chaos Dimension” at Barnes and Noble and on Amazon.