I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I don’t like to make people pay for my work, but at the same time, I’m disabled, I can only work a few hours a week and the exhaustion is interfering with my ability to write. I want to give myself an incentive to write when I feel well enough. If I have paying subscribers, I have to write!
I may have mentioned the Space Dragon story I’ve been working on for a couple of years. The plan is to share a chapter a month for paying subscribers until I’ve written it all. You won’t be getting the first draft, since I write that by hand, but you’ll get the edited version. There will probably be further edits in future before I release it as a book. I might also share some of my short stories as paid subscriber posts.
What do you think?
Let me share a few paragraphs with you and if you want the rest, please feel free to join the paid subscription.
Update 22/03/2025
No one wanted paid subscriptions, so I’ve unlocked this chapter and any others that I’ve posted.
ISBN: 9781835413784 Format: Paperback Pages: 320 Published: 27th Jan 2026
Description
Port Astor is a city of ghosts. Once home to the beautiful, brutal courts of the fae, forty years ago they vanished without explanation – and Port Astor decided to forget.
Brix and Bellefeather are paranormal investigators, working to keep Port Astor’s wraiths and spectres from consuming the city. Both have hauntings of their own: Belle shares her body with a demon, Belizial; Brix has trapped the soul of his dead fiancée in the world of the living, unwilling to let her go.
While investigating the glamorous and notoriously haunted Peony Hotel, Brix and Belle come across a young couple tangled up in one of the city’s most infamous tales. Jimmy Valentine, silver screen idol and one-time favorite of a fae queen, has returned to haunt the Peony. But Jimmy is no mere ghost, and Brix and Belle soon realize his return is more intimately tied to their own hauntings than they could ever have imagined.
The fae have not forgotten that Port Astor once belonged to them. And their Hollow Queen won’t give up her kingdom so easily.
My Review
Brix is dealing with losing his beloved Abby, Belle is dealing with her childhood trauma. They work together as investigators of the supernatural in a haunted city. One day they investigate a haunted hotel, and the next they’re dealing with the Hollow Queen, a powerful fae.
Brix discovers that a ghost has been called, a ghost so powerful that it’s drawing others to the hotel. He sets about rescuing the two young people who caused the problem, only to realise that the ghost, famed singer and actor, Jimmy Valentine, was once the amour of the Hollow Queen, and she’s never forgiven him for loving her.
Belle’s sister Dee comes to call, desperately looking for help. Her husband Clarence, a priest, has been behaving strangely: he’s cheating on her with a parishioner, he doesn’t go to church anymore, and he’s spending an awful lot of time in the old barn. When Dee takes herself back to the family farm, Belle, and her demon Beliziel, follow, because something is clearly not right.
It’s very not right. And the two cases are linked. Between them, Brix and Belle work on either end of the case, lay ghosts to rest, and banish the fae, while fighting their own internal wars. Belle and Beliziel have to find a way to live equally, while Brix has to find the courage to let Abby go. And they both have to rescue/protect the two young people, Virgil and Leonie, and Dee, from themselves, Clarence, and the Hollow Queen.
Wow, this was…
Overwhelming melancholy
Longing for a lost love
Demon sex
Ghost threesomes
Pyres and gallows
A bullet to the brain
Strangely enough, it ends with hope, and I can see this being the first in a series following Brix and Belle, as they mentor Virgil and Leonie, and Belle builds a new relationship with her sister, while they hunt down the rest of the doors, and work out why the fae retreated from Arcadia in the first place.
The story starts strong, and I was intrigued by the going’s on at the hotel. That strand was definitely the strongest of the novel, exploring Brix’s angst about losing Abby, and the strong connection of people to places. The young lovers, Virgil and Leonie, who carelessly summon the spirit of Jimmy Valentine, are bound up in each other. This is where the ghost threesomes come in. Yeah, that was weird, but fine I suppose. It makes sense in the plot.
Brix, with Virgil, and then Jimmy, unwind the bonds, discover the cause, and fight the Hollow Queen, in the confines of a hotel room that keeps disappearing. It’s beautifully described, and the four characters feel full, rounded, even the ghost.
There’s the echo of the Hollow Queen permeating the whole narrative, too, becoming solid when Jimmy leaves, helped by Brix and Virgil. The other haunting here is love and heartbreak. Jimmy was in love with everyone, and broke hearts, including his own every day, always seeking a home and never finding it. His love is so deep, he might even sate the Hollow Queen. And that’s a problem for her. Their complicated relationship drives the hauntings and the religious fervour, as the Hollow Queen hungers to devour everyone and everything, and Jimmy hungers for a place where he can stop running.
Belle’s strand was weaker, and there could have been more focus on her past with Clarence. Why does Clarence hate her? He’s a priest and he knows about Beliziel, but how? The reader knows Belle’s parents abused her – they were religious and delusional believing her to be possessed long before she actual met Beliziel, but she left home before Dee met Clarence. Did her parents tell him about their wicked, demonic daughter? Did Dee?
The relationship between Belle and Beliziel is complex, and it’s only after they accidentally kill Ada, Clarence’s mistress and the host to whatever is causing the blinding light in the barn, that there is a reckoning between them. Belle must face her pain, as must Beliziel, instead of holding it back and hurting each other. They also have sex a lot. I’m not sure why, other than as a bonding exercise? It wasn’t particularly explicit so I am not going to object.
I think if the author writes a sequel, focusing on Belle and Dee’s relationship will be an important strand, maybe answering some of the questions I have about their childhood and Clarence.
The setting is pseudo-1950s U.S. There’s cars and movies, industrialists and robber barons, a Gilded Age hotel past its prime, and Belle is clearly considered to be eccentric, someone out of time, but there’s an otherness to it. Some of the dialogue feels psuedo-working class English, not American. Arcadia could be anywhere, a floating place, unattached to any known map, and yet has a definite USian vibe.
Honestly, an enjoyable read that kept my attention and the way the two separate mysteries are brought together is clever. I found the ending a little abrupt, but I can see what they author was doing. I think it would make a good film. There’s a theatrical quality to the novel that would translate well.
It’s a bit gothic, with a dark undertone and terrifying highlights. Hardly anyone dies. There are no explosions.
Other than the lack of explosions (the hotel could definitely have blown up from the energy of fighting the Hollow Queen, surely? Or the barn?), I recommend this novel to lovers of gothic horror who wants to shake things up and read something lightly dark, and to the urban fantasy or paranormal romance lover looking for something slightly less romantic and slightly darker.
Release date: 28 January 2026 Kindle eBook Paperback Hardback later in 2026 Page count: 40 Self-Published
Blurb
A short, mixed style poetry collection about not dying just yet – exploring chronic illness, depression, trauma and finding moments of joy and love in a painful world. Inspired by the authors own experiences with disability, trauma, healing and then healing again, this collection captures the strange existence of someone not quite living but still alive.
The paperback is 283 pages. Genre is sci-fi, cli-fi and dystopian.
Blurb:
When the past lies buried beneath the waves, and the present hides behind a veneer, what power do we have over the future?
As high-flying energy magnate, Parsley Ringland, prepares for maternity leave, tragedy strikes. She passes out after a health complication and wakes up elsewhere. In the tower that sustained the life she had once known.
As she fights to protect herself and her unborn child, Parsley begins to fear for humanity itself. She is faced with an impossible dilemma. Does she keep the world in comforting darkness? Or expose a cruel truth that might destroy it?
Is it better to endure a terrible truth than to lounge inside a lie?
War Comes For Those Who Forge It. And It Never Forgives…
Haltveldt is a nation built on bloodshed. With the Order of Sparkers brought to heel, Emperor Locke wields his mages – and their magic the Spark – like a weapon as he wages a war of genocide.
But the enemies of his empire multiply.
In the almost-forgotten north, the ancient citadel of Solitude, filled with two-hundred exiled Sparkers, watches over the mysterious Banished. With a new apprentice under her wing, Zanna Alpenwood pines for her estranged daughter when everything changes – for the first time in centuries, The Banished are on the move.
Miles away in Haltveldt’s southern frontlines, Calene Alpenwood makes a startling discovery in the most unlikely of places and her estrangement from her mother is tested. As is her faith in the Order of Sparkers and loyalty to the Empire.
And in Haltveldt’s capital, Kade Besem – whose son Arlo is training with Zanna – scrambles to react to the events at Solitude in a den of vipers.
Haltveldt is an empire forged in fire and nothing is at it seems. But one thing is certain: with the Banished returning, and the elves to the south on the brink of annihilation, Zanna, Calene and Kade stand on the brink of earth-shattering change.
A great game, millennia in the making, is coming to its stunning conclusion. Who will survive? And who is the true enemy of Haltveldt? ‘In Solitude’s Shadow: Extended Edition’ – now with all new chapters, expanded scenes and including the prequel ‘Before The Shadow’, reveals all…
The magic of ‘The Wheel of Time’ meets the grittiness of ‘The Witcher’ in this fast-paced series starter!
If you read ebooks, the whole saga is available on Kindle Unlimited.
My Review
I have two editions of this book, the original and the updated edition. I’ve only read the updated edition. There are spoilers in this review.
Set some time after Magic, Maps, and Mischief, about two centuries I think, we return to Haltveldt to find the eleven genocide almost complete, a paranoid emperor, and a Master of War searching for new enemies.
In Solitude, Zanna Alpenwood watches as the Banished gather before the gates, running from something. Zanna wants to talk to them, the leadership want to kill them.
Her daughter, Calene, leaving the southern battle front finds herself escorting a Banished to the capital, until terrible events in Spring Haven and an assault on the road, leads Calene and her new companions towards Solitude. Something is happening in the far north and it’ll bring destruction to the empire.
The characters of Zanna and Calene are fully fleshed out and their relationship reads realistically. The rift between them is illogical – Zanna killed to save Calene – but understandable in the cultural context. The healing of their rift is a slow but natural consequence of the changing circumstances.
Zanna is caring for a 12 year old apprentice, Arlo. His parents are a man of influence in Spring Haven, Kade, and an elven slave, who died in childbirth. The relationship between Zanna and Arlo is parental and loving. She’s in awe of his growing power and dedication to research. He’s instrumental in finding information relevant later in the story. His heritage puts him at a severe disadvantage in Spring Haven but in Solitude nobody notices and his strong Spark protects him. So long as no one finds out his mother is an elf.
The nascent relationship between Sparker Calene, recently returned from the battlefields to the south, and Brina, an elven freedom fighter who rescues enslaved elves from humans, is subtle and well-written. Brina is angry and hates humans, because they’re committing genocide against her people. The humans have been convinced by imperial propaganda that elves are evil and will kill humans if given a chance, even though the elves and humans worked together to defeat their common enemy in the past. Calene doesn’t believe it, but she is forced by the Emperor, like all Sparkers, to fight in his war. She doesn’t kill, only defend and heal. Brina makes it clear she feels that’s a narrow distinction without meaning.
Kade Besem has a minor ministerial position in the imperial government, with a serious addiction to a snuff-like substance, a son in Solitude, and very few friends. He is increasingly side-lined, when he receives the message that the Betrayed are at Solitude’s gates and tells everyone, he is ignored. Kade tries to get mercenaries to go to Solitude but is prevented by the mad Master of War, who kills his allies and tries to kill Kade. Kade grabs a ship and travels north.
Tilo is Tilo. A Betrayed sent south to find his purpose and to warn the humans of the south that there is something coming. Calene finds him in a cellar and initially plans to take him to Spring Haven, but an attack on the road by a new type of Sparker changes plans. He slowly learns to understand Brina and Calene, as they travel north, and rescues Kade from a murderous attack. His singing magic is unusual to Calene and Brina who are used to the Spark.
This disparate and desperate band come together on the road to Solitude to help Zanna and Arlo, find out what is happening beyond Solitude, and alert the rest of Haltveldt to the danger.
Greton makes appearances by reputation if not in person throughout. He’s leading some sort of resistance from his library by the sounds of it.
Unfortunately, there are people who don’t really want them to get there. The emperor and his Master of War are both paranoid and narcissistic, convinced that they are right and that hidden prophesies are about them. This leads them to commit terrible acts of torture, murder, and genocide which leaves the empire vulnerable to the unseen forces coming from beyond Solitude.
The worldbuilding is strong and full. The magical system has rules and consequences for breaking the rules. The writing is easy to read and flows well, while the dialogue feels natural. The events rush along with action and not a scene wasted. The tone is quite dark but the moments of affection and lightness relieve it.
The final scenes are a crashing wave of excitement, fear, and then a mix of sadness and relief. I loved it, but I need to know what happens next.
I really enjoyed the novel and would like to read the rest of the series. I need to order them directly from the author, when I’ve got enough money together. The full series is available on Kindle Unlimited, but as people know, I struggle with e-books, so usually use that to read graphic novels. I will be downloading it though, to help David.
25th November 2025 | PB | 9781915998927 | £9.99/$18.99 | Also available in ebook | Fiction | Fantasy | Paranormal
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Conversing with the dead is nothing new for Lou. It’s a curse she’s learned to hide from everyone – including herself. After running away from a past that took advantage of those abilities, Lou finally carves out a normal life for herself. Until a mysterious message from a ghost – the Veil is thinning – and a cult of necromancers infesting her small town puts that normal life in jeopardy.
In a race to discover and defeat her foe, Lou learns she’s not alone in the fight. She grudgingly leans on her allies but wonders who to trust. What’s more impossible is suddenly finding herself the romantic interest of a man who somehow isn’t afraid of all the dark, creepy things about her… but even he has secrets for her to discover.
Time is running out, and reality seems to be slipping away. To save her new life and the people she loves, Lou must learn to accept who she is and embrace her true abilities, no matter where they might take her.
Format:427 pages, Paperback Published: October 8, 2025 by Independently published ISBN: 9798269020877
Book Description
What Would YouDo To Discover Your Heart’s Desire?
Greton of Willow is in a spot of bother. Caught in the act while escorting a family of elves to safety, Greton flees for greener pastures with only his scant magic and brilliant mind to his name.
And a question. The question.
‘What is your heart’s desire?’
A life-long outsider, Greton sets out to uncover what lies at the centre of his heart. Is it adopting a tawny owl? Owning his very own map shop? Forging a found family with others as similarly scorned as himself? The possibilities are endless. Determined to put his marvellous mind to the task, Greton discovers a way to reveal anyone’s heart’s desire, but not everyone’s longings are as pure as his…
Something odd is occurring in Greton’s new home of Barrow’s Hill, and, before long, the old man in search of a comfortable new life finds himself swept up in danger and mischief.
My Review
Firstly, a disclaimer. I know the author, he’s the BFS Secretary, and currently running a writing course I’m on. I had an advanced ebook of this novel last year. Unfortunately, I struggle to read ebooks, so I got a physical copy at World Fantasy Con in October/November just after it was published. Dave has signed it and everything. I also heard some of the story at Fantasycon in Chester last year. So I knew from what I’d already heard and read that I’d enjoy it.
We meet the Sparker, a magic user, Greton on the island of Haltveldt. He’s forced to join a raid looking for elves. The Emperor has been committing genocide and some of the Sparkers are happy to help. Greton is not. He helps a family of elves flee but is caught by one of those murder-happy Sparkers. Greton is forced to flee to Valen, a state on the main continent. On the way he makes a friend in Atlas, the tawny owl and finds a patron, an explorer looking for accurate maps. On the way he ponders the question asked by one of the elves, what does his heart desire?
Greton loves maps. He is an extraordinary mapmaker. In Valen, Greton makes his way to Barrow’s Hill. Here he settles into a shop next door to a tea shop and across the road from a book shop. He’s very happy, and sets about creating maps, before trying to develop an ink that will show him his hearts desire. Along the way he makes some good friends and helps uncover a mystery – who is robbing the homes and shops of Barrow’s Hill and getting in and out unseen? He also discovers his heart’s desire was right in front of him the whole time.
There are some things that are obvious to the reader that Greton is oblivious to, but it’s part of his character. His instincts can be good but he’s uncertain about them because of the bullying he’s experienced. He’s a rather sweet old man who wants to make maps and help people. Aria is an energetic, fun character who balances Greton’s steadier nature, between them, they work well and successfully. With Petra across the road, they form a chosen family that is stable and loving. Greton is an autistic character, Aria is an ADHDer, and this book is a celebration of ND life and friendships. The characters have settled into my brain and I want to read more about their lives.
I enjoyed the cosy tale and the mystery was well-formed and the explanation entirely sensible. I picked up the clues that some people were dodgy fairly early on, but the execution of the mystery had good pacing and a satisfying resolution.
The world building is strong and memorable. The settings are clearly defined and I enjoyed exploring them with Greton. I would like to go exploring with Greton and make maps with him.
I knew changing from an ebook to a physical book would be sensible – I started from where I left off in the ebook, while I was in Brighton and got about half of it read. I had blog tours to read for so I put this book down until Saturday, when I spent the afternoon reading the rest. I needed a couple of days processing time to write a review, but here it is. I enjoyed the story, the characters and the setting. I need to read In Solitude’s Shadow, which is set 200 years after this book. I enjoy David’s writing and I want to know more about the world of Greton and company.
If you want a cosy fantasy with explicitly ND (autistic, ADHD) and Queer (asexual, lesbian) characters, I recommend this book.
Everything Is Better With Dragons 