For the first time, my books have been nominated. James and Seventeen need your help! The Indie Ink Awards is an annual contest run by Indie Story Geek, with public nominations and voting, and lots of different categories. For the first time, two of my books—From the Grave of the Gods, and The Re-Emergence have received nominations in several categories. I am amazed, since they’ve been eligible...

This Black Friday weekend, we’ve got an impressive list of some amazing indie books for you, all with fantastic discounts. This year there’s 170 indie SFF books in the sale from 120 different authors! This sale has been organised and hosted by indie fantasy author James Lloyd Dulin who co-organised last year’s sale, so massive shout-out and thanks to James...

It’s release day! My cosmic horror novelette, The God Sun is out now. I freely admit this wasn’t a book I thought I would have written at this point in my author journey, much less actually released for people to read. I’ve had the title banging around in my mind for the last six months or so, and I thought it would become a new novel trilogy set in a completely different universe...

If you’ve been following my social media posts for the last few weeks, you’ll no doubt have seen it teased that I got into the Halloween spirit and spent the latter half of October writing something spooky. I had intended to finish and publish it before the end of the month, but as always things took longer than I expected. But, not two days into November, I finished the first draft...

A brief writing update, and a look at some new art. If you're following along on social media, you'll probably be aware that I have put a pause on writing Legacy of the Gods for the time being while I work some things out. To put it simply: I burned myself out doing NaNoWriMo in 2023, writing over 30,000 words in just 30 days (yes, I fell short of the 50k goal). Then I had to re-plot the book...

Announcing the first annual Indie Orbital Science Fiction Sale! You really thought Indie August would be the last of the big group sales for the year? Well not this time. Here we have a brand new group sale dedicated to independent and self published science fiction books kicking off Sci-Fi September! This sale is being hosted by sci-fi author and graphic designer, Conrad Altmann...

It’s been a long old journey, but I am please to announce that The Shadow of Arcadia: The Augment Saga Book Two is out now and available to purchase in ebook from Amazon, and in paperback from all retailers. Signed paperbacks and book swag are available to UK residents from my store. It is also available to read for FREE via a Kindle Unlimited subscription.

Fresh from a live chat conversation with KDP support about the status of print pre-orders on Amazon for The Shadow of Arcadia, I thought I should update you on the situation. I know many of you were probably waiting for the print version to be available to pre-order through Amazon before ordering, but it is with great regret and profound disappointment that I announce this will no longer be possible.

Meet the characters of the upcoming second novel in the Augment Saga, The Shadow of Arcadia. Captain James Fowler: James has been a test pilot for the International Space Administration for the last two decades under the command of Captain Austin Queen, flying the IXS-17 Aurora: an experimental spaceplane containing the first faster-than-light engine known as the Austinium Drive...

On Thursday 18 July from 6:30pm to 7:30pm, I will be at Rainham Library celebrating the launch of my new book, The Shadow of Arcadia. During the event I’ll be giving a talk all about the book, my writing process, as well as reading an excerpt. There will be space for a Q&A session and signed paperbacks of all four of my books, and Augment Saga swag packs, will be available to purchase.

It’s time to announce my next book launch! It’s been a long time coming. At least, it feels like it to me after so many delays. But I am pleased to announce that the fourth entry in The Augment Saga, and its second full-length novel, The Shadow of Arcadia, will be releasing into the world on Monday 15th July 2024. What’s more, you can pre-order it now!

That’s right, for the first time I’m putting out a call for ARC readers for The Shadow of Arcadia, the second full-length novel in the Augment Saga! With three books already under my belt, you’d think I’d have gotten this publishing stuff figured out by now. But the one thing I’ve always missed out on during the run-up to release is sending out ARCs. And the main reason for that is timing…

I’m thrilled to announce I now have some extra goodies available in my online shop. It all started because I wanted to do something else with the art I had been making to go along with my books. I already had the bookmarks, and someone said that the mission patch would make a great sticker. Plus, I’d spent so much time painting the art for my book covers and then slapping typography over the top that I really wanted to have something where the art itself could shine through…

I am excited to say that I have now completed all the beta reader edits for The Shadow of Arcadia and it is now at the point in the book creation process where it needs to be sent off for a professional edit. The word count currently sits at around 126,400 words, which is a little bit longer than From the Grave of the Gods was. All major rewrite and scene additions are done; I’ve tidied up the prose and typos as much as I possibly can. So now it’s time to turn it over to the professionals…

First of all, I need to update you all on the progress of The Shadow of Arcadia. I’ve made no secret that I’ve struggled writing this book. It has absolutely been the hardest book I’ve ever written, and things have taken a lot longer than I wanted. The good news, however, is that the book is now away with beta readers! I’ve asked for around 3 months of turnaround time, so it’ll likely be January before I get their feedback to incorporate. As you can probably tell, this means the bad news is that the book won’t be coming out this year, something for which I feel I must apologise profusely.

I am beyond thrilled to announce that I’ve finally reached the end of my second full-length Augment Saga novel, The Shadow of Arcadia, and it feels amazing! So mark your calendars! I’ve got something special for you all. I promised on my social media that I would do a cover reveal once the draft is done, and true to that promise, the cover art and blurb reveal for The Shadow of Arcadia will happen on FRIDAY 26 MAY - that’s 7 days from now. Keep watching my socials, as I’ll be posting a new graphic each day revealing just that little bit more of the cover. I’m very happy with the artwork I’ve produced for the book, and I hope you’ll join me in giving both it and the book the celebration they deserve.

In this longer blog post, I hope to take you through a journey of thinking about alternative applications for the speculative technologies in your sci-fi worldbuilding. There are already a lot of articles out there on the internet about the different types of faster-than-light (FTL) drive tech that have been used throughout science fiction. It’s a deep well you can draw from. There’s your warp drives, wormholes, hyperdrives, jump drives, even infinite improbability drives! And all of these have different flavours—such as the Federation’s dilithium-based matter/antimatter engine vs the Romulan singularity-based one… or others such as jump-gates, stargates, slipstream, and frame-shift drives—the list goes on and on.

Progress on The Shadow of Arcadia is still slow. I’m finding this to be the hardest book I’ve yet written, but I am still making progress. It is now past novella-length, and past the length at which I extracted it from the original draft of From the Grave of the Gods, but there’s a lot still to add, and I’m just shy of half the way through. As I write Part Two of the novel, I have a very clear picture in my mind of where it’s heading, and there’s a sequence which I am absolutely dying to write.

You all know by now how much I adore Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing, so it comes as no surprise that I would be over the moon about the prospect of learning more of the art of writing from her. Steering the Craft is a fantastic short guide packed with lots of great insights and writing exercises across a range of different aspects of the craft. Mainly aimed at the kind of writer who’s been doing this thing a little while and wants to hone their craft, it’s an excellent resource for both lone and group work. As such, it doesn’t go over the basics like how to create characters, build fictional worlds etc… But focuses more on style.

The experience of selling signed copies of my books for the first time at craft fairs. At the end of October I bought a stall at the Fairkytes Arts & Crafts Market in Hornchurch. I’d never done anything of the sort before, though I had seen other crafty people in my family exhibit at them. It was certainly a learning experience, so I thought I’d share that with you. I became aware of the Fairkytes Arts & Crafts Market entirely by chance when a family member happened to mention they had seen it advertised on Facebook.