Announcing a new series of novels, available now!

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To all my long-time fans – or rather, long-time fans of Felix and new fans of Jack – I have an important announcement!

The books, while immensely fun to write and receiving critical success, haven’t exactly been commercial best-sellers. Not the path to happy retirement I was planning on.

Accordingly, I am taking a new direction with my writing, based on the best ‘wisdom of crowds’ advices sourced on the interwebs, will immediately commence to write to market. I have been relentlessly hitting the keyboard like never before, producing an average of 3,000-5,000 words per night, including self-editing. The subject are what sells, aka centuries old vampires taking an unhealthy interest in teenage girls. This means that I should be able to publish a book per fortnight (apparently the plot doesn’t take as many words to develop). To keep up the pace, I will also swallow my pride and put shirtless men with 12-pack abs on the covers, wearing flimsy clothing and smouldering looks.

You can now expect an unending stream of sparkling-in-the-daylight vampires, attractively-hairy werewolves, no other facial expression except smirking, and enough 🌶️ in the book description to make even a Mexican hot-sauce champion cringe.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

OK, clearly I’m joking. It’s April 1st and all. However…

You knew this was coming, didn’t you?

However, I do have a couple of announcements regarding new publications. For real, this time.

New anthology!

The good people at Purple Toga Publications (that’s Eric and me), are in the final stages of preparing the latest speculative-fiction anthology. Our previous ones – It Takes A Village about the meaning of care, and Rainbows aren’t just for Leprechauns about reimagining colours – have been such fun that we decided to go at it again.

Working with some brilliant indie authors to explore topics has been an amazing experience, and we were blessed with such a breadth of excellent contributions that it was hard to limit ourselves to just the very best. This one will be far larger that the previous, probably speaking to the fundamental nature of the topic (and, maybe possibly, to us getting better at it).

As for the topic, we’ll keep it under wraps. Let’s just say that May 11th is National Eat What You Want Day. This is one delectable anthology, that will surely whet your appetite (or not).

As for my contributions, beyond editing and publishing, I actually have FOUR new stories in there 😱 In escalating order of squee:

  • The Egyptians Were Wrong, a flash fiction I already published on my mailing list
  • Red Riding Wolf, because everyone deserves a voice
  • Rabbit Stew, a new Jack police file, somewhere between Monty Python and A Night in the Museum
  • Stench, a new Felix mystery!!

You read that right. This is the first new Felix story I’ve written in five years, and it brings together two of the elements all his fans love dearly – free Roman food and smelly disasters.

Bet you can’t wait to get your hands on it 😉

New Author – and new books!

For real!

An ex-colleague has reached out to me. Unlike me, with my overly complex plots and immersive worlds that take over 100k to cook properly, she does have the talent hinted above at producing Paranormal-Romance / Urban-Fantasy blends at an alarming rate. Not quite the insane rate I alluded to, but far faster than me. She reached out about help publishing, and we started chatting in depth, and soon Purple Toga will have a new author and a new line.

We used to work together in cyber-security adjacent areas, so she will be using a pen-name. Something about being taken seriously in IT is hard enough for women as it is. A sad commentary about our world, but not one we’ll fight.

She has an incredible raw talent for writing, and Eric and I are helping with editing and the rest of the publication business side of things. We’re balancing writing to market with the royal-quality associated with the purple toga.

Still, it’s amazing how many people are like that, whose artistic tendencies wake up late and with a roar. There will be more announcements coming later this year.

Yes, but… Felix? Jack?

Don’t worry, they haven’t been mothballed. In fact, I’ve just found out that Jack’s The Chambermaid’s Tale (a Tasmanian ghost story) has won an honourable mention from Writers of the Future.

So while I have been distracted with those other two projects (on top of life), my core writing is just as satisfying as it’s always been. I’m looking forward to publishing those shorts with Jack this year, as well as slowly plugging away at more content – even, gasp, the actual full novel with Jack.

More good things coming your way – soon! 😊

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