This week: seven chapters drafted for RAF Dragon Corps Book 3, work begins on Five of Swords, The Prince and the Fool launches, and Orphan Farm Boy of Destiny is now free on Patreon.
This week, I’ve been making strong progress on RAF Dragon Corps Book 3, completing the first draft of the opening seven chapters.
The Battle of Britain is beginning to take shape, and I’m enjoying getting back into the world of dragon riders, aerial combat, and wartime Britain.
I’ve also started work on Five of Swords, continuing my return to The Ravenglass Chronicles.
On the reading front, I finished Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon by Matt Dinniman. It’s an incredibly dark book, veering into horror at times, but I found it compelling from start to finish. I’ve now moved on to Dominion of Blades by the same author and am enjoying seeing a different side of his storytelling.
In publishing news, The Prince and the Fool is out today, marking the next chapter in the Ravenglass Legends saga. Also, my satirical fantasy novella Orphan Farm Boy of Destiny is now available free to followers on Patreon.
A busy week of writing, reading, and new releases!
This week: outlining RAF Dragon Corps Book 3, planning the Keeper-focused Ravenglass Guardians novel, and reading the dark and gripping Kaiju Battlefield Surgeon by Matt Dinniman.
This week, I finished outlining RAF Dragon Corps Book 3 and wrote the first chapter, officially kicking off the next stage of the series.
This instalment takes the story into the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, so there’s plenty of research and planning involved before the dragons take to the skies once more.
I’ve also been planning the next Ravenglass Guardians novel, this time focusing on the Keepers.
Each Guardians book explores a different path within the order, and I’m excited about the themes and conflicts this one will tackle.
On the reading front, I’ve been making my way through Kaiju Battlefield Surgeon by Matt Dinniman.
It’s much darker than Dungeon Crawler Carl, with less humour and more horror, but it’s exceptionally well done and has completely pulled me into its world.
A week of planning, plotting, dragons, Guardians, and giant monsters.
Why fantasy is shifting from grimdark to nobledark—a working novelist on cultural cycles, the Fourth Turning, and where the genre is going next.
Something has shifted in fantasy.
If you’ve been paying attention to what’s selling, what readers are actually reaching for, and what’s getting talked about online, the texture of the genre has changed in the last few years.
The brutalist nihilism that defined fantasy from roughly 2005 to 2020 is no longer the dominant note.
The doorstop grimdark epic isn’t dead (Abercrombie still sells, Lawrence still sells) but it isn’t where the cultural energy is any more.
Something else is rising in its place, and naming it properly matters, because we’re going to be reading and writing in this new register for at least the next decade.
This post is about what’s shifting, why, and where I think the genre is going.
The short version: we’re moving from grimdark to nobledark, and the shift is being driven by something larger than literary fashion.
What Grimdark Was, and Why It Dominated
Grimdark didn’t appear out of nowhere. It was the natural literary register for a particular cultural moment.
The genre’s grimdark era roughly coincides with the years after 9/11 and especially after the 2008 financial crisis.
These were the years when institutional trust collapsed in real time. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated that the old certainties about righteous causes weren’t going to hold. The banking crisis demonstrated that the people running the economy didn’t know what they were doing (or did know and didn’t care). The political class on both sides of the Atlantic looked increasingly hollow.
The fantasy genre, which had spent the previous half-century in various forms of Tolkien-inflected heroism, started writing books that reflected the new mood.
Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself arrived in 2006. Mark Lawrence’s Prince of Thorns in 2011. R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Nothing trilogy had started in 2003. George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (already running since 1996) became culturally dominant in this period and reached its televised peak in the early 2010s. The Witcher books found international readership in English translation.
What these works shared was a basic posture: heroism is a lie, institutions are corrupt, the people in charge are venal or worse, and any character who believes otherwise is naïve and probably dead by chapter ten.
That register made sense in its moment. Fantasy was doing what good fantasy does. It was taking the underlying anxieties of the culture and giving them mythic form. The bleak chuckle of an Abercrombie protagonist was the appropriate literary response to a world that had stopped believing its own institutional myths.
But that moment is passing.
The Fourth Turning Lens
There’s a sociological frame worth bringing in here, because it explains the shift better than any purely literary analysis can.
Strauss and Howe’s Fourth Turning thesis, published in 1997, argues that history moves in roughly 80-year cycles consisting of four phases—a High of institutional confidence, an Awakening of cultural rebellion, an Unravelling of institutional trust, and a Crisis of collapse and reformation. The Crisis phase, by their account, is when the existing order can’t sustain itself any longer and a society has to reach back to first principles to find what it actually believes.
You don’t have to buy the theory wholesale to find the diagnostic useful. The grimdark era of fantasy maps onto what Strauss and Howe would call the late Unravelling—the phase where institutional trust is collapsing and the dominant cultural mood is ironic, distrustful, and exhausted.
That’s exactly the types of books we were reading from 2005 to 2020.
What we’re in now is something different. By Strauss and Howe’s reckoning we’re somewhere deep in the Crisis phase, and Crisis phases have a different cultural signature. They produce appetite for first-principles narrative. They reach back for heroic archetype not out of nostalgia but out of need.
The institutions can’t be trusted, so the question becomes: what do you trust instead?
Your own moral code. The bond between you and the people you love. The duties you choose to honour. The cost you’re willing to pay to do the right thing.
This isn’t a return to pre-grimdark heroism. The brutal world that grimdark insisted on hasn’t been disproved. Readers in a Crisis era don’t want to go back to a pastoral Tolkien-era register where everything works out and the orcs are clearly delineated from the elves.
They want fantasy that acknowledges the grimdark world and then tries to live morally inside it anyway. That’s a different register, and it deserves a different name.
The Markers of the Shift
You can see the shift in what’s getting commercial traction.
John Gwynne’s career arc is one of the clearest signals. His Faithful and the Fallen and Of Blood and Bone series are gritty—Norse-coded, brutal, properly dark—but they aren’t nihilistic.
Loyalty matters. Friendship matters. The decent characters are decent without being naïve.
Gwynne has overtaken many of the original grimdark writers commercially, and he isn’t doing grimdark. He’s doing something else.
The Conan revival is another signal. Robert E. Howard’s original stories are seeing a genuine cultural resurgence—new comics from Titan, new film projects, Heroic Signatures’ careful stewardship of the property.
Conan is pure first-principles myth. A man, a sword, a corrupt civilisation, a personal code that operates outside institutional law. That isn’t nostalgia for the 1930s. That’s a culture in a Crisis phase reaching for the archetypes it needs.
The cosy fantasy boom is part of the same shift, even though it looks different on the surface. T. Kingfisher, Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes, the explosion of low-stakes warm-tone fantasy—these books are also rejecting the grimdark register, just from a different angle. They’re saying: actually, kindness is the interesting thing now. Decency is the rebellion.
Even the romantasy boom, often dismissed as commercial confection, is part of the same shift.
Underneath the spice and the dragon-bonded mates is a fundamentally hopeful register. The bad guys lose. The morally serious choices matter. Love is real and worth fighting for. That’s a Crisis-era register too, even when it’s wearing very different clothes from John Gwynne.
What all of these have in common is that they’re rejecting the grimdark assumption that heroism is a lie. They aren’t pretending the world is gentle. They’re insisting that meaning is recoverable inside a brutal world. That’s the cultural energy of a Crisis era, and it’s the energy fantasy is now running on.
Naming the New Register
I’ve been calling this nobledark, partly because the existing taxonomy doesn’t quite catch it.
Grimdark is dark in a particular way: the world is brutal and heroism is a lie. The two go together. Heroes get killed or corrupted, decent characters are revealed as fools, and the moral arc bends toward nothing. Whatever else you say about grimdark, it has an honest internal logic.
Noblebright is the opposite—the world is broadly hopeful, heroes are mostly good, evil is identifiable and defeatable, and moral effort is generally rewarded.
This is the arena Tolkien works in (with complications) and the register that dominated fantasy before grimdark arrived. It’s still alive—it isn’t extinct—but it doesn’t catch what’s happening now either.
The new register isn’t asking us to forget the grimdark insight that the world is brutal. It’s asking us to live morally inside that insight.
Nobledark is the register that holds both. The world is as brutal as grimdark said it was. Heroism is as hard as grimdark said it was. Institutions are corrupt, power is venal, decent people get destroyed by forces larger than themselves.
But—and this is the bit grimdark refused—moral commitments still matter, decency is still possible, hope is real even when it costs you everything to keep it alive. The world bleeds, but the bleeding doesn’t conclude the argument.
You can see this all over the books I named in the previous section. Gwynne does it. The Conan revival does it. The cosy fantasy boom does it from one angle, romantasy from another. Even some of the grimdark writers themselves are drifting toward it—Abercrombie’s The Heroes and his Age of Madness trilogy have noticeably more weight on the moral commitments of their characters than his earlier work.
What nobledark refuses is the easy ironic detachment that defined grimdark. It refuses the bleak chuckle. It refuses the implied authorial position that all of this is grim and pointless and isn’t it interesting how much of it I can wallow in. The Crisis era doesn’t have time for that posture any more.
What This Means for Writers and Readers
If you write fantasy, the shift matters because the readers you’re writing for are no longer the readers of 2010.
The reader who wanted Prince of Thorns in 2011 wanted a confirmation that the dark world they suspected they were living in was the real one.
The reader picking up new fantasy in 2026 wants something else. They’ve already accepted that the world is dark. They want to know what to do about it. They want characters whose moral effort is taken seriously by the text. They want costs that mean something. They want hope that has paid for itself.
If you read fantasy, the shift matters because it explains why your taste might have moved without you realising it. If you used to love grimdark and have noticed that recent grimdark releases feel slightly off—not bad, just somehow not landing the way the old books did—that isn’t because the books got worse. It’s because you’ve moved, and the broader cultural moment has moved with you.
In the Ravenglass Universe, what I’ve been trying to do—what the whole King of Nobledark framing has been about—is write fantasy that lives in this cultural shift honestly.
Ragnar in Ravenglass Legends lives in a brutal world that crushed his family and saw him adopted by his enemies. Maja lives in a court that survives on manipulation and threat. Soren in Dawn of Assassins lives in an empire that’s actively collapsing around him.
None of these are gentle worlds. But all of them have characters who choose, repeatedly, to act morally inside brutal circumstances, and whose choices cost them real things.
That’s nobledark, and it’s what I think fantasy is going to be doing more of for the foreseeable future.
Where Fantasy Goes Next
I don’t think grimdark is going anywhere—the books are good, the readership is loyal, and the genre will continue to produce strong work. But it isn’t going to be as dominant over the next decade. The cultural moment that gave grimdark its weight has passed.
What’s coming next is fantasy that takes the grimdark world seriously and then asks the next question. What do you owe the people you love when the institutions can’t be trusted? How do you act morally when the law is corrupt? What do you choose to honour when no one’s making you? How do you keep faith—in anything—when the world has given you every reason not to?
These are Crisis-era questions, and fantasy is uniquely equipped to answer them because it can build the worlds that make the questions visible.
The next decade of fantasy is going to look different from the last one, and the writers and readers paying attention can feel it already.
The age of grimdark is winding down. The age of nobledark is starting now.h
A week in Rome sparked fresh fantasy ideas, from the Colosseum and Vatican power symbols to Ostia Antica’s ruins, sculpture, empire, faith and memory.
I had one of those rare weeks where I didn’t write.
We spent the week in Rome. Not a writing trip. No laptop, no word counts, no “I’ll just make a few notes” that quietly turns into a chapter by accident. But when you write fantasy for a living, you can’t really switch that part of your brain off.
And Rome is ridiculous for story fuel.
Every corner gives you another ruin, statue, inscription, archway, or impossible piece of engineering, and every one of them is whispering something about power, empire, spectacle, faith, or the strange lengths people will go to make themselves permanent.
So yes. I came home with ideas.
The Colosseum is one of those places that feels unreal even while you’re standing in it. I kept trying to imagine sitting there two thousand years ago, packed in with tens of thousands of other people, watching gladiators kill each other for the afternoon’s entertainment.
As a fantasy writer, you can’t help thinking about the machinery behind that spectacle. Not the combat itself — the systems around it. Who pays. Who benefits. Who gets sacrificed. What it does to a culture when public violence becomes the default civic entertainment.
Cheery holiday thoughts, obviously.
The Forum gave me the same feeling. Walking through the bones of power. Temples, law courts, political spaces, monuments — all of it ruined, all of it still heavy with what it used to mean.
I’m always drawn to that gap. The distance between what something once claimed to be and what’s left of it.
The Vatican Museum was a mixed experience. As most of you know, I’m legally blind, and the Sistine Chapel’s lighting did me no favours. I couldn’t make out much of the imagery, and a lot of the detailed paintings were lost on me.
But I got a different kind of useful from it.
The scale. The wealth. The careful performance of sacred authority. The contrast between the Gospels (poverty, humility, washing other people’s feet) and the centuries of accumulated gold, marble, and gilded ceiling above your head. That gap again. What an institution claims to be versus what it actually became.
The Egyptian collection was a highlight, especially a magnificent Anubis statue.
My favourite part of the Vatican Museum wasn’t the Sistine Chapel.
It was the Popemobiles.
I genuinely loved them. There’s a whole section showing papal transport through the ages, from golden carriages to modern vehicles with raised bulletproof platforms. A golden carriage tells you one thing about power. A bulletproof glass box tells you something else entirely. Both are theatre. Both are how a ruler manages the distance between himself and the people watching.
I can already feel that feeding into the Ravenglass Universe somewhere. Not Popemobiles, unfortunately, but the question of how rulers present themselves to the public. What they sit in. What they wear. How high above the crowd they stand. How close they let anyone get. How much danger they’re willing to admit exists.
The kind of detail that makes a fantasy culture feel real.
My favourite place on the whole trip was Ostia Antica, the old Roman port at the mouth of the Tiber.
I’d been to Pompeii before. Astonishing, but heaving. Ostia Antica was quieter. Space to slow down and actually be there. We walked through streets, bathhouses, courtyards, old living spaces. The amphitheatre felt almost modern in its layout, which is a strange thing to say about something two thousand years old, but you could immediately understand how people gathered there.
That’s the thing that gets me. The past feels distant until you’re standing somewhere and realise people haven’t changed as much as we like to think. They still wanted entertainment, comfort, status, food, gossip, religion, beauty. Somewhere to sit. Somewhere to wash. Somewhere to be seen.
The museum at Ostia Antica was wonderful (and well-lit) so I could actually enjoy the exhibits. As some of you know, I studied history of art to PhD level, and worked at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds for a while, so the focus on sculptures meant I was in my element.
A good sculpture shows you what someone looked like.
A great sculpture shows you who they were.
There were portraits, reliefs, sarcophagi, mythological figures. A statue of Minerva I keep thinking about a week later.
There’s something about sculpture that feels especially useful for fantasy. It carries memory. It turns people into symbols. It can flatter, distort, preserve, threaten, or haunt. Statues in fantasy worlds shouldn’t just stand in courtyards looking decorative. They should tell you what a culture values, what it fears, and what lies it tells about itself.
A rare week off writing, but not really a week off stories. I came home with ideas for scenes, settings, power structures, rituals, public spectacles, imperial symbols, and the ways empires try to make themselves look eternal.
Some of it will end up in the Ravenglass Universe.
That’s one of the great joys of writing fantasy. You look at our own history, with all its beauty and brutality, and ask what happens if you tilt the mirror slightly.
This week: a trip to Rome, a day at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, Guide Dog updates, and the release of Two of Swords on Kindle. Plus plans for the week ahead.
This week’s Author Diary is a little different as I look back on a fantastic trip to Rome.
From ancient ruins and historic landmarks to wandering streets packed with history, it was a great chance to recharge and gather plenty of story inspiration.
Before heading off to Italy, I also enjoyed a fun day at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, proving that rollercoasters and holidays make a pretty good combination.
I provide an update on my application for a new Guide Dog, which continues to move forward as my current guide approaches retirement. It’s a significant change on the horizon, and I share a little about the process.
I also talk about my plans for the coming week and some of the projects I’ll be getting back to now I’m home.
And finally, Two of Swords (The Ravenglass Chronicles, Part 23) is out today on Kindle!
Why has fantasy mostly stopped engaging with faith as faith? A working novelist on Lewis, Tolkien, Sanderson’s Mormon themes, and the Ravenglass Universe.
A reader on Reddit recently asked what role religion plays in modern fantasy.
The question stuck with me, because the honest answer is not much, and that’s strange.
Fantasy is full of churches, gods, prophecies, cults, and sacred texts. What it mostly isn’t full of is faith.
Religion in modern fantasy usually functions as worldbuilding, politics, horror, or symbolism. Characters rarely believe in a way that feels sincere and grounded. Genuine belief is often treated as manipulation, fanaticism, or naïveté.
That absence feels odd in a genre perfectly suited to asking religious questions.
is an evangelistic project. Aslan is a Christ figure in plain sight, and the books are designed as theological storytelling. Lewis wasn’t subtle about this and didn’t want to be. He believed fiction could carry the gospel, and the Narnia books came directly out of that belief.
J. R. R. Tolkien approached religion differently. Tolkien was a lifelong Catholic, but he rejected allegory. Rather than writing doctrine into Middle-earth directly, he let faith shape the world’s moral atmosphere.
Mercy matters. Pity matters. Bilbo sparing Gollum ultimately saves the world. The longing for the West, the fall of Númenor, the sudden turn from despair to hope. None of this is Catholic in the obvious way Aslan is Christian. But the worldview underneath it clearly is.
That distinction shaped much of what followed.
Lewis uses fantasy in service of faith. Tolkien lets faith shape the texture of the world itself. Both take belief seriously. Both assume that what people believe about the divine matters.
Modern fantasy often doesn’t.
Four Modes of Religion in Modern Fantasy
Modern fantasy tends to approach religion in four broad ways.
books with gods, ascended beings, cults, and ancient powers, but the religious systems mostly explain how the world operates. The focus is cosmology rather than belief.
Brandon Sanderson often does something similar. His magic systems function almost like theology rendered mechanically. The systems are important and deeply tied to the plot, but they’re rarely about ordinary people wrestling with faith itself.
uses religion in The Broken Earth Trilogy as part of imperial control. Mark Lawrence does similar things in Book of the Ancestor. In these stories, the institutions matter more than the underlying belief. Religion becomes another mechanism of authority.
The third mode is religion as horror.
A lot of modern fantasy still sits under the shadow of H. P. Lovecraft. Divine knowledge becomes dangerous knowledge. The sacred becomes corrupting or alien. Writers like Tamsyn Muir use religious imagery to create unease, decay, and metaphysical wrongness.
The fourth is religion as symbolic structure.
This is where writers use systems like tarot, alchemy, mythic cycles, or kabbalah as narrative architecture rather than literal faith. Italo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italo_Calvino
The Castle of Crossed Destinies is a classic example, using tarot spreads to organise narrative patterns and meaning.
None of these approaches is wrong. They’ve all produced brilliant books.
But very little of it is about lived belief. That’s the missing piece.
Modern fantasy often treats religion as institution, system, or symbol, while sidestepping the inner experience of faith itself.
Sanderson’s Mormon Themes and Hidden Theology
The biggest modern exception is probably Brandon Sanderson.
Sanderson is openly Mormon and has talked many times about how his faith shapes his fiction. What makes his work interesting is that he rarely writes religion directly into the foreground. Instead, Mormon theology shapes the deep structure of the worlds.
One of the clearest examples is the Mormon idea of eternal progression. In LDS theology, humanity can move toward divinity through growth, trial, discipline, and moral choice.
That idea appears everywhere in Sanderson’s fiction.
gain power through moral development, knowledge, and self-mastery. Human beings move upward rather than being punished for reaching too high.
That creates a very different type of fantasy thanTolkien.
In Tolkien’s Catholic-influenced cosmology, reaching for divine power usually leads to corruption. Sauron falls through it. Saruman falls through it. The Númenóreans fall through it. Galadriel’s defining moment is refusing ultimate power when it’s offered.
Sanderson’s worlds often move the opposite way. Progress toward the divine is treated as the goal rather than the temptation.
Another recurring pattern is revelation through rediscovery.
Characters constantly recover forgotten truths. Ancient systems become understood again piece by piece. Knowledge unfolds progressively rather than arriving complete. That mirrors the Mormon idea of continuing revelation, where truth remains open rather than closed.
Put together, Sanderson’s fiction becomes deeply religious in structure without becoming apologetic. It’s the Tolkien approach applied to Mormon theology instead of Catholicism.
Building Religion in the Ravenglass Universe
Thinking about how other writers handled religion made me more deliberate about it in my own work.
The ravenglass universe/tag/ravenglass-universe spans multiple eras over roughly a thousand years, and one of the recurring questions underneath the stories is what people believe and what those beliefs cost them.
The dominant religion is the worship of Creation, the force underlying reality itself.
Creation isn’t a god in the traditional fantasy sense. It isn’t a person. It doesn’t speak. It doesn’t intervene directly. It’s closer to a metaphysical principle than a deity.
People who worship Creation aren’t praying to a being who answers them directly. They’re orienting themselves toward what they see as the underlying order of existence.
At the centre of the faith stand the Nameless Four. Their lack of names is deliberate. The idea comes partly from apophatic theology and mystical traditions which hold that the divine can’t truly be contained in language.
That idea shaped the Four.
They’re known through symbols, actions, and associations rather than names or fixed identities.
The religion changes dramatically across different eras of the setting.
In the imperial age of the The Ravenglass Chronicles, worship of the Four becomes institutionalised through temples, priesthoods, and political hierarchy.
In Ravenglass Legends, especially in Wiete, belief becomes more localised and practical. Household rites. Seasonal customs. Folk traditions the Empire might consider heretical if it paid attention.
By the time of Guild of Assassins, much of the organised structure has collapsed, but individual faith often becomes more intense because it’s no longer reinforced institutionally.
What mattered to me was allowing belief to feel real to the characters without the books confirming or denying the truth behind it.
When characters pray, they mean it.
Some believe they receive answers. Others lose faith entirely. Some interpret coincidence as divine intervention. Others see silence.
I didn’t want the worldbuilding to settle the argument for the reader. The /uncertainty matters.
Tarot in Fantasy Fiction and the Ravenglass Chronicles
The Ravenglass Chronicles is built around the Major Arcana of the tarot.
Twenty-two novellas. Twenty-two cards. From The Magician to The World.
Kat’s journey loosely follows the Fool’s Journey, moving from innocence through transformation toward integration and self-knowledge.
Part of the appeal was structural.
The Major Arcana creates a shape without forcing the story into a conventional three-act framework. The cards carry archetypal weight even when readers don’t consciously recognise it. A book linked to The Tower naturally carries a sense of upheaval and collapse whether the card itself appears or not.
The tarot also has a long literary history beyond fortune telling.
Calvino is the clearest example, but writers like Charles Williams, Robert Graves, and John Crowley all used esoteric systems as narrative structure.
What interests me most now is that the tarot exists outside the awareness of the characters themselves.
Nobody in the story lays out cards or discusses the Arcana. The structure exists for the reader rather than the world.
That creates an interesting split.
The tarot shapes the narrative.
Why This Matters
Part of this is simply about storytelling.
Religion remains one of the deepest motivators in human history. Characters who genuinely believe in something beyond themselves often make different choices, accept different sacrifices, and carry different fears from characters who treat religion as background decoration.
Fantasy loses something when belief becomes purely aesthetic.
But there’s also a broader reason.
Fantasy is uniquely suited to religious questions because fantasy worlds can negotiate metaphysics directly. Realist fiction has to take a position on whether God exists. Fantasy can create worlds where belief is justified, mistaken, partially true, culturally constructed, or permanently unknowable.
That uncertainty interests me far more than certainty ever could.
In the Ravenglass Universe, some believers are vindicated. Others are crushed. Most exist somewhere in the middle, with faith and doubt running alongside each other.
That isn’t a flaw in the worldbuilding. It’s the point.
This week: audio editing Reign of Daggers, planning RAF Dragon Corps Book 3 during the Blitz, and beginning the assessment process for my next Guide Dog.
This week I’ve been doing an audio pass of Reign of Daggers (Dawn of Assassins, Book 4), listening through the full manuscript to make sure the story flows properly before putting it aside for a while.
I find hearing a story aloud is one of the best ways to catch pacing issues and awkward moments.
I’ve also started work on RAF Dragon Corps Book 3, mapping out the timeline before begininng the draft.
This instalment will take place during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, which should make for a dramatic backdrop for dragons and aerial combat.
On a more personal note, I talk about beginning the process of being assessed for a new Guide Dog.
My current dog is retiring this year, so I’ve started the application and assessment process for my next guide.
As someone who relies on a Guide Dog to get around, it’s a big life transition.
Birthday break, a brilliant new Dungeon Crawler Carl novel, and near-finished drafts. This week I worked on Reign of Daggers and listened to A Parade of Horribles in just two days.
This week I took a few days off for my birthday and ended up listening to the new Dungeon Crawler Carl book, A Parade of Horribles, over the space of just two days.
Safe to say, I absolutely loved it. The series continues to balance chaos, humour, and surprisingly emotional storytelling brilliantly.
I also continued working on Reign of Daggers (Dawn of Assassins, Book 4).
I initially thought I’d finished the draft, but realised the story needed a little more room to breathe, so I’m adding three extra scenes plus epilogues for each of the core characters.
That should bring the draft to a proper conclusion next week.
This week: 60k words on Reign of Daggers, conspiracy podcasts, classic Poirot, vintage Attenborough documentaries, 6k running progress, and reading Heir to Atlantis by Chris Fox.
This week I hit the 60,000-word mark on Reign of Daggers (Dawn of Assassins, Book 4), and the story’s continuing to build momentum as I head toward the final stretch.
I also talk about the end of the Knowledge Fight podcast and my love of conspiracy debunking/deconstruction shows, including Some Dare Call it Conspiracy, Conspirituality, and QAA.
There’s something fascinating about pulling apart modern myths and misinformation.
On the viewing front, I’ve started watching the classic 1980s Poirot series, which I’m really enjoying, and revisited an early 1961 David Attenborough documentary on Madagascar. I love the slow pace and calm tone of those older documentaries.
Outside of writing, I reached 6k running, which feels like another solid milestone.
I’ve also been reading Heir to Atlantis by Chris Fox, an archaeological thriller drawing inspiration from pseudo-history, which has been a fun read so far.
Past the midpoint of Dawn of Assassins Book 4 and revealing its working title. Also got The Prince and the Fool back from my editor, ran 5.8k nonstop, and tried tandem cycling.
This week I passed the midpoint of Dawn of Assassins Book 4 and officially reveal the working title for the project.
It’s been great getting back into this world after such a long break away from the series.
I also received The Prince and the Fool back from my editor, so that’s now moving into the next stage of the publishing process.
Outside of writing, I’ve continued with my running and managed 5.8k without stopping, which felt like a huge milestone.
I also took part in a tandem cycling taster session, which was a lot of fun and something I’d love to do more of.
