Jon Cronshaw finishes Seven of Swords, starts new Ravenglass novella The Waywarden, and goes gliding with local sight-loss charity Galloway’s.
This week, I finished Seven of Swords and sent the completed draft off to my editor.
With that one done, I’ve started work on a new novella set in the Ravenglass Universe called The Waywarden. It’s a nobledark ranger story set on the border between Ostreich and Molotok, and I talk about the story and its place in the wider world.
I also did something completely different this week. I went gliding in an unpowered aircraft with Galloway’s, a local charity supporting blind and visually impaired people. It was a fantastic experience, and I talk about what it was like getting up into the air without an engine.
Plus, the usual thoughts on writing, storytelling and life as an indie author.
Jon Cronshaw shares progress on Seven of Swords and Wyvern Academy, prepares for his guide dog’s retirement, and talks about his assessment for a new dog.
I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather this week, so writing has been slower than usual, but I’ve still made progress on both Seven of Swords and Wyvern Academy.
Away from the writing, there’s a much bigger change coming. My guide dog’s retirement is now imminent, and he’ll be rehomed early next month. I talk about preparing for that goodbye and what the next few weeks are likely to look like.
I also had my assessment for a new guide dog on Wednesday. The process is moving forward, but it sounds as though I could be without a dog for a while before the right match comes along.
Jon Cronshaw reaches 40% of Seven of Swords, adds new chapters to Wyvern Academy, and shares his final thoughts on Will Wight’s Cradle series.
This week, I’m around 30% of the way through the first draft of Seven of Swords and talk about how the story is progressing as I get deeper into the book.
I’ve also spent some more time on Wyvern Academy, adding three new chapters to the first act and continuing to develop the story beyond the original Wyvern Rider novella.
On the reading side, I’ve finally finished Will Wight’s Cradle series.
Jon Cronshaw reaches 40% of The Hammer and the Crown, returns to Wyvern Academy, and shares his thoughts on finishing Will Wight’s Cradle series.
This week, I’m around 40% of the way through my draft of The Hammer and the Crown, book five in my Ravenglass Legends series.
The story is gathering momentum, and I talk about how the draft is progressing as I move deeper into Ragnar and Maja’s next adventure.
I’ve also returned to an older project, Wyvern Academy, a follow-up to my Wyvern Rider novella for Patreon.
On the reading side, I’m nearing the end of Will Wight’s Cradle series. I’m now on the final book and have been hugely impressed by how the series has developed.
Wight has done a fantastic job of building the characters, escalating the stakes and improving his craft across twelve books while keeping the story compulsively readable.
Jon Cronshaw finishes Six of Swords, reaches 25,000 words on Ravenglass Legends book five, and discusses Will Wight’s Cradle series.
This week, I’ve finished Six of Swords and sent it off for editing, bringing another Ravenglass Chronicles novella to the next stage of production.
I’ve also made good progress on The Hammer and the Crown, book five in the Ravenglass Legends series. I’m now around 25,000 words into the draft as Ragnar and Maja’s story continues.
I also talk about my ongoing readthrough of Will Wight’s Cradle series. I’m currently on book eight, Bloodline, and thoroughly enjoying it.
One of the things that has stood out is how much Wight’s craft develops as the series progresses, particularly in terms of pacing, character work and handling an increasingly large story without losing momentum.
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.
Finished writing Two of Swords and kicked off Three of Swords. I also share thoughts on Dark Matter by Blake Crouch—well worth a read if you like twisty sci-fi thrillers.
This week I finished writing Two of Swords and started work on Three of Swords, continuing my return to The Ravenglass Chronicles.
I also enjoyed reading Dark Matter by Blake Crouch.
In exciting news, The Ravenglass Throne: Parts 5–8 boxed set is out today on Kindle and paperback.
And if you’ve not started the series yet, Parts 1–4 is free on Kindle until February 1.
Nearly finished Two of Swords! This week I talk writing progress and how Meta’s smart glasses are helping me navigate the world as a visually impaired author.
This week I’ve nearly finished Two of Swords, with just three chapters left to draft.
I also share my thoughts on using Meta’s smart glasses and how they’re proving surprisingly useful for someone like me with a visual impairment.
The Ravenglass Chronicles is back! This week I reveal my secret project, post Ace of Swords to Patreon, try Meta’s Smart Glasses for vision aid, and talk about finishing Stranger Things.
This week I reveal my long-hinted secret project—I’m back writing The Ravenglass Chronicles!
The first two chapters of Ace of Swords is now live on Patreon, and I’m deep into Two of Swords.
I also tried out Meta’s Smart Glasses, a game-changer for accessibility, and share my thoughts on the Stranger Things finale.
Fantasy author Jon Cronshaw shares how writing The Nanny’s Secret—his first domestic thriller—reignited his creativity after completing The Ravenglass Chronicles. Discover how his new pen name, J. Cronshaw, opened a new chapter in his storytelling career.
If you’ve been following my work for a while, you probably know me for wyverns, assassins, and dark fantasy worlds.
I’ve been publishing fantasy and speculative fiction since 2016, and I’ve been a full-time author since 2018.
Most of my readers found me through The Ravenglass Chronicles—a long-running epic about magic, destiny, and rebellion that spanned half-a-million words. It was an intense creative journey, and by the time I finished it, I needed to catch my breath.
In 2022, I decided to write something completely different. No magic. No kingdoms. No wyverns. Just people. Ordinary lives under extraordinary pressure. It started as a palate cleanser, a little side project to clear my head before diving into my next fantasy series. That story became The Nanny’s Secret.
At the time, I didn’t think I’d ever publish it. It didn’t fit with my other books. I love reading psychological thrillers, but I saw them as something separate from what I wrote. I wasn’t keen on setting up a new pen name or building a whole second author brand. So I set the manuscript aside and got on with other things.
But the idea of writing thrillers stuck with me.
The stories kept coming—small-town secrets, lies, betrayals, and the dark undercurrents that run beneath everyday life. Before long, I’d written a second thriller, then a third. Now, I’ve written eight and I’m working on my ninth.
When I showed them to a friend who writes thrillers, he told me I was mad not to publish them. I told him I didn’t want to annoy my regular eaders, and I didn’t want the stress of juggling two identities. He gave me a simple solution: drop my first name.
So “Jon Cronshaw” became “J. Cronshaw.”
Same writer. Different shelf.
That small change made everything click.
I’ve since built a new website, newsletter, and social media presence for J. Cronshaw—the domestic thriller author.
I’ll admit, I was reluctant at first. Starting over from scratch after years of building my fantasy world felt strange. But once I began, I rediscovered something I hadn’t felt in a long time: the spark of building something brand new.
These domestic thrillers are grounded in real life. They draw on my years as a court reporter, on real places near where I live—Morecambe, Heysham, Lancaster.
The stories are intimate and claustrophobic, the kind of tension that doesn’t need magic to feel dangerous. And in a way, writing them has made me a better fantasy author too. They’ve sharpened my sense of pacing, dialogue, and emotional realism.
I’m still writing fantasy—always will.
The Ravenglass Legends series is continuing, and there are more stories from that world on the way. But writing thrillers under J. Cronshaw has reminded me how much I love storytelling in all its forms. It’s a different kind of worldbuilding—one built from truth, not myth.
So if you ever fancy reading something a little different from me—something without wyverns, but still full of secrets and twists—you can download your free copy of The Lodger HERE to give you a flavour of what I’ve been doing.
And if you’d like to hear more about what I’m working on—both fantasy and thriller—you can listen to my weekly Author Diary podcast. I’ve been recording every week since 2017 and haven’t missed an episode.
It’s been a strange journey from wyverns to whispers, but I’m glad I took it. Because sometimes, stepping outside your world is the best way to remember why you built it in the first place.
