Jon Cronshaw reaches 60% of Seeker’s Reckoning, continues Clout Maxxing, plans Ravenglass Origins and finishes He Who Fights with Monsters Book 2.
This week, I’ve reached around 60% of the way through my draft of Seeker’s Reckoning, the third Ravenglass Guardians standalone, and I’ve continued working on Clout Maxxing alongside it.
That’s a big jump from 25% a fortnight ago. You can follow where every book stands on my Project Tracker. Clout Maxxing, my British LitRPG, is now running as a weekly serial on Patreon.
Planning Ravenglass Origins
I’ve also been outlining a potential future project called Ravenglass Origins. This would take the story right back to the very beginning of the kingdom of Ostreich and give me a chance to look at a much earlier period in the history of the Ravenglass Universe.
On the reading side, I’ve just finished book two of He Who Fights with Monsters and I’m having a great time with the series. After bouncing off it earlier in the year, I’m now fully invested and keen to keep going. I talked about giving it a second try in last week’s Author Diary. If you want to try it yourself, Shirtaloon still releases new chapters on Patreon.
Plus, the usual thoughts on writing, reading and life as an indie author.
Listen, Watch and Read
Author Diary goes out every week as a vlog on YouTube and as an author podcast on Spotify. New to my fantasy books? Browse the full library, or grab a free starter library through my newsletter.
Jon Cronshaw talks Seeker’s Reckoning, Clout Maxxing and Seven of Swords, celebrates nine years of Author Diary and revisits He Who Fights With Monsters.
This week, I’ve been working across a few different projects. I’ve made more progress on Seeker’s Reckoning, continued writing Clout Maxxing, and spent time editing Seven of Swords.
I’ve also finally decided what I’m going to do with Clout Maxxing. Rather than leaving it as a wacky side project, I’m going to run it as a Patreon serial, posting a new chapter every week.
There are a couple of personal milestones this week too. My wife and I have now been together for 25 years, and I’ve reached nine years of recording my Author Diary podcast without missing a single week.
On the reading side, I’ve returned to He Who Fights With Monsters after DNFing it earlier this year. This time around, something has clicked, and I’m really enjoying it.
Plus, the usual thoughts on writing, reading and life as an indie author.
Silent Watcher by Jon Cronshaw is out now in Kindle, paperback and audiobook, narrated by Claire Aston. Discover this standalone fantasy spy thriller.
Silent Watcher is officially out now in all three formats: Kindle, paperback and audiobook.
This is the first novel in my new Ravenglass Guardians series, and although it takes place in the same world as my other Ravenglass books, Silent Watcher has been designed to work completely as a standalone.
So, if you’ve never read one of my fantasy novels before, you can start here.
And if you’re already familiar with the Ravenglass Universe, this book takes you somewhere rather different.
A century has passed since the events of Ravenglass Legends.
The Guardians have become an established institution. They were founded to watch without shaping, protect without ruling, and preserve the truth.
But institutions change.
And sometimes the people tasked with protecting the truth become very good at controlling it.
A Fantasy Spy Thriller
Silent Watcher follows Anselma Versen, a Watcher sent to the isolated town of Halborg under a false name.
Her mission appears straightforward.
A fellow Guardian is dead.
The official report says it was an accident.
Anselma quickly becomes convinced it was murder.
But Halborg is a town where everything feels slightly wrong.
The streets have been scrubbed clean. Witnesses give suspiciously similar answers. Records disappear. People seem to know more than they are willing to say.
Then Anselma discovers reports carrying her own signature.
Reports authorising operations she never witnessed.
Some are dated to days she cannot remember.
Someone knew she was coming.
Someone has already decided what she is supposed to discover.
And the last Watcher who asked these questions is already dead.
With Silent Watcher, I wanted to write something that felt closer to an espionage novel than a traditional quest fantasy.
There are no armies marching across continents here. No chosen one setting out to defeat an ancient evil.
Instead, the danger lies in reports, testimony, missing documents and carefully constructed lies.
Anselma is trained to observe.
Her job is to establish what happened and report the truth.
The problem is that she works for an organisation that may have its own definition of what the truth is allowed to be.
That made Silent Watcher a chance for me to focus on questions of institutional loyalty, secrecy, surveillance and the ways organisations protect themselves.
What happens when the system you trust tells you that the evidence in front of you cannot possibly be true?
And what do you do when telling the truth could make you the next problem the institution needs to remove?
The Beginning of Ravenglass Guardians
Silent Watcher is also the first book in Ravenglass Guardians.
The series will consist of seven standalone novels, each following a different branch of the Guardian Order during a growing internal schism.
Each book will tell its own complete story with its own protagonist, setting and central conflict.
At the same time, the novels will gradually reveal a much larger struggle over what the Guardians are supposed to be.
Protectors.
Observers.
Judges.
Or rulers.
Silent Watcher approaches that conflict through espionage and psychological suspense. Other books in the series will take on very different styles, including military fantasy, ethical and medical dilemmas, legal conflict and other corners of the Ravenglass world.
You won’t need to read every book to understand an individual novel, but readers who follow the whole series will see the larger crisis developing from several different perspectives.
The Audiobook, Narrated by Claire Aston
I’m especially pleased that the audiobook edition is launching alongside the Kindle and paperback editions.
Silent Watcher is narrated by Claire Aston, who has done a fantastic job bringing Anselma and the inhabitants of Halborg to life.
This is a story built around suspicion, uncertainty and the things people leave unsaid, so the performance matters enormously.
Claire captured that atmosphere beautifully.
If you prefer to experience your fantasy through audio, the complete audiobook is available now.
What to Expect from Silent Watcher
If you pick up Silent Watcher, expect a slow-burning mystery built around secrets, deception and institutional betrayal.
At its heart, it’s a fantasy spy thriller.
It’s about a professional investigator entering a place where everyone appears to be lying, only to realise that the conspiracy may extend far beyond the town she was sent to investigate.
If you enjoy the political and institutional tension of Seth Dickinson, the espionage of John le Carré, or the morally complicated fantasy of K. J. Parker, Silent Watcher should be right up your street.
A Dead Agent. A Silent Town. A Conspiracy Written in Her Own Hand.
Watcher Anselma Versen arrives in Halborg under a false name to investigate a colleague’s death.
The official report calls it an accident.
The evidence says murder.
The streets have been scrubbed clean. Witnesses repeat the same rehearsed answers. Records vanish overnight. Then Anselma finds reports bearing her signature, authorising operations she never witnessed and dated to days she cannot remember.
Someone knew she was coming.
Someone has already decided what she will find.
The last Watcher who asked these questions is already dead.
As Anselma pulls at the threads, she uncovers a truth buried at the heart of the Guardian Order itself. The rebellion she was sent to document may never have been real.
And if her role in the conspiracy was written before she arrived, she may not be meant to leave Halborg alive.
Silent Watcher is available now in Kindle, paperback and audiobook.
What if a rebellion wasn’t entirely real? A look at agent provocateurs, manufactured unrest, institutional power, and the ideas behind the fantasy spy thriller Silent Watcher.
Here’s a question I’ve found myself thinking about a lot recently:
Looking for fantasy novels where information is the battlefield? Discover five fantasy books about secrets, espionage, bureaucracy, political intrigue, and the struggle to control the truth.
Armies clash. Heroes fight villains. Kingdoms rise and fall.
But some of the most interesting fantasy novels I’ve read are about information.
Who controls it.
Who hides it.
Who gets to decide what’s true.
In these books, the decisive battles aren’t fought with swords. They’re fought with records, secrets, bureaucracy, manipulation, and the ability to shape what people believe.
If that sounds like your sort of thing, here are five books worth checking out.
This is probably the clearest example of what I’m talking about.
Baru comes from a conquered people and decides she’s going to destroy the empire that took her homeland.
The twist is that she doesn’t do it with an army.
She does it through administration. Tax policy. Economics. Bureaucracy.
It’s a novel where financial systems are weapons and accounting can be more dangerous than a sword.
What makes the book so compelling is the cost. To use the empire’s tools, Baru has to understand them. To understand them, she has to become part of them.
The result is one of the most devastating political fantasies I’ve ever read.
You could put several K. J. Parker novels on this list, but this is probably the easiest place to start.
The protagonist isn’t a great warrior or a chosen hero. He’s an engineer.
When a city comes under threat, he survives through logistics, planning, deception, and sheer nerve.
The joy of the novel is watching an intelligent person solve impossible problems.
The horror is realising how easily practical solutions can become moral compromises.
Parker understands better than almost anyone that institutions often run on paperwork, procedure, and people convincing themselves they’re being reasonable.
Abraham is interested in leverage rather than spectacle. Most of the important moments involve negotiations, agreements, obligations, and people understanding things their opponents don’t.
Very little is settled by violence.
Almost everything is settled by information.
What I love about Abraham’s work is that he never loses sight of the human cost. These aren’t abstract political manoeuvres. They’re choices that affect real people.
If you’ve read any of these books, I’d love to know what you thought of them.
And if you’ve got recommendations for fantasy novels where information, bureaucracy, espionage, or institutional power sit at the heart of the story, let me know. I’m always looking for more.
What if your honesty, diligence, and loyalty made you part of the problem? A look at institutions, complicity, and the central question behind the fantasy spy thriller Silent Watcher.
One of the questions that sits underneath Silent Watcher is surprisingly simple: What if you’re part of the problem?
Not the villain. Not the mastermind. Not the person giving the orders. Just someone doing their job.
It’s an uncomfortable question because most of us naturally imagine we’d be the exception.
When we read about corruption, institutional failures, or historical injustices, we picture ourselves as the person who would have spotted it. The whistleblower. The dissenter. The person who refused to go along with it.
Very few people imagine themselves as the person quietly helping the system function.
Yet that’s where most people live.
Not because they’re bad people.
Because most institutions are built from ordinary people doing work they believe matters.
The uncomfortable truth is that systems rarely depend on villains.
They depend on competent people. People who show up every day and do their jobs well.
Most of the time, those people don’t see the whole picture.
The person filling in the form doesn’t know where the form goes next.
The person writing the report doesn’t know how it will be used.
The person recording an event doesn’t know who benefits from the record.
Everyone sees a small part of the machine.
That’s what makes these systems so effective.
The people inside them don’t need to be wicked.
They just need to keep doing their jobs.
What interested me most wasn’t the discovery of corruption.
It was what comes afterwards.
Imagine discovering that you helped something harmful happen.
Now imagine discovering that your best qualities were the reason.
Your strengths. Your honesty. Your diligence.
The institution didn’t need to exploit your flaws.
It relied on your virtues.
That’s a much harder thing to live with.
It’s one thing to discover you made a mistake. It’s another to discover that the qualities you’re proudest of were exactly what made you useful.
When I started writing Silent Watcher, I knew the protagonist couldn’t be cynical.
She had to believe.
Anselma has spent twenty years serving an organisation she genuinely respects. She believes in its mission. She believes in its values. She believes she’s helping preserve the truth.
She’s good at her job.
She’s proud of her work.
She’s convinced she’s one of the good people.
That’s what makes the story work.
A cynic expects corruption. A believer doesn’t.
When a cynic discovers a lie, they shrug.
When a believer discovers a lie, the discovery threatens their entire sense of self.
Because suddenly the question isn’t whether the institution can be trusted.
It’s whether they can trust themselves.
I won’t spoil where Anselma’s story goes. But I will say this was the question I kept returning to while writing the book:
If you were diligent, decent, honest, and loyal, would you have seen what was happening?
Or would those very qualities have made you useful to the system?
I’d like to think I’d have noticed.
I’d like to think I’d have asked the difficult questions.
Most of us would.
But that’s exactly why I find the question interesting.
I’m not sure any of us really know the answer.
And I suspect admitting that uncertainty is probably the most honest place to start.
Silent Watcher is a standalone fantasy spy thriller about a woman who serves the truth inside an institution that has learned to manufacture it.
For readers of Seth Dickinson, John le Carré, and K. J. Parker.
Why I wrote a fantasy spy thriller about records, archives, and institutional power. A look at how paperwork, documentation, and official narratives inspired Silent Watcher.
When people hear “fantasy spy novel”, they tend to picture assassins, coded messages, secret meetings, and people passing sealed letters in dark alleyways.
There’s some of that in Silent Watcher.
But the thing that ended up fascinating me most wasn’t any of the spycraft.
Reports. Archives.Records. The mundane machinery by which institutions decide what officially happened.
And possibly one of the most frightening.
Think about how much of your understanding of reality depends on records. Who owns a house. Who owes a debt. Who was born. Who died. Whether something happened at all.
Most of us don’t rely on memory for those things. We rely on documentation.
A functioning society more or less depends on that.
You can’t run a country on competing recollections. So we trust the record.
The problem is that whoever controls the record controls something very close to reality itself.
That’s not a fantasy concept. That’s just how institutions work.
The version that gets stamped, filed, and archived almost always beats the version that exists only in someone’s memory.
The report becomes the truth.
Or at least the official version of it.
One of the things that interests me about institutions is that they can produce terrible outcomes without containing a single obviously evil person.
Fantasy often gives us a Dark Lord. Or a tyrant. Or a corrupt noble.
A person we can point at and blame.
Real life is often messier. A witness statement gets revised. A report gets adjusted. A death is recorded as an accident because accident is the category that closes the file.
Each decision seems small. Each decision seems reasonable. Everyone involved can honestly say they’re simply doing their job.
Yet by the end of the process, the official record describes a reality that never actually happened.
That’s what unsettles me.
Not the lie itself.
The fact that nobody involved necessarily thinks of themselves as lying.
That idea eventually became Silent Watcher.
The protagonist, Anselma, belongs to an order whose entire purpose is to observe and record events.
Her reports become the official account.
Her authority depends on documentation being trustworthy.
Which makes her the worst possible person to discover that the records may not be reliable.
She arrives in a quiet town to investigate the death of another Watcher.
The official report says everything is settled.
The evidence suggests otherwise.
Then she discovers reports in her own handwriting, carrying her own signature, authorising actions she has no memory of taking.
At that point, the investigation stops being about a dead colleague.
It becomes a question of whether she can trust anything at all.
Including herself.
One of the things fantasy does particularly well is take an ordinary fear and make it impossible to ignore.
Most of us have experienced that moment when the official version of events doesn’t quite match what we know happened.
Most of us have dealt with a form, a database, or a decision that suddenly feels more real than our own experience.
Fantasy lets you turn that feeling into the central conflict.
It lets you build a world where the record really is stronger than memory.
Where the paperwork can come for you.
Where the truth isn’t hidden.
It’s been replaced.
That’s the idea that sat underneath Silent Watcher from the beginning.
A document.
And the uncomfortable possibility that the document is wrong.
Silent Watcher is a standalone fantasy spy thriller about secrets, deception, and institutional betrayal.
For readers of Seth Dickinson, John le Carré, and K. J. Parker.
This week: 60% through RAF Dragon Corps Book 3, editing The Sentinel’s Mercy, and celebrating nine years since publishing Wizard of the Wasteland.
This week I’ve continued working on RAF Dragon Corps Book 3 and have now reached the 60% mark in the draft.
It’s been great returning to the skies over wartime Britain and continuing the series.
I’ve also been working through The Sentinel’s Mercy, getting the manuscript ready to send off for a professional edit. It’s always satisfying to move a project closer to publication.
And this week marks a special milestone: nine years since I published my first novel, Wizard of the Wasteland.
Looking back on nearly a decade as an indie author, I reflect on how far things have come, the lessons I’ve learned, and the stories still waiting to be told.
Thanks to everyone who’s joined me on this journey. Here’s to the next nine years!
Meta Description: This week: 60% through RAF Dragon Corps Book 3, editing The Sentinel’s Mercy, and celebrating nine years since publishing Wizard of the Wasteland.
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.
A slower week thanks to a spring virus. I worked through edits on The Silent Watcher and read Don’t Let Him In by Lisa Jewell, a gripping psychological thriller.
This week’s been a quieter one as I’ve been under the weather with a spring virus.
Even so, I’ve been working through the edits for The Silent Watcher, making progress on polishing the manuscript.
I’ve also been doing some reading and picked up Don’t Let Him In by Lisa Jewell, which was a gripping psychological thriller.
Not the most energetic week, but still moving things forward behind the scenes.
