Chapter 4: Trauma (excerpt)

He looked in the mirror. Scar tissue stood proud of his skin, a new landscape, the body repairing itself too well. The doctors had offered to remove it, but Inba had declined, he wanted the scars there to remind him. The scars were the manifestation of his memories. He traced his fingers over the flaking …

Chapter 3 – Recovery

A sliver of light cut the darkness, a heartbeat in time with his own flowed through the crack in the void. The air was warm, his lungs fluttered, shallow breaths one after another. Warmth around him, comfort and security, swaddled like a new born. A thought half formed entered his stirring mind, playing over and …

Chapter 1: Part 2

Each breath turned him inside out as his lungs struggled to keep pace. They were going to catch him, if he could just....then he saw it, the scaffolding rods only a few meters away. The shouts and growls from behind him felt like they were tugging at his ankles, trying to foul his footsteps. They …

Chapter 1: Trial by Fire

Reality assaulted Inba as he heard a sharp, pulsing, high pitched tone, his eyes opening just a fraction. It was all he could manage as light blinded him, and then pain. So much pain, blooming like creepers with cruel thorns, constricting his senses, slicing at his veins. He wanted to scream, and he was screaming, …

I don’t really enjoy YA BUT…|Review| Fallen Flame

Awesome reviews from an awesome friend!

Book Beyond

Well slap me silly and call me Gertrude – I fully enjoyed a YA fantasy novel. This does not happen very often.
J.M. Miller has crafted a story that may boast a few of the standard YA fantasy tropes – a “different” heroine who knows her way around a sword, some unrequited love that threatens to evolve into a love triangle – but she deftly outmanoeuvres many more. This story is relatively short with no waffly paragraphs describing repetitive and dull feelings, and at no point did I want to shake our heroine, Vala, by the shoulders for her stupidity.

Vala is the head guard of Prince Caulden of Garlin. She takes her duties very seriously, not least because she kind of fancies him. She’s also very different from anyone else on her island kingdom – her skin is scorched (I imagined it like charcoal or cooled lava) and burns…

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Historical World Building in Fantasy ; What was it really like and why do our worlds matter?

So what to write for a first post? Like any novel I hope its going to be grand and sweeping, using its finely wrought claws to transport fascinated readers, carrying them away into fabled  lands never for them to return to the mundane. I am going to present something that had been bouncing round my …