Ffion and Rhiannon meet to attend the Torsday Fights, an underground combat bracket, as a reprieve from their woeful conscription into the Gallo Corps.
The Garden of Ruin: Hunters Rising
Prettanica's haunting forests teem with the madden fæ.
At 17, Ffion has trained all her life in the shadow of war heroines to defend against the madness at the gates and reconquer the fæ wilderness. When she’s conscripted and given her chance, her fantasies of heroism are crushed.
Ffion is scarred for life by forest monsters only to retreat home to an icy reception from her ruthless commanders. As she loses faith in herself, she finds solace in her childhood friend Rhiannon, whose quirky optimism helps Ffion heal her shattered confidence, but when Rhiannon’s hope crumbles, it becomes clear she needs Ffion far more than Ffion needs her.
With her body and mind shaken, amid crushing responsibilities to her people, Ffion weighs her vows of duty against her sense of justice as she faces a war she struggles to believe in.
The Garden of Ruin is a fantasy franchise intended as a trilogy with YA Crossover potential. The First book, Hunters Rising, weighing in at 115k words. It’s an action fantasy inspired by the themes of Princess Mononoke transposed with ancient Celtic myth, recalling the imperialistic culture of World War I Britain with happy LGBT characters that don't have to explain themselves or die.
Manifest Misery
Dust devils wander the Apacheria night prairie like ghosts with no one to haunt, spinning the chill breeze thick with dust and scrub grass as they go along their lonely way.
The new world dies slow, haunted by the revenants of its sins. Colonial armies war over territory while the Dead West is left to fend for itself. The land has become a ghostly prairie of forgotten battlegrounds prowled by backwoods witches and slavering nightmares. The First Nations watch on, long grown apathetic, as the Frontier Townships struggle to survive.
Manifest Misery is a gothic western currently in progress. Much of the setting, characters, and plotting has been fleshed out, putting me into the drafting stage.
My writing is being informed by like-minded critique partners and sensitivity readers.
Moonlit Landscape with a View of the New Amstel River and Castle Kostverloren by Aert van der Neer, 1647
Needs Must When the Devil Drives
William Marwood, an independent surgeon is consumed with excitement when he managed to procure a freshly dead body from the gallows, Helena Penbrooke a roguish woman and lifelong groundskeeper sentenced to death for murder.
Unfortunately for him, Helena isn’t quite dead.
Her voice, alas, she yet mourns. With her throat too badly damaged to speak, Helena strikes a bargain with her would-be coroner. Wishing to hide from the constabulary as Marwood wishes to protect his reputation, Helena agrees to become a bodysnatcher herself for reasons she will not divulge.
Sent out to the graveyards of London under cover of night, her accomplice, Shiver Tom, plucks at the threads of her past. What is this woman’s story, why did she murder her employer Mr. Rawls, and why does she wish to return to the scene of the crime, where Rawls’ mourning fianceé Lady Valencia Langdon lives a hollow, bitter life.
The plot thickens when Tom learns Ms. Langdon has no love for her almost husband, and in fact grieves for her seemingly dead groundskeeper.
Needs Must When the Devil Drives is a historical short story of 7909 words imagining a gruesome queer love story set in early 1800s London while the city was gripped with an epidemic of body-snatching. Read it here!