I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I don’t like to make people pay for my work, but at the same time, I’m disabled, I can only work a few hours a week and the exhaustion is interfering with my ability to write. I want to give myself an incentive to write when I feel well enough. If I have paying subscribers, I have to write!
I may have mentioned the Space Dragon story I’ve been working on for a couple of years. The plan is to share a chapter a month for paying subscribers until I’ve written it all. You won’t be getting the first draft, since I write that by hand, but you’ll get the edited version. There will probably be further edits in future before I release it as a book. I might also share some of my short stories as paid subscriber posts.
What do you think?
Let me share a few paragraphs with you and if you want the rest, please feel free to join the paid subscription.
Update 22/03/2025
No one wanted paid subscriptions, so I’ve unlocked this chapter and any others that I’ve posted.
Another prequal from the Empire of the Wolf! I’m very much looking forward to this novella and adding a hardback edition to my collection, eventually. Waiting on the ARC at the moment.
Book Description
It is winter in the Empire of the Wolf, and the town of Eisbrück burns with plague.
Whilst physicians struggle to contain the pox, the atmosphere thickens with recrimination and rumour: talk of inauspicious constellations, and a demonic witch filling the streets with bodies and black magick. Amongst the chaos, Sir Konrad Vonvalt must recover a dangerous fugitive—a child murderer who has escaped from Blackmarsh Insane Asylum.
But with winter’s bite closing and plague spreading like wildfire, finding the killer may be the least of his problems…
A forgotten wreck. A forbidden map. A gate that should never have been opened. On the salvage moon of Veyra’s Fall, Kade Renn only wants one thing: a working air filter for his sick sister, Lira.
Instead, he finds a buried courier ship older than the official history books. Inside it is a dying Driftborn pilot, a forbidden star map, and a message from Kade’s mother, Elian, who supposedly died nine years ago. The Directorate says the gates saved civilisation. It says the Driftborn are criminals, free-route smugglers and a threat to every recognised human world.
The Directorate is lying.
Forced to flee with Lira, their strange scrap-mech Nix, and a half-illegal ship called The Moth, Kade is pulled into a hidden war over the true origin of the gates. The deeper they travel beyond authorised space, the more dangerous the truth becomes.
The first crossing was not what humanity was taught.
The gates were not built by us.
And something has been waiting for us to understand what we woke. For readers who enjoy grounded space opera, ancient alien mysteries, damaged ships, found family, dry humour and human stakes beneath the scale of the stars.
The Driftborn is a tense, character-driven science fiction novel about control, memory, survival and the danger of mistaking every door for an invitation.
A deadly contagion spreads throughout the world, while scientists grapple to find a cure before it’s too late…
Dr. Monica Cucinotta works on the front lines of a hospital in Cassino, Italy, dealing with a deadly contagion that causes thorns to erupt along the surface of the body. When Monica becomes infected with the virus and must leave the hospital, she begins ajourney across the dark landscape of a pandemic world where she meets the best and worst of humanity that tests her belief in science and faith as she struggles to return home to her loved ones.
Hardcover with sprayed edges. In the sequel to A Rebel’s History of Mars, Azad and his fellow time-traveling historians must contend with the consequences of the dark secrets they’ve exposed…
After exposing the dark origins of his world on the distant planet of Nabatea, Azad is a fugitive, hunted across the galaxy by the fearsome Vitruvian Authorities. But to lead a passive society into revolution, Azad and his crew must enlist the unlikely help of a space pirate with an agenda all her own. Their adventures once again draw them into the past, into the early days of settlement on Nabatea, where a death continues to haunt the fledgling community and a mother must contend with her son’s monstrous vision for their new home.
The year is 2050. In the teeth of a climate catastrophe, the world is left with a drastic solution: one global leader to steer it through the coming apocalypse.
The final two candidates are ex-US President Lockwood, and Solomon, the world’s first political artificial intelligence. As whispers of a global conspiracy emerge, investigative journalist Marcus Tully find himself at the centre of it – when Solomon’s creator turns up murdered.
Overnight, one investigation becomes two, and it’s not just the result of the election that’s at stake but the future of the species. Suddenly humanity must make an impossible choice – between salvation, or freedom.
Due to be published by Grim Dark Magazine in August, this novella by C.L. Clark sounds like it’ll be a very good read. I’ve reviewed one GdM novella and there’s another on my currently reading pile, so I’m really looking forward to getting my ARC of this book.
Book Description
Kill the beast. Earn some coin. Get the girl.
Or at least, that’s how it was supposed to go. Kova of Stormwatch made a promise when she left her mother and sweetheart weeping on the shore back home: she’d earn her fortune slaying the beasts that haunt the woods and the horrors that lurk in the shadows, or she would die trying. But to do that, she needs an apprenticeship with a master monster hunter. The best of the best: Sayre Boarbane.
Pity that Sayre works alone.
When Sayre drags Kova home by the ear, they’re both in for a rude awakening. Kova’s mother? Missing. Kova’s lover? Taking long walks on the beach with a stranger.
And all those monsters Kova wanted to slay? They’re back in Stormwatch, dragging villagers into the ocean.
I have a few spec fic books lined up for later this month and July, but I felt the need for history. I’m also trying to work through my TBR pile. A lot of my books have been packed, but there are a lot more to go.
I’m being evicted. It’s a Section 21 no fault eviction, but it feels like an insult and injury. I’ve lived here for 9 years, I wasn’t planning to move for a few more years, but the landlord obviously doesn’t want to comply with the Renters Rights Act. It came into force on May Day, so his agent sent an eviction notice 30th April. I officially have to move out by midnight 6th July.
That’s probably not going to happen. According to Shelter, so long as I keep paying my rent and keep the landlord or their agent updated, they can’t throw me out without a Section 8 notice from the courts, so that’s the plan. Also, my rent payment covers 21st to 20th of the next month; if I move out before 20th July, I’ll be demanding my rent back.
The violence of the private renting system is revolting. I’m limited in my ability to work so I rely on the state for most of my income, but I have to pay about 1/3rd of that to a private individual, my landlord. Essentially, tax payer money is funnelled to private individuals. The government is funding the lifestyles of landlords, while blaming the poor and disabled for being poor and disabled, a drain on public finances, putting us under increasing scrutiny. Did you know that PIP fraud accounts for 0.4% of all PIP payments? But we’re regularly threatened with prosecution if we so are seen on a good day doing a normal activity.
Twas ever thus.
Both the scrutiny of those in receipt of state support – we all pay taxes by the way, so the whole ‘tax payer supporting the scroungers’ narrative is bullshit – and the state propping up landlords.
Historically, landlords were literally that landed Lords. Who owned everything under the monarch (fucking Normans!). They controlled everything and demanded labour, the results of that labour, and money in return for allowing a person a roof over their heads and land for subsistence farming.
Pages 43 and 44 from Thou Savage Woman, by Blessin Adams, describing the enclosures.
It got worse when the enclosures started and the commons were taken away. This forced people into towns and cities, and into the power of employers, who might house them, at a price. Long hours and poor pay, with limited ability to provide for yourself unless you were one of those lucky enough to make significant income, and become part of a Guild.
The came the Industrial Revolution. The skilled trades were pushed out by machines and factories. Desperate people will work for less when their skills have become so devalued. And still, they paid what they earned to landlords who owned their tenements. Food prices fluctuated wildly, made worse by government policy and the greed of landowners.
And if they were disabled by their labour they were thrown out. If they were lucky they might get a pittance from the parish, or they might end up in the workhouse, labouring for meager meals, separated from spouse, parents, children. Scrutinised, bullied and insulted because they couldn’t work or there was no work available.
Everything changes and nothing changes. When capital is king and decent housing is a privilege there will always be those who scapegoat the most vulnerable and let the wealthy do what they will.
I hate it. I hate that I, and everyone else in the 99%, are at the mercy of the 1%. I hate that they turn us against each other to maintain their position. I hate that 50 families in the UK own 90% of the land, and that houses stand empty when there are people in need of homes. I hate that it took so long for a government to provide even basic rights and protections to renters.
I hate that the government are yelling ‘Build! Build! Build!’ but very few of those houses will be council housing. The councils could just buy some of those houses to house all the people on the waiting lists. In Grimsby there are loads of new houses, but lots of people are stuck in cold, damp badly built houses because they can’t afford these shiny new houses – to buy or rent – or even to move. The council could sort that easily, if the government really means what it says.
But we know they don’t and won’t. Can’t have the needs of the people coming before the needs of landlords and builders, can they? After all profits for shareholders are more important than the people who are paying for it all through taxation.
Right, rant over, I’m going back to reading about female killers.
A ship, a gun, and a nice teal robe to find one killer on a planet of criminals: will Qays Mendoza get the answers he is looking for? Qays Mendoza get the answers he is looking for?
On the edges of mankind’s domain there is a penal planet called Fresh Start where a sentence is at best exile to five generations, but more likely death in its harsh unforgiving wastes. It is to this planet the empire sends the worst of the worst and it is on this planet that Qays Mendoza searches for his old captain.
The galactic empire is falling, civilization contracts. Fresh Start is abandoned. Without oversight, the planet is wild, without guards; the Oubliette, the supermax prison on the supermax planet, lies open, and the Butcher of Raznak, a killer worse than the one Qays seeks, is on the loose. With the help of a street waif called Patience, Qays seeks answers. His soul is stained with guilt and his spirit broken by complicity. Religion did not have the answer; duty did not explain it. Birthright and station were not enough. His answers lie somewhere on Fresh Start.
Everything Is Better With Dragons 