Since I last interviewed you, The Maddox Verdict has gone out into the world. How does it feel to have written a whole series? Lily, I don’t know yet. When I started all this almost ten years ago, I had no intention of writing a series. I wrote Adam’s Witness to basically save my sanity. Then people asked, “When is the next book coming out?” And I said, “Sorry . . . what?” Did I have another book in me? Well, I decided to give it a go. I suppose after the second one, I had be

When I last interviewed you in 2023 you had published three books, now it’s six. Can you update me on your books? Since 2023, I’ve written my Lightbody Mystery duology, telling the story of the fictional Martha Lightbody, a woman subjected to ‘trial by drowning’ in 1645. Before being thrown in the lake, Martha curses the men responsible. Her body is never found.

FINALLY Rainbow’s Book of Prompts is out in the world yay!

Back in 2024 I wrote three posts about my little writing journey and then disappeared for a bit. I did come back but I never finished the story, well as much as that’s possible, more of a bring you up to date thing really. As it’s been two years (rather than the week I said it would be) I will link the previous parts of the story at the bottom of the post.

Tell me about your books. Following the Future World Prize shortlisting, I was contracted to write for the popular children’s series The Magical Unicorn Society and wrote eight short stories for their 5th book, The Dark Heart Unicorns edition in 2024. The book is filled with beautiful illustrations, fact pages and a quiz for readers aged 8 upwards.

This is everyone’s favourite story from Sandcastles … Love, Andy which was originally written for an online magazine.

Yesterday I found out Sandcastles, my short story collection, had been awarded a red ribbon being one point shy of being a finalist.

‘You wrote a book?’ Yes I did. Several in fact.

I am including Small Press Books as Indie Books. Given their small teams the members can be called to multi task and they do not have the reach of the larger and more well known publishers. Some are also authors themselves. As some of them told me 'they need all the help they can get'. I will talk about some of the presses themselves in another part of this series but for now here's some books you might like.

Thea is a queer writer of various types of SFF, including the Seer of York series published by Brigids Gate Press, and a number of short fiction works published by Eerie River Publishing, Bag of Bones Press, and others. She is currently querying cyberfae adventure Legend of the Bard. She’s also the British Fantasy Society Event Coordinator for Greater Manchester. See Thea’s upcoming events page for details of what they’re doing.