My two most recent books, Letters from Shadow Oaks and A Carousel for Shade Tree, are both contemporary fictions. They don’t include any magic or fantasy elements. Both books were inspired by actual situations I’ve encountered. I enjoy writing and reading fantasy, but when a real-world opportunity presents itself for storytelling, I can’t resist writing it.

Tell me about your books The Transcendent Series is about a girl (woman really, she’s 18/19 in the first book) who randomly, and rather inconveniently, body jumps into her past lives. The first book in the series, Transcendent, came out July 1st this year! It contains a passionately fated but “doomed” love story, secret societies, real friendships, university settings, intrigue and ...

Tell me about your book The Boy with the Heart of Sea Glass is boy meets boy, but it’s much more than that. It’s about the healing power of love and found family. And how the relationships we choose, and those we don’t, impact us.

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.

This month's list was put together with the help of Heather Lynn. (Skywatcher_HL on socials) https://linktr.ee/HeatherLynn_author. Author of the Skywatcher series. There are four books so far with a fifth on the way.

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.

These small presses were recommended to me. I am defining Small Press as presses that you submit to who publish in a similar traditional manner to the big five whose human numbers (as far as I can tell) are in single figures. It’s only my definition but I sometimes say if you fit in one regular sized car.

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

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.