Hey, and hello to new subscribers and regular readers.
Happy New Year, on this second day of our lord two thousand and twenty-six.
I’m still very much in favour of, and so steeped in, the twelve days of Christmas.
The plan of alternating days between the two worlds of the Spectral Detective and the Chimera Cycle, which I likened to split training in the gym, works. Albeit a little interrupted by the Christmas and New Year festivities.
Progress in the second part of the Spectral Detective’s first novel-length adventure is going well. Part one is available as an e-book, being a shorter novel at ~60k words, and thanks to those who are reading, your support is much appreciated.
At a little over twenty thousand words, part two is then around a third of the way there.
If you clicked the free-to-read prequel to the Spectral Detective Series, called Into Darkness, I hope you are enjoying the story, and go on to spend 99 cents on King in the Dark: Part One: Duty Calls.
If you’ve time to leave me a review, I would appreciate it |
Since my last newsletter, I’ve updated the Chimaera Cycle Beta for readers who have applied and been accepted. Again, thank you all for your interest and input.
Not only new chapters but also tightening of the completed chapters, and I anticipate another 5,000 or so words will complete the prequel novella at ~25k. Hard to predict exactly when it will be cooked, but it won’t be long…
The introduction to the idea of a “reader magnet” a free giveaway novella, came long after I first began plotting the Chimera Cycle and the Spectral Detective.
In both cases, I could use the backstory already in place. King’s story is an adult one. Bringing the commando mission that costs him his sight but gifts him with his extra spectral perception proved, on one hand, a relatively straightforward tale of wartime daring-do. On the other, I faced the challenge of showing, in prose, how King perceives the unseen realm.
For the Chimera Chronicles, I planned to begin ‘novel one’ in 1650, with the main characters as youths becoming adults. Yet when the idea of a reader-magnet prequel arose, I found myself considering an infancy story. Given some key players are functionally near-eternal vampires, I could set a prequel anywhere in the last ten thousand years!
However, I always imagined the Chimera Chronicles as an adventure experienced, though not exclusively, through the principal protagonist. It’s Jack’s life. As he discovers a world hiding in plain sight, cloaked in myth, legend and secrecy, the reader would too.
Making this Jack’s story meant breaking one of those writing rules/advisories: don’t start with the hero’s infancy. While it’s not bad advice most of the time, I can’t help but reflect here on the ninth day of Christmas—celebrating the greatest story ever told, that it starts with a baby.
Telling Jack’s story from the beginning, while never plan-A, however, introduces Jack’s world in interesting ways.
My aim is to take classic genre tropes but reinvent them, making them more real. Bites don’t magically transform anyone into a vampire—or any other kind of monster. This is an infection, but it’s not a sure thing. It’s a process that kills more people than it changes. Even the fittest and strongest adult risks death, and it’s a journey that lasts decades. Faced with an ever-changing and more populous world, some ancient vampires seek to improve their reproductive odds and eliminate weaknesses—to make a new kind of vampire. One such project enlists the help of a human scientist, and he succeeds in 1639. Twelve babies are born with human and vampire traits—the Chimera. In the Seventeenth Century only half of those born lived to see ten years old. In a world of monsters, how many special children will survive to change it?