Blog

This post is a step-by-step guide to launching a self-published science fantasy novella on Amazon. If you are an indie author preparing for your debut release, these strategies will help you maximise visibility, reviews, and category rankings.

When I started writing six or so years ago, I never realised that writing was the easy part. Publishing is another mountain altogether, and a far more treacherous one. Yet having written, I knew I couldn’t keep my book to myself. Couldn’t let it die with...

Son of Osivirius follows a young pilot who crashes near a rebel base and forms a connection with the family that saves him, leaving him to decide what side of the battle he wants to be a part of. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

It was one of those serendipity moments. I was struggling to come up with an idea for a scene writing exercise where the prompt was ‘three characters, all with different goals’. I was getting super frustrated, beginning and discarding idea after...

I enjoyed a lot of books this year, most of those I read actually, but these are the standouts. There are a few others I can’t mention because they are secret projects that I beta read.

Many on this list were written by my indie author friends, but there are some big names in the mix too. Many of them are available to buy, but a few were ones I had the privilege of beta reading, and they’re not out (just) yet.

So without further ado:

Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson. I read the bulk of this...

Northern Hemisphere summer/autumn is summit season in the author world. I had become kind of cynical about the usefulness of summit workshops, but something nudged me to look into the WorldShift Summit. When I saw the opening talk was Wired For Story by Lisa Cron, I was in.

But what I came away with was so much more than story theory—it was validation.

This may surprise you, but facts are quite ineffectual at convincing most of us of anything. Instead, they activate our defence mechanisms or...

It’s Sep 21st as I write this, several weeks before I intend to post it.

And I’m nervous and upset and frustrated and a few other things besides.

Because I’m looking at events in the world, and in the US, and I’m crushed with despair and so, so frustrated at seeing certain people on both sides of the divide making things constantly worse.

Now, I’m Australian as you may or may not remember, and I’d never even heard of Charlie Kirk before he was shot, but now I am hearing about him a LOT. From...

This movie was one of the best I’ve seen in a while. It had excellent storytelling, amazing visuals, fabulous character development, a clear message, and great songs!

I love musicals. Things can be conveyed through songs that are very difficult to do with dialogue. And conveyed very efficiently too. We see the inner thoughts of characters effortlessly, and layers of meaning can be packed into lyrics.

That was certainly the case with K-Pop Demon Hunters.

The songs were so rich with meaning.

It was...

Thomas Umstadt's original articles/podcasts can be found HERE and HERE if you'd like to delve deeper.

Zeitgeist can be thought of as the 'vibe' of the times, and apparently, we have recently entered the 4th turning of this cycle. Each turning lasts approximately twenty years, so the cycle is roughly eighty years long. The last time we were here as a culture was therefore 1944—right before the end of WWII and a dark time to be sure. Coincidence? Perhaps not. When you remember that this past...

Our systems are broken. And like no other period in history, we’ve been able to watch them deteriorate in real time. Or maybe not. People have lived through some pretty awful times. Some came through the other side, some didn’t.

I think what makes this time in history different however, is that we in the west are trapped by our comfort, rather than having nothing to lose. We have just enough to cling to, so that risking it seems foolhardy, impractical, self-defeating.

So we let ourselves be...

Enjoy this character art of Colony Commander Tun, who definitely will NOT recognise your worthiness.

A few of my author friends have written recently about how many of their characters struggle with feeling unworthy, and have related it back to their own feelings of unworthiness. It got me thinking about my own main characters, and I noticed a different but related problem–unrecognised worthiness.

I was in my late teens when Disney’s Aladdin came out, and it remains one of my favourite animated...

During the beta reading phase, one of my wonderful readers queried this line:

“The python was being a python, just like she was being Masu.”

‘Shouldn’t it be ‘a’ Masu?’ he asked.

No. This phrasing was deliberate. And here’s why: I was giving them equal dignity with humans.

It’s a subtle thing, but we tend to objectify the world around us and other creatures. I wanted to do something different in this book. I wanted to have the animals be the mentors.

But still stay animals.

The Masu are not just...

One of the cool things that happened during drafting was a subconscious dovetailing of each of the main characters around how they deal with fear. Fear is the motivating emotion for Jayden, Nettle, and Colony Commander Tun–particularly the fear that there’s not enough.

This scarcity mindset is in large part responsible for the mess our world is in, and I’m so pleased this theme undergirds the story, just like it’s hard-baked into our culture. I’m certainly not immune, so exploring responses to...

When you read The Hobbit, did you notice that Bilbo and Thorin wanted the same thing? If you didn’t, take heart, because I didn’t either, and this is something that a superb author like Tolkien can slip in without the reader noticing consciously. But the subconscious feels it—that’s one reason a book becomes a masterwork, and we come back to it again and again.

Bilbo and Thorin both longed for home. Bilbo was very comfortable in his at the beginning of the novel, and Thorin was homeless—his...

If you missed the first two articles, you can find them here:

Why The Hunger Games Works as Dystopian Fiction

The Hunger Games as Harbinger

Warning: contains spoilers

One of the greatest decisions that Suzanne Collins made in The Hunger Games was to not make Katniss the revolutionary leader. To have her be a reluctant figurehead, and to eventually kill the revolutionary leader because Coin was about to usher in a new dystopia.

Because she refused to compliantly play Coin’s game, Katniss was able...

As soon as I heard the premise for this book, I knew I had to read it. The author has since become a friend (@rednovabooks on IG), so I was lucky enough to score an ARC. It is PHENOMENAL. Action, emotion, humour, and something deeper. It's all there. Seriously, read it!

The Blurb:

For a demonic spirit, Yuriel had scored the perfect assignment—a cozy house in suburbia, a young drug addict with an openness for possession, and all the marijuana brownies they could eat. With a selfish human like...

This article continues my series on The Hunger Games. You can read the first article here.

If you’ve heard how Suzanne Collins came up with the idea for The Hunger Games, it’s pretty incredible. Prophetic, some might say. And I can’t help wondering if it became so popular because there was a deep collective cultural need for it at that moment in history. I think, at some level, we sense that we are living inside a dystopia right now—a decadent dystopia akin to Brave New World. Something isn’t...

Marley was dead, to begin with.

So begins one of Dickens’ shortest and most-beloved works. The story is both powerful and uplifting, and has stood the test of time.

Have you ever wondered what makes a story really powerful like that? It’s something I am deeply interested in, and since you’re here with me, I assume you are too. Powerful, transformative stories are what I crave, and what I seek to write. Ones that won’t be forgotten in the wake of the next trend.

So, on that, I watched a fantastic...

Suzanne Collins did one thing right that so many other authors of dystopian fiction don’t seem to get—she created a dystopia that made sense. It was horrible, cruel, oppressive, and those in the Capitol were unbelievably blind to it, but it wasn’t arbitrary. It didn’t appear out of nowhere. It had been created for a very specific reason that worked for those in power.

That’s it, really, in a nutshell. I could stop here, but I’ll explain a bit more what I mean.

For any fictional setting to work,...

The final book in one of my favourite fantasy series’ is coming out this year, and if you’re not afraid of reading 11 chunky books with flowery language, I highly recommend it. Janny Wurts speaks to my slow-reading heart with an incredibly complex and nuanced world, compelling characters that go through the most painful experiences imaginable, and a plot as twisty and knotted as a ball of wool your toddler got to.

There is political intrigue, a constrained magic system, a sci-fi element of a...

The Type of Writer I Am

My journey to writing has been an interesting one, and despite my very logical, linear brain, I am not a natural plotter. I am much more of a discovery writer. My daughter Emalyn, on the other hand, is a firm plotter, even though her brain is not linear, but rather thinks randomly. I don’t write the next scene until I’ve finished the one before. She leaves massive gaps in her story and writes whatever excites her in that present moment.

I find these differences...

I had the opportunity to take my daughters to see The Phantom of the Opera today, so after delivering a swathe of content warnings to my thirteen-year-old, we settled into our seats prepared to enjoy the show—for it is genius. Written in 1910 by Gaston Leroux, the novel has been adapted into several films and more than one musical, but it is the 1986 Andrew Lloyd Webber version that has entranced me and many others for decades.

What is it about Phantom that is just so juicy? Well, it is a...