I Am A Modern Day Artist
In The Creative Way, you share with readers the photography and digital artwork that has grown out of nature, travel, memory, illness, recovery, grief, and curiosity. Why was it important for you to share this book with readers?
I wanted to share my story and my art because I have always enjoyed capturing the beauty of nature in photos.
Was there a particular moment when you realized photography and digital art had become an essential part of your life?
Photgraphy has been a hobby for most of my life. I am a modern day artist who creates art out of photos. I use photo editors or apps to perfect my images. I use A.I. when I can I used it to create an image of a woman standing at heavens door when a close woman friend passed away.
Do you typically see the finished image in your mind before you begin editing, or does the artwork evolve as you work?
Sometimes I have an idea on how the should look and other times I experiment with apps or a.i. and change the image to some even more beautiful.
What advice would you give to artists who want to experiment with digital tools but feel intimidated by the technology?
Don’t be afraid of Technology. I use it in my photography and when I am writing to research and check for errors. You can create an image of anything without leaving the house.
Author Links: Instagram | Facebook | Pixels | Website
An Everyman
Over Brooklyn Hills follows a seventy-year-old man whose struggles with the painful realities of climate change parallel larger threats involving fossil fuel interests and a climate terrorist group. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Several things bother me about a lot of climate fiction, and one is that while climate change is an actual existential threat to the social and economic well-being of humans and our biosphere, climate fiction often puts climate change to be upfront acutely. Today—and into the near future—the danger of climate change is less on a human scale than most other of life’s challenges. Much of climate fiction has some apocalyptic quality to the story or presents a main character who is a climate scientist or activist trying to correct a wrong. Unfortunately, such approaches can fail to help readers identify with the issue of climate change within their own lives. Without such identification, the issue of climate change is more likely to remain abstract and all the more easily ignored.
One of the important threads in my writing of fiction and poetry is to make the attempt to capture characters’ feelings as they respond to circumstances. I love to write full-on action and plot-driven parts of stories too, but both as a reader and as a writer, I find that characters without some interiority seem only pawns in the puzzle master’s play, and no matter how compelling or cleverly built the plot may be, the story will feel empty. Raymond Chandler, as much as he’s pointed to as a master of private investigation pulp fiction, is a wonderful and effective writer because the reader gets to know Philip Marlowe, whether by actual reflection by the character, the way the character describes the world around him (including the famously odd and wonderful similes), or how he interacts with other characters.
Why did you want to tell this story through the perspective of Davin Caine at this stage of his life?
Davin Caine is something of an everyman—neither hero nor villain, not a genius with special knowledge nor someone lacking curiosity. Caine, like many other characters in the book, knows about climate change, but like most everyone else, his priorities are the bills to pay, work, friends, family, the next house repair….
By the time of the action of Over Brooklyn Hills in 2035, Caine is seeing a lot of change with the climate crisis and has gotten more involved. Climate migration—writ small and large—is one of the themes.
At the start of the series (in Kill Well, taking place in 2026), Caine is still recovering from a divorce, is worried about paying bills and the cost of energy, and is ambivalent about his paying job. All the chaos of the Trump regime overwhelms him. He’s frustrated that he can’t get into his art studio, and anxious, basically, about everything. Caine feels isolated, just like most people living in our culture today. One of the themes in this book is the difficulty of grasping in our daily lives the import of climate change; another theme is the malfeasance of entrenched interests such as the fossil fuel corporations and the countervailing forces obscuring, delaying, and denying climate action. Well, the malfeasance of moneyed interests and danger of income inequality carry throughout the series.
In Dear Josephine (which takes place in 2029), the climate situation worsens, but progress has a glimmer of hope in the U.S., post-2028 elections. Still, Caine and most everyone else tend to focus on mundane everyday concerns, but the climate crisis keeps creeping in, and acutely so with Hurricane Josephine. I didn’t want the hurricane to be experienced directly—that’s not how most of us would experience it. Caine is in the Berkshires, and the perspective on the hurricane is mediated by the news and by distance. A major theme is how climate change affects us, including economically, even when the consequence is not direct. Another theme is the previously referenced malfeasance, but in this book, the readers see bad actors emerging from different sides: pro-climate, pro-economic justice, and the big money interests.
As I age, I find myself interested in how aging fits into climate fiction, so Caine is set up to show us these effects. Farm to Me, the last book of the series and set in 2047, has Caine at 82. There’s plenty of climate progress, but the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the years before maintain a changing climate. There’s a distinct focus on young persons’ climate change struggles, in part contrasting with what we see with Caine.
I don’t think you can talk about climate change effectively without including it in daily lives.
Do you think fiction can help readers grapple with issues that often become polarized in public debate?
I believe so, but I can’t claim to know this. There have been some studies on the efficacy of climate fiction to get readers involved, but those studies are thin—small sample sizes—and there’s the lack of consideration in them about the characteristics of the specific climate fiction used in the studies. One easy conclusion? Apocalypse and dystopia may have the tendency to discourage people from acting, but I’m pretty sure there’s no need for a Ph.D. for this finding.
The biggest need for public action is to end the social silence suppressing conversations about climate change. In the U.S., nearly three-quarters of the population think climate change is a serious problem, but only something like 20 percent talk to others about it. Can the right fiction help encourage conversations? I hope so. Is my work that kind of climate fiction? I hope so, but this question can only be answered by readers. Climate change is a big problem, and big problems get addressed legislatively. Conversation is oxygen for political metabolisms.
One of the reasons why I pursued the topic of climate change through a series is to provide a sort of longitudinal study across the next two decades. Restricting the series through characters to the Berkshires helps, I hope, to keep the reader thinking about their own everyday lives in relation to climate change. The fact is that here in the developed nations, we aren’t on the verge of climate change-instigated societal collapse, even if the energy systems we’re participating in are laying the groundwork for longer-term problems that make the world a harder place for people to thrive.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
I’m at work on Farm to Me, which is the last book in The Steep Climes Quartet. I expect a Spring 2027 publication date. In this last book, food production is a theme, as is the consequence that the young will suffer. Like the other books in the series, there are thriller elements, although none of the books are simply thrillers, which is why I describe the series as “literary climate fiction.”
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Davin Caine is at last on Medicare and is getting a modest Social Security check each month, but still works with Berkshire Interactive. He’s also been busier in his studio and has sculptures in galleries in the Berkshires and the Hudson Valley, and his solar/batteries and VPP membership keeps electricity bills down. His three house sharers, with housing still scarce, help with expenses. Marsha’s been with the Housatonic House on the Hill for nearly a decade, and she’s queen of the big vegetable garden. Charlie is a more recent house sharer, and a nigh-on perfect one, since he’s often away on business or holed up in his third-floor bedroom working. The newest house sharer is Be, a ceramic artist who helps Davin out with the first floor Airbnb apartment and who has just claimed a corner of the studio and could easily claim his heart if he isn’t careful.
But as summer approaches, a stunning heatwave settles over New York City, west to Lake Erie, and south into parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The heat drives people to escape into the relatively cool hills of the Berkshires just as high season is coming on, so there’s little room for the hordes. Young Brooklyn hipsters take up camping in the woods around Monument Mountain Reservation and along the Appalachian Trail, or double and triple up at the summer homes of friends’ parents, or anywhere, somewhere, to sleep. Many in the town aren’t happy about it, or the spike in petty crimes, and it’s up to Marian Gray-Fletcher, Great Barrington’s town manager, to solve the problem. But she’s distracted with her own philandering husband, until a drug-gang killing focuses her attention.
The international news is full of climate migration stories and political problems in Europe and a conflict between India and Pakistan. Central and South American climate change-induced droughts make for huge numbers of people heading north and the militarized southern border and running battles between cartels and U.S. forces are in the headlines. And then there’s No One is Safe, a climate terrorist organization that has a history of blowing up refineries and pipelines and the occasional oil exec, and one climate direct action veteran finds himself wondering how deep the NOS-cartels connection goes.
Theatre History
Play! follows two cousins and their eccentric neighbor as their outing to see Peter Pan takes them on a time-traveling adventure through theatre history. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
As a young theatre professional, I worked often with Birmingham Children’s Theatre, and I spent a lot of time in audiences full of schoolchildren and the brave teachers trying to remind them, just before the curtain rose, that this was not quite the same thing as recess. I remember thinking how helpful it would be if there were a fun way for children to learn a little theatre etiquette before they ever set foot in the playhouse.
Later, while I was teaching theatre at Samford University, I wrote an early picture-book version of Play! and had an art professor colleague illustrate a few pages. We came tantalizingly close to publication, but the editor who was championing the project moved to another company that didn’t publish children’s books. Then life did what life often does: my artist friend and I both hit stretches of personal upheaval, and the manuscript sat quietly on a shelf for quite a while, trying to be patient.
A few years ago, a school librarian encouraged me to return to it, and I sent it to Sheila Booth-Alberstadt of SBA Books in Daphne, Alabama. She loved the idea, but wisely suggested that instead of a picture book for younger children, I turn it into a chapter book for middle graders. Once I made that shift, the story opened up in all sorts of exciting ways. I found a wonderful illustrator, Jarrett Rutland, and we worked on the book for about a year. After several rounds of editing and design, Play! is now heading out into the world, which is both thrilling and slightly surreal.
As for the setup itself, I wanted two children because I liked the idea of a boy and a girl responding differently to what they were seeing. And since I wanted them to travel through important eras in theatre history, they clearly needed an adult guide. At that point, an eccentric professor more or less materialized, tapped me on the shoulder, and informed me that he intended to be in the book. It is generally unwise to argue with someone named Dr. Dante Marlowe Browne, so I let him in.
Why did you choose Peter Pan as the event that launches the adventure?
I have always admired J. M. Barrie. Peter Pan is one of those rare children’s stories that is full of delight and theatrical fun, while also carrying something deeper and more wistful underneath. It turns childhood into myth, but it also tells the truth about it: that it is radiant, reckless, imaginative, and already shadowed by loss.
The story captures both a child’s fear of growing up and an adult’s longing for the vanished world of childhood. Peter represents freedom, adventure, and the intoxicating idea that no one can make you do arithmetic ever again. Wendy, on the other hand, brings story, tenderness, order, and the first stirrings of maturity into Neverland. I love that balance. Barrie gives us both the wild freedom of childhood and the ache of knowing it cannot last forever.
But Peter Pan also seemed the perfect launching point for Play! because it is such a glorious theatrical experience for children. Characters fly, a crocodile ticks, pirates swagger, fairies interfere, and the whole thing is drenched in stage magic. Nana is portrayed by an actor in a dog suit, and Mr. Darling and Captain Hook are traditionally played by the same actor, which is exactly the sort of glorious stage nonsense children ought to encounter early in life. It is a play that invites young audiences not only to watch, but to fall in love with the sheer imaginative mischief of theatre itself.
How did you balance historical accuracy with storytelling and humor?
Having worked in theatre for nearly sixty years, I know the history pretty deeply, so I wasn’t starting from scratch. I certainly wanted the historical material to be accurate, but I never wanted it to feel like children were being marched through a lecture with a few jokes scattered on top as a reward for proper behavior.
The good news is that theatre history is wonderfully cooperative in this respect, because it is already full of larger-than-life people, ridiculous mishaps, flamboyant personalities, and moments of sheer absurdity. In other words, it comes with its own humor built in. I didn’t have to manufacture too much of that. I simply had to let the children and the professor stumble into it.
So my goal was always to make the story feel alive first. I wanted young readers to have the sense that they had slipped backstage into the past and found it still bustling along, with everybody in costume and nobody entirely behaving.
What can young readers learn from live performance that they can’t learn elsewhere?
Live theatre is one of the richest gifts parents and teachers can give children. Reading is, of course, foundational and wondrous. It shapes language, imagination, attention, and a lifelong love of learning. But theatre offers something reading alone cannot: an immediate, communal, multi-sensory encounter with story.
In a theatre, children are not simply being told that a character is frightened, brave, selfish, lonely, or kind. They are watching those emotions and characteristics unfold in real time through voices, faces, bodies, music, silence, scenery, and the electric presence of living actors only a few feet away. They learn empathy because they can feel an entire audience leaning toward the same moment together. They learn attention because theatre asks them to listen, watch, and imagine all at once. And they learn that stories are not abstract things trapped in books; stories can breathe right in front of them.
Theatre also teaches children how to be an audience, which is no small thing. It teaches patience, curiosity, concentration, and respect for a shared experience. It says, in effect, “For the next little while, let us all agree to enter another world together.” In an age of constant distraction, that may be one of the most valuable lessons of all.
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“Barbara Sloan has written a charming book that will make kids and grown-ups alike fall in love with the history and the magic of live theatre. Through the magic of their friend Professor Browne, cousins Violet and Collins are transported across time and distance to experience what it was like to be everything from groundling at the Globe Theater, to a part of the Chorus in Ancient Greece— and why maybe it’s not a good idea to throw rotten apples at actors in any age!”
Roger Day is an award-winning children’s songwriter and performer known for his witty, literate lyrics and music that delights kids without talking down to them.
“Time travel through theatre history from Ancient Greece to a Medieval Village in York to Commedia dell’arte to Shakespeare himself at the Old Globe, and all the way to the contemporary Sizzlepop Theatre, Barbara Sloan has created a theatrical romp through the ages in PLAY. With such real characters in Collins and Violet, best friends and cousins, who journey with Uncle Marley in the world of storytelling and plays, this is a story of comedy, tragedy, theatre etiquette, and everything in between. The gorgeous illustrations of Jarrett Rutland and the beautiful language of Sloan masterfully raise the curtain to inspire, teach, and invite young readers to explore the world of theatre through characters, masks, lyres, costumes, and spectacular adventures.”
Kerry Madden-Lunsford is an acclaimed children’s and young adult author celebrated for her lyrical storytelling and deep compassion for young people finding their voices.
How Different The Dating World Is
The 12 Bad Dates Before Christmas centers on a hardworking single architect whose demanding mother issues her an ultimatum: go on 12 dates before Christmas or allow the church cupids. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration for the story came from my daughter, who uses dating apps and has endured her fair share of bad dates. She often shares her experiences—and some of the messages she receives—with me, and I couldn’t help but be entertained by the challenges of modern dating. It made me realize how different the dating world is today compared to when I was dating in the 1980s. Back then, we met people at bars, not by swiping through profiles on an app. The contrast between those two worlds sparked the idea for The 12 Bad Dates Before Christmas and all the hilarious, awkward, and heartwarming situations that followed.
Why did you choose St. Augustine as the setting for this holiday romance?
I chose St. Augustine as the setting because I live just fifteen minutes from its historic downtown and spend a lot of time shopping, dining, and exploring the area. There’s something magical about the city’s charm, rich history, and welcoming atmosphere that draws people in year-round. During the holidays, it becomes even more enchanting, making it the perfect backdrop for a heartwarming Christmas romance.
Which of Evie’s “bad dates” was your favorite to write—and which one made you laugh the most?
My favorite was the catfishing date in Chapter 9. Even though the date wasn’t what she expected, it led to an unexpected friendship. Steven was a sweet, lonely older man who was simply looking for someone to talk to. The best part was seeing her connect him with friends from her mom’s church, turning a disappointing date into something truly heartwarming.
Beneath the humor, the book explores fulfillment, vulnerability, and readiness for love. What message do you hope readers take away?
I hope readers walk away believing that love is worth the risk. It can be messy, awkward, and unpredictable, but it can also be the greatest adventure of all. Sometimes, while we’re searching for love in all the wrong places, we discover it has been quietly waiting for us where we least expected it.
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Evie Holliday has everything she thought she wanted—a thriving career as an architect in the charming town of St. Augustine, her sweet but spirited cat, Raven, and her ever-faithful best friend and roommate, Lanie. But when her well-meaning mother delivers a holiday ultimatum—go on twelve dates before Christmas or let the “Church Cupids” take over—Evie agrees to prove she can find love on her own terms.
Twelve dates. What could go wrong?
Between awkward encounters and unexpected mishaps, Evie begins to wonder if love is worth the chaos… until she meets Ryan McCormick at Peace, Love and Little Donuts. Kind, steady, and devoted to his teenage daughter, Ryan isn’t part of her plan—but he might be exactly what her heart needs.
Ryan McCormick has always put his family and his job as a police officer first. Falling for Evie wasn’t in his plans—but neither was watching her walk into one bad date after another. The more their paths cross, the harder it becomes to ignore what’s growing between them.
With Christmas approaching and time running out, Evie must decide if she’ll stick to her plan… or take a chance on a love that feels like it was meant to be all along.
Counterintuitive Truths
So You Want To Be A Deep Sea Diver is an illustrated guide that shows young readers that deep-sea diving is both an adventure and a serious, disciplined career. What is the most rewarding aspect of writing guides for young readers?
Children are the most honest readers. Adults will keep going out of politeness, or because they paid for the book, or because someone gave it to them. Children won’t. If a page bores them, you’ve lost them, and no amount of well-meaning framing will win them back. That’s not a problem; it’s a gift. It forces a writer to be useful on every page, to trust the reader’s intelligence, to leave out the throat-clearing that fills so much adult nonfiction.
The most rewarding part, though, is knowing that somewhere a child is sitting cross-legged on a bedroom floor, holding one of these books, reading about a job they didn’t know existed three days ago — and a small door is opening inside them. Maybe it stays open. Maybe they grow up and become the deep-sea diver, the archaeologist, the dinosaur hunter. Maybe they don’t, and the book just plants the idea that the world contains more possibilities than any one childhood can hold. Either outcome is enough.
Were there scientific concepts that were especially difficult to translate for younger readers without oversimplifying them?
The hardest one was the physics of breathing at depth — the strange truth that the same air you breathe safely at the surface begins to behave like a drug if you go deep enough. Nitrogen narcosis is one of the most peculiar phenomena in human physiology, and I wanted children to understand that, not just nod past it.
The second hardest was explaining why technical divers at extreme depth breathe gas mixtures with only three percent oxygen — a mixture that would put a person to sleep at the surface. The metaphor I landed on was a lock and a key: the gas has to match the depth exactly. Pressure changes the lock, and the gas has to change with it.
What I’ve learned, again and again across this series, is that children handle counterintuitive truths better than most adults assume. They don’t need the science softened, but they need it told well (which can be a challenge).
Notably, my first draft of this book was much drier than what eventually went to press, because in my attempts to delve into the science, I let safety and risk take over the narrative. The protocols are real, and they matter — but a book that leads with caution buries the very thing that makes a child want to learn the caution in the first place. If the child does not feel the wonder first and understand the draw, the precautions are just rules, and rules without reasons are the fastest way to lose a young reader. So I started over. The redraft was about putting the beauty back where it belonged: at the front of the story, where it lives in real life.
Was there one behind-the-scenes role in deep-sea operations that surprised you most?
The standby diver. On any serious dive operation, there is one person who suits up in full gear at the start of the dive and stays that way the entire time — fins, tank, regulator, ready to enter the water inside seconds. They (generally) never get to make the dive. Their job, as I came to think of it, is to be a goalkeeper: alert, watching, prepared, and hoping with everything in them never to be called.
I love that role because it captures something children don’t always learn from the stories they’re told about heroism. The standby diver doesn’t get the photograph. They don’t get the discovery. They don’t even get wet on most days. And yet without them, the dive doesn’t happen, because no responsible team enters dangerous water without someone ready to come after them.
That is one of the best lessons the ocean teaches: being ready is its own job. Some of the most important people in any operation are the ones whose value is measured by what didn’t go wrong.
What do you hope this book teaches children about adventure — that it is not only excitement, but preparation, teamwork, and learning how to face the unknown?
Yes — and one thing more. I hope it teaches children that fear is not the enemy. Panic is.
That distinction is one of the oldest lessons in diving, and it’s one I most hoped kids would carry out of this book and into the rest of their lives. Fear keeps you sharp; it tells you something matters. Panic makes your body move before your brain can stop it. The difference between the two is learning and training — the willingness to spend years preparing for a moment that might last seconds. A diver who trusts their training can be afraid and still safe. A diver who doesn’t can be unafraid and in real trouble.
Adventure, in the deep-sea diver’s life, is not the opposite of preparation. Preparation is what makes the adventure possible. I’d love for every child reading this book to grow up understanding that — for diving, and for everything else.
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So You Want To Be A Deep Sea Diver is an illustrated nonfiction guide for young readers ages 10 to 14 who want the true, complete answer to that question. It follows the path from a kid’s first fascination with the deep ocean all the way through open water certification, advanced dive training, saturation techniques, and the most extreme underwater operations on earth — welding, construction, salvage, scientific research, and marine exploration in conditions most people cannot imagine.
Inside, you will discover the real science of deep diving: how pressure works on the human body, why the wrong gas mixture at depth can be fatal, how decompression keeps divers alive, and what it means to live in a pressurized chamber for weeks while working hundreds of meters below the surface. These are not simplified facts stripped of their meaning. This is the actual physics and physiology, presented clearly and honestly for readers who deserve more than a surface-level overview.
You will also explore the world divers enter — a place of crushing cold, near-total darkness, and strange deep sea creatures and ocean animals that thrive where sunlight never reaches. You will learn about the teams of dive supervisors, saturation technicians, and support crews who make every descent possible, and the absolute calm that divers must bring to emergencies that can only be resolved in slow motion, because panic at depth costs lives.
This book does not talk down to kids. It brings them all the way in — into the training, the discipline, the wonder, and the weird and extraordinary reality of a career spent in the deepest places human beings can go. It is honest about the difficulty, specific about the science, and deeply respectful of the young reader who feels the pull toward something most people will never experience.
Most of the ocean remains unseen by human eyes. The divers who go deepest are going somewhere almost no one has ever been. Maybe one day, that diver will be you.
I Wanted A War
A Shroud Undone follows a haunted hunter drawn back into an ancient war between humans and the Sylphar, where faith, grief, old gods, and impossible choices collide in a brutal struggle to end generations of bloodshed. What inspired the ancient conflict between humans and the Sylphar?
I wanted a war that had gone on so long nobody alive remembered why it started, and yet both sides were completely convinced they were right. The Stillight burns above the Mountain Temple, this double helix of red and gold, and both humans and Sylphar believe it validates their claim. Their entire faiths are built around it. Their cultures, their military structures, their sense of identity. So the war isn’t just territorial. It’s existential. If you stop fighting, you’re admitting that everything your people believed for a thousand years was wrong. That’s a harder thing to ask of someone than just laying down a sword.
The inspiration came from real history. Many of the longest and bloodiest conflicts in human history have had religion or ideology woven through them so deeply that the original cause gets buried under centuries of grievance and doctrine. I wanted to explore what happens when the thing both sides are fighting over turns out to be something neither side understood in the first place.
Theron carries a great deal of emotional weight throughout the story. What was most important to you when developing him as a reluctant warrior?
When we meet Theron, he’s not doing anything grand, and that was intentional. He’s wandering from village to village, feeding people who are starving, and asking for nothing in return. That was the foundation of his character for me. He’s not hiding because he’s afraid. He’s hiding because he failed, and penance is all he has left.
The most important thing was making sure his reluctance felt earned rather than passive. He doesn’t avoid the fight because he’s a coward. He avoids it because he knows exactly what it costs. He’s already paid that price once, and the world bled for it. So when he gets pulled back in, there’s this tension between a man who desperately wants to stay small and invisible, and a man who knows he might be the only one who can stop what’s coming. I didn’t want a brooding hero who sulks about his destiny. I wanted someone who had genuine reasons to stay away, and more importantly… genuine reasons he couldn’t.
The Stillight sits at the center of both faith and violence in the novel. How did you approach building its mystery and significance?
I knew from the beginning that the Stillight had to feel like something worth killing over. Not just politically, but spiritually. Both sides of this war have built entire belief systems around it, and if the reader doesn’t understand why, the conflict falls flat.
So I approached it in layers. On the surface, it’s a symbol of divine authority. Both humans and Sylphar look at it and see proof that their god or gods chose them. Beneath that, there are hints that the Stillight is doing something neither side fully grasps. And beneath that is the real truth, which I obviously won’t spoil here. But the key was making sure each layer felt complete on its own. A reader halfway through the book should somewhat feel like they understand what the Stillight is. A reader in the last chapter of the book should realize they were completely wrong. And a reader who has completely finished the book should understand that both sides were wrong from the very beginning. That line in the blurb on the back cover, “They were all deceived,” is the entire engine of the book.
A Shroud Undone has a bleak, grounded atmosphere where war feels exhausting rather than glorious. What themes do you hope readers take away from that portrayal?
I grew up on fantasy where battles were exciting and heroic, and I love those stories. But I wanted to write the version where you feel the mud and the fatigue and the weight of carrying a friend’s body off the field. War in this book is not glorious. It’s grinding and ugly and it breaks people in ways that don’t heal cleanly.
The theme I care about most is the cost of conviction. Every character in this book believes they’re doing the right thing, and most of them are paying for it with pieces of themselves. Theron is paying with years of guilt. Nyra is paying with the doubt that gnaws at her after every victory. The soldiers on both sides are paying with their lives for a war they inherited from people who are long dead. I want readers to walk away asking whether the causes we fight for are worth what we sacrifice to win them, and whether the people who started those fights had any right to ask that sacrifice of the generations that followed.
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For over a millennium, soldiers have died at the Mountain Temple, believing the Stillight—a divine flame of red and gold—demanded their sacrifice.
They were all deceived.
Theron hides in a forgotten village, feeding the starving and asking for nothing. Atonement is all he has left for the choices that shaped the war. But when battle erupts at the Mountain Temple once more, his past drags him back.
Nyra commands the Sylphar legions with ruthless precision. Total victory is the only answer. Failure is not permitted. But the orders she receives from the gods themselves make no sense—and obeying them may cost her everything.
When their paths collide beneath six empty thrones, they uncover a truth the gods never wanted revealed.
The war was never about territory. The gods aren’t distant. And the light everyone worships? It’s been lying from the beginning.
Stopping the war means confronting what keeps the world alive. And some truths don’t set you free—they doom you.
A dark epic fantasy for readers who crave:Morally complex characters with no easy answers
Magic systems with brutal consequences
Gods who lie, manipulate, and hide in plain sight
War portrayed with weight and cost, not glory
Plot twists that reframe everything you thought you knew
