Treating Vampires As Real
Anatomy of a Vampire: Part 2, Present Day centers around the investigation of a brutal attack in the Canadian forest that leads scientists to connect the deaths to a mysterious adaptive virus. At what point did you decide you wanted to completely rethink the traditional vampire myth?
The works of Le Fanu and Stoker along with the movie adaptations had always fascinated me as a young man but I wanted to approach this genre now through a modern lens.
I had once read about uncovered vampire burials, one such individual was found with a stone slab placed in his mouth. This plus the sheer amount of undiscovered biodiversity gave me a plausible seed — what if the myth wasn’t purely imaginary but describes something real we haven’t yet classified?
That’s the premise I built the book on, treating vampires as a real, undiscovered species rather than a figment of our imagination.
The SAV virus gives the novel a strong scientific foundation. How did your interest in biology and virology influence the story?
I’ve always been drawn to biology’s edge cases, and viruses are the strangest of them. They sit in a gray area on how we define life — they carry traits of living organisms but lack others, and that only resolves once they enter a host and start replicating. That ambiguity has even led some scientists to float the idea that viruses may not have originated on Earth at all. I found that gap irresistible — a place where real science stops short and imagination can take over. SAV grew directly out of that space: as something not of this world.
Was there a supporting character who became more significant than you originally planned?
Yes, there was an emotional tie to one main character who grew as I wrote. However, I cannot reveal who the character is. The sequel will reveal this.
If you could have readers ask you one question about the novel after finishing it, what would you hope it would be?
Is there more to this than just a science fantasy novel. Is there a personal or moral message imbedded the story you are telling?
Mystery at the Edge of the World
Mystery at the Edge of the World, by J. Clifford Barnes, is a cozy, small-town mystery centered on Jace Carter, a recently retired civil engineer living in the foggy coastal community of Inglesee, California. Jace expects retirement to consist of gardening, fishing, good coffee, and quiet afternoons, but the disappearance of his former coworker, Al Meyers, pulls him into a murder investigation. The book combines an amateur detective story with the comfortable rhythms of everyday life, giving readers a mystery that feels relaxed and approachable even when the stakes become serious.
Jace is an appealing narrator because he’s observant, practical, and refreshingly ordinary. He doesn’t have special training as an investigator, but his engineering background helps him organize facts and notice connections. His dry humor also makes his voice enjoyable. When describing his retirement strategy, he says, “The key is to not go anywhere.” That line captures his personality well. He enjoys his peaceful routine, but he’s curious enough to leave it behind when something doesn’t add up. His gardening, meals, naps, and coffee-shop visits make him feel like a person with a full life rather than simply a character moving from clue to clue.
The mystery begins with Al’s strange interest in geopolymers and the large amount of money he wants to invest. Barnes uses Jace’s professional knowledge to explain the material and its possible uses without separating the information from the story. As Jace learns more about Al’s money, his abrupt retirement, and his frightened behavior, the investigation expands naturally. The discovery of Al’s body raises the tension, while the missing funds provide a clear trail for Jace and Detective Sam Roblee to follow. The technical and financial details give the case an unusual identity and fit well with Jace’s experience.
The coastal setting adds plenty of atmosphere. Inglesee is filled with mist, Victorian houses, cliffs, local businesses, and familiar residents who make the town feel lived in. The plot also maintains a conversational pace, moving between interviews, domestic routines, and moments of danger. A shooting at Jace’s home gives the later chapters a sharper edge, and the final confrontation delivers an energetic payoff. Jace’s conclusion that “There is no peace for the wicked” neatly expresses the book’s view of guilt, greed, and the consequences of believing stolen money can create a better future.
Mystery at the Edge of the World is an inviting amateur detective novel with a distinctive older protagonist and an interesting construction-industry angle. Its strongest quality is the way it blends murder, engineering, retirement, and community life into one consistent story. Jace solves the case by paying attention to people, timing, money, and small inconsistencies, which makes the resolution feel connected to everything that came before it. The ending also leaves him open to future investigations, and his combination of patience, technical knowledge, and quiet curiosity could carry him through many more mysteries.
Pages: 101 | ASIN : B0H3GVPW3G
Unlike Any Other Woman
Johanna Rules follows a shifter princess who has lost her and her place in the pack but finds an intense bond with the fae king who saves her life. Where did the inspiration for this novel come from?
I have written bear shifter novels and wolf shifter novels and with Johanna her wolf would manipulate other wolves so I knew Val had to be different. I wanted something that would be the opposite so I was watching tv one day and they had a documentary about fae or fairies. It hit me then, that was what I came up with.
One of Johanna’s defining qualities is that she refuses to lose her independence, even after finding love. Why was that important to her character?
I wanted to stay true to her wolf and to her and I loved her fire and her independence. She had to keep it and I made sure she did. Val loves that about her and she is unlike any other woman.
Did you always know how Val’s relationship with Johanna would evolve, or did it develop naturally as you wrote?
Some of the beginning yes but as i wrote it changed but i loved the dynamic and the fights scenes were so fun to write. I wanted an enemies to lovers kind of book and I think i got it.
Did your ending stay true to your original outline, or did the characters lead you somewhere unexpected?
No, it was true to the end. I wanted some slight changes but not many. I did have some changes when she teased Val at the end but it was hard to leave them. They became friends that you just had to visit so yes it ended how i wanted it.
Author Links: Amazon | GoodReads
Johanna is a wolf shifter who went too far. After fleeing the council for attempting to murder her brother’s fated mate, Shay, her desperate escape ends in a roaring river. She expects the freezing currents to take her life. Instead, she is dragged from the jaws of death by the one creature she never expected to meet: Valdoran, the ruthless King of the Fae. But survival demands an unthinkable price. The moment their eyes meet, an ancient, inescapable magic snaps into place. Johanna isn’t just his prisoner—she is his fated mate. Now held hostage deep within the cavernous, underground world of the Fae, Johanna is surrounded by deceptive magic and lethal court intrigue. Valdoran rules his subterranean kingdom with an iron fist, and he expects his wild new mate to bend to his every whim. As the fierce wolf inside her rebels against his strict commands, a scorching, dangerous passion ignites between them. Can a rogue wolf shifter break free from the caverns of the Fae, or will she be bound to the merciless king forever?
Beyond the Lies
In Beyond the Lies, author Kimberli Edmonds blends memoir, reflective self-help, and guided practice to explore how inherited shame, damaging relationships, financial fear, and self-imposed limits can become mistaken for identity. Her central argument is that lasting transformation doesn’t come from motivational language alone, but from gathering concrete evidence that an old belief is no longer true. She traces that process through deeply personal experiences: discovering the documentation that helped her recognize the manipulation within her marriage, announcing her decision to divorce while physically trembling, returning to school after repeatedly dropping out, learning to speak with authority in executive meetings, and entering a women’s prison to lead worship despite her fear. Each chapter moves from story to interpretation to practical reflection, gradually widening the book’s focus from individual survival to professional growth, financial possibility, community, and service.
What affected me most was Edmonds’s refusal to make courage look clean. Her strongest scenes preserve the body’s resistance to change: the hand gripping a doorway, the long nights spent turning a dining table into a financial “war room,” the woman sitting in a college parking lot while every old failure argues that she should leave. These moments give emotional credibility to her insistence that action often precedes confidence. I was especially moved by her image of washing a plate without shrinking after deciding to leave her marriage. It’s such a modest gesture, yet it captures the book’s deepest insight: freedom often enters quietly, first as a nervous system discovering that it no longer has to obey. Edmonds writes with directness and considerable tenderness toward the selves she once judged. Her language can be emphatic, but that usually feels purposeful, as though she’s trying to speak over years of internal accusation with something steadier and more humane.
I also admired the book’s distinction between guilt and shame, and between accountability and lifelong self-punishment. Edmonds doesn’t excuse harm. Her account of publicly wounding someone she loved, then delaying an apology because shame made repair harder, is candid and morally serious. At the same time, she argues persuasively that a damaging act cannot be allowed to become a permanent name. That idea gains force when she describes the incarcerated women she initially viewed through fear, particularly Keesha, whose guarded presence dissolves into vulnerability during worship. The encounter exposes Edmonds’s own reflexive judgment and gives the book a welcome ethical turn: healing isn’t complete when it merely improves one person’s circumstances; it becomes meaningful when it enlarges that person’s capacity to see and lift others. The recurring chapter structure and repeated phrases about evidence, doorways, and “the old story” reflect the author’s method. Beliefs formed over decades rarely yield to a single elegant sentence.
I finished Beyond the Lies feeling that Edmonds has written less a conventional book of inspiration than a compassionate manual for testing the stories that govern a life. Its practical exercises are grounded enough to be useful, while its autobiographical passages keep the advice from becoming bloodless or abstract. I appreciated that the book doesn’t promise a sudden reinvention; it asks for a smaller, harder commitment to take the next honest action, record what happened, and let reality slowly revise identity. This will resonate most with readers recovering from abuse, shame, financial limitation, interrupted ambitions, or the persistent conviction that they’ve missed their chance. It will also be valuable to leaders, mentors, and caregivers who want to challenge people without reducing them to their performance. I’d recommend it to anyone ready to stop treating the past as a verdict and begin regarding change as something patiently, bravely built.
Pages: 116 | ASIN : B0H6VCW78S
The Holy Spirit speaks of His creation and service to God
The Holy Spirit Speaks of His Creation and Service to God is not a conventional Bible study, a work of historical theology, or even a straightforward retelling of Scripture. James A. Kemp presents it as knowledge communicated directly by the Holy Spirit, then moves through much of the Old and New Testaments while folding in an elaborate private cosmology. God has a father and a brother with another inhabited planet; Earth’s moon is brought from Uranus; aliens build the pyramids and later anger God by rescuing people during Noah’s flood; reincarnation exists alongside judgment, Heaven, and a renewed Earth. Familiar episodes involving Adam and Eve, Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, Paul, and John are therefore less the book’s destination than its scaffolding. Kemp uses them to support a far stranger and more personal account of creation, divine government, spiritual gifts, apocalypse, and the physical details of the afterlife.
When Kemp describes mermaids basking near Israel, Bigfoot as a soulless creation, or the inhabitants of Heaven receiving white stones and wearing particular tunics, he offers these claims with the same composure he brings to the Exodus or the Crucifixion. That certainty gives the book an undeniable energy. I sometimes felt as though I were listening to someone recount an immense dream whose internal logic had become more real to him than ordinary waking life. At its best, that directness feels vulnerable and intimate, especially when Kemp writes about prayer as a quiet conversation with the Holy Spirit rather than a performance.
The book is loosely organized and frequently moves from biblical paraphrase to revelation without transition. Yet its roughness also preserves the feeling of an urgent testimony. Kemp seems less concerned with elegance than with recording everything before it can be lost, whether that means recounting Jacob’s ladder, explaining the hierarchy of Heaven, or specifying the hair and eye colors people will possess after death. I found that accumulation fascinating.
Ultimately, this isn’t a gentle devotional, an academically grounded interpretation of Scripture. It’s a sprawling and deeply sincere act of private revelation, filled with imaginative cosmology, firm conviction, tenderness, fear, and judgment. I came away with a vivid sense of the spiritual world Kemp believes he has encountered and of his determination to describe it without compromise. I’d recommend it to readers interested in highly personal Christian visionary writing, unconventional biblical cosmologies, and books that provoke reflection precisely because their convictions are so far from cautious or ordinary.
Pages: 400 | ASIN: B0GPRH2QS2
Linking Fiction and the Real World
Betwixt And Between follows a man who wakes up with a new identity, missing memories, a mysterious woman’s photograph, and clues leading him deeper into a world that seems to be rewriting itself. Where did the inspiration for this novel come from?
Betwixt And Between started out as a spy story, similar to a James Bond tale but with a comical twist. The trail I fleshed out in the outline didn’t feel right, and that led me to have the hero wake up in a cheap hotel with total amnesia, my way of letting my hero, Johnny Marathon, lead the way. I encountered some false starts, added and deleted some scenes before an idea struck me. Using the amnesia idea, it wouldn’t be physical or psychological trauma that had brought on Johnny’s memory loss; it was his author, a fledgling writer who built a familiar world (NYC) for his story but failed to consider his characters beyond a name, and even then had little consideration in naming some of his characters beyond descriptions. From there, the scenes and chapters followed what popped into my head, many of them complete surprises to me, like when Man In The White Suit kills Julie or Judy, or when I realized The Fat Man is not only a woman but also a little person.
The novel shifts dramatically in tone and structure early on. Was that twist part of the original concept from the beginning?
My original version started with my hero waking up in the cheap NYC hotel before he sets out to understand who he is and who his love is, but that created a problem – who was this man and why should the reader feel empathy for him when they know no more about him than he does about himself? That was remedied by the addition of five starting chapters that introduce Peter Noble and establishes the reason my story’s author transitions Peter to Johnny.
The novel contains several surprising shifts in perspective and reality. How did you keep the narrative coherent while embracing unpredictability?
I addressed the shift between Peter Noble’s world and that of Johnny Marathon by using a character’s dialogue to foreshadow a major shift in time/space. This is when my character Nick Peggoli makes a statement of fact: “What I can tell you,” Nick said in a near whisper, for her ears only, “is that if Peter’s body is not located, the world as we know it is at an end.”
Linking fiction and the real world was more of a crapshoot. I didn’t know if it would work. That concern changed when I found the reported existence of spirits, Tulpas, who are conjured by Tulpamancers through intense meditation. (See Google AI) That concept was the entry point I needed, with a boost of imagination, for my fiction characters to step across the line between their world and ours
What do you hope readers are still thinking about a week after they finish the book?
I hope readers of Betwixt And Between will appreciate the story my characters created and enjoy referencing the movie dialogue the story’s fictional author provided.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Instagram | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Creating A Fantasy World
Pentagon Pirate Gang & The Poisoned Apple follows a group of friends involved in a dangerous mystery involving poisoned students, hidden notebooks, secret orchards, & adults they cannot trust. What draws you to write middle-grade adventure tales?
JW – I wanted to write something for my two teen children, their primary school was/is called Orchard PRimary. There’s the first link to the first book (The Secret of Orchard). I wanted a school setting and Sherwood Forest isn’t far away, so all those elements drew me to start the writing.
Then creating a fantasy world that readers could get lost in and enjoy, by building key elements to sustain the story over several books, like the notebooks, the mystery behind the orchards, what are the secrets and why are the teachers trying to hide them? Then the ‘enhancement’ element using fruit (hence the School of Fruit Teaching (SOFT), where students gained thier enhanced ability from a fruit based mixture (“ There is great power in humble fruit”) is my personal mantra. This helped design the teachers names (mainly fruit or plant based) and became part of the whole package for the themes, plots and sub-plots.
The School of Fruit Teaching has its own language, traditions, games, rivalries, and hidden secrets. How did you develop the rules and culture of this world?
JW – very carefully. Planning out the story, then who interacts with it and why, leaving gaps and questions to be filled in or answered in following books. Trying understand what would make the book readable from invested buyers, who wnat to feel and root for the baddies or the goodies or both, but still learn some lessons and empathise with some of the characters or what they have to endure, so although fantasy some of these emotions and feeling I hope become real, making the reader want more, but understand what is happening and why.
How do you approach writing young characters who must face fear, secrets, and difficult choices?
JW – Carefully. I did wonder how much ‘pain’ or ‘fear’ to put them through. The characters are young and so will many of the readers, yet there needs to be some ‘mild dread’ which could face any of us, but each handles it that fear differently, even at a young age. But alos adding the support network of their close friends, means that no one is really suffering completely alone, with no help in sight.
Additionally, these young characters need to be able to hold secrets, not spill the beans even when they are itching to. The revelation at the wrong time could cause major upset, so they are learning many life skills as they draw on each others strengths.
What do you hope young readers learn from the choices Aime and the others make?
JW – I do hope they firstly enjoy the book. Be entertained by it and tell their friends to read it. then there are the ‘lessons’, if you want to call the that. Friendships, courage, bravery, patience, respect (for the teachers even when they may be wrong), plus knowing they have the backing of their parents, even though they are not with them. Ultimately i like to hope that enough readers are keen enough to follow the whole journey from start to finish, and bring many more with them.
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website | YouTube
Following their frantic and life-turning adventure at the School Fruit Teaching, in the Secrets of the Orchard, the five students from Fig House lay ghostly white in the school infirmary after being maliciously poisoned. Two of them recover only to be led into another perilous escapade to find the remedy to cure the remaining three, which lies in the second orchard.
As their dangerous, filled journey continues, they learn shocking new truths about Mr Thornby, the deputy head. Back in the school, tensions mount between the teachers, Amie and her best friend Gramon, with far-reaching consequences, whilst the school’s governing body is called in to question the headmistress, one of whom happens to be Gramon’s mother, whom she hasn’t seen for six months.
Will they all recover and survive what Mrs Blackfruit has planned for them?
A Story Worth Telling
In Home, you share your childhood experiences with hunger, addiction, shame, and repeated uprooting through the lens of adult trauma therapy. What inspired you to share your story with readers?
In the beginning, I wrote to give voice to the child I was, to bear witness to her pain and her struggle. It was a way of reclaiming myself. For so long, my childhood was a tremendous source of shame to me, a story I’d never told anyone. Somewhere along the start of the almost ten-year process of writing my memoir, I found Brené Brown and her work on shame. Her quote, “You either walk inside your story and own it or stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness,” stopped me cold. I realized that I had a story worth telling, and that in doing so, it had the potential to help others.
Was there a particular childhood memory that was especially difficult to put on the page?
The most difficult memory for me was contained in the chapter “Dragons.” It describes the story of when my family lived in a hippie commune in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in 1970. It was particularly difficult to write about because I was dissociative for much of that time.
How did learning about trauma change the way you viewed your childhood?
Previous to learning about trauma, I perceived many of the skills and strategies I used to survive as weaknesses. Learning that these were, in fact, “hidden talents” was an absolute game changer for me. It shifted my thinking from someone with significant deficits to a woman with assets and adaptive skills she could use in positive ways.
Looking back, were you surprised by how much small gestures shaped your resilience?
Yes. Before trauma therapy, I had difficulty remembering positive moments. After therapy and through the writing process, I was able to remember what I once described as lily pads of safety in otherwise stormy waters, which allowed me to hopscotch to a better life on the other side—teachers, caring neighbors, bus drivers, cafeteria ladies, the parents of friends, and other caring individuals who were sources of support and nurturance.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
After nearly losing her husband, Amy Smyth Miller’s panic spirals out of control. Therapy reveals a diagnosis: Complex PTSD. In search of healing, Amy embarks on a harrowing excavation of her past-childhood neglect, homelessness, parental addiction, and a family history shadowed by suicide. Amid the wreckage, she discovers the people and circumstances that kept her safe and helped to shape her life: her wise great-grandmother’s teachings, the watchful eyes of caring adults, and her own fierce determination. Each memory is a clue, each family story a piece of the puzzle. But the most elusive truth is buried in a forgotten childhood memory-one that holds the key to her deepest fear.
Part investigation, part love letter to survival, Home is a courageous story of trauma and transformation, love and forgiveness, and realizing that sometimes the home you’re searching for is the one you build inside yourself.
