Raising Awareness
Jackdaw Affliction follows Billy from a rough-edged 1980s English childhood into adulthood, where grief, love, and the advancing grip of ataxia turn survival, dignity, and endurance into the heart of the story. What drew you to tell Billy’s story across such a long emotional and physical arc?
My desire in writing this novel was to keep things real and plausible. I have lived experience of Ataxia and strong connections with peers across a wide range of disabilities. To stay truthful to what many folk experience, it was necessary to have an arc where Billy loses everything. Or at least perceives he loses everything.
The beginning of the novel – Youth – is about the growth and making of the man. The second half of the novel is about diminishing abilities and the effects on the mind. The frightening thing about ataxia and all degenerative conditions is that they slowly chip away at you until there is nothing left. Often, the mental health side of this is not explicitly discussed. I wanted to change that.
How did you balance the intimacy of Billy’s voice with the wider family-saga feel of the novel?
I wrote this book with the aim of raising awareness of a rare condition. But also, I wanted to give readers an insight into the mind of someone who slowly loses all that made them who they are. Mental health is a real and delicate thing. It is for me, and it is for many people with debilitating conditions.
The book was always about Billy’s story. Always predominantly his narration. After my first draft, it became apparent that I needed more structure and readability. This is when the vignettes from his family members came in. Both to tell the story from other perspectives, but also to offer some unquestionable truth and reliability to the manuscript. The family was always a vital cog in Billy’s wider story, even when they were no longer present in his life.
Music feels like a quiet current running through the book. What role did it play for you while writing?
Music helps set the theme, feel, and time stamp this story. Almost by chance, I had found myself listening to certain tracks whilst writing and developing the book. Each track helped me set the scenes and characters to a specific point in time. Whilst not a historical novel, it is set over 35 years, so being accurate on the recent past was a necessity.
Also, if you pay really close attention to each song in the book, you can almost see a story told by the track listings.
As important as music is, it was also important to have an absence of music during Billy’s darker times. For this reason, almost all of part 4 is devoid of music.
When writing Billy’s experience of ataxia, how did you approach portraying disability, humiliation, and endurance without slipping into sentimentality?
The aim from the outset was to portray a plausible, real character. Inspiration porn was not the goal. By this I mean it was important that all characters made mistakes, had flaws, and had mischievous thoughts, rather than paint them as some kind of saint or martyr. Hopefully, the book balances vulnerability with agency. The idea was not to have characters as symbols or lessons, but to present flawed, authentic human beings. As mentioned, it was great to draw on my experiences and those of my peers to keep the story feeling as genuine as possible.
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From bike rides through the suburbs of 1980s Hampshire to the claustrophobic grind of adulthood, Billy Cooper’s life is shaped by loss, fractured family ties, and the creeping onset of a degenerative disease. As his body betrays him and grief corrodes what remains, Billy turns inward—into recollections that blur, narratives that contradict, and personas that may never have existed.
Jackdaw Affliction is a descent into memory’s labyrinth, where trauma, illness, and longing distort the line between truth and invention. Told with brutal honesty, warped humour and hallucinatory edge, S. G. Hyde’s novel explores what it means to live when the ground of reality keeps shifting beneath your feet.
At once harrowing and tender, it is a story of survival through imagination, self-deception, and the desperate human need to stitch meaning out of chaos. A haunting meditation on identity, illness, and loss, sprinkled with dark comedy, this is fiction at its most unsettling and raw.
Corruption Isn’t Explosive
Broken Shields is a crime thriller in which Internal Affairs detective Kat Booker investigates the murder of a friend and uncovers a web of corruption, predation, and buried truths. What were some sources that informed this novel’s development?
Broken Shields was shaped by a mix of real-world cases, crime fiction, and an interest in the gray areas within law enforcement. I kept coming back to stories where the line between “good cop” and “bad cop” isn’t clear. It shifts.
I was especially drawn to stories about internal investigations, where the protagonist is forced to turn inward and investigate their own department. Films like Internal Affairs explore how deeply corruption can take hold, and how personal the pursuit of truth becomes.
More broadly, I was influenced by procedurals that lean into psychological tension—where solving the case isn’t the hardest part. At its core, Broken Shields came from a simple question: what happens when doing the right thing means tearing down the system you’ve sworn to protect?
How did you balance the procedural side of the novel with its deeper focus on grief and moral injury?
I didn’t treat them as separate tracks. The investigation is how Kat processes grief. Every interview, every report, every decision forces her to confront what she’s lost and what it’s cost her to stay in the job.
The procedural side gives the story structure, but the emotional weight comes from what those steps mean to her. I was less interested in how a case gets solved and more in what solving it does to the person doing the work. In Internal Affairs, you’re not just chasing a suspect. You’re turning on your own. The job demands detachment, but the closer Kat gets to the truth, the harder that becomes to maintain.
Tideview feels vividly damp, decayed, and compromised. Was the setting inspired by a real place, or did it emerge entirely from the book’s themes?
Tideview was born from my time living in Vallejo, with Mare Island sitting there in a kind of quiet decay after the Navy pulled out. That image stuck with me. This place that once had purpose is now slowly deteriorating. I started to imagine what it would look like if an entire city grew up around that very foundation.
The environment mirrors what’s happening inside the department. Nothing collapses all at once. It’s erosion. Structures left unattended and problems ignored. The dampness, the decay, it all ties back to the idea that corruption isn’t explosive. It’s slow, it’s tolerated, and at some point, it simply becomes part of the system.
The novel is skeptical of institutions while still caring about justice. What were you most interested in exploring about that tension?
What interested me wasn’t just corruption. It was how it survives. Institutions tend to protect themselves first: reputation, control, continuity. Justice is disruptive. It threatens all of that.
Kat sits right in the middle of that conflict. Her job is to hold the system accountable, but doing that makes her a liability to it. The tension comes from the fact that justice isn’t clean or rewarding. It isolates you. It costs you relationships. And sometimes it doesn’t fix anything. It just exposes what’s already broken.
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The case looks airtight.
It isn’t.
When a Tideview police officer is found murdered, the evidence points conveniently to a single suspect. Too conveniently for IA Detective Kat Booker.
The timeline fits.
The motive is obvious.
The department is ready to close the case.
Kat isn’t.
As she continues the investigation, a small circle of suspects begins to emerge—each with something to hide, each with a reason to want the victim dead. The deeper Kat digs, the more the story unravels, exposing contradictions, long buried secrets, and a past that refuses to stay buried.
Because this isn’t just another case.
Twelve years ago, on the same dock, Kat lost everything.
Now the truth is circling back.
With pressure mounting from inside the department and the clock ticking toward a wrongful arrest, Kat must untangle a web of lies before the real killer disappears for good.
Everyone is a suspect.
Everyone is lying.
The only question is—can you figure out the truth before she does?
God, Love, and Family
Marion, Faith & Ice Cream follows an eight-year-old’s simple question about believing in God as it unfolds across one day, where family love, sensory wonder, and everyday beauty teach her how to see faith for herself. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration was my daughter’s family. The gift of becoming a grandparent is being able to view the development of a child from 30 thousand feet. As a parent, you are in the thick of the day-to-day duties and responsibilities, but as a grandparent, your experience allows you to see what really matters. Therefore, God, love, and family are the central elements.
How did you balance writing about faith for children in a way that feels gentle and discovered?
Thank you for asking the question this way. Children are so much more sensory-focused than intuitive, so it was important to me to connect the faith to something they can observe with their own senses. The unseen concepts of air and wind are ones children understand, so drawing the connection gives them a tangible connection to believing versus simply a spiritual one.
Marion’s father, being a scientist, adds an interesting dimension to the story. What drew you to pairing scientific observation with spiritual belief?
My son-in-law is an MD, so pairing a science angle that relies on “proof” with a child’s desire for something concrete seemed like a natural fit.
What do you hope children, and the adults reading with them, feel or talk about after they finish the book?
That God is calling us all to take a leap of faith. I think we all have a deep yearning to believe in something beyond what we can see. Therefore, I hope it gives children (and maybe even some adults) the simple framework to connect this tangible world with the spiritual one.
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Marion isn’t sure. She’s eight years old, full of questions, and she’s never seen God. So how can she know He’s real?
Everything changes during one breezy Saturday. As she watches eagles glide above her, leaves swirl around the yard, and delights in a sparkling lake that seems to wink at her, Marion discovers that the world is filled with things she can’t see but still knows are true. And, maybe faith works the same way…
A beautiful picture book that helps children explore faith, family connections, and the amazing wonders all around us. With loving guidance from her dad, Marion learns that belief is so much more than just what meets the eye.
A Balanced Perspective
Spirit of the Cowboy is a poetry collection in which you use the cowboy myth to explore desire, wounded masculinity, and the emotional fallout of America’s inherited scripts. What inspired you to write and publish this collection?
This probably sounds extremely left-field, but I was watching a documentary about Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the reporter said something along the lines of, “Every great artist has a throughline in their work that gives the collective whole a unified vision.” That night, a chord was struck in me as I had a slew of test dummy projects under my belt, but didn’t understand what I was creating for other than therapeutic self-expression. Spirit of the Cowboy was born the moment I realized that my life’s work is and will be Coding a New Masculinity.
What first drew you to the cowboy as the central figure for thinking about masculinity and desire?
Brokeback Mountain only scratched the surface for me, reinstating the cowboy as a quintessential symbol of both perception and longing, but left me needing more than another closet to cry in. I wanted to bust the entire privilege of being born a man wide-open, digging deeper into the open wound that being a male attracted to another male entails in the 21st century. We have more language and societal awareness than perhaps ever before in history, yet we are still bruising each other as we become either more or less ourselves in the process of living.
How did you balance personal vulnerability with the larger political and cultural critique running through the collection?
In pursuit of a balanced perspective, I approached this project with a sort of directorial lens, reminding myself often that in order to honestly interrogate my origins, I must also extend the frame to capture America’s.
When writing this book, what did you hope readers might recognize in themselves?
I hoped readers might recognize that the resilience founded upon their rough edges and sharp tongues can co-exist with a genuine sense of belonging and a desire for softer expressions of love.
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Empower Readers
Exit Signs follows an eighteen-year-old girl with plans to graduate early and attend Stanford, who has it all ripped away when her mom throws her out with nothing, leaving her homeless and vulnerable to coercion disguised as love. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Thank you for that question. For years, I kept this close to my chest due to the lingering shame, but the truth is: my own life was the inspiration. This actually happened to me. The story began years ago as a cathartic exercise titled Abandoned, which sat on my computer for a long time. However, after losing my eldest son to cancer, I felt a profound need to tell his story—and he had such a beautiful life. To tell his story properly, I realized I had to start from the very beginning. Stella’s journey is the result of that, and readers can expect her narrative to unfold across three books in this series.
The book emphasizes the practical realities of homelessness—money, hygiene, parking, paperwork. Why was that level of detail important?
I wanted the reader to truly inhabit Stella’s world. Those specific, gritty details aren’t just creative choices—they are drawn directly from lived experience. To write about such a sensitive topic with precision and impact, I felt it was a necessity to include the small, often overlooked realities that define a person’s survival from day to day.
The novel explores how control can disguise itself as generosity. What drew you to that theme?
That question actually makes me laugh a little because it hits so close to home. In my own life, generosity has often been the “front door” of my relationships, while control was the way they ultimately went wrong. I wanted to explore that theme to empower readers. My goal is for them to realize that they ultimately hold the power over their own lives and destiny. I hope Stella’s story serves as a reminder: do not let someone else’s “generosity” become your cage.
Can you tell us what the second book will be about and when it will be available for fans to purchase?
The second book is currently living in my head, and the characters—especially Stella—are screaming to be unleashed! While I am juggling a few other projects at the moment, fans can expect the sequel to arrive sometime in 2027. Of course, if the writing process goes particularly well and I stay “in control” of my schedule, perhaps we’ll see it as early as the end of this year!
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When you have nowhere to go, any door looks like open arms.
Some doors don’t close; they slam. At eighteen, Stella Hart had a plan: early graduation, a Stanford acceptance letter, and a future she’d built from scratch. Then her mother threw her out with nothing but a pile of clothes and a slammed door, and everything Stella thought she’d earned disappeared overnight.
Homeless, broke, and alone in the SF Bay Area, Stella finds shelter in the arms of a man who seems like salvation. Jim offers safety, stability, and love. But safety, she will learn, can be a cage, and love can be a leash dressed up as loyalty.
As Jim’s generosity quietly hardens into control, Stella begins to see what she almost missed: the exits were always there. She just had to choose one. Exit Signs is a raw, unflinching story of a young woman who did everything right and still had to fight her way back to herself, through homelessness, coercive control, and an unplanned pregnancy, armed with nothing but her intelligence, her instincts, and the stubborn belief that her future still belonged to her.
For readers who know what it means to survive the people who were supposed to love you.
Live a Healthy Life
Nurse Florence®, What Are Eosinophils? follows students and a knowledgeable nurse as they explore what eosinophils are, how they work, and why understanding them helps kids make healthy choices. What inspired you to focus an entire children’s book on a lesser-known type of white blood cell?
Since we plan to publish over 700 Nurse Florence® books, we will need to explore the lesser-known things about the body to get to that number.
How did you approach balancing scientific accuracy with accessibility for young readers?
I have both as coequal goals or objectives, so I do my best to make both happen with each page.
Were there particular health topics that you found especially challenging to simplify without losing nuance?
Trying to explain what doctors may want to do if the cell count is too high or too low.
How do you decide which practical health habits to include when connecting science to everyday life?
I try to promote eating a healthy and balanced diet, exercising regularly, and sleeping well into every book if possible, as well as not smoking cigarettes. These are things that show up in the literature over and over again to help people live a healthy life.
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Weighing a Miracle
Weighing a Miracle retells the raising of Lazarus from John 11, but it does so from the ground level rather than the halo. Author Steven Nimocks centers the story on Caleb, a merchant whose life is built on weights, ledgers, contracts, and whatever can be proved, then sets that temperament against Lazarus, Mary, Martha, and the gathering rumor of Jesus moving through Bethany. The result is a biblical novel that begins in commerce, friendship, and illness, then tightens into death, waiting, and the unbearable strain between measurable reality and divine interruption.
I admired that the book does not treat faith as a decorative glow laid over the narrative. It treats faith as friction. Caleb is not a cardboard skeptic; he is a wounded, disciplined man whose need for order feels earned, even poignant. That gives the book its real voltage. Again and again, Nimocks returns to the language of scales, seals, balances, and records, and instead of becoming repetitive, that imagery acquires moral density. I felt the novel’s emotional pressure not in its largest miracle, but in its quieter humiliations: the way grief narrows a room, the way practicality can become both mercy and armor, the way a friend’s hope can irritate you precisely because you fear it may be true.
The prose has a clean biblical-historical surface, but underneath that surface is a distinctly modern psychological intelligence. Nimocks writes with tactile specificity, the dust of the Jericho road, the heft of bronze weights, the smell of sickness, the faint trace of burial myrrh, and those details keep the book from floating away into pious mist. I would not call it flashy prose, and that is to its credit. It’s steady, exact, and occasionally luminous. The novel’s seriousness can make it feel over-deliberate in places; it advances by moral accumulation rather than narrative speed. But even there, the patience suits the subject. This is a book about a man learning that his categories are too small for what is happening in front of him.
I would recommend this to readers of biblical fiction, Christian historical fiction, faith-based literary fiction, and Scripture-centered retellings, especially those who prefer interior conflict over spectacle. Readers who appreciate authors like Francine Rivers, or who responded to the scriptural intimacy of The Chosen, will probably find this book congenial, though Nimocks feels quieter, sterner, and more merchant-eyed in his sensibility. For readers who want reverence without blandness, and devotion without soft focus, this is a strong fit. Weighing a Miracle is a novel about resurrection, but even more, it’s a novel about what happens when a man’s scales can no longer hold the truth.
Pages: 147 | ASIN : B0DLWXN7C4
Inheritance Lost
Inheritance Lost is a courtroom novel, but it’s really about the afterlife of theft. Author C. Anthony Sherman opens with Isaac Simon being forced to sign away his land over a Bible under armed pressure, then carries that wound forward more than a century into a civil case brought by Dexter Simon against the descendants and institutions that profited from it. What follows is a legal drama built not just on evidence, testimony, and strategy, but on a larger question the book keeps worrying like a nerve: how long can the law live comfortably beside a wrong once the wrong has finally been named?
Sherman doesn’t treat dispossession as old history, or as a backdrop for suspense. He treats it as a living structure, something that survives by changing its vocabulary. The novel keeps returning to paper as a weapon, to signatures, ledgers, title chains, settlement language, all the cool administrative surfaces that make brutality look respectable. There’s a chilling intelligence in that choice. I also found myself unexpectedly moved by the book’s restraint at key moments. Dexter isn’t written as a swaggering avenger. He feels tired, disciplined, and painfully aware that even a favorable verdict can’t restore what was taken. By the time the jury names the title “historically tainted,” and later Dexter refuses to turn the result into a personal monument, choosing instead to build a registry and a legal structure for others, the novel has earned its sadness. It understands that recognition is not repair, even if recognition matters deeply.
At its best, the prose has a grave rhythm that fits the material beautifully. The opening pages are especially strong, and scenes like Isaac’s coerced signing, Meagan Roulier’s testimony, and Claude Plaine’s unraveling have real voltage. Sherman knows how to land a line. He also knows how to stage a courtroom so that shifts in posture, silence, and timing carry dramatic force. At times, though, the novel leans so hard into solemnity that every exchange arrives with the weight of a pronouncement. I occasionally wanted a little more surprise in the dialogue. Still, even when the book grows overtly declarative, I understood why. This is a novel written in defiance of euphemism. Its strongest passages don’t merely tell a story. They press on the language that has long been used to soften or bury stories like this one.
Inheritance Lost is absorbing, forceful, and genuinely affecting. It’s not subtle about its convictions, but it is thoughtful about consequence, and that distinction matters. I finished it feeling sobered rather than exhilarated, which seems exactly right for a book so concerned with memory, inheritance, and the terrible durability of respectable lies. I’d recommend it most to readers who like courtroom fiction with moral and historical weight, especially anyone interested in land, lineage, and the uneasy distance between legal judgment and justice.
Pages: 266 | ASIN : B0GLV1B1C3
