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Someone Already Carrying History
Mya is a romantic gothic historical novel about a centuries-old woman navigating Victorian medicine, buried folklore, and a dangerous love that forces her to imagine a future beyond mere endurance. What first came to you in writing Mya: the atmosphere, the character, or the central relationship?
It was the atmosphere first—always. I tend to see scenes before I understand them. Liverpool docks in the mist, damp cobbles, lamplight catching the edges of things. Once I have that, the character almost walks into it.
Mya followed naturally from that world. She didn’t arrive as a mystery to be solved, but as someone already carrying history—someone composed, controlled, and used to enduring rather than living. The relationship came later, but once William entered the picture, everything shifted. It stopped being about survival and became about the risk of wanting more than that.
How did you balance Victorian medical history with older folklore so that neither element overwhelmed the other?
I treated them both as systems people believe in. Victorian medicine, for all its progress, still had its blind spots and rituals. Folklore, on the other hand, has its own internal logic that’s been tested over centuries.
So instead of one explaining the other, I let them sit side by side. William approaches things with reason and discipline, while Mya carries something older that doesn’t need to be proven—it simply is. The tension between those two ways of understanding the world creates the balance. Neither cancels the other out, they just… coexist, sometimes uncomfortably.
Mya feels defined by discipline, intelligence, and grief rather than mystery alone. How did you shape her interior life on the page?
I didn’t want her to feel like a puzzle for the reader to solve. She knows exactly who she is and what she carries, so the writing reflects that. There’s no melodrama in her—everything is controlled, measured.
Her grief sits quietly underneath everything she does. It’s not something she expresses openly, but it informs her choices, her restraint, even her intelligence. She’s someone who has learned, over time, that emotion has consequences.
So instead of explaining her, I focused on how she moves through the world—what she notices, what she avoids, what she allows herself to feel and when. That tells you far more than exposition ever could.
Music, scent, texture, and silence all play a major role in the book’s emotional world. How consciously did you think about building the novel through sensation as much as plot?
Very consciously—but it’s instinctive at the same time.
I tend to write scenes as if they’re being experienced, not just observed. What does the air feel like? What can be heard just outside the frame? What lingers after someone leaves the room? Those details are what make a moment feel real.
Music plays a big part in that because it helps me find the emotional tone of a scene before I write it. Once I have that, everything else follows—the pacing, the rhythm of the dialogue, even the silence between lines.
For me, plot is what happens. Sensation is what makes it stay with you.
Author Links: Facebook | GoodReads
in the fog-choked streets of a city built on secrets,a woman arrives with a past too old to name – and a darkness she can no longer outrun.
her name is Mya
She has survived by staying unseen.
By never letting anyone close.
Untill she meets William, a man whose kindness unsettles her far more than fear ever could.
As whispers spread and something savage begins to stir beneath the gaslight, Mya is forced to confront the truth of what she is, and what she was forced to become.
A Victorian gothic tale of survival, forbidden love,vengence, and the monster the world creates when it pushes a woman too far.
For those who wish to step deeper into Mya’s world, a curated companion playlist is included – adding an optional extra layer to the experience
Mya
Mya is a gothic historical novel with a real feel for texture: wet cobbles, gaslight, apothecary glass, winter hedgerows, lecture halls, churchyards, and drawing rooms that seem to breathe on the page. It opens in 1883 Liverpool and London, but it keeps one foot in older, deeper folklore, so the book reads like a meeting point between Victorian medicine, old-world myth, and a love story that knows from the start that tenderness can be dangerous. What struck me first was how confidently the novel understands its own atmosphere. It isn’t just dark for the sake of being dark. It builds a whole emotional climate around secrecy, restraint, ritual, and longing.
At the center is Mya herself, and the book works because she isn’t treated as a puzzle to be solved so much as a person who has spent centuries managing survival with discipline, intelligence, and grief. Her connection with William Ashbury gives the novel its emotional shape. He’s a doctor drawn to botanical medicine and careful observation, and their conversations let the book become a romance of ideas as much as a romance of feeling. One of the smartest lines in the novel is, “Forward does not always mean away.” That sentence isn’t just about medicine. It’s the book’s whole philosophy. Mya keeps asking whether modernity actually means wisdom, whether buried knowledge still matters, and whether care can exist without control.
What I liked most is that the supernatural material is woven into the novel’s deeper concerns instead of sitting on top of them. The wolf mythology, Mya’s tincture, and William’s medical curiosity all feed the same question: what does it mean to live with a force inside you that can’t be cured, only understood imperfectly? That gives the story a surprising amount of emotional seriousness. Even when the book moves into danger, pursuit, and revelation, it stays grounded in questions of mercy, containment, loneliness, and bodily cost. There’s also a really appealing thread about lost knowledge and dismissed healers, crystallized in William’s beautiful line, “And that space… is where medicine lives.”
The prose is often lush, but it usually earns that lushness because the novel is so committed to sensation: scent, sound, weather, fabric, breath, animal unease, the pressure of silence in a room. Music matters here too, not as decoration, but as part of the novel’s emotional architecture. The result is a book that feels composed rather than merely plotted. Scene by scene, it keeps returning to the same tonal register of ache, beauty, and suspended threat, and that consistency gives the later chapters real weight. By the time the story reaches its final movement, the tragedy feels not imposed but grown from everything the novel has been quietly building all along.
Mya is a romantic gothic novel about survival, intimacy, and the cost of carrying an old violence through a modern world. It’s rich in setting, unusually tender toward its heroine, and genuinely interested in the overlap between science, folklore, and moral choice. More than anything, it’s a book about a woman who has mastered endurance and then dares, briefly and painfully, to imagine a future larger than endurance. That gives the ending its sting, but also its grace. I finished it feeling that the novel had delivered exactly what it promised from its opening pages: fog, firelight, danger, music, and a love story haunted by history yet fully alive in the present of its telling.
Pages: 282 | ASIN: B0GTB1JZ5F
Quietly Philosophical
The Last Orbit follows a crew of four astronauts aboard the ISS as they witness the destruction of Earth by an asteroid and realize they are alone in space. What was the first image that sparked your story — the asteroid, the ISS, or the idea of watching the end from a distance?
The distance.
I had the visual of the impact from space first — almost like a pebble dropped into a pond, with concentric rings radiating out from the centre. From that height, it looked strangely peaceful.
Then I played with the idea of the crown of water splashing upward at the point of impact — something catastrophic, yet quite beautiful when seen from a distance.
That contrast stayed with me: unimaginable destruction reduced to something visually serene simply because of how far away the observer is.
Each astronaut responds differently to catastrophe. How did you develop Ava, Greg, Koji, and Lena as emotional counterweights to one another?
I suppose they’re all facets of the same person.
I needed a commander in Ava — someone who could take charge when everything fell apart. Greg is the heart of the crew, the emotional glue that keeps them human. Lena is the workhorse, the one who keeps moving because stopping would mean thinking. And Koji is the voice of reason — reflective, grounded, and quietly philosophical.
Together they form a complete emotional response to catastrophe, allowing different ways of processing grief to exist side by side.
What balance were you aiming for between scientific accuracy and emotional storytelling?
I started with very little scientific knowledge beyond the basics, but I knew enough to research what I needed to make the setting plausible.
I didn’t want the technical detail to overpower the real story. The Last Orbit isn’t really a space novel at all — it’s a human one. Space is simply the environment that strips everything back.
As long as the science felt grounded and believable, it allowed the emotional side of the story to breathe. Once the reader accepts the reality of the situation, the focus can stay where it belongs — on the people living through it.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?
It’s a complete change of environment this time.
The next novel is titled Mya, a traditional gothic horror set in 1880s England — gas lamps, fog, cobbled streets, and long shadows. It’s very nearly finished and is scheduled for release in early February.
This will also be the first story in a connected universe of horror I’m developing — not a strict numbered series, but a shared world with overlapping characters, locations, and events for readers who enjoy discovering those links.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
When a catastrophic impact hits Earth, four astronauts are left circling a silent planet — their mission meaningless. Cut off from command and running out of time, every decision could be their last.
As the truth of what happened unfolds, fear, hope and love collide in the cold vacuum of space.
The Last Orbit is a haunting, cinematic thriller about the human spirit at the edge of extinction.
Companion playlist included inside.
An optional layer to explore after the story
The Last Orbit
The Last Orbit is a science fiction novel that follows a small crew aboard the ISS as they witness the end of the world unfold beneath them. It starts in warmth and routine, with astronauts teasing each other over birthday cake and Bowie songs, and then shifts as they detect what looks like a simple anomaly near the sun. That flicker becomes an approaching asteroid, and soon the crew is watching the Earth fall apart as fragments strike Berlin, Naples, Rio, and eventually the entire Atlantic coast. Cut off from Houston, stranded in orbit, the four astronauts are left with nothing but each other, the damaged station, and the impossible weight of survival in a world that no longer exists below.
The writing is simple and vivid, almost cinematic, but what pulled me in most was the emotional pacing. Author Mark Heathcote lingers on quiet moments: a tomato drifting in a hydroponic bay, a Polaroid stuck to a wall, the metallic creaks of the station as it flexes in shadow. These details make the early chapters feel warm and lived in, which makes the later horror hit harder. When the asteroid fragments start landing, the scenes are brutal, shown through the detached silence of orbit. That contrast makes everything sharper. I kept thinking how strange it is that a catastrophe can look almost beautiful from far away. The author plays with that feeling a lot, letting awe and dread sit side by side.
What I enjoyed most was how grounded the characters felt. Their reactions aren’t heroic or polished. Sometimes they panic. Sometimes they shut down. Sometimes they argue because there’s nothing left to do and nowhere left to go. I appreciated that the author didn’t try to tidy their emotions. Ava’s insistence on discipline, Greg’s grief-strained anger, Koji’s quiet resilience, Lena’s obsession with data as a kind of ritual. None of it feels dramatic for drama’s sake. It feels like people are trying to hold on to something solid when the world below them is literally being torn apart. The book leans into the psychological weight of isolation rather than into action-heavy sci-fi, and that choice makes the story feel more intimate.
The book is bleak, yes, but also reflective, in a way that reminds me of standing outside on a cold night and realizing how small you are. If you like science fiction that mixes disaster with character-driven storytelling, or if you enjoy space settings that feel tactile and real instead of glossy, this book will be right up your alley. Readers who appreciate slow-building tension, emotional honesty, and apocalyptic fiction seen through a very human lens will get the most out of it.
Pages: 154 | ASIN : B0FVTTJFT4
