Blog Archives
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.
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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?
Waterhole Economies: The Only Economies That Never Collapsed
Waterhole Economies argues that the most durable economies in human history were not market systems, empires, or industrial states, but the small, mobile, sharing-based lifeways of hunter-gatherers, whose survival depended on remaining inside the limits of ecosystems. Author Samuel Layne builds his case around the image of the waterhole, a place where humans, prey, predators, plants, seasons, and necessity all meet. From there, he traces a vast arc through the Neolithic Revolution, ecosystem collapse, legal-person economies, fossil fuels, climate migration, and the uneasy return from nonrenewables back to renewables. The book’s central claim is simple but far-reaching: an economy that forgets survival as its first purpose eventually becomes an engine of collapse.
I found the book most compelling when it stayed close to that primal image of the waterhole. There’s something powerful in Layne’s insistence that access, sharing, restraint, and coexistence were not sentimental virtues, but economic necessities. His comparison between mobile hunter-gatherer bands and modern sedentary economies gave me the sense of looking at familiar words, economy, growth, progress, through a newly tilted lens. I especially appreciated the way he treats ecosystems not as scenery or resources waiting politely offstage, but as the foundation beneath every human transaction. The Mars rover analogy, used to evoke the complexity of Earth’s life-support systems, struck me as one of the book’s sharper imaginative moves. It gives scale to something we usually flatten into abstraction.
Layne has a gift for returning to a phrase until it gathers pressure, particularly in his repeated contrast between survival-driven economies and profit-, surplus-, and GDP-driven ones. Some claims arrive with such certainty that I wanted more room for complication, especially around hunter-gatherer life and the tangled legacy of agriculture. Still, the book’s intensity feels earned. Its discussions of the Maya, climate migration through the Darién Gap, fossil fuel companies, and legal-person economies give the argument a human ache. These aren’t just systems being examined.
Waterhole Economies is an ambitious, searching, and deeply concerned work that asks readers to reconsider what an economy is for. Its strongest idea, that survival should be the measure of economic success, stayed with me long after the final pages. I’d recommend it to readers interested in ecological economics, anthropology, climate change, sustainability, and anyone willing to sit with a challenging critique of modern growth culture. It’s a demanding book, but a worthwhile one for readers who want their assumptions unsettled rather than merely confirmed.
Pages: 730 | ASIN: 1733755551
Pentagon Pirate Gang & The Poisoned Apple
Pentagon Pirate Gang & The Poisoned Apple, by J W Nelson, is a middle-grade/YA fantasy adventure that returns readers to the School of Fruit Teaching, where Aime, Oro, Semia, Gramon, and Violer find themselves caught in a dangerous mystery involving poisoned students, hidden notebooks, secret orchards, and adults who may not be as trustworthy as they seem. The story begins with alarm and urgency, as Aime and Oro’s parents sense that something terrible has happened to their children, and from there the book unfolds into a school-based adventure full of games, clues, rival houses, strange powers, and a deeper conspiracy tied to Mrs Blackfruit, Mr Thornby, and the mysterious red notebooks.
I enjoyed the way Nelson leans fully into the oddness of his world. SOFT isn’t just a school with a fantasy twist. It has its own rules, sports, rivalries, food-based language, and hidden dangers tucked behind everyday routines. That made the setting feel lively and a little eccentric, like a place where a normal breakfast can suddenly become part of a bigger mystery. The writing is busy, but there is charm in that energy. I could feel the author’s affection for the students, especially in the way the members of the Pentagon Pirate Gang look out for one another even when they are frightened, confused, or keeping secrets they do not fully understand.
I also found myself thinking about the author’s choice to make the adults so central to the danger and the protection in the story. Mrs Blackfruit and Mr Thornby bring real menace to the book, while Mrs Peaches, Mr Figgin, and Mr Tumbleweed give the children just enough support to keep going without taking the adventure away from them. That balance matters in a fantasy adventure for younger readers. The kids still have to be brave. They still have to make choices. They still have to face the emotional cost of secrets, especially near the end when the arrival of the governing body opens old wounds for Gramon and Semia. That final turn surprised me because it shifts the book from mystery and action into something more personal. Suddenly, the adventure is not only about maps and poison. It’s about family, trust, and what children are not told until the truth is standing right in front of them.
I would recommend Pentagon Pirate Gang & The Poisoned Apple to readers who enjoy middle-grade and young YA fantasy adventure with school rivalries, secret societies, hidden maps, strange magic, and a strong team of young heroes at the center. It will especially appeal to readers who like stories that mix playful worldbuilding with danger and who don’t mind a plot that leaves some threads open for the next stage of the journey. It’s imaginative, sincere, and full of movement, with a sense that the orchard still has plenty of secrets left to give.
Pages: 219 | ISBN : 978-1037120787
