Blog Archives
Nothing Ever Happens on Main Street
Daren Hatfield’s Nothing Ever Happens on Main Street begins in the quiet town of Harding Springs, where life hums along in predictable rhythms. Parker Riley, restless and yearning for more, assumes his days will remain uneventful. That changes the instant he steps into 55 Main Street, where a startling discovery shatters the stillness of his world. With his town inexplicably tied to a stranger’s mysterious purpose, Parker finds himself on a journey that will test his courage and reshape his understanding of the life he once dismissed as ordinary.
This novel transports readers into a setting both nostalgic and enchanting. The streets of Harding Springs, with their tranquil charm and sense of timelessness, feel like home—yet beneath the surface lies an undercurrent of magic waiting to be uncovered. Hatfield skillfully balances the serenity of small-town life with the suspense of Parker’s unfolding adventure, creating a story that is at once thrilling and deeply reflective. Parker Riley’s character stands at the heart of this tale, embodying the universal struggle between longing for something greater and finding meaning in the everyday. His transformation is relatable and compelling, drawing readers into his emotional journey.
Supporting characters like Cora, with her quiet strength, Cassandra, with her playful energy, and Edison, with his enigmatic wisdom, add richness and dimension to the story. Even the antagonists—multi-layered and unpredictable—command attention, challenging the notion of black-and-white morality.
Hatfield’s prose is both accessible and profound, capturing the essence of life’s subtleties with disarming simplicity. By framing the narrative as Parker’s memoir, the story resonates with a poignant nostalgia, a reminder of how fleeting yet impactful youth can be. Moments of exhilarating action are interspersed with quiet introspection, creating a rhythm that keeps readers captivated while leaving space for deeper themes to unfold.
Daren Hatfield’s Nothing Ever Happens on Main Street is a masterful exploration of connection, choice, and the courage to embrace life’s uncertainties. Its ability to transport readers, evoke emotion, and spark introspection is a testament to Hatfield’s storytelling prowess. This is more than just a book—it’s an experience that lingers long after the final page is turned. For anyone seeking a tale that weaves magic into the mundane and celebrates the quiet heroism of the every day, this novel is an absolute must-read.
Pages: 274 | ASIN : B0DJM7WGRV
A Time for Love
Greg Van Arsdale’s novella A Time for Love offers an intriguing blend of romance, self-discovery, and time travel. The story follows Joe Dixon, a successful but dissatisfied stockbroker, as he stumbles into an extraordinary journey of love and adventure. After meeting Amber Covington, a woman living in 1940s London, Joe faces challenges that test his bravery, values, and the strength of his newfound love.
The writing in A Time for Love is straightforward and approachable, though at times, the dialogue feels a bit contrived. Joe’s conversations with his friend Ian early in the book feel like setups rather than organic exchanges. Once the time-travel twist is revealed, the dialogue becomes more engaging, especially as Joe and Amber navigate their feelings against the backdrop of war-torn London. What I enjoyed most was the vivid imagery of 1940s London. The fog-covered Chelsea Bridge scene where Joe meets Amber is enchanting and transports readers to another era. It felt magical yet grounded, as if you could hear the clip-clop of horses and feel the damp cobblestones underfoot. The historical context, like references to the Battle of Britain and rationing, adds authenticity. The romance between Joe and Amber is sweet and earnest but somewhat rushed. Joe’s declaration of love comes quickly, making it hard to fully buy into their connection. That said, their chemistry shines in moments of vulnerability, like when Joe reassures Amber after the break-in. The action sequences, especially Joe’s martial arts showdown with burglars, are thrilling, though they contrast sharply with the otherwise romantic tone of the story.
A Time For Love remains an engaging and adventurous novella. It shines in its ability to weave historical tension with themes of love and existential longing. For readers seeking a quick, exciting story with a touch of romance and time-travel intrigue, Van Arsdale’s work provides an enjoyable escape.
Pages: 146 | ASIN : B0CWCR9S6N
Once Upon a Time Machine
Once Upon a Time Machine by Peggy Gerber is a dazzling anthology of short stories that traverse genres, from time travel to alien encounters, with themes ranging from heartbreak to whimsical absurdity. The collection captures human emotions in fantastical scenarios, like a grieving mother rewriting history in “Saving Aaron” or the humorous alien misunderstandings in “Necessary Exclusion.” These tales brim with creative twists that keep you wondering what might come next.
One thing that really stood out to me is how these stories manage to be relatable while being wildly imaginative. In “Saving Aaron,” the protagonist’s grief over her child’s death feels raw and visceral. Her desperate use of a time machine to undo her pain raises haunting questions about morality and consequences. I found myself heartbroken and conflicted, wondering if I’d make the same choice. The story’s bittersweet resolution stuck with me long after I closed the book.
Another favorite was “The Mystical Rock,” which had an almost fairy-tale charm to it. The protagonist’s life changes when she discovers a seemingly enchanted stone that only she can see as special. It was such a lighthearted and feel-good tale, especially after the darker entries. The story’s message about self-belief and hard work resonated with me. It reminded me of how small affirmations can make a world of difference if we let them.
While I enjoyed the book overall, not every story landed perfectly. “Necessary Exclusion,” while funny and satirical, felt a little on the nose with its commentary on human violence and hubris. I liked the aliens’ baffled observations, but some of the humor felt stretched. That said, the cleverness of weaving in cultural references, like the “supreme leader Taylor Swift,” made me chuckle despite myself. Even the less polished tales had moments that sparked a reaction—whether laughter, introspection, or disbelief.
This collection is a fantastic fit for lovers of speculative fiction who enjoy the unpredictability of short stories. Each story brings something unique; humor, suspense, or heart-wrenching emotion. While the tones and styles vary, they reflect a shared curiosity about life, choices, and humanity’s quirks.
Pages: 248 | ASIN : B0DHFB37TS
Partners in Time Meet A Boy Called Romulus
Nicholas Hodgson’s Partners in Time Meet A Boy Called Romulus is a captivating historical fiction tale that blends time travel, friendship, and the bittersweet allure of second chances. As the second installment in the Partners in Time series, it picks up with Harry and Jett, whose chaotic and accidental ventures through time have landed them in yet another adventure. This time, they encounter Romulus Augustus, the exiled and forgotten last Emperor of Rome, who has inexplicably found himself lost in 1942 England. What follows is a thrilling collision of timelines and a heartfelt exploration of power, identity, and loyalty.
Hodgson’s story is a fusion of nostalgia and mystery, weaving the grandeur of history with the wonder of time’s intricate possibilities. Hodgson uses time travel not as a mere plot device but as a means to explore themes of belonging, loss, and redemption. The story’s heart lies in its characters. Romulus, the boy Emperor, is a deeply haunting figure marked by loneliness, defiance, and the crushing weight of his fallen empire. His quiet strength and vulnerability leave a lasting impression, making it impossible not to feel his pain. Harry and Jett, in contrast, bring a sense of grit, determination, and relatable humor, serving as the perfect counterbalance to Romulus’s solemnity. Together, the trio navigates the complexities of their unlikely alliance, creating moments of humor, tension, and deep connection.
The prose is dynamic, tumbling forward with a lively rhythm that captures the urgency of the plot while pausing just long enough to savor its emotional depth. Hodgson’s ability to balance historical authenticity with modern sensibilities is impressive. The dialogue, though occasionally a bit contemporary for a historical setting, brims with wit and relatability, making the characters feel alive and engaging.
The fast-paced plot keeps readers on edge, plunging them into a series of high-stakes adventures while never losing sight of the personal journeys at its core. The action-packed moments are tempered by thoughtful introspection, ensuring that the story resonates on an emotional level. Though the pacing sometimes leaves little room for the narrative to breathe, this brisk tempo enhances the sense of urgency. The stakes feel personal, centering on three individuals trying to find their place across disparate worlds rather than on the grand machinations of history or empire.
Partners in Time Meet A Boy Called Romulus is a beautifully written and emotionally rich story. Hodgson handles historical detail with care, creating a world that feels both immersive and playful. This book is perfect for readers who long to dive into the margins of history while enjoying a fast-paced, imaginative adventure.
Pages: 304 | ASIN : B0DJWGSWJB
Suffering and Joy
The Heartbreak of Time Travel follows a woman as she travels through time to the past and the future while caring for her husband, who is slowly losing his faculties due to dementia. What was the inspiration for the setup of this novel?
The story is considered a nonfiction novel or literary memoir. The inspiration arises from my husband’s ordeal with frontotemporal dementia (FTD). The events within are either actual events or “adorned” through time travel and sprinkles of fancy as literary devices.
What was the most challenging part of writing your “memoir,” and what was the most rewarding?
Writing a memoir is a person’s own written account of her life and is the retelling of an event or time that impacted the person in such a way that it stands out for her. The most difficult and challenging moments writing this story is how I wish I was writing about someone else’s story and not my own. Remembering how we got here causes me to reminisce into places that will never be and can never be. A future looks daunting because his life expectation is very short now. Thus, I make up a future through time travel into a better future for both of us.
Are there any emotions or memories from your own life that you put into your characters’ lives?
Writing this story is a compilation of both our stories at this point in our lives. It’s an account of the suffering and joy of living through hardship.
What is the next book that you’re working on, and when can your fans expect it?
I just got edits back from an agent friend who also does content editing. That story should be finished by the end of the year and then it’s off to the publishers. It’s a story about a man whose life was filled with amazing experiences and how each experience impacts the end of his life. I love this story. I’m so excited about seeing this one in readers’ hands. I only hope they love it as much as I do.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Snuffy Cod (Wingate’s alter ego) is the sole caregiver for her dying husband… okay… stop. He does die but sometime in the future—a future she visits on and off through popovers to past and present. Snuffy’s visits occur in fits and starts via some perceived time travel portal. She embarks on these excursions several times throughout the day, hour, minute, second—sometimes simply during a thought. Nothing more. Nothing less. Is it escapism? Of course not. Don’t be silly. Pshaw! Meanwhile, her husband lays flat, unmoving in a hospital bed upstairs on an excruciatingly slow slide toward death—death by molasses slick. Or is he? If Snuffy Cod can remain in the past, even the present, might she be able to prevent a future and, thusly, his impending death?
THE HEARTBREAK OF TIME TRAVEL is a brutally honest deep dive into dementia, caregiving, grief, hope, and love.
Into the Mist
In a world where past and present collide… Cheyenne Tanner, heartbroken and lost, stumbles upon a Victorian mansion shrouded in mist. Inside, forgotten memories whisper through dusty hallways… and the past beckons her. Slipping into the year 1895, she meets Augustus Moore, a man whose fate is destined to intertwine with hers. As time fractures, Cheyenne uncovers a sinister plot—a betrayal that could destroy everything and everyone she has come to love. Can her heart’s strength rewrite destiny? “Into the Mist.” Hurry, time is running out.
Love and Forgiveness
Lightning in the Collied Night follows a group of scientists who embark on a bold mission to harness the power of a newly discovered wormhole in a desperate bid to secure the survival of the human race. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The original story idea came to me several years ago. Back then, it was a simple story about a young physicist who overcomes personal and external challenges to travel to the future through a wormhole and discovers… well, I can’t get into that as it’s the crux of the story! I can say that there were multiple inspirations for the story, from literary and sci-fi sources; those are brought out in the novel. Over time, I added twists, layers, and characters to my story until I thought it might be suitable for a novel. When I retired in 2023 and had time to learn how to write fiction, I decided to share my story.
A lot of time was spent crafting the character traits in this novel. What was the most important factor for you to get right in your characters?
Probably the most important factor was that I wanted the characters to be relatable to readers. The story is set (mostly) about 30 years from now. I wanted readers to be able to understand and feel what these characters were going through as they overcame many challenges, both from within themselves and the outside world. One of the ways I did that was to try to make the dialogue seem “natural,” like people actually talk, and liberally use interior monologue to let readers get “into the heads” of the main characters.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
Probably the most important theme was the power of love and forgiveness to transform a person… or perhaps a world. Another theme is that AI can be an extremely powerful and useful tool when used appropriately, but it’s not the best solution for every problem. There’s a difference I think between what AI could do for humankind, and what we should allow it to do. Finally, I wanted my novel to reflect our wonderfully diverse world, and thus I strove to have the characters be representative of that diversity.
Will there be a follow-up novel to this story? If so, what aspects of the story will the next book cover?
I hadn’t planned on a sequel. But I’ve fallen in love with the characters (most of them, anyway!) and believe there’s much more of their story to tell. Thus I’ve started outlining a sequel, with a planned release of Summer 2025. I don’t want to give any spoilers, but I will share that the draft tagline is, “How far would you go for love?” The sequel will be more of a traditional sci-fi story than Lightning, but still approachable by people who aren’t quantum physicists. Like Lightning, it will be focused on the characters, their relationships, and their struggles. I think it will be entirely based on Earth of the future–no trips to wormholes, this time. And, like Lightning, the title will be from Shakespeare. 😉
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
In the mid-21st century, a brilliant American physicist joins a secret mission to travel through the galaxy’s lone stable wormhole. When a series of challenges threaten the project, she must find another way to accomplish its objective: save the human race. With help from an unexpected ally, the young scientist races to harness the universe’s mightiest force and preserve humanity’s future.
Who Are We as a Species?
The Last Loop follows an AI agent from the future on a mission to restore balance to the universe and save humanity, who travels back in time and has her consciousness transferred to a 19-year-old girl. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I have always had a great imagination and a host of half jotted down ideas on my phone in the old yellow notepad app. This idea was at least a few years old. Scribbled, half cooked, more of a softer young adult idea less than 2 pages long that I lost interest in as I couldn’t envision it properly. It sat in my phone.
I’m a nurse and mum to 2 under 5, and I lost my mum to MND in Jan of this year. I was in quite a serious and heavy place, and I was coping by staying as busy as I could so I started working on an idea I had. A paranormal comedy, but it stalled.
I had gone back to this old idea on my phone of this fractured, broken android woman in this dystopian future, where our world no longer exists, standing in an iridescent, bio-luminescent false garden, trying to find the strength to return to Earth’s past once again, when she herself was so damaged, so conflicted. Most of that idea was rewritten immediately. For one, Cynth isn’t a victim and I wrote her originally as damaged, barely coping when really, she is an idealist and a battler. Someone who questions, and has learnt through trial and error and experience.
Also, with the realities of AI and technological advancements currently and how AI is changing various fields, business, art, literature, once I applied the concept of these androids being human AI, it felt I had something to ground the novel on where these androids originally began and where they were at, at Origin Point. I couldn’t stop writing. I could picture it differently and better than I originally had. I wrote easily over twenty pages in an hour or two and I just didn’t stop. I had this story burning clearly in my mind. The entry records came to me first. These crucial notes that slightly reflect later in the book. The initial conversation with SPEAKER. Every scrap of spare time I had, between work, kids, packing a house to move interstate, ect, I wrote. Most of it began on my phone but it got to a stage where I had written all these chapters in different notes on my phone and i kind of needed to get a laptop so I could put this story together.
The inspiration for my novel has always been there but to actually sit down to write and give it a go, came from trauma and coping with a hard reality. Losing my mum was a catalyst to just sit down and try. Start writing, and see where it led.
Finishing my first novel was as much for my sake as my mum’s. Publishing and having completed something I created was a huge tick on a personal goal that I was proud of and I thought she would be proud of. If people liked it or didn’t like it, regardless, it was done. I handed over a finished manuscript to Hannah, business owner of Bookish Trinity and she beta read, formatted and edited The Last Loop. It was a constant dialogue of communication. She would ask me to elaborate, expand, reword, adjust, add emotion, or make clearer to the reader.
I also chose to say no or explain why I was writing something that way or where I was going with that, or why I didn’t wish to change something. Working together, with her feedback during formatting and editing, led me to have a much better book than what I had originally perceived as finished.Truly, she was invaluable to this book and to me, as a first time author. I would work with her again.
There was a lot of time spent crafting the character traits in this novel. What was the most important factor for you to get right in your characters?
I’ve read my entire life. I’m a reading enthusiast. I’m a serial reader. I know in the first couple of chapters, if I will like a book. Sometimes I’ve been disappointed, and sometimes pleasantly surprised by the story, but the characters are everything.
What I didn’t realise when I began writing is that Cynth, Warden, SIG, Harry, the apartment girls, Pam, LOR, all these characters had rented space in my brain and demanded to be written and heard.
I’m aware I packed so many concepts and ideas into this novel and I needed my charactors to be as believable and normal as I could get them, to help carry the heavy sci fi elements and concepts.
I wanted to blur reality and fiction. I wanted characters that pose questions at the heart of us that might resonate with the reader.
I tried to use humour and emotion, but this story is told not through great action scenes, but the day to day world we live in and the relationships we have. I wanted it to feel like any day of our lives.
Hannah really helped with expanding Harry’s opinion during Cynth’s monologues and prompt me to add more emotion.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
Who are we as a species? where are we going as a species? what are we doing right now to fix problems in our world? What are some problems in our world? How might we react or deal with a species that might supersede us, or a sentient species in general. An idea of how we would really be seen by an intergalactic sentient culture. The idea of AI being sentient, helping to wipe us out but needing us later on, so trying to fix what they helped break.
Reincarnation. The far future, dystopian societies, time travel.
I think I went a bit nuts on the topics to be honest, so I can see how this novel migh be seen as complex and to be tackled by an adventurous reader. I think I will get better at this, as I go. I Just have to keep writing.
What is the next novel that you are working on and when will that be available?
My partner and I recently completed painting this house after an interstate move. I am full-time mum-ing at the moment. I don’t know when they will be available. I hope within six months. I have three paused for this month in various stages.
A sequel to the last loop, penned outline, two chapters. High paced, moving parts, tying in old and new characters. Complex. And split storyline between four key figures.
A paranormal comedy 1 quarter of the way through. This book will be light and humorous with absolutely endearing, funny charactors when I finish writing it, one day.
Lastly, a story that blends historical fiction, reality now and world building through plausibility. A thriller. It’s a great idea and story, and it’s very ambitious for the level of writing I am at but I’m giving it a go.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Book Review
One last chance to ARC drop an Agent to a human body, into a set time to try and alter humankind’s direction to stop them from being destroyed.
With no Agents able to return to Origin Point, Cynth is the last. The very last, they can send.
With ARC focal point set to the 2019 SARS pandemic, ARC drop 2020, Cynth must attempt something never done before successfully. No pressure, just success or total destruction.
With her Operator SIG monitoring her human life, returning to dimension CERN 2008, ARC drop year 2020, Cynth must fight to restore herself from a brain injury, to remember who she is and begin her task.
Trying to piece herself back together and fit into this new life her mind felt it was reaching for a place. A place so far away, so infinitely far, it was a different universe. She had never felt more alone, in that in-between place of knowing this was her life, and this absolutely, was not her life.
With the CERNR 2001 Anomaly’s Dimensional Disturbance destabilising the dimensions,
Origin Point under threat of destruction, and humankind being its usual ridiculous stubborn species, Cynth thinks it’s a big ask, to accomplish what she was sent to do.
LITERARY TITAN 