Blog Archives
He will never know who I am.
Olympus or Oblivion tells the story of fictional sexual encounters with fifteen different Hollywood icons. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Like most people, I have favourite movie stars. One actor in particular, Clancy Brown, has lived rent-free in my head for forty years. I realised one day that my limerence for him (although compelling and chemically indistinguishable from love) was essentially the adoration of a stranger. He will never know who I am.
That led me to think more deeply about the one-sided relationships we build with these people. Why do we place them on pedestals? Do they really deserve a status approaching demigods?
I wanted to place them into ridiculously implausible but very human situations – not to expose them, but to expose us. And, if I’m honest, writing about me getting jiggy with a selection of A-list movie stars was also a gloriously stupid comedic premise and an escape from the mundane.
I wanted readers to laugh, wince, and occasionally stop and think. It would be disingenuous to ignore that there’s erotica in there as well, which may… entertain. Ultimately, it had to feel like the inside of my own head splattered onto the keyboard. The icons get an affectionate roasting by me and my judgmental, sentient house fern, Della. I take their godhood, and their clothes, stripping them down to what matters – their character.
Get your minds out of the gutter. That’s my territory.
We live in a world that moves quickly and often skims the surface of what’s real and meaningful underneath. We celebrate fame as though it were the highest achievement, while quietly overlooking those who make a tangible difference – surgeons, scientists, people who change lives in ways that don’t trend on social media.
What do you find to be the most challenging aspect of writing satire? The most rewarding?
To have a broad appeal yet remain 100% true to myself. That’s it. I’ve no intellectual answer to that. I am largely unfiltered, so my challenges are few.
But that’s also the reward. The inside of my head is a delicious, chaotic, entertaining mess. Readers should relax and enjoy the ride. Lean into the cringe and try not to snigger on the train.
The power of my comedy lies in discomfort; the horror of the cringe, sharp snarking, and weaponised sarcasm. I don’t have much interest in formula or convention. Creative writing, to me, should actually feel creative. Writing courses, degrees, process…nah. Not for me. Watch as I open my flip-top head and let the crazy out for a walk.
If it ever ends up in a library, I quite like the idea of someone having a mild crisis about which shelf it belongs on.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
That fame does not equal legacy.
Striving to be known is deeply human – we all like to think we’ll be remembered. But fame without substance collapses under its own weight. Legacy, on the other hand, is built quietly, through actions and impact, whether people are watching or not.
The people who leave the deepest mark are often not the ones chasing recognition, but the ones who earn it without asking.
Can we look forward to seeing more work from you soon? What are you currently working on?
You surely will.
I’m currently working on another comedy – Olympus or Urbana. It’s a sequel, of sorts. Kind of. It’s a mythological whodunnit with romantic elements, swearing, and multiple story arcs, set across Olympus and its surrounding realms.
There are two co-protagonists, Vox and Hera Minor, both mortals, tasked by Zeus with solving a mystery – helped and hindered in equal measure by a cast of interfering gods. It features riddles, Latin dialogue (with translation), exotic creatures, strange places, and more than a few familiar faces in unexpected roles.
There’s a realm built entirely for hedonism, a god desperate for more adoration than he currently receives, arguments about shades of green, endless feasting, lizard-wrestling, swearing lessons, and Henry Cavill boring everyone to death as Olympus shakes to the collective roar of, “Shut up, Cavill!”
Now, if you don’t mind, I’m off to take my imagination for a long walk along the banks of the Acheron.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook
Part satirical memoir, part erotic odyssey, part divine smackdown—it asks one burning question: If you could sleep with fifteen of the world’s most iconic men, would you risk it all to see who truly deserves godhood?
From Henry Cavill’s heroic inability to navigate basic female anatomy, to Josh Holloway’s hypnotic Route to Ruin; from Chris Pine’s tragic squeaking to Clancy Brown’s gaze hot enough to fuse steel; from Hugh Jackman’s oceanic allure and suspicious interest in tropical fish, to Tom Cruise’s relentless habit of stealing everything that isn’t nailed down—each trial is a riot of emotional chaos, sexual physics, and the occasional pigeon.
Some men rise to Olympus.
Some fall into Oblivion.
All are judged.
Set in the Scottish Central Belt and narrated by a mortal woman with a snark cannon and zero tolerance for mediocrity, this is a filthy, funny, and fiercely honest celebration of desire. Forget perfect abs—these are complex, broken, brilliant men facing one final test. And they’d better pass.
Yes, there’s sex—scorching, poetic, absurd, occasionally athletic enough to dislocate something—but beneath the thrusting runs a deep vein of honesty. It’s about longing, disappointment, body image, female desire, and being seen after a lifetime of invisibility.
Featuring:
15 celebrity “gods” in entirely fictionalised encounters
A judgmental houseplant named Asphodela
Hysterical Latin names for every trialist
Obscene metaphors unfit for church
No male gaze—just squinting female scrutiny
Full-frontal mythology with a chance of redemption
This is not fanfiction.
This is not romance.
This is Olympus or Oblivion.
And the gods are on trial.
Moving Targets
Moving Targets is a detective thriller about Miles Darien, a Lakeville, Wisconsin private investigator whose cases keep pulling him toward bigger questions about loyalty, justice, grief, and what it means to build a life with other people. It opens like a classic PI story, with stolen church artifacts and Miles’s quiet vow, “I will find them,” but it grows into something more personal and more emotionally loaded.
The book works best when it lets Miles investigate through conversation, observation, and old-fashioned persistence. The Holy Trinity case is a smart early mystery, full of fingerprints, misdirection, and small details that matter. Then the cold case involving Charles Powler shifts the story into darker territory, bringing in land, mining interests, racism, corruption, and violence. The author gives the investigations a steady, procedural rhythm without making them feel cold.
What gives the novel its heart is Miles’s circle: Ken, Ryan, Anne, Carl, George, Cora, Bobbie, Olivia, and Molly. Their banter makes the book feel lived-in, like you’re dropping into an ongoing community rather than just following a lone detective from clue to clue.
Moving Targets becomes a book about survival as much as solving crimes. Miles keeps working, but the work doesn’t magically fix him. The later sections, including the New York wedding, the Robin subplot, therapy, the move into Carl’s office, and the brief Santa Fe trip, show him trying to find a shape for his life after loss. The final discovery gives the ending a gentle lift without pretending grief is neatly resolved.
Moving Targets is a warm, character-driven detective thriller with several mysteries braided through one man’s changing life. It’s strongest when the cases and relationships feed each other, because Miles’s talent as an investigator comes from the same place as his friendships: he notices things, he cares, and he follows through. The book is part mystery, part community portrait, and part grief story, and that mix gives it more emotional weight than a standard case-of-the-week thriller.
Pages: 327 | ASIN: B0FNC4QS6Q
Villa of Mysteries
Lorraine Blundell’s Villa of Mysteries: A Novel of Pompeii imagines the lives behind one of Pompeii’s most enigmatic frescoed rooms, beginning with Lady Claudia Lucilla’s commission of the painter Famulus and widening into a many-stranded portrait of artists, slaves, merchants, lovers, priestesses, and patricians living under the long shadow of Vesuvius. The novel braids domestic detail, Bacchic ritual, political danger, romance, and catastrophe into a story where beauty is never quite separable from peril.
I was most drawn to the book’s tactile sense of place. Pompeii here is not a museum under glass; it is hot, fragrant, noisy, uneven underfoot, and morally crowded. Blundell lingers over cinnabar walls, rose perfume, bread, wine, gardens, fresco pigments, bathhouses, and shop counters until the city feels less reconstructed than re-inhabited. At times, the abundance of description slows the plot, but it also gives the novel its chief pleasure: the feeling that every threshold opens onto another chamber of ordinary life, and that ordinary life is the very thing history is about to steal.
The emotional current worked best for me when the novel stayed close to its women: Claudia with her secrets and authority, Alessia with her talent and vulnerability, Tullia with her perfumed hopes, Julia with her hard-won survival. The book is sometimes more mosaic than spear-thrust, moving through many characters and episodes rather than driving relentlessly forward, but that structure suits Pompeii. A doomed city should feel populous. By the time danger arrives, the reader has been taught to care not only about who survives, but about what gets lost: songs, rooms, recipes, friendships, gossip, colors, and private ceremonies no ash can fully preserve.
I think the ideal audience is readers who enjoy immersive historical fiction, women’s fiction, romance, and disaster fiction with a strong sense of setting. Readers of Robert Harris’s Pompeii may recognize the volcanic dread, though Blundell’s novel is less engineered thriller and more frescoed social panorama; it also has something of the intimate, household-centered appeal of authors like Kate Quinn. Villa of Mysteries turns Pompeii’s last bright days into a vivid, intimate fresco of beauty, secrecy, and impending ruin.
Pages: 318 | ASIN : B0GMZQPXNJ
Weighing a Miracle (Silent Spaces)
Weighing a Miracle reimagines the story of Lazarus through Caleb, a man of logic whose belief in absolutes is shaken by a divine event he cannot explain. What inspired you to retell one of the most well-known moments from the Bible?
What inspired me for this story is a sermon I heard titled “There’s a Revival in the Graveyard.” The thought came to me about the reaction Lazarus must have gotten from the people that knew him, and attended his funeral. I wanted to capture the look on their face(s) when they saw him alive. In my mind I thought ‘that’s an interesting concept’ and I left it at that. But the thought would not leave me. I carried that thought for a week and it was burning in my mind. Finally, I decided to outline a story out of the biblical account just to see what it would look like. As I finished the outline, I started writing the first draft and couldn’t stop until I was done. The rest is history and here we are.
How closely did you adhere to the biblical account, and where did you feel free to imagine or expand?
That’s a good question and I am glad you asked. There are some stories in the bible that give a lot of detail. Stories that have a lot of meat on their bones. Then there are stories that don’t even give you the name(s) of the main characters in the story. What I like to do is to make the unnamed characters come alive by bolstering their lives with more detail. The bible stories that have unnamed characters and such, I give them names and also a history if possible. My goal is to make the original story more vivid by supplying the missing detail. And at the same time, I don’t want to ‘bend’ the original account of the story by altering the known facts about the story. So, instead of changing the original story, I enhance it with the missing details that make a good story better.
Were there scenes you found especially difficult to write because of their spiritual or emotional gravity?
No, I don’t think so. With my philosophy of keeping the original story intact and just retelling it with more ‘meat on the bones,’ I don’t find any of that difficult. I just want to make good stories better.
What do you hope readers who are uncertain or skeptical about faith take away from Caleb’s journey?
I hope to inspire people to persevere when the trying of their faith comes along. Keeping the faith is paramount. Especially in the face of adverse conditions.
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Website
Caleb ben Josiah has built his life on certainty — on weights that balance, contracts that hold, and truths that can be measured.
When his closest friend Lazarus dies, Caleb does what he does best: he steps in to manage the practical realities of loss for the grieving family. He expects grief. He expects finality.
He does not expect the tomb to be found empty.
And he certainly does not expect Lazarus himself to appear at his door — alive.
Now the careful merchant faces a reality that shatters every ledger he has ever kept. As grief, memory, and impossible evidence collide, Caleb must confront the one question his scales were never meant to answer:
What do you do when the world you trusted no longer adds up?
Weighing a Miracle is a quiet, introspective reimagining of one of the most famous moments in Scripture — told through the eyes of a man who measures everything, and suddenly can measure nothing at all.
A Silent Spaces Story
Silks and Stones
Silks and Stones by Quinn Lawrence is a fantasy mystery about Hokuren and Cinna, a pair of investigators whose trip to Fondence begins as a family obligation and turns into a larger case involving smuggling, old secrets, goblins, a dangerous wizard, and the buried truth about Hokuren’s parents. The book sits comfortably in the fantasy genre, but it borrows a lot of its engine from detective fiction: clues, rumors, coded diaries, false assumptions, and the slow pleasure of watching pieces click into place.
What I liked most was how grounded the story feels even when the magical stakes rise. Lawrence opens with a cat rescue, which is funny, messy, and oddly perfect. It tells you right away that this is not a fantasy world built only for grand speeches and glowing spells. It has scratched-up tunics, unpaid bills, awkward clients, and people trying to make rent. That choice gives the book a warm, authentic texture. I also appreciated the rhythm between Hokuren and Cinna. Their partnership has the easy snap of a long friendship, but underneath the banter there is real care. Sometimes it is as simple as bandaging wounds that will heal anyway.
The author’s biggest strength is balancing humor with emotional weight. Hokuren’s grief over her father and her questions about her mother could have made the story heavy, but the book keeps moving through curiosity, action, and small comic turns. Cinna brings a blunt, physical energy that cuts through the sadness without cheapening it. I did occasionally feel the plot had a lot on its hands at once: family history, smuggling, wizard politics, goblins, coded writing, and the central relationship. Still, most of those threads feed the same larger idea, which is that knowing the truth about people can make them more complicated, not less lovable.
I’d recommend Silks and Stones to readers who enjoy cozy-leaning fantasy mysteries with heart, humor, and a strong central duo. It will especially work for people who like investigations in magical worlds, found-family dynamics, and stories where the emotional case matters as much as the criminal one. For a reader who wants a thoughtful adventure with wit, warmth, and a little mud on its boots, this book is easy to recommend.
The Biltmore’s Mona Lisa
The Biltmore’s Mona Lisa is a World War II heist novel built around a terrific what-if: what if the Mona Lisa, moved to America for safekeeping, ended up hidden at the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina? The setup is part art-history puzzle, part wartime thriller, with the book opening under the warning, “Thou shalt not covet…” and then spending the rest of the story showing how many people fail that test.
Author Daniel D. Smith, Sr. gives the novel a roomy, procedural feel. We spend time with curators, soldiers, German operatives, Biltmore staff, politicians, and art dealers, so the heist feels less like a single caper and more like a web of errands, loyalties, favors, and bad choices. Captain Declan Donahue, with his damaged body, practical mind, and Chinese puzzle box, is one of the book’s most grounded figures. Rolf Gunther, meanwhile, gives the German plotline a steady engine as he’s tasked with the blunt mission: “I plan to steal the real Mona Lisa from an estate near Asheville.”
What the book does best is turn logistics into drama. Moving paintings, choosing rooms, guarding stairways, swapping uniforms, rowing through fog, hiding in blind spots, and protecting a crate all become suspense beats. The Biltmore setting helps a lot because the house feels like a character: grand, complicated, full of corridors, service spaces, rooms, and secrets. The heist depends as much on architecture and routine as it does on bravery.
The novel also has a fun fascination with copies, authenticity, and who gets to decide what’s real. The ending’s explanation of the different Mona Lisas gives the story a satisfying puzzle-box quality, tying together the German operation, Buchard’s choices, Daniel Roberts’s private scheme, and Senator Wellington’s greed. That final sorting-out is one of the book’s pleasures because it makes the whole story feel like an art-world shell game with wartime stakes.
The Biltmore’s Mona Lisa is a patient and detail-rich historical heist novel with an old-fashioned adventure rhythm. It’s at its best when it’s following people doing specific work under pressure: guarding, forging, planning, carrying, deceiving, and improvising. The result is a book about obsession dressed up as a caper, where the Mona Lisa is both a painting and a temptation that reveals what everyone around her wants most.
That’s My Style
Scrubby’s PBnJ is a small-town contemporary romance about a sandwich shop owner in learning, through work, faith, friendship, and a tender slow-burn relationship, that she is worthy of love and success. What were some sources that informed this novel’s development?
I remember back in the early 2000s, I think, there was a restaurant that opened in Downtown Chicago that specialized in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. That always fascinated me, and I wondered how they would have done had everything been homemade, and not essentially store-bought bread, peanut butter, and jelly.
How did you decide to lean so fully into the rhythms of ordinary life instead of pushing for more dramatic plot turns?
That’s my style. This book took place in the same universe as some of my other works, namely Afternoon Rebecca and 14 Hours of Saturn. There was a lot of crossover with this book and the others. Brynn is from Pine City and worked at Anderson’s Steak & Seafood, two places first found in Afternoon Rebecca, along with Dollar Junction Community College and her attorney, Charles Ruckman. Scrubby and Dewey meet Saturn O Syres and Janus Rings at a dance at a civic club in their hometown. Saturn O Syres is the protagonist of 14 Hours of Saturn, and she and Janus went to the dance a few times. Ordinary life is what I write about, and the little things one may not notice before.
Dewey and Brynn’s romance feels intentionally gentle and old-fashioned. What kind of love story were you hoping to write between them?
Christians with pasts. Also, I prefer true romance – boy meets girl, boy likes girl, boy tries to woo girl – over boy and girl meet, then immediately jump into physical relations
How much of the restaurant world, menus, cleanup, staffing, and daily routines, came from observation or personal experience?
Very little, if I’m honest. I have worked at restaurants in the past, and some of that did inform this, but it was more just my imagination over anything else.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Alongside her lively best friend Sabrina, Brynn pours everything she has into her business, determined to make her vision succeed. But when an injury leads her to Dewey Huckleberry, a thoughtful EMT with a gentle heart, Scrubby’s carefully ordered world begins to shift. As her business grows and her personal life becomes more complicated, Brynn must confront old insecurities, trust the people who care about her, and decide whether she is ready to open her heart to a future she never imagined.
Filled with warmth, humor, romance, and small-town charm, Scrubby’s PBnJ is a feel-good novel about faith, healing, community, and finding love in the most unexpected places.
