Happy 2024!

It’s unsettling that my updates seem to be once a year so hopefully in 2024 I manage to do at least one a season. ;)


2023 was a blur for me and I can’t really remember much of what happened. I have a day job (in a warehouse) where I get up at 4am (which I do not like), so my typical day is: I come home, sometimes do a workout, prep for work the next day, write for an hour or two, make dinner, then zone out in front of the TV before going to bed where I sometimes read a chapter of a book and grumble about not having enough hours in the day. I imagine you guys are mostly the same. As a result the days and weeks tend to blur together and I often stare into space wondering how different life would be if I didn’t have to work for someone else.


The good news is that Raike 6 is done! I’m halfway through my beta reader notes and I wish it was a quick and easy process but it’s not. It is a 10 out of 10 want to avoid experience where even doing it for half an hour a day saps my brain. But it’s an essential part of getting the book ready for publishing and I can’t put it off any longer. With any luck Raike 6 – Last Chance – will be out in January. I know it’s been a long time since Raike 5 came out so maybe you’re wondering if I died, was in a coma, or just quit writing altogether. So what happened?


Raike 6 began in early 2020. I was on the tail end of writing Raike 5 and I was getting worn out with the doom and gloom kind of stories I was working on. Plus there was Covid locking everyone down, I was renovating half of my house while living in the other half, and life in general was fairly turbulent. Since the Raike stories aren’t the most uplifting I felt like I needed to work on something lighter for a while, so along came a new series! The Knights of Many. I was working on the new series fairly solidly until September 2022 when I just crashed out and needed a change, so I went back to the barely begun Raike 6. I had written around 40,000 words of Raike 6 in 2020 but most of them were crap. And going back to an incomplete story I last looked at over two years ago was weird. I write by the seat of my pants and tend to jump over chapters where I don’t know what happens, like if Raike is in prison halfway through the book I know he’ll get out but I don’t necessarily know how he gets out just yet, so I skip to the part where he’s out and fill in the blanks later on. Going back to a haphazardly written story with no idea who the bad guy was or what Raike was investigating while trying to remember what was going through my head from two years ago without many notes was bonkers. So aside from the first couple of chapters I basically started over again. But working for other people is time consuming and being able to write anything more than 1,000 words a day was worthy of celebration. The book ended up being around 140,000 words and I needed to edit and re-edit all of that … plus time off for hiccups in life, doing the finishing touches on renovations, and taking some time off to recharge … Raike 6 took much longer than I expected.


Thankfully the book will be out in January unless something stupid happens. I’ve also realised I like ‘last’ or ‘lost’ in my book titles. Kingston Raine and the Lost Angel, Last Words, Last Chance, and a yet unpublished but might be published book in 2025: The Last Ritual. I will have more news about that book later on so stay tuned.


Anyway, I hope you all have a great 2024!