Need a plan to tackle that “finally write my book” New Year’s Resolution?

Find yourself typing “the end” faster (or maybe for the first time ever!) with a structured, supportive 20-week (term-length) workshop starting January 28 (9 am for adults, 10:30 am for kids) on Zoom.

Each weekly workshop includes live, interactive access over Zoom with short writing exercises and presentations on creative writing, storytelling, plotting & publishing, slide and video archives (for later review and/or if you miss a week), office hours, + individual feedback on up to 20 pages each week.

These workshops are best suited for kids, teens, and adults looking for step-by-step guidance, accountability, and encouragement in starting (and finishing!) the first draft of a (fiction or narrative nonfiction) book.

Class sizes are small due to the amount of individual attention, so don’t miss your chance to join!

Learn more & apply now!

Escape the past. Save the girl. Take back the future.

A century after Dreamfall scorched the earth and woke its merciless protectors, Spectre squad’s first unsupervised mission is boring as dirt. After all, they’re dream walkers—ecologists and healers, not soldiers.

But when second-in-command Ghost saves a strange girl from sea monsters, they stumble across a secret that shatters the foundations of their society and will change all their lives—if they survive to tell the tale.

The fate of the world rests on the shoulders of one boy desperate to escape his destiny.

Spectres of the Old World Part 1: Mud Monsters & Revelations is a fast-paced YA Dystopian Fantasy of loss, destiny, and inter-generational trauma in an eco-punk, post-apocalyptic world overrun by monsters.

This novelette-length adventure ends in a mild cliffhanger and kicks off a three-part YA Dystopian/Post-Apocalyptic Romance “micro-trilogy” in the same world (parallel timeline) as the Threads of Dreams trilogy (featuring “Ash” as the crossover protagonist.) Spectres of the Old World stories can be read as a standalone series or, due to spoilers, following Burn the Skies.

Spectres of the Old World are Kindle Unlimited (Amazon) exclusive releases:

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. . . Which begs the question “what is a micro-trilogy?”

When I relaunched the Threads of Dreams series in 2021 with the fifth-anniversary edition covers, I missed two titles: Under and Spectres of the Old World

Under was launched in 2019 as an exclusive novella release for my newsletter subscribers and is still available as a free download. (I’m working on a small glow-up and planning a wide release for later this year.)

Spectres is brand new. The only completely new release in the Threads of Dreams extended story world since Burn the Skies wrapped up the main trilogy in 2020.

I actually wrote Spectres a couple years ago and . . . just didn’t find the right moment to release it.

Or maybe knew, at some level, that it wasn’t quite finished.

Because it started as a short story that turned into a long short story—a novelette. And then hit a time-skip and turned into another novelette. And hopped past another chunk of time into the unwritten future of Cole and Ash and the gang where, you guessed it, another whole novelette’s-worth of adventures unfolded themselves.

So I had a novella’s-worth of story on my hands, split into three roughly-even parts, two of which ended on mild cliffhangers, the second darker than the first . . .

Sounds awfully like your classic three-act structure—or a fantasy trilogy.

At the same time, I’d been meaning to play rapid release strategies and KU. So this is a bit of an experiment, allowing the story to follow it’s own natural structure while giving readers an episodic mini-series sort of reading experience. Hopefully it’s fun! And, at some point in the future, I’ll probably pull Spectres from KU and give it a more standard wide-release in novella form. :)

Very excited to sneak some (slightly nerdy?) author news in before the end of the year: Fantasy Magazine just licensed first English world rights to “Children of Earth”(!!!)

Skip this next bit if you’re not into geeky publishing insider talk, but: this news is kind of a big deal because, for writers, short fiction markets operate on a scale from “for the love” (unpaid/for exposure) through various token (small money) and semi-pro rates (little bit more money) up to “pro-market” rates. While I love every story I’ve put out into the world and support and appreciate every publisher and market that I’ve worked with, Fantasy Magazine is my first “pro-market” sale. In real terms, it means (a little) more money, the potential for more exposure and recognition, and it’s also a qualifying step toward membership in professional organizations like the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association. So it’s a real milestone!

There’s a bit of fun backstory to how this all came about. Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s weekly business-for-writers blog is a must-read for anyone in publishing or thinking about/moving toward publishing, and her weekly free short stories were also instrumental in nudging me (back) into writing short fiction. She’s an amazing, prolific writer with enormous range, who just so happens to be married to another amazing writer, Dean Wesley Smith. Together, they own WMG Publishing. Which, in addition to putting out great books, does some really fun stuff in terms of Kickstarter projects & author education workshops. (One of my “when I grow up” big deal/pro author dreams is to actually do a workshop with them in person one day when I have the money/time, lol.) Definitely recommend their online or live workshops if you’re able/interested. In the meantime, I sneak in the occasional virtual workshop when I can.

In Fall 2021, I did a virtual workshop with WMG Publishing called “Writing a Pulphouse Story.” Pulphouse Fiction Magazine is a cross-genre quarterly that publishes “strange” lit. I’d already written “Castoffs” (the body-horror meets humour short story in It Was Only A Dream: An Anthology of Bad Horror Tropes Done Right) by then, so I thought it might be my kind of thing. I blew it so hard on the week 1 assignment. Week 2 wasn’t great either. But for week 3, I wrote “Children of Earth.” Dean, who edits Pulphouse, offered to buy it for the magazine. Which was amazing. But, even better, he said I could shop it around first & he’d still be interested in reprint rights. Solid dude. So I entered it in the Writers of the Future contest and (for the first time) placed, with an honourable mention in Q1 of this year (I later received a silver honourable mention in Q3 on a different short story that I’m still shopping around).

Anyway, a big shoutout goes out to Dean Wesley Smith of Pulphouse, Smith’s Monthly & WMG Publishing for pushing me to get as unhinged as possible and not edit my voice into oblivion before submitting. I also just so happened to be reading Rebecca Schaeffer’s (fantastic, twisted, dark, violent, complex) Market of Monsters series when I wrote “Children of Earth.” So the viewpoint character, “Mirella,” is an homage to Schaeffer’s series, and I suspect the body...
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WORD Vancouver Presents: World Read Aloud Day 2023

Date: Wednesday, February 1, 2023

Time: 10-11am

Location: Surrey Library Central City Branch

Type: Author Reading & School Presentation

Shoutout to the awesome team at Word Vancouver for the invitation to host their in-person World Read Aloud Day event this year!

I’ll be chatting with CWILL BC member and recent debut Emily Seo as she presents a reading from her 2022 middle grade novel The Science of Boys and demonstrates some live science.

Local schools will be joining us for this celebration of reading aloud at Surrey Library Central City Branch from 10-11 am on February 1, 2023.

I do also still have availability open on the afternoon of Feb. 1 for schools or libraries who want to book a short, free virtual reading (or, locally, live reading).