18.09.2025
Good afternoon everyone! I've been hard at work this month on the outline for The Forest of Nightmares. I've just finished it, and while it's rough and not really where I want it to be, I've got to learn how to accept that from my writing again... I've been working on various already written drafts of Heart Crushed, The Spaces Between Souls, and short stories for the past few years, so blank page anxiety and overthinking first drafts is real.
Next, I'm planning to read some of my old writing and then tackle the outline for Fear at the Fair, the 5th book in the Shimmering Lake Summer Camp series. It's been on my mind a lot lately and I'm excited to write it. I'm thinking for now I'll flip between stories as I finish each draft, but I might stick to one or the other in later drafts. I'm not sure which one will be finished first, but that's a future Laika problem.
28.08.2025
Hi everyone! My wonderful friend Fionntan has tackled the issues this site has been experiencing from launch, mainly how janky it looked on mobile, but also the random inconsistent sizing of the covers on the books page. There's also fun new buttons on the books page that show my doodled book spines (unfortunately not how the book spines look in real life), acting as a shelf to show which books are in which series, but also buttons to send you to their cover and info further down the page. I'm so happy with how the site looks now, I hope you all enjoy the changes!
23.08.2025
In a turn of events that nobody could have predicted (sarcasm), I've decided not to release The Spaces Between Souls and Heart Crushed quite yet. They're numbers 3 and 4 in a series of about 7 books (plus at least two planned spinoffs) called The Heart Stone Chronicles, and they're the only ones yet written. I had been intent on pulling a Star Wars and release them first, but the break in the story that would provide wouldn't make a lot of sense.
There's three sort of arcs in this series, with a break in the middle. The first arc is the first book, Shadow & Yuri, where the history and catalyst of the overarching story is explored: what the Heart Stones are, how they were created, how they were lost, and the inital consequences of this. The second arc is The Forest of Nightmares and The Spaces Between Souls, which are the stories of the first two attempts to stop the magpie who stole the Stones, who has grown incredibly powerful from their magic. The break in the middle is Heart Crushed, which takes us out of the main storyline to see what was going on behind the scenes during The Spaces Between Souls, and provides the end of a couple character arcs from that book, too. The next three books, as of yet untitled, are the final attempts at returning the Stones to their rightful place, and the aftermath of all these events.
So, I've decided it wouldn't make sense to release TSBS before TFON. I'm going to dive into writing TFON, and hopefully all the things I've learned in this past decade of writing will let me not take very long, haha!
On the side, I intend on possibly plugging away at Fear at the Fair, which is the next book in the Shimmering Lake Summer Camp series, taking place in 2024, though I'm unsure if I'll be able to do so while working on TFON (TSBS and HC taught me I can't write two novels at once, but who knows, TFON might prove to be a novella).
Thanks for bearing with me as always!
22.08.2025
Hi everyone! I'm excited to say that I've finished writing and editing all 26 short stories in Shimmering Lake Summer Camp Collection 1! There may be a couple more tweaks here and there before it's published, especially in the proof copy approvals stage, but that will be much more streamlined than before (launching the print book, ebook, and Internet Archive copy all at once after having done proof copy approvals). The cover is underway and I'm so excited to share it all with you in December!
I also heard from a little birdie that my books have been reviewed on Goodreads... All good authors know not to read the reviews for their own books, but my sister reads me the good parts, and it'd make my day if any of you are fans and wanted to drop a nice comment or even just a rating :3 It helps me out a ton too, because other people will be more likely to pick up a copy!
29.07.2025
Hi everyone! It's so hot here, how is it where you are?
I've finished writing the 26th short story for Shimmering Lake Summer Camp Collection 1. Now it's time to edit them all! I figure I'll have to edit a few of them twice, so my plan is to finish this round of editing, edit The Spaces Between Souls and Heart Crushed (not necessarily in that order?) and then do any more editing SLSCC1 needs. Hopfully that'll get me to December-February ish, and if the two covers I'm waiting on are finished, all three books will be launching around then.
I'm looking forward to seeing how my new strategy for publishing them will work. Once I'm able to make a print preview of each book, I'll be able to make final edits at the same time as proof copy approvals, which will let me avoid the frustrating and embarrassing process I used for the other four books. Then I'll be able to publish the ebook and print book at the same time, order print copies right away, and get the books carried at my local libraries and bookstores all in one go.
Speaking of... I'm still waiting on a couple things before I can order author copies for WITW, LLT, and LTTL, but then I'll be going all around town with my books to see who wants them! Exciting!! I can't wait :3
29.07.2025
Hi everyone! I have a bit of a silly update for you today...
I've been mulling over a little nitpicky grammar problem that I've disliked since I was a kid: italicizing titles in writing (or even worse, putting them in quotation marks). Don't worry, I'm not going to edit and reupload my published books again, regardless of what I decide to do going forward I'll just let those be... I can let it go, right? But I'm stumped on what to do for future works. Yes, it's the correct thing to use italics for the names of books, games, and albums, and put the names of songs and poems in quotation marks, to denote that they are the names of something and not just part of the dialogue/text, but... I do not like doing it. The tone change of italics is something I can get over, but I always work myself into knots trying to figure out if I really need to italicize Spiderman in "He was wearing a Spiderman shirt" or "She was reading a Spiderman comic". And-- like you just saw there-- I have an admittedly obnoxious way of using quotation marks when they aren't for dialogue. I do my very best to avoid using non-dialogue quotation marks in my writing, but if I must, I get really annoying about putting the punctuation outside of them if it's for the greater sentence and inside if it's actually included in the quote, which looks clunky and unprofessional, probably moreso than just not using italics and quotation marks for the names of things in the first place.
Anyway, I haven't figured out if I want to keep going as I've been, or if I want to do the grammatically correct thing and submit to italics. Either way, I'm gonna be annoyed about it.
24.06.2025
Good afternoon everyone! Just wanted to pop in to say that my books will all be part of the Smashwords Summer/Winter sale this July. Make sure to check out Smashwords to purchase my books at a discount & find many other great titles too!
16.06.2025
Good evening everyone! We just got back from our first ever live show as Coronerhorse (and my first ever live anything that isn't drunken karaoke). It was AWESOME! I hope I get the chance to do that again. The recording will be uploaded to our Bandcamp tomorrow!
15.06.2025
Hi everyone, short update this morning! Lured to the Lake has concluded its proof copy approval stage and has been reuploaded to the Internet Archive & my ebook streams, and will soon be sent out to print!
04.06.2025
Good afternoon everyone! I've started the proof copy approvals for Lured to the Lake. Since it's Camp Nano (in my heart), I'm hoping to get this done by the end of the month. Then it's just a handful more of writing short stories, then editing all those short stories a few times, with a break in between for... Maybe 60 Days? Maybe Shadow & Yuri? Maybe some random self induldgent scifi short stories? Who knows. Certainly not me.
In other news, Coronerhorse has our first live show coming up in a few days, I've got a pair of paintings on the walls of a local restaurant, and I've got an art auction coming up very soon too... So much happening this month!! Wahoo!
29.05.2025
I've got some small news and some big news!
I found out (a little late...) how to add a page where I can list the other books in a series inside of my book, which makes my life easier for the upcoming series I hope to publish some of by next spring, but does mean I have to reupload Love Like This and Whisper in the Woods to the IA, change the epub file on the ebook version, aaaand wait until mid August to update the version that's gone to print. So, if you want to grab a super limited edition version of Love Like This or Whisper in the Woods that doesn't have this page, make sure to buy a copy before August :3
I found a (new) cover artist for The Spaces Between Souls! I'm very excited to be working with this person (again)! I also found a cover artist for the upcoming (sort of unnamed) short story collection that goes along with Whisper in the Woods, Love Like This, and Lured to the Lake. Both these covers will be physical rather than digital art, which is a super neat change.
I've got 3 short stories to go before I move on to proof copy approvals for Lured to the Lake! I'm still on track for that, so I'm pretty sure I'll be able to work on what I need to this year prior to The Spaces Between Souls and Heart Crushed being released. I'm still on the fence about publishing those two first, since they're the third and third-point-five in the Heart Stones Chronicles series, but if Star Wars can do it, can't I? The first two books are definitely more like sequels, too, though the whole first four books in that series are technically sequels to the trilogy that wraps it all up... I do love making things complicated, haha.
16.05.2025
Good afternoon! I finished the proof copy approvals for Love Like This and sent it off! Hopefully in the next few days, it'll be available to vendors and I can start getting the word out.
I've started working on 8 or so short stories from the collection. After that, I'll move on to the Lured to the Lake proof copy, then finish up those short stories, and... Hopefully! Then I'll be done all that. It took some thinking, but I know what I want to do for the cover, and I'm excited to get that started.
In other news, I finished a different painting yesterday, but made good headway with the other one and had a good praccy sesh. We recorded a new song spontaenously, which has been posted to our Bandcamp.
14.05.2025
Hi everyone! I've decided to start writing up some updates on here about how my writing is going. I'm trying to get a bit more engagement with the public... IRL I'm not quite a recluse but I'm really not great at reaching out to people unless there's something big, but I want to try to change that, so I might as well try to change how I talk about my writing online, too!
Over the past few days, I've been working on the proof copy approvals for Love Like This. I finished Whisper in the Woods and sent it off a couple days before, and that's now out as a paperback. I'm a little over halfway through Love Like This, and I hope to have it finished by the end of the week (though Thursday, I'll have to be devoting time to practicing for an upcoming Coronerhorse show & finishing a painting for an art show next month).
I've been having a lot of fun revisiting the Shimmering Lake cast, and I'm cooking up new short stories focusing on them to release hopefully by the end of the year. Most of them are feel-good drabbles and backstory, but there's some exciting new twists, and I even tentatively have plans for a standalone book, similar to Love Like This but (maybe?) not in the series format? I'm not sure yet! We'll see when we get there.