The first Amazon review for ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ is up, and it’s a positive one. “This is a grand, ambitious tale full of thought-provoking ideas and surreal circumstances that somehow manage to strike a balance between the real and the fantastical. I was hooked from the start…” Read the rest at Amazon.co.uk.
So there’s this guy who lives in London and has a magic shop, and he’s not really a mage but he has a really cool magely power: he can see into the future. Not the future, but all possible futures, which gives him a bit of a clue sometimes, not just that stuff is going to happen, but what makes it happen and therefore how to facilitate it or evade it. So whenever he gets into a tight spot (which seems to happen quite often), all he has to do to get out of trouble is to peek into some of those many possible futures and see which ones have him escaping, and work out how that comes about. And for a while I just thought: that’s a neat idea. But when he’s able to use that ability over and over, it becomes both repetitive and, frankly, too easy. I […]
This is a cracking story. Fantasy romance is a tricky format. It can veer from straight fantasy with a little romance on the side, through to outright romance with a little arm-wavy magic or the occasional dragon thrown in for light relief. This book leans more to the relationship side of the equation, but there’s some solid world-building underpinning it. Many elements of the story are quite conventional. Rowan is the teenage girl expected to do her duty and marry well, producing the babies in unexpectedly short supply in her country, Darmid. But she’s fascinated by magic, even though it’s illegal, and why does she have strange headaches? Aren is the royal from the neighbouring country, Tyrea, a powerful sorcerer whose even more powerful older brother now rules. When Aren is sent to capture a sorcerer from magic-less Darmid for experimentation, he meets Rowan and… Well, we can see where […]
Yes, ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ is finally published. Hurray! Since it’s been on pre-order for a week or two, my daughter and stayed up until midnight to watch it go live on Amazon.co.uk. Eight hours later, it went live in the US. If I’d planned things better, I could have watched the roll-out around the world, starting in Australia. Then there was the paperback version to get up and running, which took a few hours for all the kinks to work out. Mid-afternoon, the ‘look-inside’ feature was activated. And then there were sales reports to watch and rankings to track and royalties to check. And hey, I’ve made around $5.00 already. Better get that Ferrari ordered… Oh, wait, there are refunds… 🙁 Last night I threw myself a launch party, with champagne and nibbles and a cake with ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ inscribed on the top in icing. And I’ve […]
I love a good Regency romance, but all too often the ones I find are disappointing: too silly, too inaccurate historically, too inept with the language of the era. So finding an example which ticks all the right boxes, and also manages to portray realistic and well-rounded characters is almost too good to be true. But so it is here. Daphne is the eldest daughter of the Bridgerton family, a lady of remarkable common sense, intelligence and humour. She wants to get married, but not merely because it’s the thing to do, or to be something grand in society, but because, having grown up in a big, happy family herself, she can’t conceive of any more fulfilling ambition than being a mother of many children. I liked Daphne very much; she’s a down-to-earth person that I’d be very happy to have as a friend. The male main character, Simon, has […]
The book is written, the final edits are done, the cover artwork is finished, formatting is complete and the files are uploaded to KDP. So now I just have to wait until the publication date I’ve decided on before pushing the button. But hang on a minute – Amazon now has a cool new toy for self-publishers. We can set a book up for pre-orders, just like the big boys. Even a complete newbie like me. I dithered a bit about it – once the date gets close, I can’t change anything! And what if I’ve made a mistake! It’s a bit like those did-I-leave-the-gas-on moments when you’re on the way to the airport. But my daughter assured me it would be cool to have pre-ordering available, so I went for it. And – hey presto! ‘Tis done. ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ is now available for pre-ordering, at special introductory […]
With the publication of ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ rapidly approaching, I’ve finally taken down most of the chapters posted on Wattpad, so that I can sign up for Amazon’s exclusive program, KDP Select. I’ve left six chapters up as a sample, but I don’t expect them to get many reads. I started posting the book on Wattpad a chapter at a time, many months ago, and then posted the remaining chapters more than a month ago. So how did it do? Some numbers: Total reads: 2,018 (each chapter viewed counts as one read) Votes: 344 Comments: 156 This is barely a blip in the Wattpad world, where the most popular books garner reads in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions. It’s more interesting to look at individual chapters. Chapter 1: 450 reads Chapter 2: 69 reads Chapter 3: 60 reads Chapter 4: 54 reads and so on. So a […]
This is a nice mixture of science fiction short stories, varied in both length and subject matter. I have to confess, I’m more of a fantasy reader, so I got a bit bogged down in some of the sciencey bits. However, the author’s trademark smooth writing carried me along. The first two stories, Digital Soul and Pillar, were both awesome – beautifully crafted, immersive and with that deft little twist at the end which makes a short story so satisfying. The third story, The Last Gasp of the Dragon, was short and sweet – maybe too short to make an impact (or maybe I just didn’t get it – always possible). The fourth story, Orphaned World, was long and filled with blow-by-blow detail which lost me somewhere along the way. The tension built and built, yet the resolution felt insufficient for all that build-up. I had the feeling there was […]
‘The Plains of Kallanash’ is getting closer to publication! I now have ARCs available, so if anyone out there would like a copy to read for review, please email me at brightmoon@paulinemross.co.uk. I have both mobi and epub formats available (sorry, no print copies yet). Reviews can be posted immediately on Goodreads or your blog, and on Amazon after publication in mid-September. ‘The Plains of Kallanash’ is an epic fantasy adventure with a strong romantic element. Here’s the blurb: Thousands of years after a magical catastrophe reshaped the world and pulled the moons out of alignment, the secret of magic has seemingly been lost. At the centre of the vast, forbidding Plains of Kallanash lies a land ruled by a secretive religion, whose people fight a never-ending war against the barbarians in the wilderness beyond the border. Amongst the nobility, double marriages are the norm. Junior wife Mia always dreamed […]
A lot of books are described as psychological thrillers, but very few genuinely merit the label. This one is everything a psychological thriller should be. The characters – all the characters – are in some way damaged, and therefore nothing is certain or reliable, and all their actions are questionable. Here’s the plot: Sam, the narrator, specialises in writing biographies of women who’ve suffered major traumatic events in their lives: kidnappings, murderous boyfriends and the like. Trouble is, his approach inevitably leads him to become involved with the victims he’s writing about. When he has to abandon his latest book after an affair with the subject leads to the breakup of his marriage (to his previous subject!), he finds himself scratching round for a new project. Fortuitously, he is approached by Lola, a woman whose parents were murdered when she was twelve by a man who then kidnapped her and […]