Jackson Lear's Blog

Yes, I promised Raike 6 would be out in January, and here we are in May and it’s still not out yet.

What happened? I crashed from exhaustion. And not the Hollywood version of exhaustion where I end up in rehab. I just had a lot on my plate and was met with a great ‘ugh’ when it came to the final tweaks of Raike 6. And I am awesome at giving myself excuses. Even while I’m at work (doing something I really can’t be arsed with) I tell myself, “Today I’m going to work on Raike 6,” and then I get home, crash on the sofa, and work on another book entirely. Because it’s new, shiny, and fills me with joy. Most of the time I convince myself that I’ll do that for an hour and get back to Raike 6. And then it’s dinner time and I end up watching Taskmaster, Better Call Saul, or the Orville. Then comes the weekend and Raike 6 just feels like a chore so its been getting neglected. I’m really selling the excitement of this book, aren’t I?

Also neglected – all my work emails, ads, promotions, updating my website … basically, everything crashed to a standstill and there weren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. I’ve had problems with my mailing list being transferred, the website going down, and lots of fires that need to be put out. And this is not to say that Raike 6 is done … it’s not. But it’s close. How close? It will definitely be out by next January. ;)

Anyway, the new and shiny book is on pause until I get Raike 6 published. And I will get back to my emails soon and be less of a grumble bum with limited energy.

I hope you are all well and thank you for the nice messages wondering if I’m dead.

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!

Imagine my surprise when I log into my website and get a 404 message. And then the desperation kicking in when I realise the auto-renewal thing hadn’t auto-renewed correctly. And then the shame of not discovering this sooner, because I’m pretty sure my site was down for a month without me checking. Sigh.


But now that it’s back up and running it’s time for an update!


I’ve paused the Knights of Many series. They’re unpublished so it shouldn’t affect you guys too much, but I was struggling to finish everything up to an adequate standard and I needed some time away. Maybe a year away, not sure. Either way they are definitely going to need tweaking after the wizards of the coast ogl 1.1 debacle, as I’m going to stay as far away from any potentially trademarked words, which may be tricky since these stories are definitely based on D&D.


The good news is that I’m back to Raike! I had to take some time away from Raike at the start of the pandemic as the world was kinda depressing at that time and I needed something amusing to work on. But you can’t keep a bad mercenary down, so his troublemaking ways are back. I can’t give you any details on when book 6 will be finished or even out because I haven’t even given it to my editor yet. What’s it about? Raike has to sneak one of General Kasera’s spies out of a far away city, only he arrives a little too late.


And there will be a Raike 7 as well as I have the first chapter already written and I like the direction it’s heading in. All I need now is to not need to work for someone else as then I’d have so much more time on my hands to write all these stories. But even then I’d still complain that there aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything I want.


That’s it on the updates I’m afraid. I hope you all have an awesome 2023.

Okay folks, this is another case of I can’t believe it’s been so long since I last posted something. Sigh.

I have two updates to get through: Raike and the Knights of Many. Raike first.

There will definitely be another Raike book. I like the series. It’s fun. And you all seem to like reading about him which is a huge bonus. So where the hell is book six? Well, I was about a fifth of the way through writing it when we went into lockdown in 2020. I was renovating my house at the time (completely gutting every room), the world went crazy, and everything was seriously depressing. I found myself writing less of Raike every day and more of the Knights of Many, which is a more comedic and light-hearted series. I also wasn’t liking the direction the sixth Raike book was going in – this tends to happen and I always spend a few days pacing around the house, trying different angles, writing a few chapters and tossing them out, until I find my flow again. So that wasn’t unusual. But after years of writing fairly doom and gloomy stuff I needed a break, especially with the world around me also being fairly doom and gloomy. So I paused the series and focussed on something a lot more fun. But maaaaaan, have I been missing writing Raike. As you’ll see from the res of this update, I bit off a lot more than I could chew with the Knights of Many, and going back to writing one book at a time instead of a whole series is a much more sensible idea. I have no timeline at all for when the new Raike book will be out since I’m pretty much going to scrap the old manuscript (it was an incomplete and haphazard first draft from two years ago) and start again, but only when I’ve finished writing the Knights of Many series. But Raike will be back. Trust me.

Onto The Knights of Many! In 2018 I was working in a warehouse, daydreaming about silly characters doing silly things, and one day their antics made me laugh. I had six bare-bone characters in several different scenes and I liked it enough to start writing them down. There was no way I was going to devote my whole time to this new series even though it was fresh and shiny, but every so often I would write another scene that popped into my head. I soon realised I had written more than I thought and I had to organise the random scenes into something a little more coherent. Just to be clear, THERE WAS NO WAY I was going to write another full blown series at the time, not while writing Raike and falling behind on those deadlines. But maaaaaybe I could write novelettes or novellas. I could certainly do that. And if each of the six characters was the focus of each book then I’d have six novelettes. Sweet. THERE WAS NO WAY this was going to get out of hand.

Well, stories end up being as long as they need to be. They started off being a maximum of 35,000 words but I sailed past that word count with ease. Then they were going to be a maximum of 50,000 words. Then 70,000 words. The fourth book now clocks in at 110,000 words, which would be about 320 pages when published.

I had it in my head that I wasn’t going to publish them until they were all written. That made writing them a lot more relaxing since I could change things in previous books without having to mess with your heads. But it also made the process a lot more infuriating, as I’ve been working on the same books for years now and not a single one of them has been published, so they’re cluttering up my mind all that damn time. But they are nearly done. I mean, they’ve nearly been done for a year, but … yeah, I suppose they’re not nearly done. Three of the six are done. Unfortunately they are books 3, 4, and 5 in the series, and you can’t really publish them without books 1 and 2 being done first.

I could offer you guys a window to when they will be released, but I’m pretty sure I said ‘last half of 2021’ a while ago, so let’s just say ‘who knows?’

I wish I had a better update as right now there’s nothing new to say except that I over committed once again.

Anyway, I hope you’re all well. What have you been up to?

Okay, you know how 2021 was the year that never happened? Yeah. That’s kinda what happened to me. Did I finish writing the new series? Not by a long shot. I crashed. Utterly crashed. Months went by where I avoided working on the new series as much as possible and instead spent my time and brain power working on silly things like escape rooms that I can play at home and board games that I can also play at home. And then I had to get a proper job, so that has sucked a lot of time out of my day. But! I am no longer crashed and exhausted. I am renewed! I am listening to more audiobooks and getting my brain back into writing mode. Slowly but surely I will work on all the damn books and get them into your hands as soon as possible. Hopefully I don’t have to write the same kind of update this time next year, because that would suck royal donkey balls.



Anyway, happy new year to you all. Stay safe.

After god knows how long, I have finally published the fifth Raike book – The Gentleman!

Obviously there were some major delays. These were life delays, not book delays. The whole Covid lockdown was not fun and it completely killed my energy. Plus I was renovating my house non-stop, so on my days off from that I was in recharge-mode and not writing-mode. Then I had other work stuff, I retreated from the book world for a bit, but now I’m back! So I hope you enjoy The Gentleman! It takes place in the same city as the first story, featuring some recurring characters, only Raike now has to deal with the fallout from leaving his mercenary group and becoming one of General Kasera’s heavy-hitters.



Keep your enemies close.

One year ago, Raike was forced to target the Captain of the City Watch. Now he’s forced to work alongside him.
 
With a supernatural killer on the loose, Raike comes to realize that his new partners are no longer investigating the deaths of their own members – they’re investigating Raike himself, and that maybe he’s the one the entire City Watch have been chasing for years.

Get it now!

Chapter One
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I had to wonder when Sergi realized he was going to die. Was it at the start of the day when he questioned if he had just been poisoned? Was it when his superior officer walked him to his front door? Or did it come later, knowing if he delayed his killer any longer then his wife would come home and be murdered as well?

“Careful, careful!” snapped the city watch sergeant, as the seventeen year old watchman cut Sergi’s wrists free from the rafters. Sergi’s body collapsed into the three pairs of waiting arms, his weight toppling them to the ground and his head cracking on the edge of the stone window sill. “Shit, Lius!”

“S-sorry, sir. The rope snapped.”

“Did it? Or did you just cut a little too deep into the knot?”

Two of the watchmen squirmed, pulling their hands away from the back of Sergi’s head, their palms now streaked with blood. The third watchman peered up at me in the doorway. “Sergeant?”

The broad-shouldered, bruiser type looked like he was about to bark at me for being an interfering gawker. Then he registered the curved sword by my waist. Locked onto me as though I had just become Suspect Number One. “Who are you?”

I flashed him the bronze pin on my chest – a bear rearing back, set against a floral wreath. “I come from General Kasera. This is Sergi of Asar Plaza, yes?”

“It is. Was. Why? Did someone just confess to murdering him?”

“Not that I know of.” I stepped inside. Surveyed the single room under the glare of the sergeant and worry of the patrolmen. A couple lived here, that much was clear. Male clothes lay on one side of the thin mattress – a mix of city watch uniform and civilian trousers and tunics. Female clothes on the other – all civilian. Everything was left in neat piles, but there was a lot of miscellaneous junk as well. Mismatching pots, bits of old clothes stitched together, rusty knives and daggers … it looked like the kind of crap you would want to throw away.

Sergi was still in his uniform, the only pre-death injury on his body appeared to be a rawness on the corners of his mouth from a gag. His spear remained beside the door, held upright with a simple clasp, ready to be yanked free if he needed it in a hurry, but the clasp was strong enough to resist an accidental bump.

The sergeant gripped my shoulder tightly. “If you could wait outside, sir, I can be with you in a moment.”

“Who found him?”

The sergeant squinted, his temper on the rise. “How is this connected to the army?”

“It’s not.”

“Then how is this connected to the general?”

“It isn’t.”

“Right, then this isn’t an invitation for you to stick around. It’s a request for you to leave before I bring you in for interfering with the watch.”

“Uh-huh. Who found Sergi?”

The sergeant’s bruiser personality shot straight to front and center. “Did you not hear me correctly?”

One of the youngsters whispered, “Uh, Sarge? Have you seen his sword?”

“Yeah. What the hell is a non-imperial weapon like that doing here anyway? And in the middle of the city?”

I asked again, “Who found him?”

One of the watchmen squeaked, “He was seen from the window.”

“Lius, what the hell?!”

“Sorry Sarge. It’s just … isn’t he …” Lius stepped in closer. “You know, Kasera’s bagman?”

The sergeant peered back at me. “How many weapons do you have on you right now?”

“Three.”

“Okay. Why is Kasera’s assassin interested in a dead watchman?”

“Closer. Not assassin. And my interest is mostly because of the other guy. Aldin.”

The sergeant stiffened. Chewed his lips as a go fuck yourself sneer settled in.

“Two watchmen dead within five days of each other, both tied up in their own home after being interrogated for hours, and no one around to hear them cry out. And since neither seems to have been stabbed or bludgeoned to death, would it be safe to say they were poisoned? Until a better theory comes along?”

“I’m aware of the similarities, Mr. …?”

“Raike. Who found Sergi?”

The sergeant grunted. “A passer-by down below saw him through the window. He brought the caretaker out to the street and pointed him out. The caretaker hurried upstairs and opened the door.”

“Was the door locked?”

“You know, you’ve already said this has nothing to do with the army.”

“I don’t work for the army. Was it locked?”

“If it doesn’t have anything to do with your lot then why are you here?”

“I’ll leave right now if you’ve already caught the killer.”

The sergeant mashed his lips together. “Will you?”

“Of course. I’ll just head over to wherever he’s being held and question him directly. Has he been caught?”

The sergeant seethed but did not give me an answer.

“So was the door locked?”

One of the other watchmen squeaked, “Yes.”

“Gods damn it, Aymun,” muttered the sergeant.

I moved to the window. A crowd had formed outside, looking up to the first-floor apartment. Some seemed distraught that something like this could’ve happened in their neighborhood. Others were spreading gossip like it was the first exciting thing to happen in their lives.

“Did you all know Aldin and Sergi?”

“We all come from the same barracks.”

The sergeant grunted. “You don’t have a background in the watch.”

“No.”

“Nor in the inquisition?”

“No.”

“Nor the army. Yet you know your way around the scene of a murder, so I can only presume …”

“… That I work for General Kasera, and the murder of two watchmen has piqued my curiosity. I’m hoping we can avoid stomping on each other’s dicks right now, especially as it seems like a third dead watchman may be just around the corner.”

The three patrolmen glanced at each other. Lius asked, “What do you mean by that?”

“I’m saying there’s a pretty severe penalty for murdering a watchman, right? They’d be racked, hacked, and tortured over several days as a warning to everyone about what happens if they kill one of you guys. Yet whoever did this is convinced the reward from doing it twice outweighs the risk. So it’s either someone really pissed off with watchmen and they’re targeting you all at random, or it’s someone with a specific agenda who won’t stop until he gets what he wants. When did Sergi’s shift end?”

All heads turned to the sergeant. “He was supposed to be working from dawn until dusk, only he wasn’t feeling well. Complained of an upset stomach. So he went home.”

I checked the mattress, chest, and collection of pots and pans. “No sign of vomit or diarrhea.”

“He wouldn’t be the first guy to say he’s not feeling well so he can go home early.”

“True, but this time there happened to be someone who met Sergi before he could change. Was he expecting a mistress?”

“No. I mean – maybe. I don’t know. Either way he looked like he was about to throw up and shit himself, so I permitted him to go home.”

“You did, huh?”

“I’m his sergeant.”

I sniffed Sergi’s mouth. Had to pop open his jaw to get a better whiff. His body had begun to cool. Probably dead for three hours. Probably interrogated for several hours as well.

The sergeant leaned in, smelled, paused, and smelled again. “Vomit.”

“Without any signs of vomit in the room?”

“All right, fine. Sergi was strung up and in distress. He burped a sick burp because he knew he was about to be murdered and swallowed it back down.”

Lius pulled Sergi’s sleeve up past his shoulder. “There’s also this.”

“Lius, what the fuck? Go wait outside.”

There was a slight pinprick of blood on Sergi’s shoulder, with a corresponding dot of blood on his tunic. No obvious corruption surrounding the wound. “Did you send Aldin home as well?”

The sergeant seethed with righteous indignation. “He chose to go home while on patrol. I was told he hoped to sleep it off. If you are not here as part of an official investigation then I’m going to have to insist you leave.”

“Was Aldin also found in his uniform?”

“He was. Aymun? Please escort Mr. …” He trailed off. “… this gentleman outside.”

“Both went home before noon?”

“What of it?”

“Both found just before dusk?”

“Yes.”

“Both hanging next to an open window?”

“Yes.”

“And both were poisoned. Twice, by the sound of things. The first was at city watch to get them to go home where they could be interrogated for hours, the second to kill them.”

“Ohhh, fuck you if you think someone at the city watch poisoned them. Aldin’s breath smelled fine when we found him but there was discoloration in his arm. Sergi’s breath stinks but his arm is fine.”

“Then Sergi drank the poison, but Aldin was jabbed in the arm.”

“Aymun, for the love of the gods, escort this man out of here.”

“Were Aldin or Sergi involved in anything big? A crime they were trying to solve? Something they witnessed? Or was there something they should’ve solved and didn’t?”

The sergeant’s eyes nearly exploded out of their sockets. “How dare you! They were good men! They did their jobs better than most and now you’re coming in here and pissing all over their integrity? This whole thing reeks of an assassin’s job. Now, lo and behold, we’ve come face to face with an assassin who is sticking his dick into our investigation. Why are you here? To gloat? To sabotage our investigation? Or to make sure the job is done?”

I dropped one hand to the hilt of my new sword. “Do I understand correctly that you just accused a senior member of General Kasera’s security team and a citizen of Ispar of being involved in the murder of two city watchmen? Without any reasonable proof in front of several witnesses?”

The sergeant reared back, realizing just what kind of predicament he might be in. “No, no, I was just …”

“Because if I understand it correctly, the murder of a single watchman is such a heinous crime the accused faces torture until they confess to it, and now you’re accusing me?”

“No, sir …”

“It’s not ‘no, sir.’ Your word carries so much weight you can have me tortured and executed no matter what the truth is, so the only way I can prove my innocence against your accusations is by invoking the rights afforded to me and demanding a trial by combat against my accuser so the gods may clear my name. Is that what’s happening here?”

The sergeant fell quiet. Needed a moment to gather himself. “Sir, I … I apologize for what I said. I did not know you’re a citizen.”

“So you’re happy to let everyone who isn’t a citizen be tortured because you can’t control your temper?”

A vein practically burst in his forehead. “Forgive me. I have just found another one of my colleagues has been murdered; emotions are running high.”

I gave the sergeant to the count of five in stone-cold silence. Then, finally, I released my grip on my sword. The sergeant exhaled with a deep, grateful sigh. “Aldin was jabbed in the arm, so was Sergi, but Sergi seems to have drunk his. The delivery methods were different. Why?”

“I don’t know,” muttered the sergeant. “We tend to deal with stabbings and beatings, not poison. And definitely not when they’ve been strung up like this.”

I searched the rest of the watchmen. No one had an answer.

“Hey, Sarge?”

The sergeant spun towards the door. “Hey! No more spectators or intruders!”

A heavily pregnant woman stood in the doorway. “He’s dead?”

“Out! Lius! Make sure no one else comes in here!”

I went to the door. A small gathering of neighbors had amassed on the walkway outside Sergi’s place. “Folks? Did anyone see Sergi today?”

“I did,” said the pregnant woman.

The sergeant sprung forward. “Whoa, whoa, whoa … No, please … I’ll get to you in a moment.”

I asked her, “You live in this building?”

“I do, yes.”

The sergeant looked at me. “What the hell did I just say?”

“‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, no, please, I’ll get to you in a moment.’” I returned to the woman. “What did you see?”

She cast her eyes quickly between the uniformed sergeant and me, then glanced at my pin from the Kaseras. “I was at home – just over there – setting the pots to dry outside and hanging some clothes. Sergi and another watchman came through the courtyard and went into the apartment together. That was the last time I saw him.”

“A male watchman? Or female?”

“Male.”

“Did you see him leave?”

“No.”

“Any idea know who he was?”

“No. I didn’t spend too long looking at them to be honest. I just remember it happening.”

“What did he look like?”

“Kinda like my husband.” She recoiled immediately. “It wasn’t him. I know my husband – it wasn’t him.”

“What did this other watchman look like?”

“Dark curly hair and a thin beard. More tanned than usual, like he had a hint of bronze in his skin.”

The sergeant hesitated. Squinted at the woman. “What was he wearing?”

“A city watch uniform. White tunic with a belt, sandals … that was pretty much it.”

“Did he carry a spear?”

“No. A sword, I think.”

I looked to the sergeant and his sword. “Who is he?”

The sergeant sniffed like it helped him to reset his sense of authority. “Could be anyone.”

“Of course. It’s just … the three watchmen in there are armed with spears instead of swords. You have a sword and not a spear. Unless I’m mistaken, the lower ranks carry spears and the higher ones are armed with swords, isn’t that right?”

The sergeant shrugged. “Like I said, could’ve been anyone. She even said it looked like her husband.”

The woman said, “I meant in his complexion. And hair and beard, I suppose.”

“You see?”

“Except my husband is six and a half feet tall. The watchman escorting Sergi home was about Sergi’s size.”

I asked her, “How tall would you say I am?”

She looked at my boots. “Five foot ten?”

I pointed to a guy in the street. “And him?”

“A little shorter.”

So far so good. “Did either Sergi or his friend need to duck to get into Sergi’s home?”

“It wasn’t my husband. Those two were definitely the same height – more or less.”

I returned to the sergeant. “A colleague of yours, maybe?”

“Could’ve been anyone in a uniform. Maybe not even an actual watchman.”

“But it was someone Sergi recognized.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Someone with dark, curly hair, a thin beard, and bronze skin, of a rank equal to at least a sergeant and maybe higher, was invited into Sergi’s home. Is there any chance the three watchmen over there will know who I’m talking about? Or are you keeping quiet because you know of a frequent secret rendezvous Sergi’s wife is not supposed to know about?”

The sergeant squinted back at the neighbor. “When did you see this?”

“Middle of the morning.”

“You didn’t see anyone else come or go?”

“No, nothing.”

“How long were you hanging clothes and putting pots out?”

“A few minutes.”

“And that was the only time you went outside?”

“Pretty much.”

“Pretty much?”

The neighbor squirmed. “I’m not saying he did it, just that he was here.”

The sergeant looked back at me. “Could be anyone. She saw him at a glance and that was that. Either way, thank you …”

“I’ve already given you my name.”

The sergeant hesitated, wracking his brains to remember what I had said.

“Raike.”

“Raike. … for your interest here but this is a city watch matter that doesn’t concern the army or General Kasera. If our investigation leads to the Kaseras I will be happy to keep you informed, but for now it is not wise to interfere with our investigation. Good day.”

Another watchman breezed into the courtyard below. White tunic. Sword. No spear. Dark curly hair and a thin beard. Bronze skin. Calculating eyes. I locked onto the pregnant woman. “That’s him.”

The sergeant dropped his head to his chest. “For fuck’s sake.”

Believe it or not, I typed up an end of 2020 email and then never posted it. I suck at updates. Anyway, here are a couple of quick highlights before I get into the details:

Raike 5 (The Gentleman) is complete! I finished the alpha version way back in February 2020 and it’s taken a while for me to work on it after getting it back from my editor and beta readers, but yesterday I reached the last of the edits. Today’s job: publish the damn thing.

I’ve also got a new series lined up for 2021. Six books, fantasy again, this time following The Knights of Many – a small band of heroes on their wild misadventures. With any luck those books will be out this year, but I’ve been wildly optimistic before, so let’s just say they’ll be published before 2050.

The long version:
A few things happened as soon as I finished the fifth Raike book, back in the long-ago world of February 2020. The day after I finished the book, I started renovating my house by ripping off all the plasterboard, sanding floors, and insulating walls and ceilings. A year later, the walls and ceilings are now plastered and painted a very boring white. I miss my purple office but that will be rectified soon enough. We spent the best part of a year moving furniture from one half of the house to the other, living in cramped conditions, sleeping in the TV room with missing floorboards or using the hallway as a kitchen, and I didn’t have a dedicated space to write for most of the year, so a lot of writing was sporadic in an open plan and noisy house. Basically: I didn’t do much writing.

Normally when I’m done with a book I either dive straight into the next one in the series or tinker with another project. The other project after Raike 5 was the Knights of Many. It’s more of a light-hearted fantasy series that I’d been working on between Raike books for a while, or when I was done with Raike for the day but still had some energy left, so I’d write a few hundred words here or edit a couple of pages there. I honestly wasn’t expecting to go full time on that series until after Raike 6. Unfortunately, Covid-19 happened.

Our state went into full lockdown for the best part of 9 months. I tried writing Raike 6 in bed or on the sofa, but it’s a doom and gloomy story, and since the inside of my house and the great outdoors was doom and gloomy, I just never found a good way into the book. After 20,000 words I crashed, and returned to the cheerier adventures of the Knights of Many instead.

The series has been a work in progress since just before Raike 1 was published. It was the back-burner project, originally going to be six novellas, each 35,000 words long. Considering my shortest book published is over 100,000 words, doing a third of that should be easy, right? Hellllll no. Somewhere along the way the series became six books of 50,000 words. Much more manageable, right? Nope! It’s surprisingly hard to write short books when you’re used to writing longer ones. So each book is now 70,000 words which, naturally, means that it has taken twice as long to write as I first expected. At this point I have completed 3 of the 6 (books 3, 4, and 5, weirdly). I’m trying to complete them all before the first one is published, because I know I write slower than some people prefer and they want the next book now now now. After that, I hope to return to Raike 6, though I will likely scrap what I had written before and start again.

Anyway, that’s the quickish update. More news will soon follow.

All right, so it’s been 9 months since my last post. That’s pretty crap of me. Obviously, the world went into a tailspin but maybe it’s time to tell ya’ll what I’ve been up to since January.


Thanks to Covid-19 I’ve been in lockdown since March. Being an author/hermit has definitely helped in not going stir crazy, but it looks as though I’ll still be in some kind of lockdown for the rest of the year. My repertoire of cocktails has expanded significantly. It used to be limited to espresso martinis and a vodka/schnapps/lemon juice mix. Now I’ve discovered margaritas. I don’t like limes and I don’t like tequila, but when you put them together something magical happens. My other go-to now is the vodka gimlet. I should grow limes.


I’ve completely gutted my house, walls and ceilings included, and have been insulating everything and plaster boarding everything else. The weird thing about Melbourne houses is that there’s no insulation in the walls. It’s like they’re built only for summer and forget that winter gets pretty damn cold here. Our little cat is a genius for finding a way into the attic. She falls asleep on the big, soft, insulation, and then can’t find her way down, so every day she meows until someone gets a ladder and helps her down.


I finished Raike 5 a while ago and sent it off to my editor. She’s gone through it and the book has been sitting on my desk, ready for my final polish, for about three months now. I honestly have no idea why it’s taken me so long to get to it. Probably because it’s the part of writing a book I hate the most – going through a bazillion notes and fixing them up. It also has a lot to do with having no door to my office, because we’re still renovating, and the house has been noisy with lots of banging. I still expect the book to be out this year, though.


I’m also close to publishing a new series. It’s a dungeons and dragons-esque group of adventurers travelling the world and getting into all sorts of hijinks. I started tinkering with it a few years ago and it became my back-burner series. Whenever I was between Raike books or wanted to write a few hundred words of something that I could walk away from, I worked on this series. After finishing Raike 5 I decided to focus on this series just to change gears for a while, that way I could come into Raike 6 a lot more fresh. Well, a few weeks turned into a month or two, and the doom and gloom of the Raike world started to look a lot like the world outside, whereas the new series was a lot more light-hearted. For my own sanity I focused on the new series until the point came when I had to make a decision about Raike 6. I had already written something like 20,000 words on Raike 6 but it wasn’t easy to get into it with everything else going on in the world and at home. So, for the last six months or so I’ve been working on the new series with a new plan – finish all six books in the new series and publish them close to each other. I have three books banked right now and the other three are close to being done. I don’t expect the series to be out before March 2021, but I’ll let ya’ll know how things are going a little closer to that time.


I hope you all are still safe and reading some good books, and I’ll check in with you soon.

Hey folks,

Good news, I’ve just finished the second draft to Raike 5! I hope to finish the third draft in mid-February, then it’ll go to my editor and beta-readers, and with any luck the book will be out … who knows when? Things often go awry so I won’t really have a concrete date until after I get it back from my editor. And I still don’t have a title, so lots of pacing will be involved until I figure it out.

What’s it about?
Raike is back in his home town of Erast, a few months after the events of Cold Blooded (Raike 3), now working for General Kasera instead of the other side of the law. Unfortunately, Raike’s past as a bad guy starts to catch up with him as he looks into the deaths of a couple of city watchmen, and things go from bad to worse when he realises the killer might be better at this than he is.

When will it be out?
Maaaaaybe April. Probably May.

Anything weird with how I wrote this book?
Yep. I’ve had some success with something called Zero Drafting. It’s basically writing only the bare bones of dialogue and skipping long sections of prose, descriptions, and anything that I can’t think of right then and there. I had fallen into some bad habits with writing the previous books by doing the 1st draft, 2nd draft, and 3rd draft simultaneously. I’d also jump around a lot, sometimes skipping several chapters because I didn’t know the details of what happened but I knew where the story ended up on, say, chapter 19, then while editing chapter 35 I’d figure out the unknown chapters, go back and write that, and sometimes I’d have the finale written, edited, and polished, but still hadn’t even begun a chapter somewhere in the middle of the book. Sounds nuts, right? It was. I needed something drastic to break those bad habits and that’s where zero drafting came into it. All told, the 1st draft (bare bones only) came to 57,800 words, the 2nd draft is now 105,800 words, and the 3rd draft while likely bring it up to around 120,000 words.

Aside from trying to reset some bad habits, I did this because I end up moving chapters around A LOT during the edit. Sometimes a chapter from the first half of the book gets moved to the second half and vice versa. And bits of one chapter get reworked into another chapter, sometimes with different characters saying the gist of what someone else had previously said. Because I no longer bothered writing the beginning or ending of every chapter over and over again, moving them around to see how they fit was less of an issue.

How many head-on-desk moments have I had already with this book?
Two. The first came two weeks into writing. I went into this book knowing the following information: the captain of the city watch is being blackmailed + Raike teams up with someone from the city watch who is trying to sabotage the investigation into the captain’s blackmail. That’s literally all I knew as I sat down to write the story, and for the first two weeks the book was going in a direction that didn’t quite work. What I had was okay, it just lacked tension because of the location. So I cut it out and decided to use what I had in a future book (probably Raike 7, because I’ve already got an idea for Raike 6). And with that, I started Raike 5 again, this time with the goal of having only one bad guy instead of scores of them for Raike to hack his way through.

My second head-on-desk moment is still going on – I don’t have a title. All the titles I’ve tried to come up with aren’t great so hopefully I’ll pull something together soon and put the book on pre-order for all you guys.

What else is happening in 2020?
I’ll start work on Raike 6 in a couple of weeks. We’ll see his return to Solento (the location from book 4 where he may have been responsible for a lot of people being killed) and has to rescue a double agent. No more details right now because that’s pretty much all I know of the story.

I’ve also been tinkering with a side series as well. I have bits of 7 novellas about a dungeons and dragons-esque adventuring group in a world full of elves, half-orcs, dragons, goblins, and bad guys. I doubt I’ll have the time to finish those stories in 2020, but you never know. My plan will be to finish them all and release them 2-4 weeks apart, while holding one back as an exclusive story for my mailing list. A 2021 release is more likely at this stage, so we’ll see.

Anyway, I hope you all have a great 2020!

Every career starts somewhere.

On his first major heist with the company of mercenaries, Raike uncovers a plot to betray them all. Under-skilled and with limited experience, Raike unknowingly has the fate of his whole brotherhood resting on his shoulders as he sets out to unmask the rat trying to bring them down.

Get it now!


Raike has been with his company of mercenaries for three years now. He and his brothers in crime are digging their way into a vault for what is supposed to be the heist of a lifetime. Just as they reach the wall Raike realises that someone within the company is working against them. He doesn’t know who, he doesn’t know when they’ll strike, and he doesn’t know how to unmask them before the trap springs. That’s gotta be quite unnerving for someone stuck in a floodable tunnel, right?



The first three books are set when Raike is in his mid-thirties and has the skills and experience to save everyone’s lives, so this one posed quite a few problems in writing it. One issue with writing in the first person is that Raike needs to be within ear shot of most things in the story, which is fine if he was a lieutenant in the mercenary company, but not when he’s the lowest member there. The only justification was to use Raike as bait and dangle him in front of the bad guys because he was the most expendable one. But Raike is also supposed to be able to fight his way out of problems and there needs to be a formidable opponent, so how is someone with three years of training supposed to defeat someone with twenty years on them? (Hint: by being a cheating, sneaking son of a bitch.)


The way I write books has shifted considerably over the years, and not necessarily for the benefit of my sanity. The first Kingston Raine book was probably the last time I wrote a book ‘correctly’, in that I began with chapter one and wrote everything in order until I reached the final sentence of the last chapter. Then … things started to go awry. I’d get stuck on a particular chapter but I knew what someone else was doing in a different plot line, so I’d focus on that until I got unstuck and I’d go back and fill in the blanks so that everyone was caught up again. Then I got stuck on all plot lines but I knew where they ended up in two or three chapters’ time, so I’d leap over that missing part and fill it in later. The first Raike book was written mostly in chronological order, then I found that this chapter worked better earlier, that other chapter should be moved here to provide the next with a little more oomph, and things got shifted around considerably. From then on, every book started to get chaotic. I’d write as much as I could without breaking the flow and as soon as I hit a section of ‘Raike learns something useful here from someone but I don’t know what or from who’ I’d skip over and write the next bit with the hope of tying it all together in the edit. Since the Raike books involve a mystery, he’d talk to one suspect and move on to another, getting closer and closer to figuring out who the real bad guy is, so as long as I knew how it (more or less) ended I could fill in a lot of the blanks later on. Unfortunately, that involves a lot of head-desk moments, a lot of pacing, and a lot of boring my girlfriend as I tell her of my newest problem, because Raike is here, talking to this guy, and he needs to talk to that guy over there, but the second guy is supposed to tell him information that leads him to the first guy, but I can’t put the first guy after the second guy because of this great big other reason, so maybe I should split the second guy into two guys instead, so second guy 2.1 can tell Raike something that will lead him to the first guy, and the first guy will tell him something that will lead to second guy 2.2, but that’s going to ruin the momentum of the story … You get the idea. So guess what I’ve decided to do for Raike 5? Throw all caution into the wind and write whatever comes first! And by that I mean: I’m not writing the first and last paragraphs of each chapter, since those are the ones where Raike uses the information learned from the first guy to track down the second guy. Instead, Raike just appears in front of the second guy and questions him. Will it work better? I’ll tell you in six months.


With any luck Raike 5 will be out in March, but since I expected The Long Night to be out in August when I first started it, let’s just assume that Raike 5 will be out some time in 2020.