Cameron Darrow's Blog

Beneath the Shell is out!

So long in coming, my 10th book is now loose in the world! Available for purchase on Kindle or in paperback, it's also in Kindle Unlimited if you'd prefer to read it that way.

Thank you so much for your patience. I hope you enjoy reading Raen and Sunny's story as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Beneath the Shell will be out one week from now, and I couldn't be more excited. It's my TENTH book, which is unbelievable to me, but I'm no less thrilled to share it with you than I have been for any of the others. Writing BtS has been a true labor of love. It's undergone more stops, starts and iterations than any other book I've written, so it's even more surreal that there's an actual finish line for it.

One of the reasons it's taken so long is because this had to be the next Alumita book. It is 100% a standalone story, but anyone who's read Without Words is in for a treat. BtS is not a sequel, but there are echoes of the previous book that ring through the centuries into Raen and Sunny's story you may appreciate.

My first standalone friends-to-lovers story! Let me just say that my experience with Victoria and Katya wasn't as much help as I'd thought it would be. They had five books (and ten years in-universe) to realize their feelings for each other. Doing it in one book that's shorter than any single Ashes book was like writing romance on hard mode. It was a wonderful challenge, and I hope I pulled it off!

As a New Adult story, Raen and Sunny are my youngest protagonists, both having only recently become full adults under mage custom. They (Raen especially) have a lot more to learn and growing to do than usual, and they have to do it quickly! That is to say, they are a bit less mature and more... raw. What I'm talking around is that there is more swearing in this book than all of my others put together. It's absolutely reflective of the characters and not gratuitous, but be warned if that bothers you.

It's also one of the reasons that, though it took a while to find my groove on this story, once I did I had tremendous fun writing it. I got to crack open my Id a little with Raen especially, and I may have cackled a few times in my undermining of expectations for what a library-dwelling history nerd should be. I don't want to tell you how to interpret her, so I'll spare you any more of my intentions, but I just wanted to let a little of my excitement leak out.

A skinny albino history nerd and a sun-kissed horse girl with curves to die for. A discovery that could challenge history. An ancient magic school struggling to keep up with the times. Emergence, growth and change. Self-discovery. Questions about the future. Kissy bits and more magic!

All of this and more will be yours to discover on January 27!

It's been too long since the last Alumita book, so I hope you find the wait was worth it. Enjoy!


PS

If you know you're going to read it and haven't pre-ordered it yet, please consider doing so. It would really help me out!

Pre-order link (US): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GC51CXV3

Pre-order link (UK): https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0GC51CXV3

Pre-order link (AU): https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0GC51CXV3

Pre-order link (CA): https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0GC51CXV3

Pre-order link (DE): https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0GC51CXV3

I can now make the totally official and very real announcement that my next book will be released January 27!

Beneath the Shell is the third book in the Alumita series, and I can't wait for you to be able to read it! Like the other two, it's got everything that you've come to expect from the series: romance, magic, humor and maybe a little dollop of adventure. BtS is the first friends-to-lovers entry, and the first new adult story as well!

Set at the ancient Collegium Arcanum, BtS is about two students having their lives turned upside-down just when they thought they had everything figured out. It would be an unfortunate time for their long-suppressed feelings for each other to become undeniable, wouldn't it? Or... necessary?

Like all of the Alumita books, you don't have to read the others first, but in this case I highly recommend that you do. You'll get a lot more out of it! BtS isn't a sequel to Without Words, it can absolutely be read all by itself, but there are echoes of the previous book still ringing down the annals of history...

It's been almost five years(!) since the last Alumita book, so I thank all of you for your patience. The writing of Beneath the Shell has been as trying as it has been rewarding, with many, many setbacks and obstacles to overcome along the way. I hope you find the wait is worth it!

If you enjoyed Vimika & Aurelai and Zifa & Skathi, get ready to welcome Raen & Sunny on January 27! I'm sure you'll love them just as much.

Please consider pre-ordering if you're able, early interest can be really important for a niche book like this. Like the others, it will be available in Kindle Unlimited and paperback, as well!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GC51CXV3

With my last post here having been a year ago, I thought I owed you all a little update -- or proof of life, at the very least.

The last year (years, let's be honest) have been one long uphill trudge, which is why I haven't had any energy left to post anything here, let alone publish anything. Without going into personal detail, there have been actual reasons my productivity rate has gone down the shitter toilet/loo/dunny: I haven't physically been able to get out the words at the rate I used to, and there's no real prospect that that will improve anytime soon. This then compounds into mental issues because I feel bad about not getting as much done as I want to, which spirals into diminished motivation to even try. Add this to the last year's worth of the entire world being on fire (do I need to be specific? come on), seeing my and a lot of my peers' readership numbers falling somewhere into Tartarus, and you get a creeping sense of nihilism that adds me to the list of authors who have found it an immense struggle to get anything done.

And in my case I mean done.

Started?

In the last year I've started three Alumita books and two Dizzy books, yet you may have noticed you're not currently reading any of them.

Believe me, I wish I was, too.

I don't mean for this to be a 'woe be unto me, the tortured author' kind of thing, but a year of radio silence when so many of you are eagerly awaiting my next book is poor form on my part, and this is what's happening. I averaged two books a year from 2018-2022, then none in 2023 and one in 2024. Those first few years set a certain expectation, and I'm gutted that I haven't been able to come close to matching it since.

But all is not lost.

Amidst the turmoil and flaming wreckage of... everything... there is yet a twitching mass of what some might call life.

This is not a book announcement. This is a book... update? Tease? Something positive! How should I know what word to use? I'm a wri-- oh.

Well.

How about this? The third Alumita book, tentatively titled Beneath the Shell, will be the next one I put out. It's far enough along that I can even breathe a potential title, but there are still a lot of holes to plug and bits to rearrange. That said, it's the farthest I've gotten in anything since Death Has Golden Eyes, which is miraculous progress given how I've felt at certain points since updating you last. Timeline?

*noncommittal foot shuffling and avoidance of eye contact*

But I want to get it out. For myself, for you, and for the world in general. It's a world that needs an Alumita book right now. I know, because I need an Alumita book right now. Kissy bits and magic, with a little humo(u)r sprinkled in here and there?

Sounds nice right about now, doesn't it?

I am human, and I am flawed, but I'm trying. Art is not dead, and neither am I.

Just give me a minute to prove it.

After four restarts, endless revisions and never getting past the halfway mark, I've given up on a project after committing to it for the first time. It doesn't feel like I thought it would.

For context, I've been working on what was going to be the third Alumita book for what feels like forever. It was the book I started immediately after finishing the Ashes books two years ago (!), and the one that frustrated me to the point I ended up writing the first Dizzy book to get away from it. But fresh eyes and a new book under my belt didn't work out how I thought it would. I picked it up, set it down, restarted and revised the first half innumerable times without ever making it past the halfway point. I thought it was just resistance at first, and that my usual strategy of dealing with resistance (turn away for a little while and then run past it when it's not looking) never worked.

I've talked numerous times here about working with resistance and using it to take stock of what may not be working in a story, and also how important it is to just get the story down and worry about revising later. But in this case, both strategies failed. No matter which new angle I came at it from or how much momentum I thought I was building on every reboot I hit the same wall at the midpoint. I changed the love interest, I changed the whole premise of the story (while keeping basics like the setting and other ephemera that was working), I even overhauled the main character's motivations and outlook, and all of it to no avail. No matter how much I changed the foundations around, I could never figure out a way to salvage a decent building out of it. The story just kept fighting me, to the tune of months worth of work. And it won. (I hope it's proud of itself!)

I'm still not entirely certain what the root problem was. I still think there's a good story in there, I just couldn't find it, even after months of looking and multiple restarts from different angles... in short, working on it until it wasn't fun anymore.

And that's when I knew I had to be done. For good.

I think there were two issues, neither of which have anything to do with the story:

1) The same problems were waiting for me when I got back from writing the first Dizzy book. Like I went on vacation, had a great time, and then as soon as I got back I remembered why I left in the first place. My subconscious was no help in solving them behind the scenes; maybe it was smart enough to move on before I did?

2) I think I reached a new level of writing maturity with Death Has Golden Eyes, and returning to to an old story (especially one that had so much work already done) made me feel like I was going backwards as a writer. Short of blowing it up and starting from scratch, it was always going to feel like Old Me's book, like I was going to have to devolve somehow to finish it the way that 'd started, and that didn't feel good.

And that last part is the real reason I'm done: it wasn't fun anymore. The whole point of the Alumita books is that they're fun, for me first and foremost. If I don't enjoy it, there is very little chance you will. I'm not a perfectionist or a tortured artist or anything, it's simply that being unenjoyable is pretty much antimatter to a comedic romance: they annihilate each other on contact.

Not to worry, though! There will be more Alumita books at some point, just not this one.

It wasn't an easy choice, but the decision to bury this book once and for all has been a liberating one. I feel much freer and more creatively inspired, and look forward to tackling new story problems every day, rather than for excuses not to. The sunk cost fallacy got the better of me for awhile, but the best way out isn't always through. Sometimes it's to set the whole quagmire on fire and ride the updraft.

Whee!

'Death Has Golden Eyes' has cracked the top 100 in both the LGBTQ+ Mystery (this close to 50!) AND British Historical Fiction categories in its first few days! Being my first mystery and wondering at times if I would ever write a book again makes the response even more incredible, and more than I had ever dared hope.

Thank you so much.

Excelsior!

Death Has Golden Eyes is now available worldwide!

This day has been long in coming, and sometimes felt like it would never get here. But I am proud (and relieved) to say that it is finally here! I have a new book out!

Thank you all so much for your patience and your understanding during this time. I hope it was worth the wait!

If you do read Death Has Golden Eyes, thank you, first of all, but when you're done please consider leaving a review or even just a rating. This is a new genre and a new step for me, and every review/rating helps me believe that I didn't screw everything up, and makes the book that much more visible at the same time. I spent a long time alone with it, some external feedback from all of you would be most welcome.

Thank you again, and I hope you enjoy getting to know Dizzy and the gang, and this new world they live in.

Excelsior!

I did a little Q&A interview celebrating the release of Death Has Golden Eyes over at I Heart Sapphic! A little more insight into the book, my process and what cocktail Dizzy might enjoy (including a recipe)!

Thank you to the hard-working folks over at I Heart Sapphic for the opportunity and everything they do.

Everything is locked and final for the paperback version of Death Has Golden Eyes! Since I can't put paperbacks up for pre-order, I wanted to let you know that it will be priced at $12.99 in the US, €11.99 in the EU and £10.99 in the UK, and is 324 pages long. You know, in case you need to make an extra slot on your shelf. Really happy with how the formatting came out, classy and period-appropriate.

If you've been wondering about the fabulous cover, the Kindle and paperback versions were both created by Vila Design. Check them out if you need a cover that's both incredible and reasonable.

Just a few more days to go!

Given my bibliography up to this point, you may be wondering why I wrote a paranormal mystery all of a sudden (you probably have fewer questions about the historical part). I've mentioned several times here that I needed to do something different than I'd done before for various reasons, but I haven't really talked about why I wrote a mystery in particular.

I'd been toying with the idea for several years, even picking up various how-to books on writing mysteries and going over genre conventions and whatnot. Both Remember, November and The Raven and the Firebird have mystery elements to them, so it wasn't completely uncharted territory.

The short version of why a mystery, though is this: I write romances with my heart, and mysteries with my brain. My heart was tapped out; I was emotionally toast, and simply couldn't get another Alumita book off the ground despite three different tries. But a mystery? With low emotional stakes and what is essentially a puzzle at its heart? That's something else. Something doable, I thought. Putting a puzzle together is such a different exercise from drilling down into someone's emotional core and extracting all that they are and why and everything you need to make a romance compelling and believable. They can be emotionally exhausting. Writing a mystery was still hard, but in a different way. I could let my subconscious chew on it, and being able to bring in more external obstacles was fun. Romance protagonists have to make choices for emotional reasons that are internally driven (rejecting love, protecting themselves, being nervous and uncertain), whereas a mystery protagonist having the world dumped at their feet is kind of the point. If a couple separates in the third act because one thinks the other is dead after a bomb goes off, that's not super interesting romantically; they didn't choose that. But if a bomb goes off and destroys evidence the sleuth needs? Well, shit. Now what? The whole structure and driving forces are different, and it was an incredibly rewarding exercise that I hope has resulted in a rewarding story.

"But it's a Cameron Darrow book! What about the characters?" Don't worry! It's still character-driven. They are the focus. It's about them, the circumstances they face and why they're the ones who have to do something about them. Dizzy, Azalea and Kaliori are every bit as three-dimensional as Vimika and Millie, just with much different problems. Getting into the head of an extradimensional vampire with a wildly different sense of morality is delicious, and I hope you think so, too.

So what was my direct inspiration? Two major ones: an Australian TV show and YouTube. Let me explain:

During the pandemic, I fell down a rabbit hole of freely-available mysteries from the '30s and '40s on YouTube. There are an absolute ton of them (as the copyrights have expired and they're kind of orphans), including entire runs of radio shows and movies like the famous Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes adaptations. Radio shows like The Shadow and Suspense are entirely theater of the mind, very atmospheric when listening in the dark, and force you to put your phone down and pay attention. Yes, there are extremely dated and offensive portrayals in some of them, but I skipped those episodes when that crap came up. They aren't present in, and so do nothing to diminish, the brilliance of episodes of Suspense like "Sorry, Wrong Number" or "Will You Make a Bet with Death?". They're timeless--compelling, dramatic and eminently listenable just as much today as they were when they first aired 80 years ago. The Shadow is the first modern superhero, and a direct inspiration for Batman. Did you know Orson Welles was the first person to play The Shadow? Crazy! Not my favorite portrayal (Bill Johnstone FTW!), but certainly interesting. "The Old People" is a completely batshit episode of his if you want 30 minutes of Orson Welles-led WTF-ery.

The other inspiration was the "Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries" TV adaptation. They take place in Melbourne, Australia in the 1920s, and showed me just how wonderful a period mystery could be. The glamour, the costumes, the performances (I adore Essie Davis as Miss Fisher), the characterization of Miss Fisher as a well-to-do flapper who's whip-smart, well-read, in complete command of her own sexuality and doesn't take shit from anybody is so satisfying, and a large influence on Dizzy herself. (In fact, Dizzy having bright green eyes is a direct homage to Miss Fisher.) I first saw it years ago, but it stuck in my brain as my first introduction to anything like it, and jolted me out of what I thought mysteries were and had to be. I have since read many of the books the show is based on (known as the Phryne Fisher Mysteries), but I was introduced to the show before the books, so I'm a bit biased in my preferences.

So! That's my tour of the background to the Dizzy Dixon Mysteries! I hope you enjoy Death Has Golden Eyes when it comes out June 25th! If you haven't pre-ordered it yet, that would be a super-cool totally awesome thing to do. But! It will also be available on Kindle Unlimited and in paperback, so if you're waiting for either of those, that's cool, too.

Thank you so much! More to come as the release date gets closer!

Excelsior!