Lily Mayne's Blog

Happy February! The pre-order for Moth (Monstrous: Book Five) is now available , and the book will be released on Friday 25 February! I'm so excited for you to read prickly, loner Moth's story. (Note: It will also be on KU.)

The first of my new MM Fae Romance trilogy, Mortal Skin , is also out now, and the second part, Forgotten Vows, will be released in late spring.

Moth Blurb and Cover:

When I—along with my best friend and his big purple monster boyfriend—come across a fortress-like raider camp while journeying across the monster-infested Wastes, we stop to deliver a message.

Somehow, that simple pit stop turns into a seemingly impossible quest to get this camp’s missing leader out of the prison where he’s being held and forced to fight monsters and other humans. And I know exactly where it is, because I’ve been there.

Problem is, I’m making this journey with the prickliest and most arrogant guy I’ve ever met, who seems to immediately hate me on sight. Oh, and he’s also half monster. So there’s that. And he’s in love with a raider who definitely does not love him back, and he seems determined to take it out on me. So there’s also that.

But I’m not going to rise to his childish insults and barbed words. I’m not.

I’m also going to try very hard to ignore how mindnumbingly beautiful he is, even when he’s scowling at me.

But the longer we’re out here together, the more I learn about my prickly half monster companion Moth. I realise there’s a reason he’s so closed off and angry. There’s a reason he hates everyone.

There are secrets he’s been keeping, and when I find out what they are, I want to do everything in my power to help him—even though he’s telling me he can’t be helped.

Moth is Book Five of the Monstrous series, a post-apocalyptic m/m fantasy series that features monsters and human men falling in love. It is best to read the series in order. Warning: This m/m love story contains explicit sexual content and is not suitable for young readers. It also contains graphic depictions of death and violence.

Pre-order Moth now!

A small announcement!

As a little treat to you all, I'll be releasing a free short, A Monstrous Christmas on the Homestead , on my website later this month. This will be around 4.5k words and is just a cute little extra ahead of Moth's book. We'll get:

🌲 A Wastes-style Christmas
🖤 Charlie and Hunter teaching a big purple monster about human Christmas and him getting it kind of wrong despite his best efforts
😈 Edin (need I say more?)
🍆 *ahem* More Edin

So! Those who are subscribed to my newsletter will get to see this first, on Sunday 19 December. But if you don't want to be on the newsletter, don't worry! I'll release it on the website the following day, Monday 20 December, and you can read it then. (I'll obviously post the link here.) If you do want to sign up to the newsletter, just head to my website and you should get a pop-up come up.

You can sign up to the newsletter here.

Book four in the Monstrous series, Gloam, is now available for pre-order on the Kindle store, and will be out on Friday 3 December.

These two are the CUTEST. Rig is so desperate to help his big aytorin and get that cage off his head. Mary is still a total villain. Rig and Gloam become a little team on their journey across the Wastes and it is adorable. That is all.

Blurb:

When a strange woman shows up outside our camp in the Wastes with monsters chained up to her RV, it feels like I’m the only one who actually wants to help them.

That big, grey-skinned monster with the cage on his head and the chain hanging from his back—something is telling me I need to help him. I need to free him. But I have absolutely no idea how I’m supposed to do that, especially when he can’t even talk to me to tell me how.

Collector Mary is finally leaving our camp to head back to her monster menagerie, so I do the only thing I can think of to help him. I go with her.

Now, this big beastie and I are travelling companions for the foreseeable future. Now I just have to think of a way to get that cage off his head, which seems like an impossible task. But I’m not giving up. He has no one else, and when I start to discover who he is beneath the cage, my motivation to free him becomes far more than just a desire to help.

This is so dangerous. The military is lurking. Vicious monsters are lurking. And when Mary turns out to be even worse than we could have ever imagined, my desperate bid to save this monster turns into a deadly game of cat and mouse.

I’m pretty sure I’m going to die out here.

Gloam is Book Four of the Monstrous series, a post-apocalyptic m/m fantasy series that features monsters and human men falling in love. It is best to read the series in order. Warning: This m/m love story contains explicit sexual content and is not suitable for young readers. It also contains graphic depictions of torture and violence.

Pre-order Gloam now!

Wyn's novella is out now! (Paperbook coming soon.) It was so much fun revisiting these two. It’s made me want to write a sickeningly cute series of Wyn and Danny adventures where they just get up to stuff and wallow in their love for each other. For... a really long time.

For those interested: it clocks in at around 50k words.

I will say this: please don't read this until you have read at least books one and two of the Monstrous series, otherwise you're going to give yourself major spoilers.

The Monster Index at the back of the book has been updated, and there are some other little additional info bits back there that will make sense once you've read the book.

I very much hope you enjoy it, and reading about how Wyn is secretly a complete puddle of smitten, heart-eyed goo when it comes to his sweet human.

What’s next?
Next up is Book Four in the Monstrous series. It’s our naïve, glass-half-full boy Rig from the Nebraska raider camp, off trying to free the big cage-headed dude and the other monsters being held by Collector Mary. There is some overlap here with Book Three, so we’ll get to see a little of Aury and Ghost’s burgeoning relationship through Rig’s eyes. Cute!

Also, I know you guys want to see Danny and Wyn interacting with other characters in this world. Don’t worry—they will be. I’m just not telling you when.

Wyn's novella is now available for pre-order on the Kindle store, and will be out on 1st October. I'm excited for you to read it and get some insight into Wyn's ghoulish (but just totally smitten with Danny) mind. He's an adorable little death monster 😊🖤😈🍂

Blurb:

I am a monster.

A ghoul. A demon. The bogeyman. I have been called all of them. Most creatures fear me, but humans are repulsed by me. They are terrified of me. They have created legends about me, ever since they became aware of my existence when the tear between our worlds grew and we—the monsters from their nightmares—flooded through in our droves.

There is only one human who isn’t afraid of me. The only one who matters. And I will destroy anyone who tries to hurt him or take him from me. Danny is mine.

For the first time in my unfathomably long life, I know what it means to want another so much that the thought of losing him threatens to ruin me. I will do anything to keep Danny with me for as long as I can have him—for as long as he is willing to stay by the side of an ancient, scarred creature with a voice so inhuman it has sent some mad.

For some reason, Danny loves my voice. For some reason, Danny loves me. And when we both decide that his natural human life is nowhere near enough time for us to have together, we go on a journey between worlds to the one place where we can do what it takes for us to be together forever.

Wyn is a sweet, low-angst novella that is part of the Monstrous series, a post-apocalyptic m/m fantasy series that features monsters and human men falling in love. It is best to read this series in order—if you haven’t read books one to three already, there are big spoilers in this!

Warning: This m/m love story contains explicit sexual content and is not suitable for young readers. It also contains graphic depictions of torture and violence, and very briefly mentions the lingering effects of PTSD.

Pre-order Wyn's novella now!

The Rycke is here! This sweet monster who everyone's scared of, and his ball-of-anxiety human Ghost.

This book is set mainly in the Nebraska camp that we have heard about before, and features a whole host of new characters, many of whom are getting their own books, as well.

It was fun being able to flesh out how humans who aren’t in the military live out in the Wastes—how they’ve made their homes safe enough to stay alive out there, and what being a raider means. Which, in Ghost’s case, means doing the shitty jobs no one else wants because you’re a pushover and scared of pissing anyone off. Poor Ghost.

I hope you enjoy (or enjoyed, if you're reading this after finishing it) The Rycke. He might be my favourite.

Buy The Rycke on Amazon or read on KU

What’s next?
Next up, we are revisiting our original monster-human couple, Danny and Wyn, for a novella from Wyn’s perspective!

And… in this novella, I may be backtracking on some things I’ve said before. This backtracking may make you either love me or hate me. So many people said they wished Wyn and Danny’s time together wouldn’t be so short—as in, Danny’s-human-lifetime-short. Same with Edin and Hunter. So, okay. Let’s fix that. You want Wyn to be able to have some more time with his human? I have ideas to make it happen, so I’ll make it happen.

After Danny and Wyn’s novella (which I am already halfway through), it’s going to be Rig’s story, another raider who we meet in this book.

Stay in touch
If you have enjoyed my books so far, stay in touch! Follow me on Facebook - I have an author page there. I love hearing from you.

Hello! So. At the time of writing this, I’m getting ready to release the Monstrous series (so far) on paperback. And before I did that, I wanted to get Soul Eater to a place where I was happier with it. So I went back to book one to revise and extend it. Wyn and Danny’s story is a fair bit shorter than the others, so I’ve extended it with some new chapters. (Woo!)

Another main reason I have made some revisions to the book is this: Danny and Wyn travelling by car. If your first time reading Soul Eater is after the date of this post, and you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about: Soul Eater previously contained scenes where Danny and Wyn found a car in the Wastes and drove for some of their journey.

Here’s the thing—several things. I second-guess literally everything. I also know d*ck all about cars (shocker). And I never expected anyone to read my book. So the car thing I just… didn’t overly consider.

But then people started reading it. And then people started reviewing it. And several of those reviews said, ‘Ok but… the cars would not work. Come on.’ I tend to fixate on things, and when I realised what a monumental error I had made, my anxiety went through the roof. (But it does with almost everything so that’s not a big surprise.)

(Some people also had issue with Danny eating old food, but I largely feel like you would do that in an apocalyptic wasteland, with few other options, so that bothered me less.)

So anyway, I have gone back and removed the cars. (Except for one bit.) It hasn’t changed the story at all. They just walked more. Took ‘em longer to get places.

Does all this make me an unprofessional hack? Yes. It absolutely does. But I’m not a professional. I just love writing, and I really love these characters, so I want them to have the best book that I can write for them.

In case you want to read the new scenes but don’t want to reread the whole thing, the new chapters in Soul Eater are chapters seventeen and eighteen.

Hello! A little update for you all. Book three of the Monstrous series, The Rycke, is written and currently being proofed by the lovely Kate Wood Proofreading, who has already been an incredible help and some of her comments on the book made me laugh out loud.

In the meantime, I am currently working on some revisions for Soul Eater before I release the series so far in paperback. Danny and Wyn's book is shorter than the others, so I'm extending with some new chapters and revising some of the content :)

Hi there! I'm working hard on book three, falling in love with the rycke and his awkward human Ghost. I'm also loving being able to write more about how the raiders live in the Wastes, and the relationships they form in their camps - good and bad.

I'm still missing our other monsters and humans, though. Obviously. My plan is, once The Rycke is finished, to write some bonus content revisiting our OG monster-human couple. I miss Wyn. A lot. There, I said it.

If you missed my last post, you might not have seen that I'm now on Facebook - join me over there!

Sorry for my rambling. Now, finally, keep reading for a second sneak peek of The Rycke. If you missed the first teaser, you can find it here.

Teaser #2 - The Rycke (Monstrous: Book Three)

Despite being unable to see the beastie's face, I could tell from their body language that they were uneasy and dirty and tired. Exhausted. What had they been doing here, in these ruins for the last several months? Why hadn’t they escaped with the other beasties? Why hadn’t they at least attempted to get out of these chains before? They hadn’t been that hard to cut through with Rig’s cobbled-together rotary blade. Surely the monster would have been able to find a way.

Why were they so afraid? They looked tall, and while lean, their body radiated power even in this weakened state. I had no doubt that this monster had strength far greater than either of us—beasties tended to be faster, stronger, smarter than humans. They also lived much, much longer, and with age came experience. Skill.

Maybe this one was very young.

My ears were ringing when Rig finally turned off the blade, cutting through the last of the chains binding the monster's arms tightly together. Despite the creature’s seemingly timid nature, I couldn’t help but tense up, expecting the worst, when the chain fell away and landed on the concrete floor with a sharp clank.

The monster was shaking, shoulders hunched with tension. At first they didn’t even move their arms from the position they’d been trapped in by the chains for a long, long time. I winced at the sight of all the dried, crusted dark green blood around their wrists. The deep black bruising marring their white skin all the way up their inner forearms. The pinched blood vessels in the sensitive inner creases of their elbows.

When the monster finally lowered their arms away from one another, towards their sides, a weak pained sound left their throat. Their arms trembled, moving stiffly. The veins looked dark and prominent under the white skin, but I didn’t know if it was a reaction to the binding pressure of the chains or if it was normal for their species.

“Hey, it’s okay.” Rig ducked his head, and I realised he could see the monster’s face.

I ignored the stab of… something I felt at the fact that the creature was doing everything in their power to not look at me, literally flinching at the sound of my voice, but were seemingly fine with Rig.

Why had they warmed to Rig and not me? What had I done?

Just a quick update!

I'm finally on Facebook. It's been a while. It's scary and different. Please bear with me while I get the hang of it.

I've created an Author Page - please follow if you want to receive updates and teasers over there!

Keep an eye out for another teaser from The Rycke soon...

L