Craig Schaefer's Blog

Happy Monday, all (hopefully)! I’m very pleased to announce that Rats, the third book in the five-part Castaways saga, is available now! It’s out in ebook format and should be available in paperback shortly; meanwhile, Susannah Jones has the audiobook version on her schedule and will be recording that soon.

With their friends abducted by the hulking Mr. Shaddock and his rodent mercenaries, the Castaways have to mount a whirlwind (and highly unauthorized) rescue across the multiverse, from a derelect pirate colony to a shining city where magic and technology merge. And this time, Shaddock may be the least of their problems. His sister Riva, a cult priestess, has sinister designs on Dalton…and Elmer’s apprentice, an unhinged necromancer, is determined to make sure absolutely no one escapes this mess alive.

So yeah, we’re getting weird with it. I hope you enjoy the story! Meanwhile, I’m still hard at work on the next Daniel Faust novel, which will (finally!) be out later this year. And I would be remiss not to mention Catch and Kill, the first book in the Neon Meridian series, which is coming from my friends at Aethon Books in May. It’s going to be a busy year! Stay warm, stay safe, and I’ll be back with more news soon.

Anyone up for a new adventure? The awesome Rebecca Frank just finished her work on the cover for Rats, Castaways book three, and it's coming your way...Monday! I'll post a formal update when it's live. If all goes to plan, Monday should see the launch of the paperback and e-book formats, while the audiobook version (voiced as always by the amazing Susannah Jones) will be coming from my friends at Podium Books in a month or two.

Happy Thursday, all! Early last year I announced that Aethon Books had acquired my new upcoming series, Neon Meridian. I'm pleased to announce that we finally have a release date for book one! (Yep, publishing is a slooooooow business.) It's coming on May 19, and I can also announce that Susannah Jones will be narrating the audiobooks (which should be coming out on the same day.) I'll let the publisher tell you what it's about:

Magic is no longer a mystery—it’s a corporate asset.
Seventy years ago, people turned on their televisions and saw magic on the streets of Manhattan. Real magic, and real monsters, in broad daylight.

Today, corporate sorcerers defend their employers’ interests with curses and bullets, street vendors sell cheap talismans to the masses, and the most popular late-night talk show host is a demon. It’s a world of wonders and terrors, but you still have to earn a living.

Emily Yeats is a blue-collar witch from Brooklyn, selling her services as a security auditor. For a price, she and her unconventional team will invade your business after hours, find every last loophole and flaw, and tell you how to fix it.

Until now, the challenges were all simulated.

Strapped for cash, Emily agrees to a dangerous job: an executive with the world’s biggest media conglomerate wants her boss out of the way, and she hires Emily to dig up a scandal that he took a bribe to bury.

Now bodies are dropping left and right, a supernatural assassin is on Emily’s trail, and everyone from the Mafia to the mayor’s office wants to silence her for good. It’s too late to back out now: the only way to survive is to finish the job, or the story she’s hunting won’t be the only thing getting killed.

The good folks over at Aethon say it's “perfect for fans of Six of Crows, The Iron Druid Chronicles, and Shadowrun.” I haven't read Iron Druid but I can tell you that Shadowrun was definitely an influence (as were William Gibson's amazing novels and the various incarnations of Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk. I kinda grew up on this stuff.) So if you like those, you might like this!

Also, in the meantime, book three of Castaways is almost ready for you; the book is done and laid out, and Rebecca Frank is working on the cover (I've seen a draft and it's very nice.) And with that, I should get back to work. Stay warm and safe!

Sometimes I get a really dumb idea, and then I have to put that dumb idea down on paper. It’s a writer thing. Anyway, I took a break from working on the next Daniel Faust novel to write up Merry Christmas, Mari Lwyd, a very short story that acts as a semi-prequel to the upcoming book. It’s over on my Patreon, unlocked for everybody. The holidays can be pretty stressful for a lot of folks, so I wanted to whip something up in the hopes of giving you a little bit of a smile today.

As a consequence, this is easily the goofiest thing I’ve written since Hex the Moon. And like that story, this is 100% canon. It’s not all grim darkness, after all. Be safe, be warm. Better days are coming.

As promised, we’re swiftly following up the first Castaways audiobook with its sequel, Firebreak, which is available today! Book three, Rats, is currently in my editor’s capable hands and my cover designer is doing her thing too, so hopefully late next month I’ll have some info on a release window; it’ll come out in print first, and then Susannah will work her audio magic on it.

We also don’t have a firm release date for the first Neon Meridian book yet, but right now the publisher is looking at early 2026, so you won’t be waiting long. (This year is over in less than two months? How could a year feel like a decade, and still be over that fast? Einstein was right, this time stuff is highly relative.)

And finally, the manuscript for the next Daniel Faust novel is rolling along at full speed. I’m deep enough in to feel like I can safely lock the title down, so I can tell you that it’s called…Triple World Score. My apologies to any Scrabble fans out there. It’s the penultimate story in the Enemy saga, with three targets on three parallel worlds. Daniel and Caitlin are going to visit some strange but familiar places, meet the locals, and rob them blind.

I don’t do a lot of out-of-book explaining about the lore of my books; I prefer to let the stories speak for themselves, and let readers piece together the details. That said, occasional loreposting is fun, today I’ve been pulling together a veritable fistful of note cards, scraps and scribbled receipts to get my personal “story bible” in order, and I figured it might be interesting to share a bit. Today’s topic: in the First Story universe, which parallel worlds do we actually know about?

Parallel Three is the biggie, the hub of the First Story as we know it; this is the world of Daniel Faust and Harmony Black, and the battlefield for the current impending showdown between the Paladin and the Enemy. You probably live here. This is also the setting of the upcoming Neon Meridian series from Aethon Books, albeit seventy-odd years in the future.

Parallel Five will appear in Rats, the upcoming third novel in the Castaways series. It’s a yellow-class deathworld “rendered inviable due to Enemy/Paladin conflict” with a global human population of around 150 people. Something else lives there, too. Something very large and very hungry.

Parallel Seven is nice. That’s all anyone has to say about it. It’s nice.

Parallel Twelve is the homeworld of Vail Curran, from Castaways. Best known for harsh winters and Puckslam, a hockey variant involving barbed wire and explosives.

Parallel Seventeen is the site of Nalajara, City of a Thousand Princes, an advanced techno-occult civilization where magical duels are a favorite national sport. Home to both Professor Abraham Chalk and Gecka Xaro from Castaways, and it’ll be a pivotal part of book three.

Parallel Nineteen is mostly notable for the locals having two hearts. They want to know why you only have one. Is that even allowed?

Parallel Twenty-Two is Overlord Earth, featured in the Wisdom’s Grave trilogy. A particularly brutal incarnation of the Witch and her Knight conquered the planet in an attempt to stave off their scheduled doom. The plan only half worked. Now P-22 is a cyberpunk dystopia policed by valkyries in power armor; as Dalton from Castaways puts it, it’s not a nice place to visit and you don’t want to live here. We might be making a return trip very soon.

Parallel Twenty-Six is home to the War-Dancers of Orinoco, pioneers of battle magic, but we don’t know much beyond that.

Parallel Thirty-One produced both Jellica Barnes and Elmer Donaghy. It’s a yellow-class deathworld ravaged by “necro-bombs,” occult warfare, and herds of the hungry dead. The Network likes recruiting here, because if you can survive P-31 you can survive anything (and you’re probably desperate to get off the planet, so you’ll take a bad deal.)

Parallel Forty-Four, setting of the recently-completed story Black Roses (on my Patreon), is unusually magic-rich; many pulp horror writers, most notably H.P. Lovecraft, dreamed of this place and wrote their visions as stories. Operatives from Praeda (established as a new threat in the Harmony Black novel Snake Oil Bullet) have been spotted here posing as real estate developers, trying to acquire land where the dimensional veil is particularly thin.

Parallel Fifty-Nine is on the red-list, danger rising, but it’s also the only place to get “butterscotch cinnamon babies” so the Sept of Coins is going to keep raiding the place as long as they can get away with it. They’re just that tasty.

Parallel Sixty-Two is the world of the Revanche Cycle. Most noted for being the home of the Sisterhood of the Noose, and we all wish they’d go back there.

Parallel-TANGENT One is an artificial world created by unknown precursors. It’s a vast water-world infested by enormous, nightmare leviathans, the apparent source of mermaids along with countless other aquatic horrors, first introduced in the Wisdom’s Grave trilogy (Talon Worldwide, using their own nomenclature, called this world “Deep Six.”) The founders of the Saunders Academy took over the one piece of surface land in the entire world, christening it Firebreak Island, and built their school there.

Parallel-TANGENT Eight is Noir York City, a pocket dimension accidentally created by a massively psychic child fueled on a diet of superhero comics and pulp crime novels. Originally glimpsed in The Locust Job and then later explored in The Midnight Jury, reality here operates according to the rules of comic-book logic. We’ll be going back here soon.

Of course, this list is far from exhaustive and I’m sure as soon as I hit post I’ll find a handful more to add, but it covers the ones that have been specifically numbered and called out at one point or another. Just some fun facts for your Tuesday!

Pleased to announce that book one of the Castaways series is out on audio today, narrated by the fantastic Susannah Jones! We don't have a firm date on book two yet, but it sounds like it'll probably be out at the end of October, just about a month away.

Morning, all! (Morning…ish?) Just checking in with a little update on the State of the Schaefer and what’s coming down the pipeline. First up, thanks to Podium Publishing, the audiobook adaptation of the first Castaways novel is coming next Tuesday, September 30th, and is available for preorder now. The first two books were recorded back to back by the always-fantastic Susannah Jones, so hopefully I’ll have details on book two shortly after that. Rats, book three of the Castaways saga, is finished; I’m waiting for editing and cover design now, and I’m hoping for a December/January release.

I think I’ve mentioned the reason for the delay on the next Daniel Faust book (besides a few contracts needing attention first.) I’ve had a working outline for a while, but it’s been just that (“working,” not great), and I needed it to be better. I think I’ve finally cracked the code and sorted it out, and work on the new book is underway! The current plan is to release Castaways 3, then the next Faust, then the final two Castaways novels and finish up that series. (Yes, Harmony is coming back too, just gotta find the right spot in the schedule.)

I don’t have a release date for the first Neon Meridian novel; as soon as the folks from Aethon Books let me know, I’ll pass the word along. I can tell you that book one is in the can and ready to go, and I’ve delivered the manuscript for book two, which is currently in editing. Shouldn’t be too long, and I’m really excited to share this with you.

And with that, I’ve got to get back to work. Have a great week!

Good morning, friends! It’s been a bit, so just bringing you a quick update from the studio. My biggest news of the day is that Podium Publishing is bringing the Castaways series to audio, narrated by the fantastic Susannah Jones! Book one is up for preorder now, available on September 30th, and the first two books were recorded back to back so the sequel won’t take much longer.

On that note, I’m in early rewrites on Castaways book three, which I’m hoping to have out for the holidays. To paraphrase an old Saturday Night Live bit, this club has everything: void pirates, a return to a certain location from the Wisdom’s Grave trilogy, a crew of chaotic rat mercenaries (including an unhinged rat-girl who has dark designs on Dalton), a visit to Professor Chalk’s homeworld, a forty-foot-tall kaiju (AKA The Reason We Don’t Go to Yellow-Class Worlds), and Colin doing his best Ferris Bueller impression as he tries to coordinate an interdimensional rescue mission while faking a bad case of stomach flu. It should be a good time.

The upcoming Neon Meridian series, from Aethon Books, is getting ready to roll. Book one is finished, edited, and in the cover design phase right now, so I hope to have a release date for you soon. Book two (tentatively titled The Glitter Machine) has been finished, submitted, and is currently in editing.

I’ve been asked if more Daniel Faust and Harmony Black novels are coming, and the answer is yes, absolutely. I just have to prioritize books with solid publisher deadlines (‘cause folks get mad if you blow those), and shuffle stuff around in my writing schedule accordingly. The next Faust novel is outlined, but it needs more work before I start really breaking ground on it; the outline is currently…fine. It works. But I want it to be better than “fine,” and I’m going to keep plugging at the story until I feel like it’s really firing on all cylinders.

And that’s all I can talk about for now! I’m going to get right back to work over here, and put in some overtime (because tomorrow is Forbidden Door, a massive AEW pro wrestling pay-per-view special, and let’s be honest, I’m getting nothing done that day.) Have a great weekend!

Happy Thursday, friends! Delighted to announce that Firebreak, the second book in the Castaways series, is out now. And here’s the quick synopsis:

“When Amy Nettle was whisked from her dead-end small town life to the Saunders Academy, a brooding Gothic fortress in the heart of an endless storm-tossed ocean, she was promised an education in witchcraft. She got more than she bargained for. Beyond the brutal lessons that pushed her to her mental and physical limits, there were leviathans and killer mermaids in the water, lethal magic in the air, and an invader determined to make sure none of the new students survived long enough to see their graduation day.

”Then there was Vail, a freckled tomboy with a knack for pyromancy and a lasso wrapped around Amy’s heart. Together with their fellow castaways, a band of misfits from a handful of parallel realities, they exposed the plot against the school and sent its architects on the run. The enemy is still out there, though, in the wilds of Firebreak Island, and the Academy is battening down the hatches and going on a manhunt.

”There’s danger in the woods, but even more inside the fortress walls. When warring rivals drive a wedge between Amy and Vail, their loyalty is put to the test. Worse, there’s no denying the facts: one of the students is a traitor, trying to destroy the Academy from within. Their second year of occult education has just begun, and if the castaways can’t uncover the truth in time, there won’t be a third.”

The e-book and paperback versions are available now, and audio is coming soon; Susannah Jones will be recording the first two books back-to-back shortly. Meanwhile, the first book in the series, Castaways, is on sale for 99 cents until next Tuesday, making this a great time to jump in.

Reactions to this new story have been wonderful and I hope the first sequel lives up to your expectations. Huge thanks to Rebecca Frank, my cover artist, and Jay Ben Markson, my editor. We’re currently working on book three (out of five in total); after that, you can expect the next installment in the Daniel Faust saga to land toward the end of this year, followed by the next Harmony Black adventure.