Important news!

If you love Muldoon, that is. Well, okay, maybe it's more than that...

Good morning/afternoon/evening, subscribers!

This week is what we used to have in secondary school—consolidation week, and it was actually all right. We would catch up on homework and do classwork we hadn’t finished (or if you’d finished everything, you just had a week off homework). This consolidation week is slightly different, because I’m still very much here working, but I wanted to recap on everything that’s been happening recently at A Work Of Fiction.

Firstly, I’d like to say welcome to new subscribers, too! Here you’ll find a range of short fiction as well as serialised novels and other things I felt like writing. I send out two free posts a week (Friday and Sunday when there’s a novel to serialise) and one paid post every two weeks on a Tuesday. At the moment, the paid post is for the Muldoon book club where we go behind the scenes on The Ring.

The Ring is in the running for The Kindle Storyteller competition (UK) 2025.

This is big news. I missed out on the competition last year because Oceanus wasn’t released until September, and the deadline for this contest is 31st August. I’ve entered The Ring, as it’s only just been released, and I think it stands a strong chance of consideration among the gritty modern crime thrillers and non-fiction psychology books in the running. This competition is awarding £20,000 to the winner. This is life-changing money for me and would free me up massively to pursue my writing career. If you saw any of my notes recently, you’ll know that things have been really hard and I’ve been pushed to the point where I’ll have to take on extra work to pay the bills (running two small businesses as a parent of 3 young kids isn’t enough), so entering this competition is really exciting. Also, it’s just fun to enter a contest, especially one for indies.

This summer, you can help me win the UK leg of this competition.

Here’s how you can help The Ring win:

• Read The Ring. It doesn’t matter what format. It’s currently available on Kindle Unlimited, too! If you’re a paid subscriber, you have access to the free ebook.

• Leave a review for The Ring. This is probably the most important of the bullet points, to be honest. Amazon have said that readers play a huge part in choosing the winner. I don’t know how much they’re looking at reviews specifically (some authors on there have way bigger fan bases, so have an advantage there) but it doesn’t hurt to leave one. Please leave one on goodreads too, if you can, as it sends a lot of readers through to amazon.

• If you received an ARC of The Ring, now is a great time to leave a review!

• Tell your friends about the book. Share it on social media, for example. Tell your book club, your golf club, your colleagues! Tell someone.

• Share a photo of the book on your social feed or blog. This goes a surprisingly long way, as I’ve seen. I don’t know if it just brings it to life for people? They see that you’re reading a real book so they are interested. It’s so much better than the author being the only person sharing photos of it. Like, duh, of course I think you should read it.

Not sure if The Ring is for you?

You can read the free sample on amazon right now. I’ve done all I can to convince people. I’m just letting it speak for itself now. If you click on the image below, it will take you to a website where you can choose which online store you’d like to buy it from. You don’t have to get it on amazon if you don’t want to. There is also a sample on google books.

Other things for your consideration:

I was so happy to see that The Saga of Abalonius Clew was a success! This felt so risky, because I know a lot of you are interested in the horror that I write, but I spread over a few genres generally. This was an idea for a novel that would act as a frame for my fairy tales. So far, so good. You can read chapter 1 here.

The Magpie

Again, a huge thank you for reading this one. The fairy tales are a sweet palate cleanser between gritty Muldoon mysteries.

Book 3 of Muldoon

Oh yes, just slipping this one in here. If you loved The Shabti, I think you’re going to like the next Muldoon novel. Hoping for a Christmas release, but I’m not putting too much pressure on myself. That’s all I can tell you for now!

That’s all for today. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you for being here. Have a lovely weekend, and I’ll see you on Sunday for more of The Ring.

P.S Good luck to Gabriel O. Maestas as he’s entered the US leg with Some Thing Wild.