Quick Pitch: The story of one girl’s extraordinary survival when caught in a mountainside avalanche atop a sentient glacier.
Description:

Frostfire is a tale of overcoming the odds, personal limitations and the mountain itself. Magic, gunpowder, monsters and more conspire to try and prevent a girl from reaching home and perhaps saving more lives than just her own.

Sabira is chosen for the honour of bonding a Frostsliver, an intelligent fragment of the living Glacier that spills from the top of her mountain home. Unsure of herself after decisions made years ago, she is forced to come to terms with her personal demons when she is trapped on the mountainside.

The only hope for her is to take up the power and responsibility of a Frostsliver and survive both the mountain’s extreme conditions and perhaps something worse – all assuming she can first get used to the voice of a glacier sounding in her head.

Status: Publication November 1st 2018 by Chicken House Books
Buy: Amazon Waterstones Book Depository
Target Audience: 10-14
Word Count:  60K

In Development

Quick Pitch: A tale of mystery and horror in a Venice-like fantasy city besieged by a magical plague.
Description:

The canal city of Morbetzia is stricken with a glowing cloud of magical disease that swells up stronger each night. Its only hope is those immune to the plague, pressed into service of the city’s corrupt nobility. A young thief must find a way to survive his new life – especially the things that stalk the streets at night under cover of plague.

He and his friends must survive fire and pestilence before descending into the bowels of the under-city. It is the only way to discover the truth behind the horror that has ruined so many lives.

Status: Submission Ready
Target Audience: 10-14
Word Count:  45K

Quick Pitch: Thunderbirds meets How to Train Your Dragon in fantasy Australia.
Description:

Noin Ninestitch has always wanted to pilot orgaphants, strange flying monsters used to rescue people from terrible disasters – including Noin herself. The problem is that there’s only one academy where you can learn – Razorpeak – and it only takes rich boys of noble families. She is none of those, but has a friend who is.

Hatching a plan for him to attend with her as his servant, they will have to navigate the academy’s secrets, make allies with outcasts and survive the attention of bullies. Especially if they are to have any hope of saving the day when thousands are put at risk and they are the only ones with the will to try.

Status: Submission Ready
Target Audience: 10-14
Word Count:  75K

Quick Pitch: Dystopian fantasy where verbal dissent against the system causes instant death.
Description:

Robin Belial is about to be Tested. It’s her one chance to be a Glass Mage, one of the powerful people that run her society. When things go unexpectedly though she finds herself publicly known and in a position to push for change in ways she has always wanted to – so long as she avoids the gaze of the Prism Mind, the ever watching sentinel of the isles. One word wrong, and she will burn on the spot, no matter where she is.

Status: Drafting
Target Audience: YA
Word Count:  90K

Quick Pitch: A young religious assassin filled with doubt is set to kill an agitator out in desert sands that flow like a sea.
Description:

The sandtide is always shifting, and no one knows that better than Godlance Malhemra, a boy assassin for the ruling religious order. They control the desert cities that float on a sea of sand that flows like water, full of dangerous creatures. Only by chaining up giant daemons called ifrit can the cities avoid being pulled beneath the sandtide.

With his own, much smaller daemon bound cat and owl familiars at his side, Malhemra has killed murderers and heretics for his masters – but now they have sent him after a new target, a woman who will challenge everything he has ever known.

Status: First Draft
Target Audience: YA
Word Count:  80K

Quick Pitch: An inventor girl and her party of oddballs searches for her father in the surface wasteland, hunted by monsters that live in the light.
Description:

Kari’s world fell apart once long ago, when a ball of fire burst from the land and scorched it, heralding the arrival of soul stealing monsters made of pure light: Lumaphage. That was centuries ago though, and her world has just fallen apart again – her father is missing, presumed dead.

Together with a disreputable band, including a maker of magical fireworks that’s blown herself up once already, a mapmaker allergic to his own ink, and a rough miner with a tragic past, Kari ventures up into danger and away from the safety of darkness. Ancient secrets, betrayal and monsters await.

Status: Drafting
Target Audience: 10-14
Word Count:  70K

Quick Pitch: Magical murder mystery in a desert trade caravan.
Description:

The Pillars Of Being is the story of a young man thrust into investigating the murder of his mentor, while attempting to hold together the trade caravan he lives in as it rushes to cross a great floodplain before the waters come again.

The setting is dry, hot and lonely, with inspiration pulled from African salt-flats. Animal life is rare, besides the odd vulture and the giant centipede-esque creatures that call the plains their home. It is to the canyons in this desolate space that the caravan in which the story is set must venture to acquire magic for trade. Every trip is a risk, for coming down from the basalt columns bordering the plains puts the caravan in danger from the floods that regularly swamp the land.

Already fraught with peril, things get much worse when the trade caravan’s officer of the law is murdered, and the only one with the skills to investigate is her young, partially trained apprentice.

Status: First Draft
Target Audience: YA
Word Count:  75K

Quick Pitch: Dresden Files style urban fantasy set in an Aztec inspired epic fantasy world.
Description:

Jom Briarthorn, disgraced shaman with few friends, did not hope for much more from life than a steady stream of jobs and not to be eaten by any of the clawed fiends that prowl the rainstorms that constantly press in on his tree-carved city, Taloc.

His days were spent hunting rogue shaman and more than a few times introducing them to the business end of a lightning bolt – that is, until an unexpected client comes to him for help.

Soon, what looked like hopeless missing person case sends him barrelling through the city’s underbelly, from its dark and illegal markets to the heights of the sacrificial temple whose magics are the only thing standing between Taloc and the ever encroaching rain.

Someone has an interest in organs, and the uses they can be put to. That and Briarthorn’s target add up to a plan that may threaten more than a few lives. A plan echoed by the laughter of skeletons…

Status: First Draft
Excerpts: 1.
Target Audience: Adult
Word Count:  Book 1 – 90K, Book 2 – Draft In Progress

Quick Pitch: From a village built on the back of a gigantic creature locked in combat with another, two children struggle to change the lives of everyone they know.
Description:

When a young and rebellious climber named Sam finds a message sent from the enemy it causes him and his best friend Elly to see the war with new eyes, and begin to see the humanity in their village’s foes.

Elly has a talent for folding, the magical skill of bringing life to creations made from the folded scales of the vast lizard-like animal that carries them. Together, they hatch a plan to use her gift to bring peace to both the giant beasts, known as Polahedra, and the settlements built upon them.

Status: Submission Ready – Runner Up for the Bloomsbury/National Literacy Trust New Children’s Author Prize 2015
Target Audience:  8-12
Word Count:  Book 1 – 30K, Book 2 – 35K, Book 3 – 40K, Book 4 – Draft in Progress

Quick Pitch: Epic fantasy in which a spellsinger, a crystal diver and a smith’s apprentice race across a continent to prevent doom from a falling star.
Description:

Vast leviathans glow from below the waves and stars above shine both day and night, lighting the continent of Krayt. One of those stars is falling and as it does, the smallest sliver of its spellsteel core ejects from its corona, herald to its parent.

Erisem, a spellsinger whose magic flows from the beauty of her song chases that fragment of a star, to prove to the world the danger, but others crave it for their own ends. When two young friends find the shard of metal, they have no idea what dangers they have brought upon themselves, or what hope they have bought the world.

The star’s metal will be fought over and jealously guarded. It will be a warning for rulers and nations. It will be shaped and wielded with skill honed hands.

It will be spellforged.

Status: First Draft
Excerpts: Chapter 1 (Erisem)
Target Audience: YA/Adult
Word Count:  250K