Even on such a clear night, the starlight wasn’t enough to make her hand look anything other than black. She might have swatted the bug; she might not. Mika resisted the urge to wipe her hand on her trousers, and instead, wiped it on a large leaf. In the city, a bug smeared across her clothes would draw attention. There were no bugs in the city.

On she crept. Carefully stepping over the tall grasses and walking well clear of the dangling vines. The starlight revealed their dark outlines, even if she couldn’t see much detail. But she didn’t need to see the detail; she knew the way well enough. Half her life had been spent in the forests that surrounded the city of Zarzon, and which covered much of the planet Zarg. She had learned long ago to feel more at home among the wildlands than amid the bustling hubbub of her own kind.

Around a big, round bush with grey-looking flowers—they’d be yellow in daylight, past the three skinny trees with the drooping leaves, and straight on to the pile of rocks covered in vines. Rocks that would look like they belonged where they lay to any Zargon other than her or Hoki. Rocks that looked ordinary. Rocks that were riddled with anthrophcite; the rare mineral that blocked the beams and sensors of Zargon tech. It was the mineral that meant the hidden tunnel would go unnoticed.

Mika stopped short of the pile and traced the trapdoor edge with her fingers, finding vines that had grown too long and moving them out of the way without damaging them. They helped disguise the door. It was rare for other Zargons to enter the Wild—very rare. But Hoki had taught her the importance of hiding the secret route into the city.

She found the catch and released it. The rock-covered door hinged open, its ascent helped by the hydraulics in the hinges’ pistons. A soft squeak gave the only hint of the simple bit of tech in this primitive place.

Mika crept into the tunnel, pulling the door closed behind her, and left the roar of the forest behind her. The chorus of insects, chirping birds, and creeping reptiles was easy to ignore until it was gone. Then the absence of noise was deafening.

With wide eyes and not a hint of light to fill them, Mika headed down the tunnel with her fingers and toes as her guide. Feeling her way along the secret passage, she slid blindly through a route she had followed many times before. This was not the first time she had snuck unnoticed into the city of her birth. But regardless, it didn’t stop her trembling as she neared the tunnel’s end.

A smooth steel door.

Inside the city, a steel door was normal. It wasn’t an anomaly. It wasn’t something anyone would suspect. Mika found the control pad and pressed her thumb on the sensor. It shot up into the ceiling.

With a racing heart and squinting eyes, she edged out into the glare of the artificial light. Pausing as the door shot down behind her, she lifted her heavy lids as her eyes adjusted.

Grey everywhere.

The default colour of the Zargon. The colour of steel, most stone, and Zargon skin. So dreary compared to the greens of the leaves, the browns of the tree trunks, and the rainbow mix of the blooms in the Wild. Every time she came here, the colour alone made her heart sink.

‘No need to look so miserable.’ The voice came from nowhere.

Mika recognised it, but she couldn’t see it. Was government on to her? Had the AI been hacked? Were they trying to lull her into a false sense of security? She spun on the spot. Eyes searching the room before settling on the controls to open the door she’d just come through. She snapped her thumb towards the sensor pad.

‘Leaving so soon?’

The door at the far end of the windowless, empty, grey room shot open. A smiling Zargon with weathered skin and a hunched back edged through, her walking stick tapping the shiny grey floor as she walked.

‘Sark!’ Mika let out a long sigh of relief.

‘Who else were you expecting?’

‘Um, well, anyone, I suppose. What if you’d…’ she left the sentence hanging. Sark was well beyond the average age of natural death for a Zargon.

‘Then Hoki would have been told!’ Sark snapped, answering the question she’d guessed Mika was about to ask. ‘Here in the city, everything is automated. Even notifications of one’s demise. Hoki would have been alerted, as would an associate of mine who would ensure no government agents came poking around my basement.’

‘But what if your associate—’

‘You worry far too much for someone on a secret mission. How the heck do you expect to break into an apartment if you get jittery just walking into one where you’re welcome?’

Mika took a deep breath. Her mission was far more important than her own fears. She resolved to bury her concerns. She’d succeed, or she’d be caught. And if she was caught… she was determined not to dwell on that outcome.

‘You have blood on your neck.’ Sark advanced, whipping a wood fibre sheet from her pocket as she did.

How is it that old people always have cleaning sheets stored about their person? Mika mused to herself, smirking. Her smirk turning to a scowl as Sark spat on the sheet and reached up to her neck.

‘Hold still!’ Sark snapped.

Mika grimaced and dutifully leant forwards while the old Zargon dabbed away the blood.

‘There.’ Sark stepped back. ‘Bug bite?’

‘Yep.’

Sark rolled her eyes. ‘You will insist on living in the Wild. But I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve tried to convince Hoki to move back into civilisation. I keep telling her that with the right identity programming and the right places to live, you can live in clear sight and still be off the radar of government.’

Mika gave Sark a warm smile. ‘Hoki knows; she just likes it in the Wild, I think.’

‘You’re not forced to live with her.’

‘I know.’ Mika was going to say more, but she wasn’t sure what exactly kept her out in the Wild with Hoki. Was it loyalty? Was it fear of the city? Was it love of the Wild? Whatever the reason, until she found out the truth about her mala, she planned to stay in the Wild. She’d come this far, and she wasn’t about to do anything that might risk her progress.

Mika pulled her focus from the aged Zargon and looked ahead at the open door. It led to another room, one filled with shelves full of boxes, broken bits of computing equipment waiting to be fixed, and an eclectic assortment of objects Sark had collected during her long career as a field agent. Objects she probably ought not to have kept for personal use—which is probably why they were in her basement and not on display in her ground-floor apartment above.

At the far side of the storeroom was a staircase, and the route to the outside.

‘I suppose it’s time you got going. The ulterior period won’t last forever, and you don’t want to be snooping around a high-class apartment block in the overt. There will be far too many snooty Zargons around.’

‘Of course, I aim to be back in the Wild before dawn.’

‘Off you go then.’ Sark gestured towards the door. Mika set off at once, without a glance back.

She headed through the storeroom, up the stairs, and into Sark’s apartment. Down the corridor and out towards the front door; she turned the archaic manual handle to let herself out. Automated front doors were all too often hacked, Sark had told her. She pushed it closed behind her with a satisfying click.

The fake daylight lit up the city bright as day. There was no nighttime in the city. In the ulterior, artificial light rained down from the massive shield that isolated the city from the Wild. During the natural daytime, known as the overt, the artificial light dimmed to nothing, and the real sunlight was allowed to penetrate the dome. If Zargons wanted nighttime, they’d programme their windows to create that effect.

Daytime was constant in the city of Zarzon, but still, most Zargons preferred to go about their business in the overt, making the streets as quiet right now as they were ever likely to get.

Built as it was at the dome’s edge, Sark’s apartment block was small. There wasn’t enough height here for a tall building. The buildings got progressively bigger the closer to the city centre you got. The richest Zargons lived in the tallest buildings. The home of the Zargon she hoped to break into worked for an organisation known as The Cooperative. And the Cooperative was not short of very rich donors.

Cracked concrete, broken slabs, windows that needed cleaning. Mika plodded through the dreary-looking outskirts of the city of Zarzon as casually as she could.

Buildings grew taller, steel grew shinier, and the walkways began to lead uphill. Respectable Zargons didn’t walk at street level. That’s why street level was ignored. Street level was where the grime collected. Where the abandoned wheeled vehicles lay broken and forgotten. Where the Zargons whom the respectable folk would prefer didn’t exist lived. Where Mika had spent her early childhood. Before her mala died.

She took a final breath of fresh air before continuing into the smog that lingered in the forgotten streets. Mika found a path that led through the muck and followed it.

The buildings grew taller, the smog grew thicker, the streets grew darker.

The hum of the city grew louder.

High above, where the wealthy Zargons lived, the air filtration systems kept apartments fresh. Transporters buzzed. Some Zargons chatted—the few who were about. The retired Zargons, most likely. Those who liked to avoid the crowds enough to live their lives in the ulterior.

She picked a route which would take her right to the base of the block where her target lived. One that would keep her well away from the block she’d spent her early years in. Her final glimpse of her mala dead on the floor still haunted her. She didn’t need reminding of that horror. The purpose of her mission alone was enough to ensure it never strayed too far from her mind. But she needed answers. She needed to know if her mala had died for nothing, or something. She needed to know who was to blame.

Mika had never forgotten the face of the Zargon who’d visited their apartment just tarns before the heavy knock came; the heavy knock which sent her mala into a panic. The knock that made her take one look through the spyhole in the door and tell Mika to run. To climb out of the window. To hide. To not come back for at least a storn.

A storn later, Mika’s mala was dead.

For cycles Mika had searched for that face. Now she’d found her. She was called Anark, and Mika had learned where she lived. But that was all she’d been able to discover. The only way to learn more was to talk to her face to face.

There was another Zargon ahead. They took one look at Mika and went another way. On she went. A sorry Zargon with her head hung low shuffled down the street. Limp arms, filthy clothes, a swagger that screamed too much castabar. Mika took a wide berth.

Paw prints crossed her path. Signs of a scort. A venomous scavenger that somehow survived in these parts, despite the authorities’ best attempts to eliminate them. No wild animals were allowed to live in Zarzon. No one and nothing that didn’t conform was openly allowed to be free here.

On she went.

Left, right, round a corner, and she was there. She’d rehearsed the route enough times.

The street level door. All buildings had them; even the tallest, shiniest buildings in the city. All buildings had foundations and emergency exits.

The steel slab stood solid with no controls. There was no way to open it from the outside—unless you had the right gadget.

Hoki had built one. Mika fished it out of her pocket. The small dome looked like nothing special; like part of a sensor, maybe. Smooth and black with a rounded top and a flat bottom. Mika held it in one hand, and with the other, she pressed a button on her wrist monitor. A signal shot into the security camera, sending it on loop so she wouldn’t be noticed—she hoped. That’s what Hoki had told her would happen. With her heart now slamming her blue blood through her grey limbs, she advanced to the steel slab, dome in hand. She pressed its flat bottom on the smooth steel and held her breath.

One, two, she counted to three in her head. Blood pulsing past her ears, before she got to four, the door shot upwards.

Mika nearly dropped the dome. Sweaty fingers kept their grip somehow. She stashed it in her pocket and slipped inside. The door dropped behind her.

One rubber-soled boot in front of the other. A quiet thud echoed off the ceramic tile, juddering round the empty space.

Empty and dark.

A hum of the air filtration systems filled the quiet.

A single red light shone in the blackness.

Mika crossed the empty space. Thudding across the tiles towards the doorway. This one had controls; not that she could see them. The dark kept her hidden, and Mika liked it that way. Plus, all use of controls was monitored. Hoki’s dome made tech work without a trace.

Mika fingered the red light, tracing it to the control panel, then finding the frame of the doorway. She found the door itself and placed her dome on its surface. It didn’t open, but something clunked, then creaked, then swooshed. The elevator was moving down to the empty ground floor.

A thump. And the door began to slide. Mika pulled her dome away and let the door open, revealing a small, illuminated space—the elevator.

A glance at her wrist monitor ensured the cameras were still being fooled. If anyone cared to check, the trip to the ground floor would be considered a malfunction. Mika stepped inside, then waited.

Elevators defaulted to the top floor at the ulterior. They waited nearest to the richest Zargons’ apartments to transport their owners to street level after a period of rest. Wealthy Zargons rested during the ulterior.

The elevator zipped to the top of the building soon enough. With the help of her door-opener, she exited, then navigated through a couple more doors and down one flight of stairs before she found herself at Anark’s door. One last door to open.

Mika took a deep breath. She reached into another pocket and pulled out a small, cylindrical object. It looked just like a pen to the untrained eye. Except that this pen was deadly.

She used her dome to open the final door. It zipped up. Mika stepped inside. The door closed behind her.

Darkness.

A thumping heart.

‘Don’t move.’

Mika froze.

‘Did you really think you could get into my apartment, or even my building, without me noticing?’

Mika’s jaw sagged. Her tongue curled, but she couldn’t form words.

‘Slice, lights on,’ the voice ordered—Anark, Mika assumed.

The apartment was illuminated, revealing a figure stood rigid, dressed in a sleeping shirt with a gun pointed firmly at Mika. Mika hoped it was set to stun, but she couldn’t be sure.

‘Drop it.’ The figure nodded at Mika’s pen.

Mika opened her fingers. The pen clattered on the white tiles.

‘And that.’ She indicated towards the dome in Mika’s other hand. Mika obliged.

‘A, a, Anark?’ Mika stuttered, finding her tongue at last.

‘Slice, seal apartment,’ Anark ordered.

A brief shimmer rippled down the walls.

‘Apartment sealed,’ the artificial intelligence system replied.

Anark’s head tilted, and a smile crept up her mouth rims. ‘Got lost on your way to the academy, did you?’

Mika scowled. ‘I’m twenty-eight cycles old!’

‘Which is still young enough to be in education. I studied until I was thirty.’

Mika’s bottom mouth rim quivered.

‘Something’s telling me you left school some time ago. Very unusual. I wouldn’t have expected an uneducated Zargon to make it all the way into my apartment without altering security. Intriguing.’ Anark rubbed her chin. ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m not uneducated!’ Mika snapped.

‘When did you leave school?’

‘I, I, um…’ Mika had spent a total of three lunans in school. Her mala and Hoki had taught her most of what she knew.

‘Slice, run identity check on the intruder.’

‘Acknowledged,’ the AI replied. ‘Scan commencing.’

Mika felt a brief tingle shoot through her core.

‘Intruder is recorded as Zargon RJ35489, known name is Mika.’

Mika’s eyes bulged.

‘So, you are in the system…’ Anark narrowed her eyes. ‘Slice, provide a summary of Mika’s log.’

‘Mika is recorded as being a naturally born specimen. Mala deceased, dama unknown. She was enrolled in the institution aged eight cycles old and subsequently went missing three lunans later. Subject is presumed dead.’

‘A natural-born?’ Anark’s face exploded into a grin. ‘How interesting. Do you know how rare your kind are?’

‘Who killed my mala?’ she exploded. Mika was shaking.

‘I have no idea who your mala was. How would I know who killed her?’

‘Twenty cycles ago, you came into our apartment block. You knocked on our door. You said, “Is that yours?”’ The words had echoed in Mika’s head, as ingrained as Anark’s face. ‘You left, then tarns later they came. They killed her. It was because of you! We had lived in peace until then. No one bothered us. It was you who brought them!’

Anark’s mouth rims creased into a pout, her heavy lids narrowing her large black eyes slightly as if in thought. After a few tense moments, her pout became a half-smile.

‘You’re the youngling who was clinging to your mala’s leg. I remember. I was looking for someone, but your mala wouldn’t do. She didn’t seem desperate enough.’

‘They came after you left,’ Mika blurted. ‘They came, and they killed her. Who was it? Why did you send them?’

Anark shook her head. ‘I didn’t send anyone. You and your mala were of little consequence to me. Not then. But I do think my employers would be very interested to learn about the development of a natural-born who grew up outside the system; you could provide a very interesting subject of study.’

Anark straightened her arm. It was a tell she should never have made. Mika dived.

The shaft of laser energy shot through her shadow. Mika was on the floor. She snatched her dome and threw it at the door. It opened, the dome sliding off and smashing on the tiles. Mika grabbed her pen and scrambled to her feet; an instant later, a beam of laser hit the floor where she’d been. She sprinted towards the apartment doorway out of sight, another laser beam chasing her as she went. It missed by a hair’s breadth.

Down the corridor, round the corner. Doors opening for her as she went. Getting out was easy. It was a safety feature of building design to let occupants escape the building with ease.

She pounded down the stairwell, taking the steps three at a time. Chest heaving and pulse racing, she made it to the ground floor. But it wasn’t dark; it was lit up, and Anark was there. The elevator was quicker than Mika, it seemed.

Anark’s gun was aimed; the trigger was about to be pulled. But Mika’s reflexes were fast. She’d spent much of her life surviving in the Wild; life in the Wild had made her quick—quicker than Anark, it seemed.

She pointed her pen; she pressed the button on its tail. It fired.

The beam was on target.

Mika knew how to hunt.

It hit Anark in the belly. She bent double, dropping her gun. Mika sped past her, running for the door that led to the street. Slamming the release button. A tense orn passed and then another before it finally opened. She sprinted out into the grimy streets of Zarzon. A place where no respectable Zargon would follow.

Charlotte Goodwin is a science fantasy author who on this occasion, is branching out into sci-fi. Discover here novels, here:

www.charlottegoodwin.co.uk

For years we’ve been told about the problems associated with over-population: more demand for resources, more natural environments being destroyed, more pollution. But what happens when our numbers start to decline?

Ultimately, if we fail to have enough children as a species, we will eventually die out.

This isn’t a problem for me or you. We’ll be long gone by the time this is a significant problem—in most countries, at least. But in the long term, what do you think humanity will do to resolve this?

I write science fantasy novels; which is fantasy blended with sci-fi. In my case, I have a scientific basis for the magic system on my far-away magical planet, and alien observers who study the lifeforms on the various inhabited planets in my made-up universe, including my fantasy planet and Earth. They aren’t supposed to interfere, but one day, one of them did, and a whole saga unfolds…

I’m not going to start talking about my books; instead, I’m going to focus on the aliens I mentioned. They play a relatively minor role in my novels, but I created a whole society for them to live in, nonetheless.

In many ways, I based them on what I think the human race could look like in the future. I think that technology will one day allow us to create all our food in labs or with replicators, meaning farming becomes a redundant practice. This sees the land outside of towns and cities returned to wilderness. I think nation states will eventually merge. In 700AD, there were seven kingdoms in England, three in Wales, and various kingdoms and tribes in Scotland. Now all these kingdoms form part of the United Kingdom. The trend over time is for smaller countries to merge to become bigger ones. I also think our falling future population collapse will eventually be solved with technology.

My aliens are called Zargons, as they originate on the planet Zarg. On Zarg, all the things I mention above have come to pass. Almost all Zargons live in cities surrounded by climate-controlled bubbles. Each home has its own replicator for food. The planet has a single government. And children are born in labs.

Scientific reality is getting very close to allowing this to happen for real. Some sources suggest that an artificial womb designed to save extremely premature babies could be developed in 5 to 10 years. And although the technology to grow a baby from conception to birth in an artificial womb may be decades away, scientific advances mean this is more or less inevitable eventually.

I’d suggest my made-up aliens are several hundred, or possibly thousands of years ahead of humans in terms of their scientific development. Their population exploded, then collapsed a long time ago. After financial incentives and social policies failed to encourage Zargons to have more children, they eventually started growing babies in labs, then raising them in institutions.

A whole generation of Zargons grew up without parents, and over the years, the numbers of these institution-raised Zargons grew. Eventually, they became the majority and started to look upon natural-born Zargon children as taboo. It was assumed they’d have genetic defects and lower intelligence. The parents of any natural-born children that came to the attention of the authorities were pressured into giving their offspring up to be raised in institutions—the raising of children by parents was too variable in quality to be considered a reliable way to raise a decent citizen.

Most of my adult Zargons are completely content with the status quo. They were all raised in institutions themselves and see nothing wrong with it. This method of child-rearing leads to a rather homogenous workforce, which can be guided and trained to work in areas that suit their aptitudes.

This sounds terribly dystopian, and perhaps a little idealistic. It also ignores human nature—humans are programmed to want to procreate, and I don’t think any amount of state control will remove that instinct. It ignores the biological reality that if couples are having sex, some will end up pregnant. But my aliens aren’t human, so I can get away with overlooking these things.

Except I don’t do this entirely.

In my third novel, a secret agent on my alien planet comes across a Zargon child with her mother. It’s a fleeting incident that has no impact on the rest of the story; the incident just serves as a way of showing the Zargon society has something of an underbelly.

You see, my alien race aren’t all perfect conformists. There are good ones and bad ones, and some who are still in touch with their own wants and needs beyond what society expects.

Natural born children still exist, but they’re rare.

I often wonder about the future of humanity. It irritates me that I have up to maybe 80-100 years of life, and that’s it. I won’t get to see how we evolve. I might get to see lab-born children in my lifetime; I might not. I’m unlikely to ever see massive population collapse though, based on what I can see from various population predictions. A bit of a contraction? Probably. But collapse? Unlikely. That will be a problem for my grandchildren, if I’m blessed with any.

One reason I love to write is because what I write today will survive long after I’m gone. I wonder if a lab-born child will ever read this and liken me to someone like Jules Verne who predicted worldwide telegraph networks, automated high-speed transit, glass skyscrapers, and video-call technology in his 1863 science fiction novel: Paris in the Twentieth Century.

Maybe.

As for the natural born Zargon who has a tiny role in my books? I didn’t forget her. In fact, she dwelled on my mind to the extent that I decided to write her story.

What if a Zargon grows up outside of the system, away from the institutions, and desperate to find out how and why her mother was killed?

Curious?

Mika: A Zargon’s Tale, The Search for Truth, is a completed novella that I’m releasing on Substack a chapter at a time on Wednesdays. Chapter 1 is out on 2^nd September.

New to this story?

Read Chapter 1

7. The Chase

Goblin Wood, Atropia

Borgon returned that evening with another thirty goblins; Egwin arrived the following day with forty. Goblin wood was flooded with the creatures that gave it its name. They came in such numbers from Hosta that there were entire clans made up of outlanders—clans that were large enough to steal a territory of their own in the crowded forest.

More goblins meant more hunting. More hunting meant less game. Food was growing short in the forest, while the goblins grew ever more angry at the humans that would hunt them if they left their sanctuary. So when the chance came to hunt their would-be hunters, the clans were all too happy to take it.

And they were hungry.

There were enough of them now to dare an attack on the seasoned soldiers. The forest was goblin territory. There were plenty of places for them to sneak and hide, and little room for the soldiers’ mounts to manoeuvre.

Thirty men and their mounts would feed the goblins for days.

It was now time to close in.

Grinthy led the column of her kind over the hoofprints with the three chiefs on her tail, ahead of their clans, who fought amongst themselves to be at the front of the pack.

All of them ran.

Grinthy closed her panting mouth and breathed a long breath through her long nose. Horse and dog and man mingled in the air and left their mark. Their scent was strong, and it was growing stronger.

A yap.

She thought she’d imagined it at first, but then there was another. She could hear their dogs; had they smelt the goblins? Were they warning their masters of their impending death?

Grinthy smiled at the thought of their fear.

On they ran.

The yaps grew louder, and soon the sound of men’s voices sliced through the forest. But it was not the sound of idle chatter; it was the sound of orders.

‘Stop!’ Grinthy ordered, holding out her arms to block the chiefs.

‘Who are you to give me orders!’ one of the three chiefs growled.

Grinthy met his stare with narrowing yellow eyes. Drool leaked from the fat chief’s mouth.

‘The Atropians have stopped; they’re rallying. If we keep going, we’ll run straight into their swords.’

‘You just want to keep me from the meat!’ his podgy fingers grabbed Grinthy’s arm, shoving it off his rolls of fat. She let him do it before snatching her dagger from her belt.

‘I want to eat as much as you. But you can’t eat when you’re dead!’

‘The she-goblin talks sense,’ chief Jungrik growled. ‘Listen, what do you hear?’

Snorts of goblins, rustling leaves and yapping dogs rippled through the forest.

‘The men are quiet,’ the third chief, a stocky goblin with a crooked nose, hissed.

‘And the horses are still,’ Grinthy added. ‘Can you hear hoofbeats?’

The fat chief snarled.

‘They are waiting for us,’ Chief Jungrik hissed.

‘Only a fool would rush to meet their prey head on. A wise hunter takes their quarry by surprise,’ Grinthy said.

As was the goblin way, she and the three chiefs resolved to sneak and circle the soldiers. Smaller and weaker than the humans, the goblins’ strength lay in trickery and stealth. The Atropian soldiers were skilled killers and were much feared. In a fair fight, the goblins would lose every time.

On hands and feet, Grinthy crept. Bare feet picking through the twigs to find the soft, silent mud. Fingers feeling through leaves and holding her body low amongst the ferns.

She picked a path around the soldiers’ flank, with fellow goblins all around her.

Snorting horses, yapping dogs, bits clicking in teeth. Then whoosh. A goblin screamed; branches snapped. A figure crashed from the boughs of a tree and landed in the ferns with an arrow in her back.

Another whoosh, another scream. The Atropians were looking for them, and some of the goblins were not as well hidden as they’d perhaps thought.

The time for stealth was over.

Everywhere, goblins broke cover. Grinthy sprang to her feet, hammer and dagger in hand. Twigs and leaves slapped her face, ferns tangled her legs. Branches sprung back in her wake, ferns snapped free from their stalks as she charged.

In this part of the forest, the trees grew sparse enough to let the soldiers spread out a little. Still mounted, swords in hand, they’d formed a ring of steel. But they couldn’t charge, they couldn’t move; all they could do was wait for the goblins to come.

And come they did.

Swords slashed, horses stomped, goblins were slain.

Grinthy ran, trampling over the corpse of her kin, dodging round another, she dashed towards the hooves of a mount and skidded under its belly. A swing of her hammer broke its knee, a thrust of her dagger pierced its skin through the ribs and into the chest. She yanked her blade free and sprang clear of the screaming horse.

Rearing, it kicked a goblin to its front, spilling its rider behind, then collapsed onto the trampled bracken.

The long blades of the soldiers’ kin still swung to her left and her right. Green blood sprayed from their tips, splattering her face as a goblin fell. But she barely noticed; she had her eyes on her quarry. The fallen man was struggling to his feet. Grinthy would see that he never stood again.

She sprang, bouncing onto the dying horse, one foot toed its ribs as her momentum swept her forwards. Bloody dagger pointing at her prey, hammer ready to swing.

Clang.

With one knee on the ground, and a blade brought to bear a moment too late, it was easy for Grinthy to knock the soldier’s sword to one side with her hammer. Her dagger hit home, pricking human flesh and sinking through his neck.

One strained cough, one glance at his killer, then his eyes rolled and his body sagged.

Grinthy pulled her dagger free and sped his fall with a kick.

She grinned.

She’d killed a human; her first. Taken the life of a man who’d probably killed hundreds of her kind—who’d murdered children in cold blood, like the men who’d killed her children and mate. One human was dead at her hand, and it felt good.

Ravenous for more blood, she spun, searching for her next victim, but there were few left alive.

All around her, goblins were killing the humans. Mounted as they were with no space to charge, they were ill suited to fighting amongst the trees. Goblins leapt from branches to attack from above. Goblins hacked at the horses’ legs so they threw their riders. Goblins were ready to finish off the fallen soldier.

Grinthy wanted to spill more blood, but there was soon none left to take.

Grinthy was hungry. They were all hungry. It wasn’t long before the surviving goblins had eaten their fill. Horses were left untouched; it was the man-flesh they all wanted. The humans tasted better, and to eat your enemy gave you strength. To kill them sent a ripple of ecstasy through your core. Grinthy’s appetite for food was abated; her appetite for death had only just been stirred.

She licked her dagger clean and tucked it in her belt before heading a little way from the gorging goblins and deeper into the forest. She wanted to know what the Atropians had been chasing.

Where the trampled mess made by thirty horses ended, a new track was clear to see. More horses, which meant more riders. She studied the tracks, following them a little way to work out how many there were. It was soon easy to tell.

The realm of Vallume was near, its elven magic spread beyond its impenetrable borders and infiltrated the forest. Here, the dense shrubs struggled to grow, lichens failed to flourish, and trees grew more sparse. In places, the forest opened up enough to allow grass to grow; here, the riders had moved to ride side by side, and she could see four distinct tracks.

She gave each track a good sniff. The smell of horse filled her nostrils, but there was a hint of something else there, too. Humans. Her mouth began to water. Humans on three of the horses, certainly. But the fourth? It was a smell she didn’t recognise.

She pulled her nose from the ground and looked into the forest, her thin lips pursed.

‘Three humans and one elf.’ Daganne’s voice made Grinthy jump.

Grinthy spun.

‘You followed me?’ Grinthy growled.

‘And you only just noticed. You need to be more careful, or you might find a dagger in your back. Those other chiefs will only let you live while you’re useful to them.’

‘Chief Jungrik said he might help me lead his!’ She realised it sounded ridiculous as soon as she said it. No chief shared their power.

‘He’ll try to kill me, won’t he?’

‘Him or one of the others. They keep you alive as long as you’re useful. They work together as long as it suits them. Then they’ll fight.’

‘Or just go their separate ways if they think they’re evenly matched.’

‘That might be so for the three other clans, but yours is too small. You need to kill a chief and take his place if you’re to survive.’

Grinthy nodded. ‘But we’ve humans to kill first. They kill us when we’re on their plains. We should kill them when they’re in our forest.’

She padded back to the group of goblins. Most had finished eating now, and lay resting, or squabbling. She marched into the midst and climbed atop the corpse of a horse and raised her hammer high in the air. ‘More prey awaits! Let’s hunt!’ she screamed.

All around her, goblins stopped eating, resting or squabbling and stared.

‘Who put you in charge!’ the fat chief snarled.

Chief Jungrik stepped her way, swinging a severed arm by the hand. ‘We’ve plenty of meat here, why risk hunting more?’

‘We number over a hundred!’ Grinthy snapped her reply. ‘How long will this meat last?’ She continued before anyone had chance to answer. ‘It will keep us full for days to come, but why not have enough to last a few days more? The game runs thin in the forest, but there are more humans to be hunted.’ She pointed her hammer towards the track. ‘I scouted ahead. Three humans and an elf scurry north with their horses, heading to Vallume most likely. If they make it past the border, we cannot follow.’ She raised her thin lip past her sharp teeth. ‘We lost few goblins in killing thirty seasoned soldiers.’ Grinthy screamed at the audience of the three clans. ‘We risk little hunting four. We move now, before it’s too late!’

The fat chief plodded to the midst of the ring of onlookers. ‘I’ve never tasted elf. I’ll hunt with you if you let me have the first bite of the pointy-eared.’ He swung his stare towards the other chiefs, his request directed at them, not Grinthy. But she didn’t care. He could eat every bite of the elf for all she cared. She had no quarrel with the elves; it was the humans she wanted to kill.

‘We leave a guard on the meat,’ Chief Jungrik said, raising his severed arm high. ‘A few from each of our clans, then we hunt. Let’s kill all the humans we can.’

*

Grinthy was soon running through the forest once more with three chiefs and their clans on their tail. Their numbers were lower. Thirteen had been killed by the Atropian soldiers. A fourteenth died in an argument over the heart of a corpse after, and five from each clan had been left with the meat. But there were still close to a hundred chasing just three humans and an elf.

Daganne pushed past the chiefs and edged to Grinthy’s side. ‘The elf is a sorcerer,’ she whispered to Grinthy as they ran.

‘How do you know?’ Grinthy whispered back.

Who do you think built the tree-cage the Atropians were trapped in at the forest edge?

Grinthy snorted. ‘You’re guessing it was the same elf.’

‘Elves rarely leave Vallume, you think there are two of them in our woods and we just missed the other?’

‘So it’s a sorcerer,’ she conceded with a snarl. ‘Magic has its limits, and there’s too many of us for one sorcerer to handle. Besides, if it kills enough of the other goblins, it will make it easier to kill their chief.’ She smiled; Daganne mirrored it.

They rested a little in the last hours of the day, then set off again into the darkness. The thinner canopy let in enough moonlight for the goblins to see almost as clear as day. The humans and their horses would be slowed by the darkness, but it didn’t slow the goblins.

Grinthy suspected they were gaining on their prey, and when she spotted a dead horse on their trail, she was certain.

‘They probably ran it to death,’ Daganne told her.

Grinthy spun to the three chiefs. ‘They’ve lost a horse. Soon they will lose more. We will be upon them before dawn!’ They nodded without question. She set off again, grinning. They took her word, and it felt good. It would feel better when she took one of their clans for her own. Or maybe she’d take all of their clans.

Dawn was close when she spotted three more horses, but these were on their feet. Heads low, ears drooping, even as they looked towards the goblins, they didn’t bolt. Grinthy was almost within touching distance when the three of them resigned to run. But they didn’t run far. A galloping horse is far quicker than a goblin, but the horses didn’t gallop for long. They ran until they dropped, and the goblins soon ended the lives of the exhausted horses.

Horsemeat made a satisfying breakfast, but Grinthy was determined she’d be eating human flesh for lunch. They were soon on the move again.

The forest grew thinner still. Bracken became wild garlic. Low branches were rare. Shrubs made way for forest clearings, and in some, enough light flooded through the canopy to allow meadow flowers to thrive.

Elven magic rippled through the air.

The place was light, open and eerie. Absent the dense cover that made the woods to the south feel safe, her skin prickled.

She’d been running through the night, and had only stopped at dawn to eat. It wasn’t the goblin way to continue through the daylight in a place as bright as this, usually. But now that the humans and elves were on foot, their scents were stronger. All the goblins could smell them. All of them had tasted human flesh and were hungry for more.

And then she saw them.

Three humans, one elf. Two men with swords, one woman with a bow, and the elven sorcerer.

Still at the head of the pack, she charged. Then, as she ran, she felt something. It was the tingle of magic. She saw the elf throw something her way. In an instant, a tree began growing from the soil in front of her. Before she’d taken three more paces, it had grown taller than she was and sprouted branches wider than her arm span.

She dodged to the side, but she was not quick enough. A branch shot out in front of her, striking her chest. Her feet skidded on, her torso tumbled back. She lay amid the wild garlic with goblins streaming past her and a massive tree growing above her while the chiefs and the rest of the goblins ran past her.

Winded and bruised, she scrambled to her feet as soon as she’d caught her breath.

Then she heard the screams of death. Goblin death.

She peered towards the humans and elf, but all she could see was the back of a mass of goblins.

‘You let the chiefs be killed first!’ Daganne appeared at her side, grinning.

Grinthy blinked twice, then mirrored the grin. The chiefs led the charge, they’d have been the first to die.

Last time they’d attacked the humans, she’d halted the charge, and they’d been able to attack from all sides.

This time, she hadn’t. Blinded by bloodlust and confident in their numbers, she’d been ready to run straight at her foes—straight at the men with their long swords, the elf with his magic and the woman with her arrows.

‘We take them from the flank,’ Grinthy said to Daganne. ‘Let’s go.’

She led the other goblin around the swarm of attackers in front of her, just reaching the edge of their mass when she felt anther prickle of magic. And this time, she’d not be caught out.

‘Dive!’ she screamed at Daganne.

It was not a moment too soon.

She was still flying towards the forest floor when she saw a flash. A blast of magic shot from the midst of the humans and elf and sliced over her head as she hit the ground. A shower of green blood splattered her back as screams sliced through the forest. She dared to look up. Where the mass of goblins had been moments before, there was now just a mass of gore. She looked to her left and right. One or two goblins were starting to rise. They’d dived, like she and Daganne had. She looked behind. Goblins already on their feet were creeping forwards.

She returned her stare to her front. Her prey was still alive and lying on the forest floor. But one wasn’t moving, and while one man and one woman began to rise, the elf seemed to be struggling. There were still more than enough goblins to kill her prey. She grinned.

The other goblins seemed hesitant. Then one ran, but fell—an arrow protruding from his back. No one else moved. Her heart pounded. She suddenly realised that this was her chance. The chiefs were dead; she could become chief herself of three clans. She just had to rally the survivors and survive herself.

She took a deep breath. ‘Charge!’ she screamed and set off at a sprint.

‘Uh!’ she heard Daganne yell out, and Grinthy saw her fall, an arrow in her chest. Grinthy kept going. She had her eyes on the human archer. She dared her to fire at her. But she didn’t. She’d dropped her bow and brandished a knife. She was out of arrows. Grinthy was finally getting lucky. A quick glance left and right assured her that she was not alone. The human swordsman was about to engage another group with frenzied fury and brutal skill. She was glad he wasn’t her target. Instead, she was about to face a pathetic female with a dagger.

Grinthy was just a few paces away when she realised she recognised her. She was the one she and Jarg had snatched from the plains. She was the one who’d gained her acceptance in the clan. She’d served her well once, and she was about to do it again. Grinthy held her dagger in one hand, her hammer in the other, baring her teeth in a wide grin as she got ready to strike.

Grinthy expected the human female to hold her ground. Trembling as she was, she looked terrified. She hadn’t expected her to charge. The human closed the small gap in an instant, a dagger of her own gripped in her outstretched hand. Grinthy was late to dodge her aim. The blade found her flesh with a searing bite, but it was just a shallow gash to her side. Grinthy gritted her teeth through the pain and tightened her grip on her hammer. She wheeled on the ball of her foot, the steel of her hammer helping her spin. With a mighty thud, she slammed it into the human. She screamed, her legs crumpled, and she flopped onto the forest floor. Grinthy dived, dagger in hand, point heading for the back of the human’s neck. With a pulsing heart and grinning teeth, she was about to take her second human life.

Or so she’d thought.

The woman rolled. Grinthy’s dagger stabbed the earth. With a desperate tug, she tried to free it. It was the last mistake she’d ever make.

An icy sting bit her arm, sinking to the bone. Her arm crumpled, and she dropped to the ground, letting go of the dagger—too consumed by pain to think, to roll, to escape the killer blow that pierced her ribs and found her heart.

The human had won; Grinthy had lost. With her final thought, she wondered if all of her kind would share her fate. Or would the goblins find a way to survive? Not long ago all Grinthy had ever wanted was to earn an honest living, raise her children, and live in peace, like most of her kin.

But the humans hated the goblins like the goblins hated them. And hate could only ever lead to death.

THE END

A Note from the Author

This novella grew out of book one in The Gallantrian Legacy: Path to Power; a fantasy about two humans: Emma and Tom, leaving Earth for the Tolkien-style world of Dunia, where they struggle to awaken Tom’s magic and reclaim Emma’s throne.

Over many drafts—cut, reshaped, and rebuilt—the novel evolved into its final form. One casualty was Grinthy.

Created to add depth to Dunia’s goblins, Grinthy was meant to show that goblins are more than monsters—that they are people struggling to survive, capable of choices others might call evil, yet justified in their own minds. Added later in drafting, Grinthy never fully settled into the main narrative and although she still features in Emma’s and Tom’s tale, her own story was ultimately cut to sharpen the focus on the central characters.

But she still had a story to tell; so with a touch of revision and expansion, Grinthy’s axed chapters have been turned into this standalone novella: Grinthy: A Goblin’s Tale.

Coming soon…

From fantasy to sci-fi, Charlotte’s next novella follows Mika, an orphaned alien from the race of the Zargons.

The Zargons watch, they study, they don’t interfere, until one day, one of them did, and The Gallantrian Legacy was born.

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Learn more about The Gallantrian Legacy:

www.charlottegoodwin.co.uk

You might be grateful for their empathy. You might appreciate their kindness. You might find yourself wishing that everyone could be that nice—until you realise that the world would be rather uninteresting if they were.

It’s almost impossible to hate these wonderfully nice people, but you struggle to like them, too. Because they’re flawless, and you’re not. They are everything you might wish you were, but aren’t. And that’s annoying. Hence, you turn a cold shoulder to the lovely person who just offered you a tissue after your best friend just brought you to tears, and scurry off to find the friend who was mean to you.

I think this paradigm of high-school politics is much like real life. Think of that really helpful co-worker, that excessively friendly parent of your kid’s friend, or the really ripped guy at the gym who is the first to give helpful tips on how best to work out. You smile, you nod, you’re grateful for their niceness.

Then you scowl at them behind their backs.

You start imagining how their house is really dirty, or their kids are tear-aways, or they’re really under-endowed in the trousers department and the ripped chest is there just to make up for it. In your head, you want them to have flaws.

Ordinary people are flawed; it’s what makes us interesting. The same applies to characters. Think of a character you really warmed to in a book you read and ask yourself how perfect they were. Did they make the right choice every time? What flaws did they have?

I’m going to go out on a leg here and suggest that your favourite characters were probably the most flawed, because flaws make characters relatable, and if you relate to them, you find them interesting.

When I wrote my first novel, I basically just wrote it. I didn’t think about character development. I didn’t consider things that books about novel-writing tell you to think about, like the character’s wants, needs, desires, etc. I just invented some imaginary people and wrote a story about them.

I think my protagonist, Emma, ended up as the kind of person I wanted to be. I’d love to be secretly the heir to a throne on a faraway planet. I’d love to have a sorcerer for a husband. I’d love to be strong and brave, and kind all the time. Sure, I gave her a couple of little flaws—she was rather insecure at times and found things pretty scary on a far-away planet she wasn’t used to, but these weren’t massive flaws.

I liked her, but I never loved her.

I preferred her husband, Tom. He was a bit of an immature, arrogant prat early in the story, but over the course of my first book, he grows up, and his resilience, moral courage and loyalty shines through.

These two were decent characters, but they weren’t great characters. Tom continues to grow through the sequels. He develops more strength of character and shows a hell of a lot of grit. He works very well as a supporting character, but he isn’t the guy you will love.

I’ve written six novels in the series I refer to, and the cast list is extensive. I’ve thought long and hard about who my favourite characters are; I think it’s a tie between Mark and Garrad (Jnr). Mark appears in book two and compliments Tom’s character very nicely. Tom is from a comfortable, middle-class family. He didn’t struggle an awful lot to kick start his career as a result of his early privileges (before he and his wife were taken to a far-away magical planet). Mark had a very difficult start to life. He grew up on a rough estate with an absent dad who was in and out of prison. He skipped a lot of school and got involved in petty crime. He joined the army aged sixteen and managed to turn his life around.

Mark had a difficult start, but his innate abilities shone through when he joined the Army, and he ended up as an officer as a result. He met Tom in officer training.

“Sandhurst was practically gift-wrapped for this idiot.” Mark says this about Tom in my fourth book to Garrad (Jnr), with idiot meant in an affectionate, matey manner. (Sandhurst is the British Army’s military academy for officers, if you weren’t aware)

When it comes to any kind of etiquette in polite society, Mark hasn’t got a clue. He goes to pieces when noble-born ladies want to talk to him. He’s rather insecure about his difficult start to life. He didn’t have a perfect childhood, like Tom. He’s rough around the edges. But he’s determined and a very good soldier and leader. He has some very likeable qualities while being flawed enough to be relatable.

Then there’s Garrad junior. Garrad senior appears in my first two novels. Garrad Junior is introduced in book 4; which is book one of my second trilogy and set twenty years after the first trilogy ended. Garrad was born on my fantasy planet. He is a very talented swordman and a good soldier, like Mark. He joins the Army and progresses quickly through the ranks, but then his life goes rather pear-shaped. His arrogance and bad temper see him kicked out of the army, and his inability to self-reflect sees him embark on a downward spiral into alcoholism and debauchery.

He hits rock bottom but is pulled out of the gutter by Tom—who works very nicely as a father-type character. Garrad gets his life back on track but is plagued by his embarrassment at his past.

Neither Garrad nor Mark had things easy. It’s the challenges that they overcame that make them interesting. It’s their flaws that make them relatable and likable.

Emma, my first protagonist, is present in all six novels, but with a diminished role in the later books, while my beautifully flawed characters rightly steal the limelight.

It took the writing and extensive revisions of my six books to realise the importance of building flaws into your characters, and I took this on-board when I wrote my seventh novel—a story about a young, female army recruit, who was born from a one-night-stand and is failing basic training when she’s transported to another world. She was never an obvious hero, but the story sees her find her inner strength and grow into someone she never thought she could be.

I developed the whole story around this character’s flaws and the growth in her character. And I think I created a satisfying arc as a result—my beta readers seem to think so. This particular story is sitting on my hard-drive, waiting to be queried.

I’ve written seven novels. I’m no best-seller; hell, I don’t even make a profit from my books—yet. But I have been writing for five years, and I have put a lot of time and effort into trying to figure out what makes good characters. And I think I’ve figured it out: make them flawed, make them likable, make them relatable, and give them room to grow.

My books haven’t been out long. It’s early days for me on my publishing journey; I’m yet to truly know if I’m a decent writer or not. But I know for certain I’m getting better.

Want to judge for yourself? Feel free to check out my books. I’d start with The General’s Son if I were you—I’d practiced writing on three books by the time I started that one, and this book is about one of my favourite characters: Garrad.

Read chapter 1 for free

New to this story?

Read Chapter 1

6. Hunters

The Plains of Atropia

Grinthy led her small clan north. By night they ran; by day they rested in whatever cover they could find. A ditch or a thicket of thorns was all that was on offer in these sparse plains.

Grinthy had no desire to meet any more humans until she was strong enough to kill them. And to be strong enough, she needed to build her clan.

None of them knew for sure if they’d find more goblins on the plains. They were all certain they’d find some in the woods.

The fourth night of travel saw a full moon fill the clear sky with enough light to make the plains as light as day to their goblin eyes. Daganne was their guide, but she didn’t need the moonlight to guide her. She knew the plains better than any of them. She padded through the grass at Grinthy’s side, with Egwin, Borgon and their fifth member, Ingor, trotting along behind.

‘We’ll make the woods this night,’ Daganne told Grinthy.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, we just passed the Crowded Crowns; it’s just a few hours to the woods from there.’

‘The Crowded Crowns?’ Grinthy furrowed her brows.

‘Oh, they’re that bunch of rocks over there.’ Daganne pointed back into the gloom. ‘They’re well-known in these parts; they’re basically a load of big stones that stick up on the plains. Some say they were placed there by the gods as a monument to fallen kings.’

Grinthy snorted.

‘I never said I believed that crap. It’s just what some folk say, human folk. Goblins know better than to believe that nonsense.’

‘Do you talk to the humans much?’ Grinthy asked.

‘Not anymore. I used to.’ Grinthy gave her a curious look. Daganne continued in reply. ‘There was a village not far from the woods. We’d warred with them for years. We raided them; they raided us. Then, there was a truce. We worked together to hunt other humans…and goblins.’

‘You hunted your own kind?’

Daganne shrugged. ‘Rival clans are fair game.’

‘What happened?’

‘A few clans got wind of what we were doing, so they joined forces and attacked. They killed us all.’

‘But not you?’ Grinthy asked.

‘I escaped.’ Her yellow teeth grinned through the gloom. ‘I have a knack for it.’

You and me both. Grinthy grinned. ‘And you joined the clan on the plains?’

‘The woodland goblins wouldn’t have me after that, but the plains clans are full of runaways and rejects. No one lives on the plains through choice,’ Daganne replied.

They continued to jog in silence for a while through the cool night air. Only the sound of their footsteps and the occasional call of a distant wolf filtered into their ears. Then Grinthy heard something else; it sounded like a rhythmic thud. She ran a little further. A gentle wind had picked up from the west. Daganne halted and cocked her head. Grinthy did the same. The breeze brought the thudding sound again, along with snips of voices.

The other three paused behind, and they all listened. Somewhere through the gloom, a man shouted.

‘Humans,’ Borgon hissed from their tail. He took a few silent steps towards Grinthy’s side.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’d recognise their screeching cackle anywhere.’

‘We should go and take a look,’ Grinthy told him.

‘Are you mad?’ Ingor had crept up behind her. ‘There’s only five of us; who knows how many of them there are.’

‘I don’t plan on running up to them and introducing myself,’ she sniped. ‘I just want to see what they’re up to.’ She led them off towards the sound of thudding and voices, stooping low behind a small rise. She knew even humans could see well enough with a moon this bright.

The voices grew louder, so she dropped onto her belly and wriggled up to a spot where she could see, while the others followed on her tail. Horses, humans, dogs. Their whiff smacked her in the face as soon as her large yellow eyes peeked at them through the tall grass, but she was struggling to see any of them. She could see an odd-looking clump of trees. Tall and deliberate, surrounded by grass. But somehow, the trees didn’t look like they fitted in the landscape.

‘I sense magic,’ Daganne whispered. ‘The trees are riddled with it. The humans have been penned in with sorcery.’

Grinthy looked again and saw movement between the trunks with the occasional flash of steel in the moonlight; the humans and horses were behind the trees.

‘They’re trying to cut their way out,’ she said. Now the thudding sound made sense. ‘What magic could do this? I’ve never heard of a sorcerer having such skills.’

‘It must have been an elf,’ Daganne told her. ‘I’ve never known of a human sorcerer being able to master nature like that.’

Grinthy knew little about magic, so she grunted in agreement. ‘Do you think they’re chasing elves?’

‘Maybe, perhaps they’re after some elves from Vallume. The border is a week away to the northeast.’

She heard Ingor crawl up to her side.

‘There’s meat trapped over there,’ he hissed, ‘human meat.’

Grinthy’s stomach rumbled. It had been days since they’d had a proper meal.

‘But, from the sound of them, there’s a lot more of them than there are of us!’ Daganne snapped. ‘And my guess is they’re soldiers. It’s swords they’re using to chop at those trees. Have you forgotten what the human soldiers did to our clan?’

‘They attacked us,’ Ingor replied. ‘They got us by surprise, but if they go into the forest and we follow real sneaky, we can pick them off, one by one.’

‘And their dogs will smell us, and they’ll turn and wipe us out!’ Grinthy snarled. ‘What you suggest is suicide.’

‘What if there’s another way to get our teeth into them?’ Egwin said over Ingor’s back. They were now all laid in a line along the rise.

‘Go on,’ Grinthy told him.

‘What if we find other clans? What if we tell them about the humans? What if we bring enough of us together to kill all these humans?’

‘You’re assuming they’re going into the woods!’ Borgon piped up from a spot at the other side of Daganne.

‘Why would they have been trapped by an elf this close to the forest if they weren’t planning on going in?’ Daganne asked.

‘The she-goblin speaks sense,’ Egwin said. ‘There can be no other reason for those meat sacks to be here other than to continue their hunt north. You think they’ll just run off home when they get out of there?’

‘Those arseholes keep going until their dogs have sniffed their noses bloody and their horses crumple beneath them,’ Daganne spat. ‘They’ll go into the woods; you can be sure of that.’

‘It makes sense to wait and see,’ Grinthy concluded. ‘If they go into the woods, we follow.’

‘Then what?’ Borgon asked.

‘Then we do as Egwin suggests. We find other clans, and we draw them to our prey.’

‘We’d have to join another clan!’ Daganne protested. ‘You’d no longer be our chief!’

‘A clan of five is no clan at all,’ Ingor sneered.

Grinthy scowled at him, but she knew he was right. ‘We find the clans, we take them to our prey, and we do it on the agreement that we work together. We can only defeat the humans in numbers. The chiefs should know that it would be suicide to attack without enough of us.’

It would be suicide for a handful of goblins, but if there were lots of them, they could over-power the humans and most of them would live. Some would die. If a chief died, Grinthy would be ready to take their place. And with a proper clan, she could take the fight to the humans. She’d make them pay for what they’d done to her, or she’d die trying.

*

The soldiers had escaped from their oak tree cage at dawn the day before. They headed into the woods as Grinthy had hoped, then, at nightfall, her small clan followed. Daganne, Borgon, and Egwin had set off alone in three different directions, each on the hunt for signs of the goblin clans. Grinthy and Ingor stayed on the Atropian trail.

They caught up to the day-travelling humans, using the cover of night. Even in the dark, their trail had been child’s play to follow. It was impossible to hide the passing of thirty riders through the undergrowth. She was close now; Grinthy could smell them on the air.

She plodded on through the forest with Ingor skulking on her tail. She hadn’t trusted him to find other clans to help them, and he hadn’t wanted to go either. So, she’d been stuck with him.

‘We’re almost upon them,’ Ingor muttered from behind. She knew they weren’t far away; they were upwind, and she’d smelled them, so he must have smelled their prey, too.

‘So?’ she sniped back without turning.

‘So, we’re almost at the meat. We could take a straggler; one of their sentries, perhaps.’

Grinthy slowed to a stop and turned to face her companion. ‘No. They’ll notice if their own start to go missing, even if just two of us could take on a battle-hardened soldier without waking the rest of their camp.’

‘We just sneak up on em.’ Ingor drew his blade and made a stabbing motion in the air.

‘They’ll notice!’ she snapped. ‘As soon as one goes missing, they’ll set their dogs on our trail. Humans aren’t like goblins; they’re sentimental idiots. They don’t let things like this go.’

‘Since when did you become an expert on humans?’

‘I’m not an expert, I just listen to folk who know more than me,’ she growled. ‘You go ahead if you like. I don’t need you to keep me company. I can trail them on my own. But if you do, don’t be surprised when you find a knife in your back.’

Ingor’s blade was still drawn. He launched at Grinthy. She dived to the ground. Ingor tripped over her legs, sending him tumbling into the undergrowth. She sprung onto her feet, pulling her hammer from her belt as she went. Ingor was still battling his way out of the bracken as she charged. With one hand she shoved him back onto the ground, face first. Her other hand gripped her hammer, and she swung it hard and fast. It smashed into his skull. She heard a crack, then a squelch, then the splatters of dark green blood sprayed onto her face.

Ingor collapsed. Grinthy found herself laid over his back, straddling his corpse. She wrenched her hammer free and wiped it on the bracken, then pushed herself back to her feet. She tucked her hammer back in her belt and reached down to take Ingor’s dagger and what was left of his food. There wasn’t much, just a few scraps of dried bread. She was as desperate for meat as he’d been. But she wasn’t stupid enough to throw her life away to get it. Ingor was, and now he was dead. Grinthy wasn’t ready to die just yet; she had humans to kill.

*

She’d got as close as she’d dared in the night, then rested. The humans set off again at dawn, and after a short rest, she’d continued on their trail. It was easy to keep pace with the humans in the forest. The idiots insisted on taking their horses, and horses who can’t run are slower than goblins on foot, much slower. She stalked them at a safe distance, resting when noon came, then catching them up again in the dark. They set off again at dawn, and she went with them, matching their plodding pace and waiting for her clan to catch her up, hopefully with more goblins. Daganne did not disappoint. She’d returned with a group of goblins on her tail.

A gnarled goblin with torn ears pushed past Daganne. ‘Where’s the meat?’

Grinthy made a show of looking along the trail the Atropians had made through the forest. ‘If you have to ask, you don’t deserve to eat it,’ she sneered.

‘Let’s get it!’

He made a move to shoot past Grinthy, but she held out an arm to stop him from passing her. ‘How many of you are there?’

He slapped her arm away. ‘I ask the questions,’ he barked. ‘I’m the chief!’

‘You’re the chief of your clan,’ Grinthy sneered. ‘I’m the chief of mine. Perhaps your clan would rather join mine instead?’

The other goblin laughed. ‘You have no clan!’ He glanced towards Daganne. ‘This one told me as much. Four goblins don’t count for nothing! I have fifty who follow me!’

Grinthy peered past him; she couldn’t count them all, but there certainly weren’t fifty.

‘You can have two more if you want us,’ Grinthy nodded at Daganne, ‘but I don’t follow anyone who would lead me to my death. Even with fifty-odd goblins, those thirty soldiers would kill us all. I’ve seen them fight; we need double our number.’

‘And where do you hope to find another fifty goblins?’

‘The rest of my clan are out searching; they will not let me down,’ Grinthy said with a confidence she didn’t feel.

The goblin raised his lip to show his yellow, pointed teeth. ‘The name’s Chief Jungrik. If you double my clan, I might just let you help me lead it.’

Grinthy lowered her ears and nodded. ‘Deal.’ She spat on her hand and offered it out. He did the same, and they shook.

Chapter 7 coming soon…

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Grinthy: A Goblin’s Takes place in parallel to Emma and Tom’s adventures in book 1 of The Stolen Throne trilogy. Learn more at:

www.charlottegoodwin.co.uk

A couple of years ago, I was in a bad place. I felt like everything I’d worked my ass off to achieve for the previous 15 years lay in tatters. I couldn’t go on—I’d found my limits. I’d realised I wasn’t strong enough to do what I’d long wanted to do. And it took a long time to come to terms with that. Years, in fact.

But writing saved me.

If I hadn’t started writing five years ago, I don’t think I’d ever have got to the place I’m in now: drug-free, earning very little, but content; more or less.

When it felt like my world was collapsing about my ears, there was one tiny thing that hadn’t been destroyed, that could never be destroyed, that would survive long after I’d left this world: my books.

If this sounds a little like the end of the story, it’s because it is—kind of. It’s the end of one story, but the start of something new. I’m going to tell you a little about what led me to a very dark place a few years back, then I’m going to explain why despite expecting to earn the lowest salary this year since I left university, I feel like I’m the richest I’ve ever been.

It started in 2008. The financial crash was in full swing, the property market was in free fall, and I’d just graduated from university. Having been a commissioned Army Reservist for two years by this point, I didn’t struggle to find a job. I walked straight into a graduate scheme in the waste industry. I also bought my first house.

I’ve always been frugal. I grew up with no money—I got my first job aged 14 just so I could buy myself clothes. I’ve never been unemployed since. I learnt to value cash and through my university days, I largely lived off what I earnt from the Army Reserves, while my student loan went in the bank. It was this cash which paid the deposit on my first house, pooled with my boyfriend’s money besides—he’d graduated two years prior and had a bit more than me.

Together, we bought a wreck. I had no renovation experience, but I quickly learned. We just did the bashing at first. We’d come home from a day’s work, eat dinner, then head out to knock plaster off the walls and tear out old fittings. Tradespeople did the technical stuff. But as the project progressed, I gained more confidence. This house would see me try first fit joinery, plastering and tiling for the first time.

Two years after graduating, I went to Afghanistan for my first operational tour. Two weeks after returning, I got married. A few weeks after that, I fell out with my dad-we’ve barely spoken since. A month or so after that, we bought another house.

With the profit gained from renovating the first, plus a healthy dose of extra cash from my time away at war, we were able to climb the property ladder. I went back to my old job, and then two weeks later I quit. I was bored in my graduate job before I left—I wasn’t given enough work to do. I went back and was still bored. I decided on a new path; I was going to become a property developer.

That’s how I gave up on having a proper career. I was a trainee project engineer in the waste industry when I quit my job. If I hadn’t quit, I imagine I’d be a senior project director my now. But I’m not. I’m a penniless author (I say penniless tongue in cheek, because I’m far from broke, but that has nothing to do with writing).

Fast forward to 2018.

Ten years after I’d bought my first house, I’d moved to my fourth house, renovated two others besides, and converted a basement into a flat while part-time for the Army helped pay the bills. I convinced ten different people to give me money so I could start a property business properly. And start it I did—in the middle of the Brexit negotiations.

The first house went well. I bought it, renovated it, sold it, and made a decent profit. I persuaded my shareholders to give me more money. I bought another house, and another. Renovations went fine, and they sold quickly with decent profits. But the sales on both collapsed. Brexit uncertainty was straining the market. Mortgage lenders were getting jumpy and wouldn’t lend enough to cover what buyers wanted to pay. I renovated again but bought this house of the company to let to my mum. I tried to buy some land to build a house. The sale collapsed when the seller pulled out—the purchase was dependent on sales that had collapsed, and things dragged on too long.

I eventually bought some land in 2020. Just in time for the covid pandemic to kick off. Building delays, material cost increases, and finally a crashing economy following billions of pounds of fake money being created to pay for covid saw my limits being reached.

The house hit the market at the wrong time. It sold three times; three times the sale collapsed. I agreed to drop the asking price twice to help the final buyer out—it still didn’t sell.

By this time, I’d taken on a full-time job working for the Army. There’s not much to do when your project lingers on the market, not selling. All my capital was stuck in that blasted thing. I couldn’t buy any more properties until it sold. It didn’t sell. In the end, I bought it off my company so I could pay off my shareholders and close the company down. I’d had enough.

The creeping prickle of anxiety had infested my head long before this point. The constant feeling of being on edge. The inability to relax. The need to react instantly to every problem. Being incapable of taking your time on decisions to come up with the best solution. It was perhaps a year or more after I started feeling like this that I saw a doc and got some drugs. They helped, but they didn’t solve things.

The only cure was to de-stress my life. And that would take a while longer yet.

I bought the new-build of my company and got a new job. I was bored working for the Army; I wanted something exciting. I was head-hunted by a recruiter looking to fill jobs at a new Amazon fulfilment centre. I was hired to manage one of the packing lines.

I enjoyed the job. If I’d had it when I was younger, when I didn’t have Army stuff at the weekends, two kids, and a brain that wasn’t plagued by anxiety, I imagine I would have stayed and progressed.

But I didn’t.

After reigning my full-time Army job, I was back to being a part-time Reservist—I struggled to make training because of the shifts I worked, and so I beat myself up about it. I worked night shifts, slept in the day and saw little of my kids. Despite my manager being more than happy with my work at Amazon, I convinced myself I wasn’t learning quickly enough, and that I wasn’t up to scratch. The anxiety spiralled.

In December 2023, I quit my job at Amazon; this time, to become an author.

I’d been writing for two years by this point. My first trilogy been written while I was bored in my full-time job for the Army. The sequel had been drafted in whatever gaps I had around other stuff a little later.

I knew the first trilogy needed way too much work to be publishable any time soon, so I decided to publish the second trilogy first. If I were working on it full time, I could get the edits done quickly. I could publish, market it, and make a profit. I convinced myself that if I just worked hard enough, I could make a living writing.

I didn’t and I still don’t.

But I haven’t given up.

In the years that followed, I unpublished that second trilogy. It didn’t sell as well as I’d liked, and I realised it could be better. So I pulled it and resolved to re-write the first trilogy and get it out first. Tons of work have now been done on all my books. Five are now out; the sixth is out next month. Sales are going ok-ish. But at the current rate of sales, it will be about a thousand years before I make back what I’ve spent on them.

Six months ago, I stopped taking my anxiety drugs.

The anxiety didn’t end with the closure of my company, or the quitting of my job at Amazon. It festered, pushing those rash decisions. Driving me to want to take on far more than I ought to. I no longer had a full-time job, but I still needed money. So I did loads of stuff for the Army Reserves instead. I took on lots of projects and put myself under a lot of stress, while my commanding officer did his best to make everything worse.

In winter 2025, my anxiety got so bad that I finally confessed my mental health issues to the Army. I got medically down-graded. The commanding officer was officially informed that things weren’t quite right. I took a step back from the Army for a while.

I filled my time with DIY on my own house, or my “never-ending renovation project” as I like to call it—I’ve lived here 5 years and it still has work to be done. I also worked on my books.

Six months ago, I stopped taking my anxiety drugs.

My writing saved me. Here’s how.

In 2011, I gave up my chances of a career in project management to be a property developer. For the next decade and a half, my focus was to build a property development company—to create something big—to have employees, multiple projects, and massive profits. But when too many things went wrong, I couldn’t hack it. I realised I couldn’t do what I’d set out to do. I’d failed.

I’d failed to create that thing I’d been working on for so long and was left with no career; no money; nothing.

Except that wasn’t entirely true.

My anxiety riddled head might have thought that, but it wasn’t the reality. My mum got a surprise inheritance and bought herself a house. She moved out of the one I bought for her years back. I still own it and rent it out. The new-build house I bought off my company is still let. I have a flat besides that I bought tenanted way before I set up my company because I missed out on another property at auction. I have three rentals, so make a bit of money from them.

I’m a major in the Army Reserve. I’ve done two operational tours in Afghanistan; I’ve done two full-time jobs for the Army, too. If you know nothing about the Army or its ranks, then hopefully, without sounding arrogant, I can say that major is a pretty respectable rank—it’s classed as being a senior officer.

And I have my books.

Five are published, another is on the way. I’ve written another two novels besides—one was a throwaway I wrote in my early twenties; another is one I plan to query. I’ve written two novellas—one is free when you sign up to my newsletter; you can also read it on Substack.

Read Grinthy: A Goblin's Tale

Another is in draft form; it will be released on Substack, too, when I’m done editing it.

I’ve written a bunch of short stories. I have a half-written prequel to my first trilogy. I keep sticking articles like this on Substack.

My books have been released into the world. I’ve created something; something tangible, something decent, something I’m proud of. I haven’t built a thriving property business, but I have created a whole new universe, an entire race of aliens, a fantasy planet, and a raft of characters.

When the dust on my property-business failure finally settled, I was able to realise that building the business was never about the money; it was all about creating something. The money was simply the evidence that the creation had succeeded.

But I don’t need to make money from books to know they’ve succeeded. All I need is the knowledge that at least one person enjoyed what I wrote. My written creations succeed when they are read, and every page turned on Kindle Unlimited is evidence of that.

Thanks to writing, I now know I can create something others can enjoy. I know I’ll leave behind something that will never die. I’ve found a vocation that lets me believe in myself again.

That’s how writing saved me.

Curious about Charlotte’s novels? Check them out, here:

www.charlottegoodwin.co.uk

New to this story?

Read Chapter 1

5. Live to Kill Another Day

Goblin Camp, The Plains of Atropia,

Grinthy woke to the sound of nothing but a gentle breeze rippling through the long grass.

Silence.

Before sleep had taken her, laying as she was amidst the glow of the smouldering tents, eyes as vacant as she could make them, there’d been the crackle of fire and the groans of the dying. Now there was nothing.

The fires had burnt to ash. The dying were dead.

Her chest stung. The splintered arrow shaft still needled her chest. She yanked it free and threw it out of her line of sight. She sat up to inspect her wound. Green blood trickled down her chest. She gave the skin nearby a gentle prod. It hurt, but it didn’t give more pain than she could handle. She had just the flesh wound she’d intended to give herself, and it had saved her life.

Grinthy climbed to her feet and studied what remained of the campsite. Death was scattered everywhere. Bodies, body parts, blood. Heads severed from necks. Arms hacked from shoulders. Dark green ooze staining the brown-green grass.

Faces contorted in their final feeling of pain stared up an eternal stare. Scorched remains laid black and charred amidst the skeletons of the tents.

Numb to the core, all Grinthy could do was stare. Swallowing her feelings with a dry gulp and trying not to think. Trying not to recall her own village that was scorched by humans so many months ago. Trying not to remember her mate and children, who were decapitated while she watched.

But it was no use.

Her eyes tingled with moisture, and this time, she couldn’t even pretend it was because of the smoke. She knew tears escaped her stoic eyes. She was suddenly powerless to keep her sorrow inside. Grinthy collapsed onto her knees and wept into her palms.

She cried until the tears ran out. There was no one here to see how weak she was. There was no one here who cared. When her head ached and her mouth was dry, she at last sniffed away the snot, wiped her eyes and took a deep breath. Ignoring the stench of death, she rose to her feet and forced her sorrow to become anger.

The humans had done this. The humans had murdered her new clan. The humans had taken her friends; Andreeg and Jarg—or at least she assumed as much. Andreeg was probably with the chief when he was consumed by flames. Jarg could be anywhere. She set off about the camp, checking the faces of the un-scorched dead. Then she saw the face she sought. Jarg lay with a gash from neck to chest, tongue hanging loose, blood pooled beneath.

She let her ire grow.

She gave her belt an instinctive pat, then smiled. Her hammer was still there. A second pat confirmed she had her dagger, too. She’d survived against the odds—again. She would not waste this chance. She’d grow strong, find a new clan and make the humans pay with blood.

With anger pulsing blood though her brain, she was able to think. She looked beyond the camp to the plains. The wide, open plains. There was nothing but grass, rolling hills, and thorny thickets for hundreds of miles. But to the north was Goblin Wood. That was the domain of her kind. Humans rarely ventured inside. If she could find acceptance in a clan there, maybe she could rise to become chief. Maybe she could lead enough goblins to launch raids on the humans. Maybe she could be the one to slaughter them!

Grinthy knew one thing for certain though, on her own, she’d soon be dead.

She began to scour the camp for anything that would help her on her journey north. She spotted a headless body with a thick fur cloak and headed straight over to retrieve it. Grinthy was tugging it free from the corpse when she heard something.

Footsteps.

Padding through the plains at a run, it could surely only be goblins. Grinthy snatched a look towards the sound and saw three goblins heading her way. As they drew closer, she recognised them as Daganne, Borgon and Vondrik. Clan members she’s met just the day before.

‘You survived!’ Daganne called to her as she grew close.

‘I have a knack for it,’ Grinthy replied, raising her thin lip to show her pointed yellow teeth.

‘You hid among the corpses?’ Borgon asked, drawing to a halt a few paces away.

‘Something like that; managed to play dead so the human scum left me be.’

Borgon gave a nod in reply.

Egwin pointed to a distant thicket. ‘Looks like we’re not the only survivors.’ Four goblins appeared and were heading their way.

‘Its Kring and his crew.’ Daganne said, snarling.

‘No so glad he lived?’

‘He’s a snake. Don’t trust him; be on your guard.’ Daganne warned.

Grinthy had only met Daganne the day before, but she’d already warmed to her. She didn’t know Kring.

‘If you’ve snatched all the silver, don’t think we won’t fight for it!’ Kring barked as soon as he was within earshot.

‘We’re just looking for food and supplies!’ Grinthy barked back. She gave a questioning glance at the others. They nodded to confirm her suspicions.

Kring came closer and then stopped. The four other goblins paused behind him. He gave a wide grin. ‘More recruits for my clan?’

‘Fuck off, Kring,’ Borgon snapped before anyone else could reply. It seemed Daganne wasn’t the only one who disliked the other goblin.

‘So you see yourself as the new chief then, eh?’ He paced closer to Borgon, and halted at spitting distance.

‘There’s no chief here,’ Borgon growled back, ‘but there’s safety in numbers. So it would make sense for us to stick together.’

‘Huh.’ Kring snorted. ‘So what’s your plan?’

Borgon didn’t answer.

‘We’re going north,’ Grinthy said after a short pause. She glanced at Daganne, Borgon and Egwin in turn; they replied with looks that suggested they agreed.

‘Goblin Wood?’

‘You prefer to wait on the plains for more humans?’

‘Suppose we could try to join a woodland clan.’ Kring turned to his companions. ‘What do ya recon, boys? Shall we escort these weeds north?’

‘Guess it means less time spent on watch,’ one of the others replied.

Grinthy bristled at being called a weed, but she held her tongue.

‘We’ll let you travel north with us, on one condition.’

‘Well?’

‘I’m in charge.’

‘Fuck off.’ Daganne spat. ‘I’m not going anywhere with you as leader.’ She turned to the others. ‘He’ll use us to keep us safe and betray us first chance he gets. I’ve seen this worm operate.’

Egwin and Borgon nodded their agreement.

Grinthy stepped forwards, pushing out her injured chest. ‘How about we let you travel north with us if you accept I’m in charge?’

He glared at Grinthy, narrowed his eyes as if in thought, then, in a flash, he whipped his knife from his belt and shot towards her.

She bounced out of reach, snatching her hammer free as she went, dagger still in her belt.

Kring launched at her. Bony fingers of another goblin named Vondrik grabbed his wrists and yanked him to a halt.

‘I’ve seen her with that hammer, Kring,’ Vondrik croaked. ‘Do you want to see your brains splattered?’ Just the day before, Grinthy had smashed in the brains of another goblin who’d tried to steal her dagger. It seemed Vondrik had been watching.

Kring wriggled free. With his knife still in hand, he spun with an outstretched arm, swinging his blade towards Grinthy.

Vondrik made to grab his arm. Dashing through the mud to halt Kring’s attack, he slipped. Chest falling, arms flailing, his neck fell into the path of the knife. It sliced through the leathery skin of the goblin like butter, green blood arcing behind the blade in a rainbow of death.

‘Vondrik!’ Kring yelled, eyes bulging. Vondrik slumped, and Kring caught his friend before he fell. With his arms under Vondrik’s pits, he swept the floppy form of his ally to his chest.

Grinthy froze. Her sweaty hand still held her hammer, her feet still set in the mud, but her head turned. She looked at the faces of her startled kin, scattered as they were amidst the wreckage of the burned camp.

A tender hand touched her shoulder; words were whispered in her ear. ‘You’ll have to kill him.’

She spotted Daganne from the corner of her eye, standing at her rear.

‘Get ready,’ Grinthy muttered.

Daganne’s hand slipped away. Grinthy gave a tiny nod and tightened the grip on her hammer. Her other hand found her dagger.

Vondrik’s corpse was dropped onto the carpet of ash. Kring exploded into action. Grinthy was almost taken by surprise, but not quite.

Kring’s blade shot towards her with a furious flash. She swept down her hammer at the last moment, its shaft knocking Kring’s bony hand away. The hammer’s head kept moving, taking her balance, making her stumble. But she was quick. A foot shot forwards and caught her, her balance snapping back just in time to see Kring’s blade flash her way.

She twisted, she wrenched her shoulder clear of its path, not a moment too soon—just an instant too late. Sharpened steel nicked her arm, opening a stinging gash, inflaming her rage, and awakening a newfound speed.

She danced her feet through the ash, drawing Kring towards her, pulling him to the attack while she steadied her stance. Hammer up, dagger down, she waited for him to come. His blood-shot eyes had her in his sights; they drew him towards his prey, and they gave him away.

Kring’s body shot forwards; his eyes looked down. His knife was held high, while his lowering stance showed the move he meant to make.

Grinthy waited, her hammer poised, her dagger held idle but ready to strike. Kring’s feint was useless. It was worse than useless. It made it easy for Grinthy to win.

He was close, she sprang, the coiled energy in her leg released. Her hammer flew, but not towards Kring; it moved to take her with it, to get her where she needed to be, to let her dagger do the work. The pointed steel flashed forwards while Kring stabbed Grinthy’s shadow. Her dagger found his flesh. It hit his waist, forcing a scream, causing Kring to stumble and skid on the slippery ash. He crashed onto the ground, with a hand clutching his side.

Grinthy didn’t wait to see if he’d live. She needed him dead. She had to make sure.

He was on the floor, she was on her feet, and her hammer flew high once again. Like a swooping falcon, it dropped to kill. With all her blacksmith’s strength, she let her hammer’s face find her enemy’s head.

A crack.

A squelch.

Her hammer found its mark.

She paused. Heaving lungs fighting for breath, beads of sweat stinging her eyes, trembling limbs threatening to make her look weak.

She yanked.

Her hammer came free. Kring stayed still.

‘Anyone else think Grinthy’s not in charge?’ Daganne yelled out from somewhere behind her.

‘Grinthy for chief!’ Borgon called out.

A firm hand slapped her back. ‘I stand with Grinthy!’

She spun. Egwin was behind her. She looked at the tiny audience. There were three other goblins in front of her. Two of them shared a scowl; a third skulked her way.

‘Grinthy for chief!’ he squawked with a sneer.

Grinthy shut her mouth and found her tongue. ‘How about you two?’ she barked.

‘You’re a newcomer!’ the taller of the two advanced. ‘You’ve been with us days, and then the humans attack?’ He spat a yellow ball of phlegm onto the ground. ‘You brought ‘em to us.’

‘It was that human she fetched for the Chief that brought the human soldiers!’ the shorter goblin screeched from behind his taller companion.

‘It was your chief’s scout that told us about those humans we went after! How am I to blame?’ Grinthy fumed. ‘And I lost two friends when they attacked!’

‘Friends?’ the taller one sneered. ‘You told us you only met them on that ship you ran from.’

‘Bet she was jealous that Andreeg found her way into the Chief’s bed,’ the smaller one spat, ‘and she had to go hunting to prove herself!’ he said, jabbing a finger at Grinthy.

She still held her hammer and dagger. Both dripping with blood. Chiefs didn’t stand for slurs like that. Chiefs were strong. Chiefs didn’t let their enemies live. She shot forwards, bloodlust pulsing, hammer high, dagger low, the taller goblin glued to the spot while his end raced towards him.

He didn’t fight back. Maybe he just wasn’t quick enough, maybe he didn’t have the will to fight, maybe he was ready for his end. Grinthy would never know. Her dagger found his chest, and her hammer found his head before he could say another word.

He dropped to the floor into a smear of oozing green.

His companion soon joined him.

Egwin had joined her attack and gone for the shorter one with a spear. He lay on the ground, gurgling, while Egwin pulled the point loose and thrust it back into the goblin’s heart just to make sure.

Grinthy met Egwin’s gaze and nodded.

‘Hail, Chief Grinthy!’ Daganne called out.

In unison, her tiny clan of four cheered. The four survivors of the humans’ attack, excluding her.

With hammer held low and dagger thrust back into her belt, she stared, speechless. Then, slowly, a grin crept over her face. She had to survive; she had to get vengeance on the humans. Vengeance would be a hell of a lot easier with a clan to help her. Four goblins joined her clan. She would get more. The humans would pay.

Read chapter 6

Grinthy: A Goblin’s Takes place in parallel to Emma and Tom’s adventures in book 1 of The Stolen Throne trilogy. Learn more at:

www.charlottegoodwin.co.uk

Perhaps if your book only follows one character and their experiences, it becomes simpler. But when you have a sorcerer doing one thing, a soldier doing something else, and the bad guy reaping havoc, it can be tricky to clearly convey what is happening when.

How do you manage all this while keeping a handle on characterisation and the internal conflicts of each of your characters? Battles can have all the action in the world, but if you don’t care about the characters, they are likely doomed to be boring.

I’ve never struggled to write battle scenes; they are also the part of my novels I enjoy writing the most. I can clearly see in my head what every element is doing, and I can picture the whole scene.

I should confess something here though, it’s probably not natural talent that made me confident I can imagine a decent battle. I’ve been in the Army for twenty-three years, and in 2006 I went to one of the most prestigious military academies in the world: The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. This is the place where the British Army trains its officers; where it teaches battle planning and tactics. I’ve been taught how to plan and execute battles for real.

It’s twenty years since I went to Sandhurst and I’m in the Royal Engineers, not the Infantry, so I’m no expert. I’ve also spent the bulk of my military career as a staff officer; which is someone who manages stuff rather than soldiers. However, the basic principles of battle planning is something that is drilled into you during officer training, so it’s not something that’s easily forgotten. It’s also something that is fairly simple to understand at a basic level, and I don’t think you need to be in the army to exploit the British Army’s method for planning battles for use in an imaginary world.

The Seven Questions

In the British Army, we use something called the Seven Questions to analyse a tactical problem and come up with a winning concept. It’s a step-by-step process that ensures we consider all the factors that will impact our planning and guide us towards making a well thought out plan. Here’s what it looks like:

1. What is the enemy doing and why?

2. What have I been told to do and why?

3. What effects do I want to achieve and what direction must I give to develop my plan?

4. Where can I best accomplish each action or effect?

5. What resources do I need to accomplish each action or effect?

6. When and where do the actions take place in relation to each other?

7. What control measures do I need to impose?

I can’t say I personally create a written answer to all these questions when I plan a battle, but I do at least mentally consider all these aspects. These questions were, of course, designed for real war-fighting. But here’s how I use them to plan fictional battles:

1. What is the enemy doing and why?

Before you do any planning, you need to have in your head what your enemy is doing and what their motivation is. Are they stationary in a defensive position, waiting to attack? Or are they marching towards the walls of a fortified city? Why are they doing this? Even if your battle never features any scene from your enemy’s POV, you need to understand this, as it will help inform how they react when the other side is engaged.

2. What have I been told to do and why?

The “I” in this case doesn’t apply to you as an author, but to your protagonist, or whoever your friendly forces are. Put yourself in their shoes and imagine them considering this very question. Think about how this would shape their initial movements in the battle.

3. What effects do I want to achieve and what direction must I give to develop my plan?

Again, this “I” applies to your good guys. After question 2, your good guy/guys/gals etc. should have a good idea what they are trying to achieve and should understand their motivation for achieving their aims. Now you need to think about what it is you need to do in order to achieve these aims. For example, you know your army needs to storm a castle. How are you going to achieve this? Do you need to blow a hole in the wall? Do you need to breech the walls with ladders while peppering the tops of the turrets with arrows? Do you need to send dragons in to burn all the bad guys to cinders? At this stage, you need to work out all the things that need to happen in order for your good guys to achieve their aims.

4. Where can I best accomplish each action or effect?

At Sandhurst, we’re taught that by the end of question 3, you should have the basis of your plan. You pretty much know what you want to achieve and how you’re going to do it. Questions 4 to 7 are where you’re finessing your plan and figuring out where all the nuts and bolts go to hold your plan together and make it work. Question 4 is where you start to visualise how your plan looks on the ground, and by the end of it you should have produced a battle schematic.

When I plan battles, questions 1-3 are done in my head. I don’t write this stuff down; I simply sit and stare into space until I’ve figured out the rough outline of my plan. But for question 4, I get the pencil out and start sketching.

Having just mentally counted all the battles in my six novels, I think there are eight of them. At the bottom of this article, I’ve included a battle scene from my fifth novel: The Queen’s Daughter. It’s the biggest battle in all of my novels and hence it needed the most planning. When you produce a battle plan in the military, there are a lot of conventional symbols and standardised ways of showing effects that would most likely be a little lost on you if you’re not familiar with them. I don’t use these for my fantasy battles as I’m not trying to make it legible to other people. It just needs to make sense to me.

When I did my plan for the battle I mentioned, it filled four sheets of A4. I have scribbles and words in handwriting you probably can’t read. It is basically just a series of sketches that allow me to visualise what is happening at the various stages of my battle. If you end up using this method, I guess you’d just scribble this detail down in a way that makes sense to you. Here’s what I threw together:

5. What resources do I need to accomplish each action or effect?

So, maybe you want to fire shedloads of arrows at the enemy to make them keep their heads down as your army scales the walls of the castle. You need to consider where the arrows are coming from. You might never include this detail in your narrative, but equally, if your archers run out, it could result in a sudden change of your plan.

Perhaps you want to destroy the enemy’s siege engines. Which unit or weapon are you going to use to do this? Do you have fire-breathing dragons? Maybe you have trebuchets? Maybe your sorcerers can blast them with magic?

This question is all about understanding what you need to deliver for each bit of your plan.

6. When and where do the actions take place in relation to each other?

This is my favourite question. It’s the one I use to plan my novels. Just to digress slightly—when I plan novels, I come up with an over-arching plot scribbled down as a series of paragraphs. I then work out what my characters are doing and when in relation to each other. The end product is a synch matrix. I didn’t create one of these when I planned the battle below, because the schematic I sketched acted as a kind of matrix for me. It shows four successive points in time, and shows where various units and characters are at each one of those times, so it achieved the same effect without me having to create another document.

But if you want an idea of what a neat and tidy synch matrix would look like, here’s one I did for the whole plot of The Queen’s Daughter. If you swap out pivotal events in the novel plot, to pivotal events in the battle, you’d end up with something that looks very similar.

7. What control measures do I need to impose?

When you’re at Sandhurst and you’re desperately trying to get your plan finalised before a member of the directing staff interrogates you on what you’ve come up with to defeat the enemy, question 7 is often the one that ends up with lip service paid to it. It’s important, but probably not as key as the others—probably why it comes last.

What it’s asking you to consider is what rules, constrains or orders you need to enforce in order to ensure everything goes to plan; or, if things go awry, it helps ensure bad things don’t happen; like good guys firing at good guys my mistake. It’s worth considering when you plan a fantasy battle, but it isn’t exactly going to make or break your narrative.

Seven questions considered, now what?

If you’ve gone through each of these questions in turn, you should have a pretty good idea in your head of how your battle will unfold. The next stage is to write it. Use your battle schematic and synch matrix as a handrail and write down what happens in a linear fashion; I use a bulleted list. If your battle is hectic, with lots of different things going on, it’s important to try to make it as linear and easy to follow as possible. The clearer you are about what is going on, the clearer your reader will be.

Any other tips?

Charlotte’s personal top tips when it comes to writing fight scenes or battles are:

- As we like to say in the Army: Keep It Simple, Stupid! Which makes the rather pleasing acronym “KISS”. Don’t over-complicate things; your reader will end up losing track of what is going on.

- Less is more. Excessive description in-between bouts of action kills the momentum. In fight scenes in particular, keep sentences short and descriptions minimal.

- Make sure you know what everyone is doing at every point in your battle before you even write the first word.

- Don’t forget to characterise. The action makes things exciting, but caring about the characters is what keeps your readers engaged. Don’t forget to convey how your characters feel about several thousand swordsmen charging at them, or firing off magic while soldiers are being killed by arrows all around them.

- Keep one foot on the ground. Make sure you stick to your own world’s rules. Don’t suddenly give your sorcerers a boost of power just to swing the balance. Make sure your plan stays believable within the constraints you’ve created beforehand.

That concludes Charlotte’s thoughts of how to write a killer battle scene. Now, before you run off and apply all my suggestions to your next novel, be sure to read the scene I wrote below and decide for yourself if I’m any good at it.

The Queen’s Daughter

Chapter 31: The Battle

City of Katin, Ratica, Dunia (Aura-14G)

The River Rost wound like a serpent across the northern plains of Hosta. It meandered from the frozen wastelands of the far north of Geshlamp to the far away east coast of Ratica. Before the war, it had been a great highway that connected the allied nations of the north. Trade could cross a continent by ship in the wide and deep waters, but not anymore. Ratica was at war with Eropt and its allies. At the city of Katin, the river traffic stopped. Katin was the new frontier, the outpost of the Ratican forces, the city that held most of Ratica’s dwindling army and, of course, the Army of Vorn.

If Katin was defeated, Ratica would be left defenceless. Eropt and its allies knew the city was all that stood in the way of victory, of conquering new lands, expanding influence, and taking control of almost all of Hosta. So did those who defended Katin, and they stood ready to fight to the end.

*

Summer was fast approaching. The waters of the river were low, the surface calm, but the hidden undercurrents could be deadly. There was no point risking anyone drowning, Garrad concluded, not when you had a sorcerer to keep you dry. Garrad was a substantive captain, but he’d been made an acting major. The lord commander had seen fit to put him in charge of a company who’d been tasked with a decisive mission: to sneak up on the enemy’s rear, find the enemy command group, attack where they least expected, and cut off the snake’s head.

He was all too aware of how vital his task was, and even more conscious that many more experienced officers had been overlooked to give him command. The lord commander said he’d seen something in him when he’d led the charge to rescue them in Australia, and he’d heard about his rescue of Eliza and Monty. He was the only man he trusted to make this mission work, and Prince Tom had agreed.

Prince Tom thought he was good enough for his daughter, too, and that was good enough for Garrad. It was enough for him to pull his head out of his own arse and get his shit together. With no notice, he’d gathered a company of some of the best soldiers in Vorn; he’d been given Mervin, his old friend from basic training. Mervin was now under his command as a platoon sergeant. He’d been given three lieutenants with barely any noble blood between them, just enough to make them officers, but that was why they made great platoon commanders. When you didn’t have the best blood, you had to become the best soldier. That was how things worked in the Army of Vorn.

And he had Monty too. He’d been given the rank of acting captain to be his second in command and was tasked with providing whatever magical support Garrad needed.

Their part of the attack had begun. They’d left Katin under the cover of both darkness and Monty’s cloaking magic and had made it to the banks of the river that looped around the city. Now they had to get across, preferably without getting wet. Pile of piss when there were boats, and no one was trying to kill you while you went. But there were no boats. Katin was under siege. The enemy’s main army was camped a little way away, and the supply routes into the city were guarded, especially the river.

Monty’s magic made the task simple. He could make a few hastily lashed together planks of wood sail across the water like they were guided by ropes, and all without a single splash of an oar. It took a few trips for their improvised raft to get the men across, but it didn’t take long. They were on the other side now, still cloaked under Monty’s magic as they set off along the riverbank towards the enemy’s rear at a steady jog, just as the sun peeped above the horizon.

*

The assembled army before the walls of Katin was an awesome sight to behold. Eliza had rushed up to the walls to get a good look. She wanted an idea of where the different units were so she could check her sorcerers were in the right place.

Blocks of men stood and waited for the command to move. Foot soldiers, pikemen, cavalry, and archers. All assembled and ready, spears in the air, banners rippling in the breeze. Hundreds of war horses snorted and stomped; thousands of men gripped the hilts of their swords so tightly that their knuckles turned white. She could sense their fear. The swell of humanity was riddled with it. Only a crazy person wouldn’t be afraid of walking towards a mass of men who outnumbered you two to one, and who were hell bent on your own murder. They were scared, and rightly so. As was she.

She scanned for her sorcerers, finding every one in turn, fixing their positions in her mind, checking the banner they were closest to, making sure it was the right one. Good; they were where they should be. It was time for her to take up position. The attack was about to start.

*

Tom still didn’t like horses. He hadn’t liked them when his mum tried to make him learn to ride as a kid, he’d hated them when one threw him to the ground in front of Garrad’s father, and he resented them every time the creatures stopped him from making the progress he’d like to. Horses could only gallop for so long before they got tired. Horses needed to stop and eat and drink. Horses could get scared of things and they could panic; they could be unpredictable and chuck you to the ground. Not like a good old car. He missed cars. But he had to admit, being mounted in the midst of a sea of foot soldiers felt pretty awesome. A car wouldn’t quite have cut it. A car didn’t offer three-sixty views or such an elevated position. A car wouldn’t stop on its own before it hit something or choose its own route to safety when you were distracted and using magic to keep yourself alive.

Right now, he was glad to be on horseback next to Mark and Lord Unwin, in the centre of the gathering of men formed up around him, just about ready to depart.

‘That’s the last of them. The gates have been closed.’ Mark twisted in his saddle, switching his gaze from the city behind to the army in front. ‘We’re about ready. Tom, have you checked on our sorcerers? Are Kala, Hellenia and Eliza in position?’

‘Yes, I’ve scanned for them all.’

‘Good. Send up the signal, if you don’t mind.’

‘No probs, Lord Commander.’ He cast a smirk towards Mark as he obeyed his orders. Tom had put Mark in charge—there was no point pretending his own senior rank made him better qualified to command this attack. Mark was good at this shit; this was his forte. Tom relegated himself to being Mark’s magical bitch, confident that this was the way to win. You should always play folk to their strengths.

He raised his hands and sent a beam of green light into the air. It shot as far as the clouds and disappeared into the haze. Its brightness cast a green glow on the whole army. Not one of them could have missed it—not a single soldier in their own army, nor the enemy. Tom was shielding them against a magical attack, not from view. He didn’t have the strength to do both—not if he wanted any power left to help in the battle.

The ground seemed to shake as they took their first steps in unison. They plodded forwards together, walking directly towards an enemy that was still desperately trying to form up in the face of the unexpected attack.

*

Eliza was in the midst of the army, on foot, holding her horse’s reins in her hand. She was trying not to stand out, trying not to be a target. She could see the field of battle with her magic if she needed to. But right now she need not waste her power. She’d memorised the formation she’d seen from the wall, and now she advanced towards the enemy amongst the soldiers, ready to fight by their sides.

Back straight, shoulders back, she marched amongst a sea of armour. Her power was the only armour she needed. She used a lifetime of training to appear unafraid and unflinching as they went to war, setting the example she hoped the steel-clad men around her would follow.

She could sense the enemy. They were getting close now.

She felt the first burst of movement as the siege engines launched into action. Her hands shot up, ready to strike, ready to unleash her power. But she didn’t. She waited, even as the barrel of burning oil flew towards her. She held her nerve.

Her breath halted in her throat, and her heart skipped a beat. The moment she’d been waiting for happened. She sensed the surge of magic erupt from the enemy’s side. She saw the flash of blue as it hit the barrel. The flaming mass of oil splattered high above; she tensed, then watched it slide down the sides of her father’s shield like black dribbles of ink.

The soldiers covered their heads with their shields, but it wasn’t long before they realised the danger was averted. They cheered and kept on marching.

The enemy had thrown the first stone. The counterattack was about to begin. Her father’s shield wouldn’t let magic in or out, while her uncle was providing protection against anything non-magical being hurled at their army. But that didn’t mean non-magical missiles couldn’t be thrown out—even if those missiles were launched by magic. Eliza, her sister, and her aunt got to work.

In the carts at the back of the army were stacks of rocks. Huge slabs of stone that had been ripped from buildings and loaded up to be used as missiles. Eliza had spent much of yesterday gathering them, using her power to lift the impossibly heavy objects and getting them ready to be utilised in accordance with her uncle’s plan.

She reached back with her magic. She didn’t need to look; she’d already fixed the locations of her missiles in her mind. She found one, she collected it and pulled it through the air. She launched it forwards with more power than ten catapults could have managed and watched with satisfaction as it flew towards the enemy. It went through the shield. It was falling towards the army that faced them, then it was blasted apart. How frustrating, she thought. But perhaps not all was lost. It had been blasted, not deflected. Smaller rocks would still have hit, she surmised. At least a few casualties could have been caused. Better still, it meant that one of their sorcerers had been focussed on defence, not attack, and that was how she intended to keep things as she prepared another rock to be launched.

*

Sarah’s Mansion, Illion, East Allantra, Dunia (Aura-14G)

Sarah and Stark were sitting, staring into the portal, just like they might have stared at a TV screen when their favourite show was on. The battle was in full swing; people were starting to die. People on the side of the Eroptians and their allies. It wouldn’t be long before they called her.

When she’d approached the king of Eropt and offered her terms—her help in exchange for the throne of Vorn—he’d said no. His lips quirked, as if he were about to laugh at her, but he restrained himself. He was not so stupid as to burn that bridge.

The king had said he was confident they could win. He was amassing more and more mercenaries and conscripts with each passing day. He told her how he’d been so close to taking the city on the last assault. He just needed a few more men to make it a success next time; a few more of the elven charms of protection his principal sorcerer kept mysteriously finding, and perhaps a better-thought-through plan of attack. Then Katin would be his, and the rest of Ratica and Vorn would follow.

She’d thought the idiot over-confident even before Tom and Mark turned up. She’d spotted them with her eyes, even though she couldn’t sense them with her power. They were cloaked—they all were; every sorcerer on the field. Amberallions were another elven charm, one that stopped the wearer from being located by another sorcerer. Just like the ones she’d found on her two prisoners before she’d cut open their skin and sealed them deep inside so they couldn’t get at them their selves without risking death.

As she sat with Stark, looking through the portal, she could see the whole battlefield from whatever angle she liked, and she’d been scouring the Army of Ratica and Vorn for any familiar faces. That was how she’d found Mark and Tom, sitting on horses, directing shit, doing magic, apparently in charge.

They would tip the balance. The Eroptians didn’t have a chance now that those two had added their strength. They’d come crawling to her soon enough once defeat looked inevitable.

The armies of the East were within arrow-shot of the Eroptians, and the exchange of pointed missiles had begun. Mark started using his power; he’d built a secondary shield behind the massive magical barrier Tom created. A smaller one, but a tougher one. Strong enough to stop arrows dead. Not a single arrow found the army while their own archers fired with impunity. The Eroptian sorcerers were struggling to defend against the shower of arrows and flying rocks that bombarded them.

A tingle of magic shuddered down Sarah’s spine. She spun.

A circle of sparks appeared in the air. The space inside it went black. She waved her hand and let the caller in. The circle cleared. A panicked sorcerer faced her and relayed the request from the king that she’d been expecting.

‘Time to go,’ she said to Stark. It was such a shame Jon wasn’t up for interfering in foreign wars. The boring bastard seemed more than happy looking after his little city of Anvol. But she supposed maybe it was a blessing in disguise. The last thing she needed was someone taking advantage of her absence. He could watch her prize; he could look after Illion and her prisoners while she was gone. She hoped she wouldn’t be too long. It wouldn’t do for her prisoners to get used to kind treatment.

*

City of Katin, Ratica, Dunia (Aura-14G)

Garrad’s company had made good progress at first. His men were fit; they’d been handpicked for this attribute as well as their skills on the battlefield. The sun-baked fields of West Ratica made for easy going at first, but they’d not fully taken into account the extent of the marshes. They’d been told about them, but they’d brushed them off, confident they could use magic to get across with ease. Except the marshes were big, and Monty’s magic was finite. Like all sorcerers, he could only wield so much of it until he became fatigued, and they still had a lot to do after they cleared the marshes.

They did what all soldiers faced with such a barrier would do—manned up and dived in. They didn’t sink much above waist level. For big chunks of the marshes, they could wade through the rushes and lily pads and slimy weeds that infested the depths. Going was slow, and Garrad was getting anxious. He’d seen the signal to march a while back. He’d kept one eye on the exchange of missiles. He’d seen the rocks and barrels fly, now the arrows were falling, and he was still not at his destination.

He’d had Monty send a location report. Lord Harrison had assured him that he still had time. It didn’t stop the aching in the pit of his stomach as he eyed up the stretch of marshes they still had to cross.

*

‘Jesus, what was that?’ Tom exclaimed. He was thrust back in his saddle as he struggled to hold his shield in situ.

‘What’s up, mate?’ Mark asked, eyes darting around the battlefield, monitoring the progression of the Army, while keeping those pesky arrows at bay.

‘Someone just hit my shield—someone with kick.’

‘How much kick?’

‘Like my own or your kind of kick… Fuck!’ He tensed as he deflected another attack, but he was ready this time.

Mark’s gaze shot sideways. This time, he’d seen Tom strain under the assault. ‘Shit, who the hell is doing that?’

‘Dunno. I can only hold against that kind of assault for so long, even—’ Another hit. ‘Eventually, they’ll beat me if they’re from Earth and are coming to this fresh.’

‘Sarah?’

‘Possibly. Does it matter?’

‘Not really. But if your shield is gonna die, let’s make it redundant first. Time to get this show on the road. Signal the advance.’

The blast of blue light was the signal the infantry was waiting for. The army had halted within firing range of the arrows; the blue light told the foot soldiers to weave through the archers and head towards the enemy. The battle was about to begin in earnest. Mark’s soldiers would soon be given the chance to show their worth.

‘Infantry are on the move. Do you want to send the cavalry on that flanking assault?’ Tom asked.

‘Still not sure. Seems too convenient for them to have an open side—looks suspicious to me. Get Richus. Ask him what he can see, see what he thinks.’

Tom did as he was told. He opened a communications portal to the sorcerer who’d been assigned to shadow the general. Mark had put the general in command of the cavalry to keep him out of their way and to stop him fucking up Mark’s strategy.

‘He says he has riders out keeping track of what’s going on,’ said Tom. ‘He’s convinced it’s safe. He’s champing at the bit to attack. He’s… Shit.’

‘What?’

‘Looks like he’s called the charge.’

‘Arsehole!’ Mark yelled. ‘There’s no fucking way that bastard is taking over as Master of Sword now, not if he can’t follow simple orders. Keep an eye on the cavalry, Tom. Tell me how they’re doing.’

Tom watched through a portal he had spun. The charge was in full gallop; the flank looked wide open. Thud. Another blast hit his shield. His portal flickered as he struggled to maintain his defences as well as his portal. ‘Could probably do with another sorcerer here to do this kind of thing, Mark, if you want me to keep this shield up. Shall I ask Eliza?’

‘See if she has a sorcerer spare.’

‘It’s looking good, Mark. The enemy has spotted the cavalry and seems to be panicking; they’re retreating. No, wait! Fuck!’

‘What?’

‘Pikemen. Just popped out of a ditch. Shit!’ Another hit on his shield; another flicker on the portal; another strain on his power. ‘General, get those men out of there!’ he screamed through the portal. The man practically jumped out of his saddle in shock, but he wasted no time in calling the retreat. From the look on his face, it was clear he’d seen the pikemen too.

‘Tom, get the archers to switch fire to their left flank and send a composite battalion to move in,’ Mark ordered. ‘Fourth battalion should do it. They have spearmen and pikemen of their own, if I remember rightly?’

The Master of Sword piped up. ‘The fourth battalion has a company of spearmen, pikemen and foot soldiers. If there aren’t too many enemies to defeat, they should do fine.’ Tom has almost forgotten that the man was with them.

‘Thanks, Alfor. Tom, you get that? Send fourth round and add any backup you think they need. You concentrate on that. I need to direct the main attack.’

*

Someone was hammering her father’s shield, someone powerful; Eliza could sense it. She’d tried to find out who it was. It was harder to fire her missiles now that the two sides were engaged. She couldn’t risk hitting their own. They’d already destroyed all the trebuchets. Monty worked out how to get through their magical defences at the wall. It took a lot of power to do it, but she, her Aunt Kala, and Hellenia had destroyed them all. There were no more engines of war. Most of the enemy was now being engaged by Vorn and Ratica’s forces, and Kala and Hellenia had started to focus on any enemy soldiers who weren’t. Eliza had a moment to breathe, to check on her own platoon, and make sure they were all OK.

Most were doing a good job of relaying communications. A few were in the midst of combat, supporting their assigned units as best they could on the ground. Everything was going well, but the pounding on her father’s shield was unnerving. She couldn’t find whoever was attacking. Like her, they were cloaked; they probably had amberallions like she did.

She could follow their trail if she focussed on the magical attack and she wasn’t trying to do anything else at the same time. She could trace the power to its source with patience, but she’d have to be outside of her father’s shield to do it.

She didn’t say what she was up to; he’d forbid it. He was her father, and his decisions would always be clouded by sentimentality. She just acted. She cloaked herself, leapt onto her horse, and rode out from their right flank. She galloped away from the armies and beyond the rim of the shield.

She picked a quiet spot, reined in her horse, and closed her eyes as she focussed on the blasts of magic that bombarded the shield. It didn’t take long to find the telltale signature; she grasped it in her mind and her consciousness shot back down the shaft of power. The trail vanished. She waited for the next one. She found it, and she got a little closer. After one or two more blasts, the shaft went no further. She was at the source.

She opened her eyes. She made a viewing portal just above the source of power she’d found and stared through the window she’d created. Dirty-blonde hair, skin-tight clothes, far too much flesh on show. She knew who that was straight away. It was Sarah. She was here, and she was hammering magic towards her father. Her decision about what to do was made in seconds. She dug her heels into her mount and galloped towards the enemy.

*

Monty had found some logs. The company had made short work of building the raft that was now ferrying batches of men back across the river, towards the barely defended bank on the other side. The battle was in full swing, and they were late, but they’d made it, and they’d soon be ready to hit the enemy from behind.

The Eroptians and their allies had made their camp inside the arch of a meander; they were protected on two sides by the huge, winding river. They’d clearly not considered an attack from behind to be feasible. They’d thought about assaults by boat, as they’d blocked off river traffic coming from downstream and controlled it when it came from upstream. They’d been getting their supplies in by river; boats came in from upstream all the time. In the middle section, there were no boats, and there was no way to get across without being seen, unless you had magic.

There were sentries watching this area, including a sorcerer. Monty was powerful, and it was easy to deceive someone with so little magic. He made sure no one saw a ripple out of place on the river. Not the sorcerer, not the sentries, not anyone. They might have seen the footsteps appear on the sandy shore if they were looking, but they weren’t. Half the time, the sentries kept glancing behind them to watch the spectacle of missiles being blasted out of the air above their army.

Monty led the way up the riverbank, then paused. He froze the sentries with his power while his soldiers sneaked towards each one. On Garrad’s signal, a sword went into the chest of every one of them. The rattle of their armour as they crashed to the ground was unavoidable—attention was drawn. It was time to charge.

*

Eliza leapt off her horse. It was getting too difficult to weave her way through the enemy forces undetected with such a large animal under her. She turned it and slapped it on the rear. It dashed away; back the way she’d come. It suddenly became visible, completely flummoxing the enemy soldiers, who saw a horse appear out of nowhere.

She sped away, keen not to be in the place where evidence of magic lingered. She had the spot where she’d located Sarah fixed in her head; she was heading as directly to it as the troops she was weaving around would let her. As she grew closer and tuned her senses back to the source of the magic, she found something she wasn’t expecting. There was not one sorcerer, but two. There was someone else here with Sarah, hurling missiles by her side. Eliza concentrated on their energy source to make sure it was a separate person. It was, and they were suddenly running away from Sarah, towards the rear. She needed to find out why. She knew about Garrad’s rear flanking assault, and dread flooded her. She sprinted after the running signature.

She suddenly lost the trace—it vanished. When a sorcerer wielded powerful magic, it was impossible to hide their aura, but when they didn’t use their power and they were hidden by amberallions, they were impossible to find. She was starting to panic. She stood firm as she tried to get her bearings, scanning the space around her for evidence of magic. She felt something; another shield near the river. Another sorcerer’s magic. Then a surge of energy. The signature she’d lost suddenly came back, revealing their presence.

She set off at a sprint to where she’d felt the magic. She wove around carts and tents. Monty and Garrad were ahead, Garrad at the head of his company, Monty by his side, arms in the air, magic flowing from his palms.

A clash of power in mid-air. She whipped her head round. There was a smoking cloud where a fireball had been quenched, and an odd-looking man was poised not far away. He wore ankle-length boots with laces. She’d only seen boots like that on Earth. He was a sorcerer, and he’d undoubtedly be stronger than Monty, but not her and Monty together. She bounded to Monty’s side and prepared to launch an attack.

*

‘How are we doing, Tom?’ Mark shouted above the roar of battle filling the air. ‘Tell me what you can see.’

‘Both assaults are going well, both the frontal and the flanking assault. We are advancing. Kala and Hellenia have killed several enemy sorcerers, and Garrad has begun to engage the rear. But—’ Tom grimaced. ‘I’m not sure how much longer I can hold against the attack on our shield. I think it’s time to drop it.’

‘I agree. Let’s get Kala and Hellenia to take over with some smaller, more targeted shields for our reserves. We need to move in and find whoever is blasting us… Shit, what’s that?’ Mark exclaimed, as a flash of magical radiance flared out from the rear of the battle.

‘It’s got to be Monty. Looks like he’s being engaged.’

‘Time to get into the thick of things.’ Mark turned to the Master of Sword. ‘Lord Unwin, take over. You’re in charge of the battle of steel. The prince and I will look after the war of magic.’

*

Sarah’s last blast had hit nothing. It kept going and landed harmlessly on the ground. Her attacks had been created with the sole aim of destroying a magical field. They’d have no effect on anything that wasn’t magic, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that her blast had kept going. And that meant that the shield was down. She’d finally broken through. She’d worn down whoever held the magical barrier in place, and now she was able to blast those arseholes from Vorn and Ratica to shit.

A flood of cavalry galloped past her. Eropt was on the offensive. Good. She’d broken the other side’s defences, and the Eroptians were taking the initiative. She’d spotted the gap between the main assault and the flank and wondered why the hell the other side hadn’t sent their own cavalry through. Maybe they were too depleted after running into the trap they’d set earlier with their pikemen. A clever ploy by the Eroptians.

She made ready to give the Eroptian cavalry a helping hand. She threw open a viewing portal so she could watch their progress and made ready to back them up, to help their rear assault with magical artillery. They’d cut straight through; they were behind the enemy and preparing to attack their rear. She made herself ready to help. But just as she was forming her ball of magic to throw, a blast of power came towards her. She redirected her energy to defend herself and countered just in time.

Her eyes widened in horror. It was Tom and Mark, right in front of her, two against one, and they were about to strike again.

*

Lord Alfor Unwin kept an eye on the progressing battle, watching as standard after enemy standard fell, cut down by his own men. Lord Harrison had been right about their soldiers being worth two of the enemy’s. They fought remarkably well. Eroptians armed with blunt swords, protected by leather armour and conscripted from the villages succumbed easily to the professional men of Vorn, who were protected by chain mail and steel plates. He could only look on with pride at the army he’d helped Mark to forge.

He spotted movement. A gap opened up between the main assaulting forces and those deployed at the flank. Enemy cavalry flooded through. He knew straight away what their intentions were; the rear of his army was wide open and vulnerable. Arrows flew over his head as he galloped towards the archers. They had a sorcerer with them; he needed to get a message to the general. He interrupted the sorcerer midway through preparing a spell to hurl at the enemy.

‘Get General Richus, tell him to intercept the cavalry!’ he screamed.

The sorcerer responded at once. While Alfor waited for the message to be sent, he was baffled as to where the remnants of their cavalry had gone. If they were too far away, their rear could be decimated by the enemy before the friendly forces even arrived.

The sorcerer finished passing on the message.

‘Get Lord Harrison,’ Lord Unwin yelled. ‘Ask him to send magic to our rear now!’

*

Stark was legging it towards her, just as she was feeling done for. Was he running to help her? Sarah hoped so. Mark twisted and started throwing magic towards the main melee. That left just one of them focussed on her. It was Prince Thomas of Vorn. And Stark was on his way to back her up, the odds had suddenly changed. She grinned.

Her grin dropped when she saw two others on Stark’s tail. She recognised the girl from when Aran had caught her in Australia, and the young man was a sorcerer too—he was hurling magic, and Stark was deflecting as he ran. The odds had certainly changed. They’d turned even further against her.

‘Get a portal open!’ Stark screamed as he sprinted.

She stared for a moment in disbelief, horrified and furious. Stark was being chased by that bitch who’d shot her, who’d escaped her clutches. The stupid little princess who ought not to have caused so much bother. And a boy who looked barely old enough to know his arse from his elbow.

Something inside screamed at her to blast the two kids to bits. No privileged little shits would get the better of her. Instinct told her not to. Instinct made her check on the other two sorcerers.

Thomas was about to strike. Mark would only be preoccupied for so long.

‘Fuck!’ she cursed.

She spun a portal at once and leapt through in time to avoid a missile. She kept it open for Stark to follow. She gracefully bounded onto the polished stone and waited for him. He launched himself through and careered into her chest, throwing her to the floor. She was scrambling to her feet as she made ready to close the portal, but she was too late. She stared in horror as Tom and Mark appeared through the ring of sparks, a blast of magic hurled her way as they vaulted through. She managed to counter the attack, deflecting it towards the ceiling, bringing lumps of plaster and a shower of dust down on her assailants. She turned and set off at a sprint, closing the portal behind her as she went. It hadn’t occurred to her that anyone else would follow too. She scowled at the thought of her own stupidity. She glanced behind to check Stark was following. Her scowl now focused on the oaf who lumbered after her. She’d risked everything to save that idiot.

The battle continues…

There’s another two chapters before this battle is truly over. The next one follows Sarah and the sorcerers who jump through the portal after her. In the one after, the story returns to the battlefield outside of Katin and wraps up things there.

The Queen’s Daughter is book 2 in The Offspring Trilogy. This is the second trilogy in The Gallantrian Legacy. If you enjoyed what you read and want to read more, I suggest you start with The General’s Son: Book 1 in The Offspring Trilogy, where Garrad is introduced as a young recruit who ends up on a bit of an adventure that takes him to Earth.

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4. Atropia

The Plains of Atropia

Grinthy crept up to the edge of the mound, peeking through the long grass at the camp ahead. She didn’t need to look left and right to check Jarg and Adreeg would follow her lead. They’d been travelling blindly through the plains for days, and in that time, her two companions had shown little desire to be the ones that made the decisions.

Jarg had said he knew the land on the ship. It soon turned out that all he knew was that there were massive plains in Atropia south of Goblin Wood. They all knew Goblin Wood had long been a refuge for goblins. It was part of a human-ruled kingdom, but the humans were content to leave the woods to the goblins.

The woodland clans were ancient; outsiders were rarely accepted into old clans with tight bonds. They knew they had more chance with the clans on the Plains—formed from refugees from Geshlamp—they were newer, and would be easier to join.

After long nights of heading west, dawn brought them the sight they’d been looking for. A goblin camp.

‘So now what?’ Andreeg croaked from Grinthy’s left.

Grinthy took a deep breath; she knew what had to be done. ‘We find the chief before he beds down for the day.’

‘You plan to just walk in and ask to join?’ Jarg snarled from her right.

‘What else do you suggest? We have nothing to offer but ourselves. All we can hope is that he wants to grow his clan.’ She didn’t wait for him to answer; instead, she climbed to her feet and resolved to march straight into the camp.

She’d closed less than half the distance when the challenge was made.

‘Halt!’ A skinny silhouette of a goblin sipped from the side of a tent with a crossbow aimed at her face.

She took a few more steps to make a point, then stopped, just as his finger twitched on the trigger.

A breeze swept across the plains, rustling the grass and mixing the sound with the chatter of goblins in the tent ahead. She hadn’t heard Jarg or Andreeg follow her. Cowards.

‘State your business.’ The skinny goblin snapped.

‘We want to join your clan.’

‘We? I can’t see anyone else.’

‘My two companions are hiding behind me, both have a crossbow of their own pointed at your head in case you try anything stupid,’ she bluffed. ‘We would all like to join.’

The goblin lowered his crossbow just a twitch to see her more clearly.

The sun was about to rise, and enough light flooded over the horizon to make her as clear as day to a goblin’s eyes. She was dressed as a sailor, in a grimy white shirt and trousers, with a neckerchief round her neck and a cloak bundled under one arm. Her other hand fingered the hilt of her dagger.

‘You from Geshlamp?’

She nodded. By the sound of the goblin in front of her, he was too.

‘Jump ship at Eldor, did you?’

She nodded again.

He narrowed his eyes. ‘Tell your friends to drop their weapons and come out so I can see ‘em. You can drop that dagger and all.’

She made a show of pulling her dagger out of her belt and dropping on the ground. Her hammer remained hidden under her bundled cloak.

Grinthy turned. ‘Jarg, Andreeg!’ She gestured for them to approach.

The two of them raised their cowardly heads and edged her way.

‘Had crossbows pointed at me, did they?’ the skinny goblin snarled.

Grinthy grinned. ‘Drop your blades,’ she said to Jarg and Andreeg.

‘Egor, keep an eye on the south,’ the skinny goblin called out to his left flank before turning back to Grinthy. ‘The name’s Ungurd. Let’s go see the chief.’

Ungurd led the three newcomers towards the biggest tent in the camp. With three tall apexes and a sprawling mass of heavy canvas, propped up by smaller posts besides, it dwarfed the other tents in the camp.

Ungurd led them towards the goblin chatter. He swept aside a tent flap and brought Grinthy, Jarg and Andreeg into the midst of a sea of her kin. Goblins were everywhere. Some sprawled on the ground, some sitting, talking and gnawing on bones. In the midst of the space was a long table covered in dirty plates and bones with drying scraps of skin. Brown and hairy, it looked like animal skin to Grinthy, and days old at that. Sweat, and filth, and rotting skin perfumed the air. It was a while since fresh meat had graced this table.

‘You bring me more mouths to feed!’

Grinthy’s stare snapped towards the sound of the deep bellow. A plump goblin sitting on a fur covered chair glared their way. The chatter in the tent stopped. Sleeping goblins were roused. All eyes were on Grinthy, Jarg and Andreeg.

‘More refugees from Geshlamp, Chief.’

The chief raised his lip in a snarl, showing his pointed, yellow teeth.

‘Talk, vermin.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘Let me hear how you speak.’

‘I’m Grinthy of Hankeran. I was a blacksmith. The Hostan humans came to my village and murdered my family—both mate and children.’ She gritted her teeth, forcing her face not to betray her sorrow. ‘I escaped and fled to Carrig where I found a place on a Noxun ship. That’s where I met these two.’ She indicated Jarg and Andreeg.

Jarg took a step forward and managed to straighten. ‘I’m Jarg of Isegard, near the border with Ratica. I got word that the humans were coming from the south. I didn’t wait to see them come. I got work with the Noxuns in Kuyvor. We sailed from there to Carrig, then on to Eldor where we jumped ship.’

Andreeg went next. ‘The humans killed my parents years back in a raid. I found work on the Noxun ship rather than starve. But life on a ship is hard, too hard. There’s no way back on land in Geshlamp, not now that the humans have it. Thought I’d give Atropia a go.’

The chief inclined his head. ‘I’ve not heard of Hankeran and Isegard, but I’ve a good ear for accents. Hankeran’s in the west and Isegard’s in the east, I reckon. But you sound more Noxun than owt.’ He said to Andreeg.

‘I’ve been with the Noxuns for years! What do you expect!’ she snapped.

The chief gave a hard stare. Grinthy froze, tensing, waiting for him to give his verdict.

Then he laughed. A deep belly laugh that shook his rolls of fat.

The rest of the goblins began to laugh with him.

‘Had ‘em terrified, I did,’ he said to his crowd. Grinthy knew her face had betrayed no fear; she’d forced it to be unreadable. Perhaps Jarg and Andreeg had not shown the same courage.

‘From Garlgoth myself,’ the Chief said. ‘My clan’s made of none but those from Geshlamp. Most of ‘em, at least. Any from my homeland is welcome—once they prove themselves. And I give everyone a chance. We’ve not eaten in days. I hope you know how to hunt.’

*

Grinthy padded through the long grass with Jarg at her side. The two of them followed a group of ten goblins, led by one named Ikin. He’d been out scouting earlier that night and had spotted a fire. A fire meant a camp—he’d crept close enough to see who was travelling through the plains. It was just three humans, and one was a scrawny female. And the female had taken first watch.

The humans had stopped for the night not far from the goblin camp. It was too good a chance to miss. Grinthy, Andreeg and Jarg had been in the camp just two nights when Ikin returned with his news. Andreeg had already found her way into the chief’s bed by then, but Grinthy and Jarg had still to earn their place in the clan.

Twelve goblins ought to be more than enough to overpower two sleeping males and a scrawny female. Especially if they took them by surprise.

‘You sure they’re just farmers, Ikin?’ one of the goblins in the pack ahead asked. Grinthy accelerated, keen to hear the answer. As newcomers, she and Jarg had been told precious little about what they were hunting.

‘Who else would travel this far north with a female but farmers desperate to sell stuff?’ Ikin snapped his reply.

Grinthy’s brow furrowed. She could think of many reasons. They could be hunters, trappers, or just travellers off to visit their kin in some remote human village. But neither option bothered her; they’d kill them all, regardless. Three humans would feed the clan for days, and if she was part of the hunting party, she’d have earned her place in the clan.

‘How much further, Ikin?’ another moaned.

‘Just over this rise,’ Ikin growled. ‘Now shut it; do you want ‘em to hear us?’

Ikin brought the hunting party to a halt. It was dark and damp. Drizzle had swept the vast plains all day, soaking the thorny thickets that dotted the plains, drenching the grasses and saturating the soil. It was more tricky to be stealthy when your feet squelched in the mud.

But at least the mood wouldn’t betray them this night.

Cloud still blanketed the sky, hiding what light might be cast by the moon, making it tricky to see, even for a goblin. To the humans, they would be invisible. The fire would take what pathetic night-vision the humans might have.

Ikin’s ears poked up above a rise, silhouetted black against the flickering flames of the human camp. The ears sank back down, and Ikin squelched and shuffled as he turned. ‘The female is still on watch,’ he whispered. ‘Newbies, think you can take her?’

‘Course we can!’ Grinthy growled as quietly as she could manage.

‘Good, you snatch her, we’ll take the men. Keep her alive if you can; the chief likes his food squirming when he eats.’

Ikin crept over the rise. Walking on hands and feet, picking his way through the grass and mud like they all did. Once in sight of the fire, it was easy to see well enough to pick a stealthy path. The ten goblins Ikin led moved with barely a sound. They branched right, circling the camp to approach from the rear, where Grinthy could see three horses tethered and two maggot-like forms laid on the ground—the two sleeping men.

The goblins were downwind of the camp. The horses would not smell the approaching hunting party yet. But it wouldn’t be long before they did. Horses feared goblins, while goblins had no love for the beasts. A fit goblin could easily cover more ground than a horse, especially at night. And a blind, fat, drunk goblin could move with more stealth than a horse. Horses wouldn’t allow themselves to be led by goblins, and they were too heavy to carry. The humans were their target.

‘Let’s get her before those beasts smell the others. We can grab her and run, and leave the others to fight the men,’ Grinthy said to Jarg, in a whisper so quiet, Jarg would have to read her thin lips. But he nodded. Goblins were well used to communicating while making barely a sound.

On she crept. The tantalising smell of human mixed with the charred wood of the fire. Grinthy’s mouth began to water. With yellow eyes glued on her prey, she continued.

A crack.

Grinthy froze.

She’d been careless. She felt a twig snap under her toes. The human looked her way, but blinded as she was by the fire, she soon looked away and resumed her ignorant stare at the flames.

Grinthy drew closer with Jarg close on her tail.

It was almost time to pounce.

Behind her, metal clinked on metal. Perhaps it was Jarg drawing his dagger.

‘Shhh,’ she hissed. Louder than she’d planned. The human female jolted. Stiff and staring, eyes searching. She must have heard her. She could scream at any moment.

It was time to pounce.

Grinthy leapt to her feet.

The human screamed. ‘Tom!’

The name of one of her companions, Grinthy guessed. But it was too late. She was still sitting on the ground and groping blindly for a weapon when Grinthy launched herself towards her. She landed on her chest, gripped the scrawny human by the arms and held her firm. Years of hammering metal in her blacksmith’s forge had given her a grip-strength the human couldn’t hope to wriggle free from.

‘Argh!’ the female cried out.

‘Emma!’ a man’s voice called in reply.

Moments later, weapons clashed.

Ikin and the others were fighting the human men. Grinthy had stolen their surprise. She walked backwards, dragging the female and daring a look at the fight. The men were on their feet, swords swinging wildly. One took Ikin’s head with a swipe of his blade, then slashed it back to stab another goblin in the chest.

The second human was holding off three others. The remaining five charged at Ikin’s killer.

‘Grab her feet,’ Grinthy barked at Jarg.

Jarg did one better. He gripped her waist and hauled her clear of the ground, swinging her onto his shoulder. Jarg was not a tall goblin, but he was stocky. He’d just shown his bulk hid surprising strength.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Grinthy said, leading the way into the darkness.

‘No argument from me,’ Jarg replied.

They set off at a jog back to their camp.

Just as she crested the rise, Grinthy dared a final glance back.

The human men were still fighting what was left of Ikin’s crew. She counted five goblins still standing, but she had a feeling that very soon there’d be none.

She and Jarg continued in silence until the sound of battle had faded, and just the swish of the wind through the grass and the plod of their feet filled the night.

The human let out a soft groan.

‘Quiet!’ croaked Jarg. ‘Think we’ve got a squealer here, Grinthy. If she screams again, let’s cut out her tongue. It would make a nice appetiser don’t you think?’

‘The chief won’t want his dinner half-eaten, Jarg!’ Grinthy snapped.

‘Let’s just hope the others don’t take those bigger humans alive too. Our offering will look pitiful next to the meat on those,’ Jarg replied.

‘From the way they fought, I doubt they’d let themselves be taken alive. That bloody idiot Ikin said they were probably farmers. He said nothing about them being trained fighters. His stupidity will be rewarded if they finish him off.’

‘Good job we snatched this one and ran then, eh, Grinthy! A scrawny one is better than nothing. I just hope there is enough of her so that the chief lets us have a bite.’ Jarg gave Emma’s thigh a squeeze. ‘There’s more meat than you might think on this one!’

*

‘Get back!’ the human female’s words tore Grinthy from her sleep. She sat up, blinking, scanning the tent in a sleepy daze. Her stare rested on the human. The stupid creature was trying to back herself into the pole in a futile attempt to escape from something.

Grinthy shook her head awake and focused. A goblin was crawling towards the prey—the live human she and Jarg had hauled back to the camp for the chief.

‘Get away from her, Igart!’ Grinthy snarled, climbing to her feet.

Igart cast her a scowl. Grinthy charged.

She leapt, diving his way and grabbing his chest as she landed. Igart collapsed onto his belly, where he lay for a moment, stunned, squirming free of Grinthy’s grip and scrambling to his feet. Grinthy was standing before he was, but Igart wasted no time in launching himself at his attacker.

He crashed into Grinthy, his shoulder ramming her chest, claws scraping her back while Grinthy punched his arms. She grabbed his ear in her teeth and tore his flesh. He recoiled just enough for her to land a punch in his gut.

All around, goblins stirred. Those most awake began to cheer; most of them for Igart.

Grinthy swung another punch. Igart dodged. Grinthy feinted then hooked a leg round his, tripping him to the floor. He grabbed her as he fell, pulling her to the dirt with him.

At the far end of the tent, a curtain was drawn. ‘What’s all that racket!’ The chief’s voice bellowed down the tent.

Grinthy and Igart stopped their brawl at once and pulled apart.

‘He was going to eat your prey, chief!’ Grinthy squawked.

‘Lies! She was,’ Igart goblin snarled, jabbing a finger in Grinthy’s chest. ‘I was trying to stop her.’

‘I don’t care who—’ the chief was cut short by a yell from a goblin outside.

‘Humans!’

All around her, goblins scrambled to their feet, snatching weapons from the ground. Some fled the tent; others backed towards their chief to protect him with a ring of steel.

Feet thudded on the grass, and swords rattled in sheaths as goblins ran. Screams, falls, thuds, then a familiar whistling sound. An arrow ripped through the tent’s canvas and embedded itself in the dirt.

More arrows whistled overhead, another shot through the canvas, but this one was different; its tip was ablaze.

‘Fire!’ screamed a goblin.

‘Fire, fire!’ yelled more goblins. ‘Get out of the tent!’

The canvas was ablaze, flames ripping across the oiled fabric with terrifying speed. Smoke billowed, goblins ran. Some still guarded the chief. Grinthy realised she’d stalled, frozen in fear as memories of her burning village flashed through her mind. Heart racing, chest heaving, she glanced towards the chief—he was already hidden by the smoke. Grinthy coughed. She shook her head free of thoughts of her past and forced herself to think only of survival. If she died now, she could never avenge her family.

She dropped to her hands and knees and began to crawl. Still coughing, she fought for breath as she sped up towards the light of the tent flaps—left open as others had fled.

She scrambled out into the dawn and into fresh air. She wiped her streaming eyes and coughed the last of the soot from her lungs.

She paused. She listened.

Arrows whistled, fire crackled, goblins screamed and ran.

There was another sound—a sound that brought a fresh wave of fear.

Hoofbeats.

Mounted humans were rushing her way. And on the plains of Atropia, there were no woods to run to, and few places to hide.

Think!

Grinthy panted, trying to work out how to avoid being slaughtered. She looked around her, desperate for inspiration. She spotted something. A corpse—a dead goblin—lay face up with an arrow in its chest. She scrambled over to him and snatched the arrow out of his chest, its steel point dripping green blood as she pulled it free. She collapsed onto him, pressing her chest on his, and soaking his blood onto her shirt before pulling away.

On hands and feet, Grinthy dashed towards another tent, one of the few not yet burning, and slipped inside. She twisted and collapsed onto her bottom, arrow in hand, ears pricked and listening.

The hoofbeats were growing louder.

‘Save the chief,’ she heard someone yell.

Then the chime of steel hitting steel, the war cries of men, the death knells of goblins.

A whistle.

An arrow ripped through the tent roof and landed in an abandoned bedroll behind her and burst into flames. She didn’t have much time.

Grabbing the arrow in both hands, she snapped its shaft over her knee and held the tail end in one hand. She stood, and held it out front, taking a deep breath as she prepared to do what needed to be done to save her life.

With a heavy thrust, she slammed the arrow shaft into her chest, hard enough to tear her shirt, hard enough to pierce her skin, hard enough to make her scream, but not hard enough to kill her.

With an agonising sting radiating from her chest, she looked down at her handy work. The shaft stuck from her chest in the midst of the patch of blood she’d imprinted on herself from the arrow’s first victim.

Grinthy stood frozen for a few moments, trying to work out if her heart still beat; if she’d just pierced her skin as she’d planned; if she’d not dealt herself a deadly blow.

Her chest hurt like hell, but the moments passed, and she was still standing. She tried to focus her spinning head; then she heard it—her pulse thudding in her ears.

She’d not stabbed her heart. She’d just broken her skin as planned.

Lungs gasping for air and wrenching coughs reminded her to move. She edged towards the tent flaps. All around, she could hear galloping soldiers and the final screams of dying goblins. It was time to die herself.

She staggered out of the tent, one hand on the arrow shaft, coughing, feet dragging, eyes rolling, she pushed her failing legs to take her far enough from the burning tent so she could fake her own death without being killed by flames for real.

She dropped to her knees, then her hands, and finally collapsed to the dirt, rolling onto her back with an arrow shaft sticking from her chest.

With vacant eyes staring at the clouds, she lay as still as she could and prayed to herself that Atropian humans wouldn’t stab all the dead—just to make sure.

Chapter 5 coming soon…

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Grinthy: A Goblin’s Takes place in parallel to Emma and Tom’s adventures in book 1 of The Stolen Throne trilogy. Learn more at:

www.charlottegoodwin.co.uk

As part of my background work for this article, I ran my chapters through AI and asked it to rate my five chapters from best to worst. And the answer wasn’t the one I was hoping for.

According to AI, my final opening—the one that currently exists in my published novel—is the worst. Not only that, it says that this version is the least likely to make people want to read on.

Part of me wished I’d never asked.

But before I collapsed into a corner and cried, I decided to do something else. I wanted to know how the chapters worked as openings when considered along with the two chapters that came after. And the tables suddenly turned. Hurrah!

AI much preferred my opening three chapters of my published novel to the three chapters that included its favourite chapter. So I guess if I can get folks past chapter one, then great!

I think first chapters are the hardest to get right. You have to do so many things in so few words. You need to hook your reader; you need to introduce your characters; you need to set the scene; and you need to make the reader care about what happens next.

Once you’re in full flow, your reader is already familiar with your world, they already care about the protagonist, they already know what the stakes are, so you can focus on far fewer plot elements at a time. But when you are starting out, you need to introduce so much while trying your best to engage your reader. It’s a lot to get right.

And perhaps a bigger problem is knowing where to start. Perhaps for some stories, the start point is obvious. For others, not so much. In the case of my first novel, I thought my story started when my antagonist stumbled through a wormhole and ended up on a fantasy planet. So that’s where I started my story.

It turns out it didn’t start there at all!

It was the start of my antagonist’s story, but not my protagonist’s—and that is generally what your story should focus on.

I started with my bad guy. I wanted to show her journey from a sweet young woman to super villain. So I started writing, and writing, and before I knew it, I was 40,000 words in and the reader still hadn’t met my protagonist.

I’d started in the wrong place. But where was the right place to start?

I began the first draft of my first novel around five years ago. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing back then; I just pantsed my way through and wrote what came into my head. I didn’t even know what an inciting incident was; I just scribbled down a story. Years more of writing, editing, re-writing and writing some more, have taught me a lot about some of the more technical parts of creative writing—like understanding what an inciting incident is.

If you aren’t clear on this, then it is the event that sets the story in motion. It usually involves something that disrupts the protagonist’s life and introduces the central conflict. This, in turn, drives the rest of the plot.

The keyword here is “protagonist”. Not antagonist! If only I’d known this sooner. But hey, you live and you learn.

But working out exactly what this inciting incident is can be quite tricky. It certainly was for me. After I’d clocked it wasn’t when my baddie arrived on my goodie’s planet, I realised it was the point that good guy had her life changed forever. But was that when she was abducted as a kid and sent to Earth? Or was it when she was abducted again and returned to her home planet as a grown woman?

Arguably, you can have two inciting incidents, but I concluded incident two wouldn’t happen unless incident one had happened, so the first abduction was the badger.

It was hard for me to accept that half of my entire novel needed to be axed. But axed it was, and I started my next version with the first abduction of my protagonist. But my novel is about a grown woman, not a child, so I needed to have a jump in time. I jumped, then started prattling on about Emma’s life on Earth at Uni and I show her meeting her future husband. I waffle on more about a load of other stuff that isn’t really relevant.

My book took a while to get going.

By my fourth draft, I’d figured this out, so started my novel beyond this inciting incident. I start it by focusing on Emma, not long before she’s abducted for the second time. But in this version, I skip the actual inciting incident and the start doesn’t have a fantasy vibe at all.

I had a rethink and realised I needed to include the first abduction but I also needed to get to the second abduction quickly, because the story really starts once Emma is back on her home planet. So I came up with a chapter one that covers off that first abduction, while introducing the sci-fi elements, and allowing the story to progress quickly to the second abduction which happens in the second chapter. By chapter 5 of my final version, my protagonist has travelled across the universe and has begun her quest to save her home planet—which is what the story is really all about.

A hell of a lot more work went into this story besides to get it into its current state. But I think knowing where to start it was the biggest challenge. It’s the first of a trilogy, so books two and three naturally followed on, and I found the first chapters for those pretty easy. But chapter one for my second trilogy? I had some very similar issues.

I started with my antagonist again!

Long story short, I realised I’d started too early, and only after this book had been published for a year did I decide that it started in the wrong place and pulled it off the shelves.

Now, all six of my novels are in a publishable state. I worked on the lot with a view to releasing them all this year. Four are already out, two more will be out soon.

Writing six novels, editing them, re-writing big chunks of them, and getting them publishing ready has been one hell of a learning curve. It’s taken me five years to get to a point where I think I now have a vague idea about the structure of a novel, rather than just writing what feels right. I think my next novel will be much better as a result. But you know what? If you’re anything like me, you can read all the books on writing in the world, and still only really learn when you give it a go, and you never stop learning.

As for chapter one of my first novel? I think I’ve decided to tweak it—again.

Discover The Gallantrian Legacy

www.charlottegoodwin.co.uk

Want to see how chapter 1 of Path to Power evolved? Read on…

Version 1.

This chapter starts in 1985, which is thirty years before the main narrative of my final draft starts. It follows my antagonist, Queen Lila, as a young woman on Earth, and shows how she stumbles through a wormhole and ends up trapped on Dunia. In this first version of my novel, I follow Queen Lila for twelve chapters over eleven years before finally jumping ahead to 2007 and the start of my protagonist, Emma’s story. She gets two chapters as a young girl before the story jumps again to 2016, and the story begins in earnest.

Even as I was writing the first draft of my novel, I knew, deep down, that my story didn’t really start until chapter 13, when Emma is a grown woman. It took me a year after finishing it, and getting a professional manuscript review, to final be able to admit this to myself. It was at this point that I started on version 2. I axed chapters 1 to 13 and tried to decide how to start it in a way that would ensure the rest of the story made sense.

Version 2.

I decided to start the story at the point where Queen Lila makes a decisive move to seize the power of the throne of Vorn, which happens when she assassinates her husband, the King, and attempts to assassinate his daughter, Emma, from his first marriage, too. Her aim is to clear the line of succession so that her own offspring can inherit the throne. In my second version, my first chapter is from the point of view of the alien who abducts Emma to save her life. In all my novels in The Gallantrian Legacy, there are aliens who are largely passive observers to the occupants of various inhabited planets. They aren’t supposed to interfere, but on this occasion, one of them did. Zark, the alien employed to monitor my fantasy planet, is watching a procession of the King, Queen, and Princess Emma through a city when she sees the assassination attempt and abducts Emma to save her life.

Version 3.

The starting point of the novel is the same in this version, but I was trying to make the novel more Emma-centric, as she is the protagonist of the novel. So I open with a scene featuring the build up to the carriage procession through the city from the point of view of Emma as a seven-year-old child. I later switch to Zark’s point of view, and the rest of the chapter unfolds in a similar way to how it did in version 2.

Version 4.

This version was written after I’d completed all six books in The Gallantrian Legacy, and I wanted to get the very first book publishing-ready. I gave the opening some thought. I decided I wasn’t happy with jumping though time from Emma’s abduction as a child to her life as an adult, and I also wanted to make this chapter more Emma-centric and character driven than the last one. I wanted to show a bit more of Tom, her husband, too. He is a strong supporting act throughout the story and is the protagonist in the sequel. In this version, I open with Emma as an adult, while Tom, who is an officer in the British Army, is deployed in Afghanistan. The first half follows Emma as she visits her parents; the second half follows Tom in Afghanistan.

Version 5.

I still wasn’t happy with the opening. I wanted to get the story going as quickly as possible while setting the scene as a science fantasy novel, and I was concerned that the last version didn’t reflect the genre well enough. I decided to open with Zark again. But this time, it was at the point the story was about to get going. She is on a punishment assignment after she’d abducted the princess years before, and is watching a replay of the events that led to her saving Emma’s life when she gets a call telling her it’s time to abduct Emma again, but this time, to bring her home to Dunia.

Version 6.

To be written. But I think I’ll make it a combination of versions 3 and 5. I think I’ll open with Emma to allow the reader to connect with the protagonist. I think I’ll cover off the procession up to the abduction, then have a scene break. I’ll then skip forwards 20 years to where Zark is on her punishment duty and she’s told it’s time to abduct Emma as an adult to bring her home.

There’s too much exposition in version 5, and the chance to connect with the protagonist is limited. It took the writing of this article to figure this out!

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3. Jumping Ship

Off the east coast of Atropia

Grinthy dared to steal a moment to stare; to study the harbour walls, the ships docked within, the dockhands and the humans who patrolled and kept the goblins away.

In Atropia, the humans tolerated goblins, as long as they stayed in the woods. Her kind had long been kept from the plains. They’d been forbidden from farming the empty lands that were kept wild, merely for the nobles to hunt on.

Goblins didn’t have nobles. Goblins had chiefs. Chiefs who’d earned their place at the top of the clan. There were no hereditary titles for goblins; titles meant nothing to Grinthy. How dare the selfish humans keep the plains from her people?

She’d learned much from the Noxun merchants, who had ferried her to another land. The ship she’d managed to board in Carrig had been desperate for sailors; half its crew had been from Geshlamp, and many had jumped ship to defend their homeland. The ship was short of sailors to crew it, so they were happy to take her on board. With one extra pair of hands, they had made their escape before the humans broke through the Noxun navy.

Grinthy had found a way to survive. She could live another day and grow strong again. Strong enough to get revenge on those who’d murdered her family. She didn’t want to throw her life away on the walls of Carrig; she’d slaughter humans like they’d slaughtered her kind, in cold blood.

‘Get to work!’ the first mate yelled at her, and she jumped into action, hurriedly gathering the sails. She shared a look with another deckhand, who twitched a nod. They had a plan, and it didn’t involve sailing back to Noxu as the captain intended.

Grinthy scuttled about the deck, going about her work with renewed vigour. She’d never been on a ship until she’d found her way onboard this one, but she was quickly whipped into shape. She knew if she weren’t useful, she’d find herself swimming. If she was going to swim, she’d do it on her terms.

She spotted a small rowing boat leave the harbour and head their way. Goblins weren’t allowed to dock in the harbour; goblins weren’t allowed onshore. But the Atropians wanted to trade nonetheless; the human traders would row out to the goblin ships that stopped short of the harbour. The boat was manned by six male humans, all armed. She’d learned that female humans didn’t fight. When the men went to war, they left their woman kind home to cook, sew, and coo over their babes. She’d snorted with laughter when she’d discovered that; why would a race leave half its people behind? The old could care for the young. The women could fight if they chose. Grinthy would always fight.

Grinthy stole a glance here and there as she busied herself with her chores. She saw the archers dotted along the stone walls of the harbour. She saw the warships anchored nearby, ready to respond to any threat. But she had a plan, and it would soon be time to execute it.

When the boat drew close enough, she could hear the captain shouting at the humans. She heard them barter a price for his goods while the boat was tied off to the ship. She didn’t dare look. She listened; it was enough.

The captain’s trusted Noxun deckhands were soon unloading their wares. The first crate was lowered to the boat. It was time. She whistled. She ran. She jumped.

Grinthy landed in the midst of the crew of the rowing boat. A second later, another goblin landed by her side, then another, then a fourth. The four of them pushed and shoved and stabbed. A man cried out in pain. Red blood splattered across her face. She licked her lips and grinned at the taste. Human blood tasted good. A tall man in front was trying to draw his sword, such a cumbersome weapon for such close quarters. He was taking too long, so she took her chance. Her dagger shot forwards, sinking into his soft flesh, and he screamed out in pain. She felt movement behind; time to go. She leapt into the water, a sword nicking her foot as she dived through the air, stinging like a bee, but she was free.

Arrows began to hit the water around her as she let herself sink into the depths. She reached into the pouch she carried at her waist and pulled out a coiled tube with a float secured to one end. She released it and allowed it to bob to the surface. With her lips wrapped around the other end, she exhaled sharply, expelling the water in the tube and letting her suck in air from the surface.

With kicking legs and pulsing arms, she hovered in the murky seawater. Catching her breath and straining to see her comrades—three other goblins of Geshlamp.

She spun and she searched. An arrow sunk by, but it was quickly slowed by the water. She spotted movement, flailing legs and arms, moving as if in panic, and propelled herself towards the other goblin. Her comrade held her own tube in her mouth, but she seemed unable to clear the water. Grinthy took a deep breath and passed her own tube to the other deckhand. With enough air stored in her lungs, she was able to clear the second tube. Soon, they were both breathing normally.

There were no sign of the others, but it was time to swim. With the hull of her ship behind them, they swam away from the vessel that had brought them to another continent. Hidden under the water, they swam towards the hope of freedom.

As they’d sailed westwards towards the port of Eldor, she’d seen there was a peninsular to her north. It was rocky and barren, with few trees growing from its jagged grey stem. It would provide little cover in the late-morning sun. But she didn’t plan to climb onto it; she planned to swim round it.

She swam towards a slithering mass of slimy weeds, billowing in the currents with tiny fish darting in and out of the underwater jungle. She was approaching the shore, so turned right in the hope that she was heading east.

Salty seawater trickled into her mouth. Her tube was starting to fail. Made from oiled sailcloth and sealed with needle and thread, she’d known her tube wouldn’t last forever; she just needed it to last a little longer. She turned and checked on Andreeg, who still followed; she gave a nod. The other goblin had been a deckhand far longer than Grinthy, and life at sea was gruelling. Andreeg was tougher than she looked.

They edged around the peninsular tip, struggling in the currents. Grinthy used all her strength to stay on track. The waves above crashed over the float at the surface. Water flooded her tube, but she swallowed it. It wasn’t much further.

At last, she rounded the tip. She was confident that there was a rocky screen between her and her would-be pursuers; the Noxun merchant sailors wouldn’t tolerate deserters, and the humans wouldn’t let those who killed their own kind live—if they knew they’d survived. She dared to creep to the surface.

She blinked her stinging eyes free of the salty brine as she broke the surface and looked, turning on the spot. A rocky shore, the open sea, and a coastline stretching as far as the eye could see. A ship, but a distant one. Too far away to be of concern. A few huts a way up the shore, a village perhaps, but not the port of Eldor. There was no sign of the human port. There was no sign of her goblin ship. There were no sign of danger.

She dipped beneath the surface and beckoned to Andreeg, then let the rolling waves help propel her towards the shore.

Upon reaching it, she scrambled up the steep, pebbly beach and collapsed. She lay on her back, staring at the clouds, while a wide grin spread across her face.

Andreeg splashed out of the waves and into view. ‘We made it! Your plan worked! I can’t believe it; we’re in Atropia. We’re free!’

Grinthy sat up. ‘It was my plan, maybe, but it was you who told us how to make the tubes. We’d have been seen if we’d had to surface; they’d know we hadn’t perished.’ A favour for a favour. There could be no debts.

‘It was Jarg who knew the lie of the land, though; without his knowledge, we’d have no idea what was at the other side of these rocks,’ Andreeg pointed towards the peninsular. ‘We could never know if we were swimming into more danger.’

‘Aye, Jarg’s knowledge was invaluable. He knows these lands; without him…’ Grinthy let her sentence trail. They exchanged a look, then stared out to sea.

‘And Grig too, how will we persuade the Atropian goblins to accept us without Grig?’

‘Maybe they didn’t die. Maybe they’ll catch us up. We should wait here for them.’

Andreeg’s ears sagged. ‘I saw a blade strike Grig just as I was diving into the water. It sliced him right across the gut.’ She lowered her eyes to her feet, took a few steps forwards, then slumped onto the pebbles next to Grinthy.

‘A valiant death.’ Grinthy leant forwards and hugged her knees. ‘There’s still hope for Jarg.’

They sat and waited on the shore. The pebble beach was littered in green slivers of seaweed. With their green flesh and their brown clothes, Grinthy knew they would be difficult to distinguish from the grey-brown-green medley of colours on the beach.

Behind them was a short cliff, which arced over their backs and stuck out over their heads; hiding them from behind. For now, they were content to sit and wait. To rest after their long swim and to wait for nightfall before they moved inland. Their goblin eyes were keen in the dark; to move in daylight was the curse of the humans.

Andreeg said she’d keep watch. With her chin on her bony knees, and her long fingers still hugging her legs, Grinthy ignored the cool breeze that tested her comfort, letting slumber take her.

She slept.

She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep when a cold, sharp blade was pressed against the side of her neck. Her eyes flashed open. She gasped and waited for whoever had caught her to speak. She was not dead already, so whoever it was wanted her alive.

A cackling laugh exploded over her head, and the blade was pulled away.

‘You two have no business being alive.’

‘Jarg!’ Grinthy jumped to her feet, her eyes growing wide in the dark, trying to suck in all the light the half-moon spat through the clouds. She turned and stared at her deck-mate. ‘You made it!’

Andreeg was on her feet a moment later.

‘You fell asleep!’ Grinthy chastised her. ‘You said you’d keep watch!’

‘Um…sorry,’ Andreeg placed an apologetic hand on Grinthy’s shoulder. Grinthy would have been annoyed, but now Andreeg owed her. It was good to have others in your debt. ‘Jarg, you made it!’ She turned her attention to the new arrival. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Hiding,’ he replied simply. ‘I made it to the shore, but I was away from the peninsula, and my tube was leaking. I couldn’t carry on swimming. My only option was to crawl onshore and stay hidden until nightfall. Nighttime came, and I guessed you might have made it.’

‘We did,’ Grinthy confirmed. ‘Now, can you lead us inland? Do you know the way?’

‘I know the land; I don’t know the chief that Grig knew.’ He lowered his eyes, his large ears sagging. After a short pause, he continued. ‘But if we make it to the plains, we can find our kin. After that, we must do what we can to be accepted into a new clan. We must build a new life; we must grow strong; we must find others who want to kill the humans as much as we do.’

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Grinthy: A Goblin’s Takes place in parallel to Emma and Tom’s adventures in book 1 of The Stolen Throne trilogy. Learn more at:

www.charlottegoodwin.co.uk

Is it their sheer scale and power? They are huge reptiles that can breathe fire; they can burn whole cities and snatch a human from the ground with their clawed talons. Is it some kind of transferred love of dinosaurs? My son loved dinosaurs when he was a young kid. Now he’s ten, and he’s no longer fussed about them. I guess we grow out of that love. Perhaps a dragon helps us connect with our childhood—dinosaurs reincarnated into a flying, fire-breathing magical version for adulthood. Or is it because they are a kind of psychological symbol; a physical representation of an inner, untamed self that guards our treasure and protects us against real-world threats?

Whatever it is that people love about dragons, I have to admit, I’m not personally bothered about them. In fact, if I spot a story that heavily features dragons, I tend to avoid it.

I write science fantasy—fantasy with a scientific basis to my magical systems and a in my case, with a spot of sci-fi thrown in too. I’ve lost count of how many times someone has said, “have you read Anne McCaffery?” If you’re not familiar with her, she wrote the Dragonriders of Pern series, which features telepathically bonded dragons to their human riders on a distant colony world threatened by a deadly space-borne organism. Distant worlds, space-borne threats, a medieval-style fantasy setting: these are all things that feature in my novels. I might cite Anne McCaffery’s books as a good comparable to my own novels—if I’d read them. But I haven’t.

Why?

Because they are about dragon riders, and I’m just not that keen on dragons.

Here’s a snapshot of my bookshelf.

There’s not much modern stuff here; the modern stuff I read tends to exist on my Kindle. But these are the physical books I read way before I started writing.

There’s a bit of a mix. I have classical fantasy by Tolkein, Terry Goodkind and Robin Hobb. I have comical fantasy by Terry Pratchett and Tom Holt. I have gritty fantasy by Joe Abbercrombie and George R.R. Martin. I have historical fiction and even a couple of books about mammoths. But there are no dragons here.

I’d suggest that if you threw all of these books into a blender along with Star Wars and Star Trek, then you’d have my books.

But you wouldn’t have dragons.

Sure, a dragon features in The Hobbit. But Smaug has a small part to play, and he is just a focal point for Bilbo’s quest. Likewise, Game of Thrones has dragons, but they play a small part in the story, and at the point at which George R.R. Martin gave up writing his series, they had barely featured and Daenerys had only just started riding one of them.

Dragons as a small element in a fantasy novel? I’m fine with that. But dragons as major characters, dragons as a major weapon to the protagonist, dragons who are flying around all over the place blowing fire at stuff and just generally throwing their weight around? No thank you.

Dragons are simply too big and too powerful. They over-dominate. They are unrealistic—a creature that large couldn’t physically fly with the wings they are drawn with, unless they use magic to do it.

Breathing fire? Conceivable, maybe. Some real-world creatures can create dangerous chemicals that they use as a weapon. The bombardier beetle, for example, mixes hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide to create a boiling-hot, irritating chemical spray that is forcefully ejected. This mixture isn’t flammable, but it does create an exothermic reaction, which makes it get really hot. The devil’s hole pupfish can produce ethanol, which is flammable. Add in some way of generating a spark, and you have a fire-breathing animal.

Could dragons be intelligent? Again, conceivable.

But intelligent, fire-breathing, flying, gigantic predators? They simply have too many advantages in life. And evolution doesn’t support that many advantages. If they were real, they would have been so successful that they would have wiped out every other major predator and eaten all the big prey animals. They’d soon find they had no food source left and would die out as a result. They simply don’t work as a made-up creature—not in my head, at least.

I write science fantasy because I like there to be some kind of plausible explanation for the magical worlds I create. In my stories, I include Earth as it is today, and I have a magical planet in a far-away galaxy. But on my magical planet, instead of having a magnetic field, it has a magic field, and the various races on that planet can tap into this magical field and manipulate it to create magic. I move my characters from Earth to this magical world with the help of aliens.

Sure, you could pick holes in my made-up world all day long. I imagine many people who know more about physics than me could explain at length why my made-up world simply couldn’t work. But I don’t know enough about physics for me to say that all the stuff I include in my book isn’t possible. And so a part of me is willing to believe.

I send ordinary people from Earth to a magical world because that’s what I’d love to do. I can’t, so I make up stories about it instead.

But dragons? For me, they are too much of a stretch; certainly, the massive, traditional-style dragons that most of us imagine. Mini dragons, on the other hand? Something dog-sized, timid, small enough to fly? I could work with those. In fact, after I posted on Substack that I wasn’t keen on dragons, and lots of people chipped in with their thoughts, it got me thinking about dragons in general, and what it was I didn’t like about them—hence this article. But I realised that mini dragons don’t have any of the attributes I dislike; in fact, the more I think about them, the more I like them. Perhaps mini dragons will feature in my next story. Watch this space.

To learn more about Charlotte and her books, check out her website.

www.charlottegoodwin.co.uk

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2. Fight or Flight

North of the city of Carrig, Geshlamp

Grinthy’s heart hammered in her chest, her green blood sped through her veins, the leathery pads of her bare feet pounded the forest floor. She ran. The air surged in and out of her lungs, rasping at her scorched throat. The brambles tore at her legs, and still she ran.

The sound of hoofbeats grew louder. In places, the shrubs grew tall, and the horses couldn’t pass; but not everywhere. There was space to let the horses through, and they were gaining on her.

They’d caught Vorgin; it felt like an age ago. The others had fallen, too. One by one, the goblin survivors she’d travelled to Carrig with had been picked off by arrow and blade. She was the last one. But Carrig was close. If she made it, there was a chance—if the place still held.

A bramble snagged her arm. It was a thick one. She yanked her arm at the woody stem, praying it would snap, but the gods weren’t with her today. She fell.

‘Argh.’ She pulled herself free, but the brutal thorns had already done their work. Her arm was sliced, blood began to ooze, and her eyes began to swell. She slapped the ground, then bounded to her feet, scowling at the tears that dared to emerge. Goblins didn’t cry. Goblins fought. Goblins ran. Goblins survived however they could—if they could.

The humans had marched into Geshlamp in numbers never seen before. They came from Mediss to her village. They’d murdered everyone between her home and the border. The survivors fled southwest. They ran for Carrig; they ran for the sea, and a chance to escape.

They all ran, but many had been killed. Now she was alone.

Ahead, she saw light. The trees looked thinner, but she dared not hope. The hoofbeats grew louder, and still she ran. It grew brighter and brighter, and then, a gap. The low sun dazzled her eyes. She squinted, she strained to see. She saw something; grey stone with towers behind. It was a wall; it had to be the wall of Carrig. She was close. Her heart found the strength to beat harder; her feet found the power to move faster. She ran.

She exploded from the undergrowth onto a barren plain of turned muck. Farmland. There were just a few fields and a meadow between her and the walls. She could see the gate; it was shut. She could see figures on the walls. She could see a flag on the tower—it was the flag of Geshlamp. The city still held.

There were goblins ahead, some running, some scaling the walls like ants. She was gaining on a male with a child; he tugged her arm, dragging her strides as far as her short legs would allow.

Grinthy dared to glance behind. Men on horses filled her bulging eyes. Horses that had begun to gallop. They were emerging from the forest as she reached the edge of the second field. Just the meadow to cross now. On she ran.

She passed from the ploughed muck to the grassy meadow, picking up speed as her feet no longer sank and willing them to move faster still. The city wasn’t far now, but the hoofbeats behind her grew louder.

A whistle gave too little notice, and her ear exploded in pain. The arrow hit the ground ahead. She didn’t dare check the damage. She was alive, and she had to stay that way. She had to make the humans pay.

The silver-tipped shafts of flying death peppered the wilting grass. She found a surge of hidden strength; her feet reached further, her pace grew longer, and she gained on man and child. Another whistle, and another thud, and this time, a scream.

The father fell, his final call fading to naught as the tip that pierced his heart slammed into the earth. The girl stopped. Grinthy leapt to the side, avoiding a collision with the stunned child, landing on one foot, bouncing ahead towards the wall, bouncing towards safety, but then the bouncing stopped.

The child began to wail, her voice slicing Grinthy’s heart in two like a frozen blade. It tore at her tortured soul and spun her on the spot. She stared in horror at the wave of mounted men thundering towards her, ahead of a line of archers. Her yellow eyes darted from man to crying child, from blade to tender flesh, from life to certain death.

One step, two; she reached an outstretched hand, tearing the girl’s fingers from the face they hid.

‘You must run!’ Grinthy screamed. ‘If you stay, you’ll die!’ She pointed a bony finger towards the thundering line of death, drawing the child’s stare. They were almost here; Grinthy would die soon, but she’d die trying to help another’s child.

A whistle, a thud, a scream.

The arrows still flew, and one found its mark, straight through the eye of the child. She tumbled back without a word, her fingers slipping from Grinthy’s grasp, yellow eyes staring in stunned shock, in horror, in fear. She would not die trying to save another this day. It was time to run.

Leathery foot found thirsty grass. Clenched fists pumped the air. Snorting horses carried their riders towards their prey.

She could hear the cry of the man who’d kill her, she could hear him urge his mount, she could feel the breath of the snorting horse; she prepared to meet her end.

The end didn’t come—for her.

Steel-clad hooves lost their grip on the hard-baked earth with a mighty scream of death. An arrow found its mark, but this one wasn’t meant for her; this one gave her hope.

A glance ahead saw her saviours as the line of goblin archers began to shoot a storm of death towards their human foes. The arrows sung, the humans fell, and Grinthy carried on.

At last, the wall. The cold, hard wall. She launched herself at it and began to climb, her slender fingers finding the tiny grooves in the blocks, her nimble toes gripping the rough stone. She strained, and she hauled. Safety was close. Something brushed her arm. A rope. She looked up at a grinning goblin.

‘Take it!’ he yelled. ‘I’ll haul you up.’

One hand, two hands, she gripped it. She coiled its tail round her feet. She was lifted, she was dragged up the blockwork, but she didn’t care. The grating rasp of the sandstone was nothing compared to the pain from the brambles’ tears. The bite of the rope in her flesh was like silk next to the sting of her torn ear. The pain of the flesh was like velvet next to the agony of her loss. Her family was dead, while she still lived.

*

Grinthy woke to the cries of goblins. Her crusty eyes blinked open. She sat up. The scabs on her sides ripped away where they’d stuck to her shirt. She grimaced.

Voices screamed out everywhere. Defend the gate! The final desperate orders in a city about to fall. Time to escape. She could never avenge her family if she were dead.

She stood and dusted the straw from her back. There’d been a pause in the assault, and she’d been offered a barn to sleep in. The dawn brought the second wave of humans, the one that wouldn’t break on the walls.

Grinthy ripped her shredded trousers free from her cuts, ignoring the pain and blood trickling down her legs. She headed out into the open. Goblins were running here and there; some were armoured soldiers, others just citizens. All carried weapons, and all were ready to fight. Just like she was. She still carried her hammer; she’d lost her poker, but a hammer was enough. She’d spent her life wielding it in her blacksmith’s workshop, and it was her last link to home.

She knew Carrig was doomed. Humans were flooding towards Carrig from Mediss in their thousands, and their ships had been spotted at sea. The Noxuns were holding the human fleet at bay, for now, while the merchant ships made their escape. Grinthy hoped there was still at least one left in the harbour; it was her only chance of escape. She had to live, and she had to avenge her family. She had to flee.

Grinthy ran through the streets on her blistered feet while her aching limbs screamed. But she kept going. If she listened to her pain, she’d stop. If she stopped, she’d die. She’d been to Carrig many times to trade, and she knew the smugglers’ way out.

She wove her way down the narrow streets, running with her hammer in hand, trying her best to look like she was speeding towards the fight. All goblins were expected to fight.

‘The enemy’s that way!’ a passing goblin yelled.

She sped up to a sprint.

‘She’s running away!’ the goblin yelled.

‘After her!’ another, with a deeper voice, bellowed. Heavy footsteps pounded on her tail.

She searched the streets around her for a gutter. Her pursuers were gaining on her; she could hear them. Her eyes widened, and her ears flicked back as she began to panic. The industrial quarter was rapidly becoming a residential area, and the residential areas had sewers. Where were they? She dashed left, then right, and emerged onto a busy street. A big male blocked her path. She tried to dodge him, but he grabbed her.

‘Running from the fight, are you?’

‘Hold her!’ her pursuers screamed.

She tore her hammer from her belt and didn’t hesitate to swing. The heavy lump of iron slammed into the head of the big goblin. She heard his skull crack, saw his brains splatter, and then smelled the tang of blood. He crumpled where he stood. Another goblin rushed at her. She dodged. She spotted a gutter with a drain nearby; an entrance to the sewer. She dived towards it, tore at the cover, and threw herself into the darkness.

Headfirst, she landed in a stinking stream of goblin filth. The sloppy sewage broke her fall, but she couldn’t help being totally submerged. Hammer still in hand, she splashed and scrambled to find her feet. The stream wasn’t deep; it barely covered her knees. She began to wade as she heard shouts from above.

‘She went down there!’ someone called.

‘After her, then!’ another demanded.

‘I’m not going in there; it stinks. You follow her.’

‘Why should I?’

‘Why were you chasing her, anyway?’

‘Cos she was running.’

‘Screw this, I’m off to the wall. There’s real arseholes out there to fight.’

She continued on, following the flow of the sewage; she knew it led to the sea.

Soon it was quiet. The only sound was the slosh of her legs through the sewage. The smell was overpowering. If she breathed through her mouth, she could taste the filth; her nose, at least, filtered the morbidities she guessed hovered in this foul tunnel.

She followed the flow until she could go no further. The tunnel ended at a narrow slit in the rock. Wide enough for the sewage, the rats, and a sliver of light, too narrow for a goblin. She searched for a way out.

She checked a side channel and found the darkened patch she sought; it was the way back to the street.

The sides were slippery, but she didn’t need much grip to climb the walls. She edged herself up with careful caution but progressed with ease. Her head soon butted onto the iron grate at the top. The street was quiet, so she nudged the grate up with her scalp and dared to peer about her. There was no one here. She shoved the grate to one side and scrambled into the daylight. She knew where she was; she was close to the smugglers’ tunnel.

It was quiet at this end of the city; she could hear the distant roar of battle, but she knew it raged at the northern walls. To the south, the city wall sat on a cliff. This side was impossible to attack.

She scuttled down the streets, weaving this way and that until she found the building she sought. She edged into the inn gingerly, listening, straining her keen goblin ears for the slightest sound of life. Nothing. She hurried to the cellar. The door was barred, but it took little for a blacksmith with a hammer to break her way in.

From the cellar, a hidden door led to a tunnel; the tunnel led out of the city and emerged under the ocean waters.

Smugglers often swam from the tunnel to the ships that awaited their illicit cargo. Grinthy was about to smuggle herself.

Read Chapter 3

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You write your novel, edit it, get folk to read it and give you feedback, and edit it some more. You write a synopsis and a query letter and trawl the internet for suitable agents and/or publishers to send your query package to.

And wait…

And wait…

In my experience, most agents and/or publishers never even bother to get back to you with a simple “it wasn’t for us” email. Which I personally find rather rude. And the bulk of those that do, simply say: “it wasn’t what we were looking for at this time” or something of that ilk. I’ve personally never really thrown myself into querying. Sure, I’ve queried various novels in the past, but I never stuck at it with the determination I’m told you need to succeed. Trad-published authors often cite having received hundreds of rejections before getting a deal.

I quickly got bored and decided to self-publish instead—I’ll explain why later.

But for even those who are lucky enough to get a traditional deal, only about 20% to 30% of traditionally published authors ever “earn out” their advances. This means 70% to 80% of books do not sell enough copies for the accumulated royalties to exceed the initial advance payment.

I read it on Google—it must be true.

Scepticism of the validity of Google’s AI generated answers aside, I had already heard that around a third of traditionally published authors never make back their advances, so this figure kinda fits.

I also have a degree of real-world subjective evidence to go off—I’ve talked to other traditionally published authors and publishers. I’ve spoken to literary agents too, and they paint a similar picture. The reality is that when it comes to selling books, no one can pick winners.

I’m sure you’ve heard stories about self-published authors who were rejected by the traditional publishers, then decided to try to make it on their own and went on to make millions. These examples are rare. But it proves the point that not only do those in the industry publish books that never sell, they often reject books that do sell—sometimes very, very well.

However, before I go on to say that there is no point to getting a trad deal (spoiler alert, I’m not going to do that), I want to highlight a few very relevant points:

- If traditional publishers were terrible at picking winners, they’d all go broke.

- There are a lot of very bad self-published books out there.

- Hollywood’s marketing budget is around 50%-100% of what it spends on production.

It may be the case that two thirds of traditionally published authors don’t make back their advances, but it is important to note that just because an author doesn’t make back their advance, it doesn’t mean the book is published at a loss.

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Here’s why:

The advance of a debut author is typically between £2,000-£10,000, with a median deal being around £5,000. An author gets this sum upfront after signing their soul away to a traditional publisher. In return, the publisher pays for all the editing, cover designs and most of the marketing. For a debut author, the sum of the cost of all these things is unlikely to exceed £10,000.

The publisher sells the book, and they get a profit in return. The author generally gets a fixed royalty as a percentage of the list price, usually around 10%. So, if a book sells for £10, the author may get £1. Which means you have to sell 5000 books before you earn a penny more.

Meanwhile, for every £10 book sold, after printing costs, a publisher earns maybe around £4. So, while you have earned £5000, they have earned £20,000. You have just covered your advance; the publisher has made a £10,000 profit on their initial outlay.

The publishers might not be great at picking best sellers, but they’re pretty good at picking alright books, which, if you throw a bit of money at the marketing of these books, will most likely at least wipe their backsides in terms of their initial outlay. Meanwhile, the big bucks are made from those books that really take off.

What about self-publishing?

Self-publishing has a bit of a bad name because, frankly, some self-published books stink. It’s completely understandable why this is—there are no gatekeepers to the world of self-publishing. You could write any old junk, bash out a cover in PowerPoint, and upload it to Amazon. Some unsuspecting reader may come across it, take a punt on it, realise it’s awful then think, “I’m never reading a self-published book again”. And proceed to tell all their friends that self-published books stink.

For trad-published books, someone does at least a little bit of scrutiny on the content, i.e. there are gate keepers to the world of trad-publishing: someone who is doing the vetting of stories to make sure they’d get at least a C-minus if they were being marked by a high school English teacher.

But there are a lot of very good self-published books out there, too. Some of which became bestsellers. Some very famous examples include the children’s book Eragon, Fifty Shades of Grey, and The Martian. All of which have now been turned into films. Meanwhile, millions of great self-published books linger on Amazon, unseen. I read one not so long back that had been out since 2023 and had accumulated just two reviews—indicative of very low sales. I read it because I’d chatted to the author on Twitter/X. It turned out to be a pretty good book; better, in my opinion, than Eragon which I started reading to my son not so long back, but DNF’d it because he got bored and I realised it was far too slow and needed a heavy edit.

Which brings me to my third point; the one about Hollywood spending shedloads on marketing.

How many times have you seen an awesome-looking film trailer, got all hyped up about a film, then went to watch it and thought, “that was distinctly average”. You later learn that the film, despite being only OK, made a huge profit. You find yourself thinking, “there are much better films out there that didn’t get half the hype…”

It’s exactly the same with books.

The key difference is that there aren’t millions of films available to watch on Amazon Prime or Netflix that were made exclusively from someone’s dining room table. But there are millions of books that were made this way. Some publishing groups estimate there are around 4000-7000 new self-published books uploaded to Amazon every day. If the actual figure is closer to the top end, that means over 2.5 million books are uploaded every single year!

But how many new books appear in Waterstones or Barnes & Noble every year? I don’t know, but it is nowhere near 2.5 million. The average Waterstones stocks 30,000 titles, many of which are pretty much permanent fixtures.

And how many self-published authors manage to get their books on the shelves of Waterstones or Barnes & Noble? Not many.

If you manage to get a trad-publishing deal, then your competition is much lower—in bookshops, at least.

If you throw a bit of money at the marketing and do a decent job at executing said marketing, chances are you’ll sell a few copies. I imagine the marketers who work for the likes of Penguin Random House know a hell of a lot more about marketing books than I do and are probably much better at it.

Time to revisit my opening question:

Is there any point to getting a traditional publishing deal anymore?

Sure there is. You get an advance, you don’t pay for your own editing or marketing, your competition is lower, and you get to work with a load of industry experts who have some idea what they’re doing when it comes to selling books.

But I chose to go-it-alone. Why would I do that?

Many reasons.

If I’m honest, I think the main reason is that I simply didn’t have any faith that I’d land a trad-deal. I could spend hours upon hours searching for agents, prepping my query packages, and waiting for ages only to hear nothing back.

Some agents get hundreds of queries a week and only take on a few new clients a year. So unless your book is that children’s urban romantic vampire fantasy set in 1980’s London that they were looking for, they aren’t going to take you on.

I might be exaggerating how particular agents are in reality, but my point is that most have an idea in their head of what they’re looking for. And even if an agent says they’re looking for children’s fantasy, and your book is the next Eragon, because they were looking for that romantic vampire fantasy, they’ll give you a pass.

A big secondary reason is that I’m very impatient. As a rough indication of how long all this querying business takes: day one you send out your first query. It might take you a month to send a hundred queries. It might be two more before an agent gets back to you with a full request. It might be another three months before they get back to you after that. Assuming they want to take you on, they will then start to pitch your manuscript to publishers. This could take another six months.

It’s now a year since you sent your first query.

If your stars have aligned, you now have an agent and a publisher, but it could be another two years before your book is published. It’s now three years since you sent your first query letter.

Sure, you now have that £5k advance sitting in the bank account, but that isn’t going to pay the bills for long, and it certainly won’t be time to give up your day job—unless you live in a tent in a forest and have outgoings of under £1k a year.

And that final reason I gave up on the trad route a long time ago was that the royalties are tiny. Of course if you sell tons of books, a 10% royalty rate can add up to quite a lot of cash; but two thirds of trad published authors never make back their advance, and in their excitement to accept a deal, they may have signed away rights to future books, too. So you can end up scuppered. That £5k is the pinnacle of your career, and you’re back to where you started before you started querying—trying to decide if self-publishing is for you.

If you self-publish on Amazon, your royalty rate is 70% for ebooks. You need to sell far fewer books to make the same money. And I must confess to having at least a little bit of blind optimism when it comes to how many books I will one day sell.

So I self-published. Has it been easy? Hell no. Is it for everyone? Probably not. And unless you have at least a bit of spare cash or just happen to be a ninja cover designer and editor yourself, you might struggle to make your book look like anything other than a self-published book. Trust me, badly done books have a look about them.

I’ve spent a lot of money and made a lot of mistakes on my road to getting my books out into the world, and right now, when I compare sales royalties to what I’ve spent on editing, cover designers, marketing and various subscriptions, I, er… I tell myself keeping a horse would probably cost more.

But my books haven’t been out long (the latest versions of them, at least). So maybe in time I’ll earn back what I’ve spent. Pigs could of course fly, too.

So, is traditional publishing still worth it?

You decide.

Oh, and before you go, this self-published author is trying her best to make her books stand out from the millions of others on Amazon. If you’d like to help her out, feel free to check out her work.

www.charlottegoodwin.co.uk

But even in the very early days of my writing journey, I was conscious that social media could sell books. I knew about the concept of an author platform—that loose term that basically means the sum of your online presence. And I thought I ought to build one.

So I started with Twitter.

Twitter was easy. I could post a sentence or two while I drank my morning coffee. I could reply to comments while I was having lunch. I could like and follow back in seconds. And just this simple collection of daily tasks saw my follower count grow.

The graph above shows how my follower count surged and has been growing steadily ever since. For almost five years, I’ve been posting regularly and have a count of 8232 posts to date. I calculate there are roughly 1760 days since I started posting regularly, so that equates to 4.6 posts per day—noting that figure includes replies.

I now have almost 47,000 followers.

That’s 47k people who at some point have seen my profile and clicked the ‘follow’ button.

But so what? Has it helped me sell books? Has it jettisoned me into that so called ‘influencer’ category? Has it given me some kind of gold star for my achievement?

No, on all counts (almost). I stuck the almost on the end because I have sold a handful of books to people I regularly engage with on Twitter, and a few others besides. I reckon that of the couple hundred books I’ve sold this year, a tiny handful were sold to people who knew about me on Twitter. The rest of the sales most likely came from my newsletter subscribers and ads.

So what the bloody hell is the point???

I ask myself that a lot. I keep posting; perhaps for no other reason than my follower numbers keep ticking up, and it gives me a small degree of satisfaction, and maybe a degree of credibility to anyone who wants to check out my author platform.

But the reality is that Twitter is not the place to sell books.

So where is?

TikTok, apparently; that’s what everyone says. Or BookTok, as some call it—a rather misleading term that suggests there’s some special part of TikTok reserved just for bookish types. Spoiler alert—there isn’t.

Now I can get Twitter. You can sit in a nice quiet room, reading other posts, commenting, interacting, and just genuinely doom-scrolling. But TikTok?

Personally, I have never had the remotest interest in scrolling through hundreds of amateurish videos. In fact, I rather dislike watching videos in general on my phone. I can read faster than people talk, so if I want information, I want to read it. Seeing people’s mouths move doesn’t add to my experience; it just slows things down.

It also breaks the silence. And I do love a bit of peace and quiet.

So how do you crack a social media platform you simply can’t get?

Answer: with difficulty.

I’ve tried—I’ve made trailers and videos and gone through periods of regular posting. But I never gained much traction. I look at the viewing stats and see a huge drop-off rate after the first few seconds. People aren’t interested in my videos, and frankly, I’m not very interested in making them.

Making videos is waaay more time consuming than writing a sentence. To have the staying power to maintain a regular TikTok presence requires a high degree of dedication, and I think to an extent you need to enjoy it.

I don’t.

Now, there are other platforms out there—YouTube sits in the same category as TikTok for me. I’ve had a go on there, too.

Instagram? I don’t get the point of that either. What’s the point of scrolling through a load of images plus a few videos that I hate watching, too?

Facebook? I’ve long had a Facebook account. It was the social media platform to be on back when social media was becoming a thing. My private account is just for friends and people I’ve met—I rarely accept friend requests from people I don’t know in person. I set up an author account besides. I post stuff on there now and then, but people say Facebook is dead—I’m not sure how effective it is at building a following of strangers, and I’ve not seen much evidence to suggest it’s the best place to sell books.

So now what?

I’ve thought a lot about where next to focus my author platform efforts. Maybe I just need to give TikTok another go. Maybe if I have the staying power I’ve maintained on Twitter, it will take off.

Maybe it will.

But I still don’t like making videos and I don’t particularly like TikTok.

So where does that leave me?

A little over a week ago, I put another article on Substack. I’ve been posting my blog posts and sometimes bits of fiction on this platform for over two years. I was dropping them in less than monthly, and that was it. I never wrote notes. I never interacted. I just used it as a place to dump my ramblings in the blind hope that folks would find me.

Unsurprisingly, this approach didn’t reach many people. At the start of last week, I had 9 subscribers. Now, I have 36.

So what happened?

I started writing notes.

Making myself visible on this platform drew people to my profile, where they found my article. They read it and seemed to like it.

I posted another article a few days later—this was a bit of fiction I had in my back pocket, so to speak. Today I’m writing another article.

You see, in the last few days, something dawned on me. I like writing. I like jotting down tweets; I like interacting with people in writing. Tweets are pretty much the same as notes. On Twitter, my followers are almost all authors, readers, or people who generally like books. Those kinds of people exist in droves on Substack. But here, I think the people are nicer. I’ve come across more than my fair share of nasty trolls on Twitter. I’ve blocked the lot of them. But I’d prefer it if I didn’t have to.

I like the sound of my own voice. In person, I love to get into debates or discuss politics or other topical issues. I have opinions on a lot of things. I like talking about my experiences.

Here, on Substack, I can witter away until my heart is content, and I think there are at least a few people who would like to listen.

I think I’ve found the next platform I’m going to try to master. I’m going to keep writing notes. I’ll aim to get articles out weekly as a minimum. I’ll see if I can build an audience here and hope, perhaps blindly, that some of those people will one day be interested in reading my books, too.

Check out my books here!

Village of Gorrill, Geshlamp

‘Wake up, you lazy worm!’ Grinthy gave her mate a not-too-gentle kick to his thigh.

‘Huh?’ Errag replied sleepily.

Grinthy dropped her pile of firewood on the ground by the bed. ‘Where are the children?’ she snarled before turning her attention to the fire pit. She shovelled up the ashes to prepare for a new fire.

‘They’re playing in the woods.’

‘How long have they been gone?’

‘I don’t know.’ Errag sat up and rubbed his eyes. ‘They were out when I came back.’

‘You managed to get something for dinner, I assume?’

‘Err…’ Errag scratched his head, swinging his legs off the bed as flakes of his green scalp floated onto the straw-filled mattress.

‘Errag?’ Grinthy growled.

‘I’ve got something. I found some turnips. I caught a rat earlier, too. It’s enough for a stew.’

‘You found some turnips? Stole them, more like! Did you pull that rat from someone else’s trap, too?’

‘No, I caught it myself! The little blighter was nibbling at my apron. I whacked it with a hammer. Smashed its head flat.’

‘Did you even go out hunting?’ Grinthy demanded.

‘Course I did! Can’t guarantee there’s any game about, though, can I?’

Grinthy rolled her eyes. ‘Make yourself useful and go and fetch the children while I make dinner.’

‘Right you are.’ Errag headed towards the door in the one-room hut Grinthy shared with her family. He stroked her large green ear as he passed.

She turned to watch him leave. ‘Bloody softie,’ she muttered to herself.

She soon had the fire blazing. The wood was dry and caught quickly. Even this far north, there was little rain over the summer.

Grinthy and Errag ran the village smithy. They’d shoe the ponies, forge tools, and sometimes weapons. There’d been a lot of folks wanting swords and blades made recently. There’d been talk of humans heading north. The messages had been sketchy, but she’d heard rumours of anything from a few bands of raiders to an entire army, thousands strong. There were always human raiders into Geshlamp. The goblins raided the human lands, so it was only fair that the humans raided back, she thought. Her little village was too far north and too poor to interest the humans. Or, it had been, until now.

Somewhere outside, a child screamed. The sound of hoofbeats thundered into her ears. Eyes wide and body tense, she grabbed a hammer and a poker and ran from her hut.

‘Run!’ her neighbour yelled as he sprinted past. She looked towards the treeline to the south. Tall spears and bright colours sped towards her, atop armoured horses. They were soldiers, human soldiers, and they were coming for her. She turned; she ran.

Grinthy wove between the huts while the hoofbeats grew louder behind her. Something whistled past her ear. Ahead, a thatched roof burst into flames. An arrow hit the ground ahead of her. The fire arrow still burned where it landed, impaled in the compacted mud.

Goblins ran ahead, and she overtook some. There was no point in helping them; it would only speed her own demise. She could only hope that the ones the humans caught slowed them down. As she ran, she prayed Errag and her children were far away.

She was near the edge of the village; the woods were ahead. She was almost at the treeline. She stalled. She thought. The trees were sparse; they’d provide no barrier to the mounted humans. She looked to her sides; she was desperately thinking of a place to hide. She spotted a burning hut; it was the winemaker’s hut. The winemaker had a hidden cellar to keep his brew safe from other goblins, not humans. Right now, she knew it was her only chance to stay alive.

A scream. Another one. The sounds of dying goblins filled her ears. The soldiers were in her village. Grinthy didn’t have much time.

The smoke stung her eyes, and she squinted through the streams of tears; coughing as she kicked open the burning door of the winemaker’s hut. The place was black with clouds of soot. She dropped to her hands and knees and searched for the trapdoor with her fingers. It was under the bed; a slab of stone with a straw mattress on top. It looked like it wouldn’t move to most, but she’d built the iron castors that let it slide.

She found the bed, shoved it away, yanked open the trapdoor, and hurled herself down the steps, coughing as she went. Blinded by the smoke, she couldn’t find her footing. She tumbled. Hard stone smashed her shin. Soft hands caught her.

‘Grinthy!’ She recognised the winemaker’s voice. He lowered her down to the hard stone floor, and she heard him climb the steps and slide the stone slab slide into place; she took a deep breath of clean air.

She felt hands on her shoulders, and they hauled her to her feet. She dared to blink her eyes open.

‘Grinthy, are you hurt?’

‘Vorgin,’ she said to the winemaker, ‘have you seen Errag? Have you seen Dorith or Dorg?’

‘I saw the children run into the woods, but that was hours ago. Before—’ he paused. Hoofbeats thundered overhead. Men’s shouts pierced the fire’s roar. A goblin screamed its last breath.

‘Why are they here, Vorgin? What brings them to our village?’ She heard a quiver in her voice and grimaced at the sound.

‘I don’t know.’ Vorgin showed no sign that he noticed her weakness. He tugged her arm towards a barrel and took a seat on one himself.

‘I heard the rumours but…’ She let her voice trail, for the screams of the villagers kept coming, mingling in a chorus of death. She couldn’t continue. She just perched on her barrel, pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapped her arms around her shins, and prayed for silence to come.

*

The crackle of the fire was the last sound to fade. She edged up the steps and dared to touch the stone above. A tap of her finger was enough to confirm her suspicions. It was hot, too hot to touch, far too hot to move. Vorgin was snoring to himself on the floor. Grinthy felt a need to do likewise; she’d had more than a little to drink while she’d hidden in the cellar, surrounded by wine.

The drink had taken Vorgin some time ago, while the sound of her village and her people being destroyed had kept Grinthy awake. It was quiet now, but it would still be a while before the embers of Vorgin’s hut burned to ash and the stone slab cooled enough to move. She lay on the floor and let her weariness take her.

*

Someone was wiggling her foot. She snatched it away.

‘Grinthy, wake up.’

She opened her eyes and stared through the gloom at Vorgin. Why was Vorgin here? She frowned and looked around her. There were shelves filled with bottles. The floor was littered with barrels. She was in his wine cellar. What am I doing here?

The smell of fire filled her nose. Grinthy remembered. She sat up and touched her pounding head. She massaged her scalp through her coarse strands of hair and remembered drinking the wine, she remembered fleeing the soldiers, she remembered her family.

‘We have to get out of here!’

‘I know. I think the soldiers are gone now; it’s been quiet for a while. The humans came from the south, so we should head north and try to get out of their reach.’

‘No! We have to find Errag and the children first.’ Grinthy paused. She gathered her thoughts. ‘I’m going to find my family.’ She grabbed her hammer and poker from the ground, tucked them both into her belt, and ascended the steps.

The stone was still a little warm, but it was cool enough to touch. She began to heave it out of the way. It moved an inch and stopped.

‘Can you give me a hand?’ she said to the winemaker.

‘Sure.’ He was soon pushed up against her side, straining with her to move the slab. Their combined strength got it moving. It slid a little, then jolted forwards. Grinthy took a deep breath. The smell of the dead fire still lingered, but the smoke had gone. ‘Where are you going to look?’

‘I’ll start in the woods. I know where Dorith and Dorg like to play. Perhaps they’re still there.’

‘And when you find them?’ Vorgin asked.

‘We’ll go north,’ Grinthy replied.

‘What about the fort at Garlgoth? You could be safe there.’

‘Sure, until the humans take that, too. It will be a magnet for them!’

‘This is probably just a raid; they’ll be heading south again soon.’

Grinthy didn’t answer. She climbed the last few steps and tip-toed her bare feet gingerly through the dead or dying embers. She crept back into the village, past a half-burnt hut. Then she saw the first body. It was a child. She knew the lad; he often played with Dorg. She took a few more steps, then gasped. Half of the skull of her childhood friend, Athe, was missing. Her babe was nearby, his skull smashed flat, like it had been trampled by a horse. Athe’s arms still reached towards where he lay.

Grinthy dared to lift her gaze, looking forwards towards the open space in the middle of the village. Although the space was small to be called a square, it was where the villagers hosted markets and festivities, and where the humans had stacked the bodies. Men, women, and children. All without heads.

She felt the dryness in her eyes first and realised she’d forgotten to blink. She blinked. Then, she noticed her mouth was dry. She’d been staring with an open mouth in frozen horror. She didn’t know where the heads of her fellow villagers were. She dared not imagine. She spun. She walked. She started to run towards the woods. She was going to the place where Dorith and Dorg played. They’d still be there, she told herself. Errag would be there too. They’d be hiding in the cave by the river. They’d be safe. They had to be.

The smell of the smouldering huts faded as the scent of the woodland greeted her. Birds chirped overhead. Someone called her name. She ignored it. She kept going.

The end of her poker slapped her thigh, her hammer rubbed on her hip. She paid the tools she’d tucked into her belt no heed. She ran. The ferns brushed her legs, her lungs gasped for air, her legs screamed at her to stop. But she couldn’t. The stream was nearby; she was almost there. Dorith and Dorg liked to make dams. They liked to fool the fish and make them jump. They’d catch them sometimes; when they got a big one, they’d bring it home.

She made it to the bank. She stopped, she listened – silence. There was no one here.

She spun, rushing to the cave in the bank. ‘Errag! she called as she ran. ‘Dorith, Dorg, are you here?’ The cave ceiling was low; she couldn’t run inside. She bent at the waist and kept walking. ‘It’s me, Mama. You can come out, its safe now.’ The ceiling grew lower still; she was forced to her knees and began to crawl. As her knees were bitten by the pebbles on the floor, and her hands scraped on the rocks, tears began to flow. The end of the cave was near, but there was no one here. She stopped. She sniffed. Her nose had gone stuffy. Her eyes still stung from the smoke; it was making them run. She couldn’t be crying. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Goblins don’t cry.

‘Grinthy, are you in there?’ The voice of the winemaker echoed down the cave. Grinthy sniffed again. She gave her eyes another wipe for good measure. She couldn’t let the old man see how poorly her eyes dealt with the smoke. Goblins didn’t tolerate weakness. She reversed out of the cave.

‘I’m here,’ she confirmed, ‘I’m coming out.’

She made it to the entrance, squinting in the light outside the cave.

Vorgin was waiting for her. ‘Did you follow me?’ she asked him.

‘Yes, there’s no one else alive in the village; I didn’t want to be alone,’ the old winemaker said softly, his ears sagging as he spoke, eyes looking moist, but not ready to water like hers had. He must be better able to deal with the smoke. She reached for his hand, held it in hers, and slapped her other one on top.

‘Let’s find my family. They must be around here somewhere; they’ll be with the other survivors.’

*

They’d headed deeper into the woods. She guessed Errag would have taken the children further north if he’d heard the commotion in the village. There was another village not too far away. Perhaps they’d sought refuge there? The village was in the midst of the woods. Perhaps the soldiers wouldn’t think to look for a settlement there. Geshlamp maps were scarce; she doubted the humans had one. Only the chiefs, who took the taxes, had the maps.

They walked in silence through the forest. Her empty soul felt incapable of chatter. She just had to find her children and Errag, then everything would be okay.

The trees soon became dense—too dense for horses. She was becoming more and more sure that the humans wouldn’t have come this way. There was a road, of course, but would they have found it?

A scream. The sound cut through the forest like an axe. Grinthy froze. She knew the village wasn’t far.

Around her, the ferns grew tall, so she knew she couldn’t be seen. She kept walking, then stooped to stay out of view. She felt Vorgin tap her shoulder, turned, and scowled at him.

‘Where are you going?’ he whispered.

‘I want to look; I need to see what’s happening,’ she whispered back. She continued through the ferns.

The woods began to grow more open. She dropped to her knees and crawled. The screams had stopped, but she could hear men shouting, human men. A woman whimpered. A pathetic sound that no self-respecting goblin would make. But she’d seen what had happened in her own village, so perhaps they had cause. She dropped to her belly and slid through the bracken and brambles like a snake. The thorns of a bramble sliced her, but she paid her injuries no heed, as she had to see.

She edged a little closer until she could see the huts. One was blocking her view of the goblins and humans beyond. She manoeuvred herself to one side, wriggling until she could see the centre of the village. It was smaller than her own; formed from just a single ring of huts.

Through the screen of forest floor plants, she studied the view ahead. The brightly dressed humans were there. They were not on their horses. They walked on their own legs. They carried swords; some had bows, too. Some were still, some strolled back and forth, one was yelling at the group of goblins huddling together. Grinthy had to know if there were goblins there that she knew; she dared to get closer. She stalled. A child edged to the front of the huddle. She didn’t need to be very close to recognise her own kin. It was Dorg. A bigger child came from behind. Dorith wrapped her hands around her brother and tugged him back. Behind her was Errag.

Freezing numbness grabbed her; it held her. Paralysed, she could do nothing but watch. Her heart thudded in her ears, and it drowned out the yell of the human. It dulled the screams of the goblins and the words the human spoke. She didn’t catch what he was saying. She couldn’t think. She could only watch.

The metallic ring of twenty swords being drawn sliced her soul. Brambles prickled her hand, but she couldn’t feel it. She was numb. she felt nothing; she could only watch.

The soldiers advanced. Errag wrapped his arms around her children. They turned as he held them, burying their faces in his chest. Hiding from the horrors behind them. She saw Errag drop his head and kiss his two children. She saw the blade fall. She saw his head roll. She saw Dorith turn, her mouth went wide, and she screamed. The scream was cut short as her head was severed from her shoulders. Dorg was still standing. He was silent. He stood up straight and waited for his end to come. It came soon enough. A third head detached. Grinthy’s family was no more.

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I’d never heard of the UOTC before I went to uni. I had heard of the TA. Before I went to uni, I’d already worked in a wholesale bakery, a high street deli, a kennels, a farm shop, an ice-cream van, a packing factory, a care home, and a bar. I knew what minimum wage jobs looked like, and the TA sounded far more fun.

Except I joined the UOTC instead. If, like eighteen-years-old me, you have no idea what the UOTC is, then to explain, it is basically a branch of the Army Reserves for university students. Formed in the early twentieth century, it was created to fix a shortage of military officers. Back then, only the wealthy went to uni, and if the wealthy joined the army, they became officers.

So it’s the Army Reserve for potential officers.

Except it isn’t. Not anymore. It would love to turn all its officer cadets into officers, but very few ever commission. Most who join never join the Army, and the majority of those who do sign up, join as non-commissioned ranks, not as officers. But anyway…

I spent a year in the UOTC. I did the equivalent of basic training, quit my degree, left the UOTC, then after a short break where I trotted off to France to work as a chalet maid in a ski resort for a season—having never skied before in my life—I joined the TA. I then went back to uni, but I remained in the TA.

Me as an Officer Cadet in 2006

I went to the University of Leeds to study Earth Sciences and transferred to the nearest Royal Engineers TA unit—a detachment of 106 Field Squadron—based in nearby Bradford.

A year later, I commissioned. To this day, I’m still not entirely sure how that happened. Between 2003 and 2006, I rolled through the Army Officer Selection Board, the initial three modules of officer training, and then into the final training module at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. I popped out of the other end with a single pip on my chest, wide eyes, and thinking, “how the hell did that happen?”

That was my first three years of service; I’ve been trying to figure out how to be a decent officer ever since. I’m a major now, and I’m still learning.

I graduated from uni two years after I commissioned. At this time, I was already in charge of twenty-odd soldiers as a troop commander, and I had a stable boyfriend. And despite plans to join the Regular Army when I graduated, I found myself thinking: “do I really want to go back to Sandhurst and start again?” and “Do I really want to live away from Andy?”

I decided no on both counts. I ended up marrying Andy, by the way, so I guess it was worth sticking near him! Would our relationship have survived the inevitable separation that full-time military service would have brought? Who knows…

I got a graduate job in the waste industry instead. I rattled around the various departments and settled in the project engineer team. It seemed to fit. I did enjoy the work I was given, but irritatingly, I was not given enough of it. One of my biggest fears in life is boredom. So many decisions I’ve made in life are a direct result of being bored, or trying to be not bored. Some of them have been rather rash…

Me as a lieutenant in 2009 in Stavanger, Norway, by a memorial to some Royal Engineers who were killed in the area.

But anyway. I had to turn up to work and look busy, but no one really cared what I was doing most of the time, so to alleviate my boredom I started writing a novel. Soon, To Save a Pegasus was finished. I tried to get published. Failed. Twiddled my thumbs for a bit longer, then trotted off to Afghanistan.

You see, a chance for a deployment had come up, and ever being one to jump at any opportunity that looks remotely shiny, I stuck my hand up.

This article is supposed to be about how my military service has shaped my writing. I’m in danger of writing my military biography here, so I’m not going to go into detail on the rest of my career. I’ll summarise what came next.

I spent one year away doing pre-deployment training, the tour itself, then a bit of leave before going back to my old civvy job. I went back, decided I was still bored, and quit to become a property developer. Soon after, I changed Reserve units and went to 170 Engineer Group as their recruiting officer for the Reserves. While there, another chance to deploy came up, and off I went to Afghanistan again. I came back to no job in the Reserves—my recruiting role had been taken over by someone else—so I transferred to a job in the regional Brigade Headquarters.

Me as a captain in 2014, in Belgium.

Meanwhile, I was busily bashing houses to bits as a civvy, slowly building property equity but not quite making the big-bucks I hoped to, when another opportunity popped up—a Full Time Reserve Service job (FTRS) as adjutant at Yorkshire Officers’ Training Regiment was being advertised. I applied, and to my amazement, I got it.

Three years later, after having my fill of that job, I quit. This time, I was going to do property development on speed.

I rounded up some outside investment and hit the ground running with multiple projects. Things were going well until Brexit uncertainty started playing havoc with the housing market. Sale after sale collapsed—not ideal for cash-flow. Then Covid hit. More delays, price rises, and eventually a property market crash. My head was ready to explode with the stress of it all when another opportunity came along. Another FTRS job. This time as SO2 Basing Operations, North and Scotland. I applied and I got it.

I enjoyed the role, but once I’d settled in I ran out of enough work to fill my time. I tried to find work, but kept being told that the things I suggested were not my department’s problem to solve. So, I started writing again.

It was perhaps six months into this role that I started writing the first book in The Gallantrian Legacy. Inspired by a holiday where I found time to read, I suddenly recalled an idea for a new book that had been rattling around in my head since I’d finished To Save a Pegasus. In this story, I send a military character from Earth to a magical planet where he has to become a sorcerer to help his wife defeat an evil queen.

I’ve always loved fantasy. My relationship with the army has been broadly positive. A combination of the two seemed obvious—to me, at least.

I guess the journey I send Tom on, one of my two protagonists, is a journey I would love to go on myself. Tom is a captain in the Royal Engineers when he and his wife, Emma, are abducted by aliens and told that Emma is secretly the heir to a throne on a faraway magical planet. Just to clarify, because Tom is a Regular and a man, doesn’t mean I wish I’d joined up full time and had a different gender, because I’m quite happy as a female Reservist! It just made sense that he was who he was in the context of my story.

Between 2021 and 2022, I drafted the six books in The Gallantrian Legacy. In that time, I also quit my FTRS job and started a job for Amazon. I liked the job, but between the long hours, the night shifts, the resumption of my Reservist role and family commitments, it was just a bit too much. So I quit. And late in 2022, with six books drafted and all in need of a lot of editing, I decided I was going to try to make it as an author. Three and a half years later, I’m still working on that one!

If people ask me what I do for a living, I now say I’m a Reservist, author, property developer and buildings surveyor. I do a little bit of all four jobs, but I think my passion is writing. Especially writing fantasy fused with my military experiences.

In my second book, I send Tom and Emma back to Earth. Tom ends up being arrested for desertion and has a court martial hearing in Catterick. I once did court martial duty in Catterick, so it was the obvious courthouse to choose! I’ve been to Catterick a fair few times and although I don’t mention the name of the pub where Tom catches up with his old friend Mark—a major in the infantry—I can picture it quite clearly in my head. Along with the style of the room in the Officers’ Mess that Tom ends up kipping on the floor of on the evening after Mark picks him up from the courthouse. I’ve seen the inside of those kinds of rooms plenty of times.

Me as a major in 2023, on a training weekend in Catterick.

Mark is probably my favourite character. He and Tom were at Sandhurst together, and whereas Tom is a very stereotypical officer—from a middle-class family, went to uni, then commissioned—Mark joined the ranks at sixteen and was put forwards for a soldier-entry commission in his early twenties. Mark grew up on a rough estate in Manchester and got embroiled in petty crime as a kid. Like many people whom I’ve met in the Army over the years, his service somewhat turned his life around.

Mark is a bit of a rogue. But he’s also a flyer. He’s an OC at the Infantry Training Centre at Catterick, and his career is progressing nicely when he ends up following Tom back to the magical planet that his old friend had spent the last two years on. Mark ends up stuck there and stuck in the rest of my books in that series, too!

Some of my favourite scenes feature banter between Tom and Mark. Mark takes the mick out of Tom for being a typical officer from a middle-class family. Tom grudgingly concedes Mark is better at tactics than him. Mark is clever, direct and tells things how he sees them, and has an interesting time adjusting to life on a medieval-style fantasy planet.

Tom’s character draws on my experiences as an officer in general, and my many years of working closely with regular officers, as does Mark’s character. But Mark’s start to life is more similar to mine. Like Mark, I grew up in a single-parent family on a council estate with a mum who was often out of work. I can’t confess to ever being involved in petty crime, unless the odd underage drinking session counts, but my background is very different to the majority of officers I meet in the Army.

I recall clearly how difficult I found it to relate to my peers in the UOTC. When they all chatted about gap years and ski holidays and experiences that were way outside the price bracket of stuff I ever did as a kid, I confess I struggled with a degree of jealousy at first. I’d keep quiet and wouldn’t know how to engage in the conversation. I never made any close friends in the UOTC for this reason.

Over the years, I’ve come to realise that no one can help the life they’re born into. All they can do is shape the hand they are dealt. As I have, as Mark does. And that years of service life can mean you have more in common with fellow soldiers and officers than you do with anyone who had the same upbringing as you.

The longer you serve, the more of an imprint service life has on who you are. In my case, it’s shaped my novels. I simply couldn’t have created Tom and Mark without my military experience. I don’t think I’d be able to make Tom a convincing sapper if I wasn’t a Royal Engineer. I recall someone once saying Tom wasn’t like a ‘real soldier’ in a review of one of my books. I wanted to scream back, “not everyone in the army is in the infantry!”. I didn’t. But I did tweak my manuscript to make it clearer what the role of a Royal Engineer was.

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Trying to make it as an author is hard. Bloody hard!

But what do I mean by making it as an author? In my head, it means earning more from selling your books than marketing them.

Sure, there’s loads of costs involved in getting your books out there in the first place, but these are fixed costs. Once you’ve published your book, what you’ve spent on editing and cover design never changes.

I make no secret of the fact that I’ve spent thousands of pounds getting my books publishing ready. The biggest chunk of that cost has gone to editors: circa £1500-£2000 a book, plus what I spent on editors who did a sub-standard job—whose work had to be re-done. I also spent a lot on a cover designer who produced a load of covers that I have since replaced—they just weren’t good enough. My latest designer is far cheaper and far better.

I’ve spent lots of money and wasted a big chunk of it. And now I have 6 books ready to release this year. If you want to know how I ended up with 6 books written before I published any of them, I wrote a blog post about it here. Two of them are now out, and I’ve already spent more on marketing them than they’ve earned back in profits from sales and pages read on Kindle Unlimited.

Curious about my stats?

I’m happy to share. First, here’s my sales figures:

£112.41 earned so far. Path to Power was out on 20th February, Masters of Magic was out on 3rd April. Clash of Crowns is not out until 15th May – so the £1.67 is a pre-order figure.

Where have these sales come from?

The spike on 20th Feb was mostly down to pre-orders. I’d collected 9 of them by release date. A few others around that date will be from people who might have pre-ordered, except that they wanted a paperback, and pre-orders only work for ebooks. But who were these people? I don’t know for sure, but I’d suggest they’re a mix of people who I’ve engaged with on Twitter, newsletter subscribers, with a few friends in the mix too. But as you can see, sales faded to almost zero until 25th March. A few of my Twitter posts had a lot of hits around that date—there could be a correlation. But I’m actually unsure exactly where they came from, TBH.

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I know I got 6-9 sales in late March because I attended a Royal Engineers Reserve conference, went to a function in the evening, had a few drinks, and managed to persuade quite a few people to buy my book on the spot—they got their phones out an ordered then and there! When you’re at a Sapper conference and you say, “I wrote a book where I send a Sapper to a magical planet!” It seems to get a bit of traction. (Sapper is a term used to describe someone in the Royal Engineers, if you’re wondering).

What about ads?

As for ads – I kicked off my Meta ads (Facebook and Instagram) on 6th April and have sold 6 copies of Path to Power and one copy of Masters of Magic since. I’d suggest the sequel sale is probably from someone who bought Path to Power earlier. So if we attribute all the Path to Power sales to my ads, that gives £10.05 in royalties, plus another £1.75 in pages read in Kindle Unlimited. A total of £11.80.

How much have I spent on ads since then? At the time of writing, £88.85. And here is where my money is going.

Over 20,000 people have seen one of my two ads. 487 people have clicked on the “Shop now” button. And of those people who have perused my book on Amazon, a maximum of 5 of them bought it. How cheery do those figures make you?

It’s possible that some people will have downloaded it to Kindle Unlimited. I won’t see any evidence of that until they start reading. It’s possible that some people have saved the post for later or logged the name of the book to come back to. It’s possible. But I doubt that will get me another £80 worth of sales to cover the cost of the ads.

Do I have money to burn?

Um, no. I’m lucky in that I’m in a stable financial position. Years of slaving away bashing houses to bits, renovating them, selling them and climbing the property ladder means I pay little on my mortgage and I have a bit of rental income besides. I earn a bit from the Army Reserves and from some occasional building surveying. I also have a husband with a decent wage. But can I afford to just throw money away on ads forever? No.

So why the hell am I still running them?

Er, insanity? Blind faith? A strange desire to impoverish myself? Probably all of these, to an extent. But the real reason is that I’m hanging onto that promise that both Meta and lots of established authors have repeated: that the ads don’t work right away. They take time to find their audience, and people need to see the same ad a few times before they buy.

There’s also the potential of read-through. If 50% of buyers of book one go on to buy book two, and of those, 75% buy book three, then for every copy of book one I sell, I get almost the same value again from read-through sales (I did the maths, it’s an extra 87.5% of a sale, to be precise). So that nearly doubles my profits. Then there’s the second trilogy. Then there’s the people my readers might recommend my book to. And so it ripples on—at least, that’s the theory.

Chances are I’ll lose money.

But chances are, I’ll never make a profit from my books either. Not for a while, at least.

I was recently sent an article by Written Word Media. It did a survey of 2000 authors—most of them indie authors—and the answers to one of the questions it asked is below.

This graph kind of made me feel better. I’ll have 6 books out soon. The median earnings for authors with 1-5 books out is £0-$250. For those with 6-10 out, it’s just $250-$500. If you say you need to earn at least $2500 a month to earn a living, then the median writer would need to have over 26 books out just to survive off writing alone!

That’s a hell of a lot of writing, a hell of a lot of editing, and a hell of a lot of expense—assuming all authors pay for editing and covers.

This all sounds terribly gloomy.

It does, doesn’t it? But it’s still early days. I’m going to hold my nerve on the ads a little longer and see if they start paying off. I’m going to attend some more in-person events—I went to PASCIFY last Saturday. Another very expensive marketing failure. See this post on Twitter. But the next ones I have planned will be cheaper to attend, and maybe I’ll sell more books? You don’t know unless you try. I’m going to try some promos with websites like Bargain Booksy and Book Barbarian. I’ll give Amazon Ads a go. I’ll write more books and keep trying. I’ve invested too much of my life in my books so far to give up now!

Want to give this aspiring author a boost? Every sale counts…

Check out my books!

www.charlottegoodwin.co.uk

It was September 2021, and I was on holiday. I was with my husband in Santorini, Greece, on the kind of holiday where you spend most of your time lying on a sun lounger not doing very much—the kind where you go away just to have a break from doing stuff.

On these kinds of holidays I get a chance to read; and read I did! My life is often so filled with stuff that I don’t find the time, or the headspace, to read, so holidays provide space where I can fill my time with time-fillers—like reading.

So there I was, reading books in the sunshine, when I had an epiphany. I could write a novel at work!

This sounds like a bit of a dubious connection, but bear with me. Reading fantasy novels reminded me that I loved fantasy novels; it also reminded me that a novel of my own had been rattling around my head for over a decade and still hadn’t been written.

In 2010, I was in a graduate-level job and was somewhat under-employed. I had to sit at my desk all day, but I didn’t have enough work to fill my time. No one really cared what I was doing. I was kind of surplus to the team—slotted into various departments to learn about the business, without a real role as such. I was bored, so I decided to start writing a novel. I could merrily tap away at my computer, looking busy, but doing something completely non-work-related.

The novel I wrote in 2010 was called To Save a Pegasus. It was about a teenage girl from Earth who stumbled through a portal to another world and ended up embroiled in a mission to save a Pegasus from an evil queen.

I wrote it, tried to get it published, failed, and gave up writing for eleven years. But while I was busy not writing much, I did come up with an idea for another story. I wanted to explore the idea of sending more characters from Earth to fantastical places, but this time, it would be a woman who was a long-lost heir to a throne, and her husband, who was an officer in the Royal Engineers. And in this story, they’d not travel through a portal; instead, they would travel across the galaxy to a faraway planet where a magic field replaced the magnetic field, and Earth natives could become uber-sorcerers.

The basic concept remained unchanged, but the execution certainly evolved a lot over the eleven years I spent mulling the story over. I actually started writing it twice and gave up after a few chapters on both occasions after not really getting into it.

But I still thought about the story every now and then, and it evolved into a trilogy—but it only existed in my head; until September 2021, that is.

At that time, I was employed on a full-time contract working for the Army. But I found myself somewhat under-employed. I’d tried to come up with projects to fill my time, but I kept getting told to get back in my box—the problems I was trying to solve didn’t sit within the remit of our department, apparently. So I was left to stare at a screen, bored, in case anyone Skype-called me.

So that epiphany I mentioned happened because I was reading again, which reignited my love of fantasy, which made me think of that novel I’d been mulling over for over a decade, which reminded me of that time I wrote a different novel while bored at work. So, I decided that when I got back to my desk, I would start writing book one of my trilogy.

By Christmas 2021, the first draft of book 1 was written. In the new year, I started on book 2. By Easter 2022, I’d quit my job due to not being stretched enough and was busy working my notice before I’d start a new job working for Amazon. I’d also finished the first drafts of books 2 and 3. Then I started on the sequel trilogy. By the time my contract ended at the end of July 2022, I’d finished the first drafts of books 1 and 2 of my second trilogy and started on the third.

Meanwhile, I’d had friends and family read book 1, made a few tweaks, and tried to get it published. I talk all about this novel’s journey in a blog post I wrote in August 2024. You can find it here if you’re interested. The amusing thing is that at the time I wrote that post, I thought that novel’s journey was almost finished! It wasn’t. It had a long way to go. I won’t bore you with the details, but to summarise, I published it in May 2025, then unpublished it soon after.

Why?

Several reasons—the main one being that it got review-bombed thanks to a little Twitter storm I got embroiled in. But looking back, I’m starting to think that was perhaps a blessing in disguise.

If I hadn’t been review-bombed for something that had nothing to do with my novel, I wouldn’t have unpublished it. But the thing is, it went out with flaws. It hadn’t been edited as thoroughly as it should have been because I’d been let down with editors and was determined to hit my publishing date. Its plot was perhaps not as tight as it should have been, either.

So I did some more work on it, got it beta read, digested the feedback, tweaked it some more, got it edited—again, and now it’s ready. Proofed and polished to within an inch of its life, the bloody thing is as it is now and isn’t getting changed again!

So that’s Path to Power. But I mentioned I wrote another five books besides. What was going on with all these during this period?

I didn’t just abandon them in draft form; they got work too.

To roll back a little, after I finished my first trilogy, tried to get it published and got nowhere, I had a pro manuscript review done, and when I read it, I realised book 1 stank. It needed so much work that I couldn’t face it right then, so I decided to publish my sequel trilogy instead and come back to my first trilogy later.

My second trilogy was written after I’d practiced writing on another three books, so it was, of course, better. It didn’t need as much work to get it into a decent state as I thought, so I could polish these books, publish, then after, polish the first trilogy and publish the first trilogy second. It worked for Star Wars, why shouldn’t it work for me?

So my second trilogy, The Offspring Trilogy, was pro-edited, polished, and published in 2023.

All three books got good reviews. I sold a few hundred copies. But I just couldn’t seem to build the momentum I hoped for. Sales began to dwindle, and my read-through from book 1 to 2 wasn’t great. I was starting to think book 1, The General’s Son, had flaws.

Not massive flaws, granted. It wouldn’t have got good reviews if it were a bad story. I just suspected it took a bit too long to get going and maybe lost readers early on. I wanted a professional opinion on this story before I did anything else, so I paid for a manuscript review. The review confirmed my suspicion about the start, but it suggested that a few other things weren’t working as well as they could, either. So, around a year after The General’s Son was released, I unpublished it—with 39 reviews averaging 4.5 stars.

Condor moment time. I took a deep breath and decided to start over. I’d re-write my first trilogy. I’d tweak The General’s Son, I’d then get all six books ready and shiny and polished and launch the whole lot of ‘em, starting with The Queen of Vorn (since renamed to Path to Power) in May 2025.

As mentioned earlier, The Queen of Vorn was published, then unpublished soon after, pending a re-brand and some more work.

So, after another round of editing, all six books will be out this year.

Book 1 is now out. Books 2 to 6 will be out at six-week intervals until they have all been released into the world. For good, this time. I’m not un-publishing again!

www.charlottegoodwin.co.uk

When I first started writing and did bits of research into how to be a successful author, one of the themes that came up time and time again was the notion of having an author platform. At first, I didn’t quite understand what a platform was. So if you’re in the same boat as I was in those early days, here’s my understanding.

An author platform is basically an online presence. It usually involves having a website and a decent following on various social media platforms.

The different platforms

A few years back, I tried to build this presence on a range of platforms, including Twitter/X, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. The only one I had any success on was Twitter. As for the other ones:

- YouTube: I made a load of videos for YouTube a couple of years back. Some got a bit of traction, and I collected a few followers. But making videos is time consuming and building a presence on any platform requires regular posts and determination.

- TikTok: Like YouTube, making videos requires a fair bit of effort, even if they are just the amateurish type vids that a lot of people post on TikTok.

- Instagram: I never really got this platform. At 40, I’m probably a bit too old to get it—what’s the point of a platform just full of pictures? But regardless, writing is not really a visual sport in my opinion (unless you write picture books), so I’m not certain this is the best place to build an author platform.

- Facebook: I get this platform—it took off during my uni days, and I’ve been using it for a long time. But I’m not sure I ever really gave my Facebook author platform the attention it needed to get going. So without success I sort of abandoned it.

Twitter/X

Now, Twitter…I’ve had some success there. I started posting regularly in autumn 2021, around the same time that I started writing The Queen of Vorn. And on this platform, I had some success. Writing a short post is quick and easy. I could do it in the morning while I drank my first coffee of the day. I soon found posting questions was a great way to invite interaction and hence, followers, and I realised that if you followed people, lots of them would follow you back.

For the last four years, I’ve been posting almost daily, and commenting on other posts besides. In the early days, I kept tabs on how my following was increasing. I just looked at that data and realised I last updated it in March 2023. I’ve just added in my latest follower count, which stands at 43,036. I made the graph below so you can see the trend

.You can see at first, the count rose quickly. I think this was in part due to luck. I jumped on the platform at a good time when the algorithm gods favoured me. In the early days, I could write posts that would regularly get tens of thousands of hits. That died away with time, but I had a good base and so the numbers continued to climb.

I have tons of followers, so what?

There have been plenty of people who have posted on my comments flagging this in a way that sounds a tad envious. You have loads of followers; stop whining about… that kind of thing. But:

What is the benefit of having loads of followers?

Err??? Six days ago, I wrote the following post

What was behind my sudden negativity?

Primarily, it was the result of one particular follower who I had allowed to live rent free in my head. But how did he get there in the first place?

I’m trying to move on from the horrific experience I had soon after I published The Queen of Vorn this summer. I’ve removed the blog post I wrote about it and some of the tweets relating to it too, as I don’t want it to sit as a stain on my author platform. But as a brief summary, I wrote a post about a mediocre review, got loads of attention, and as a result someone set out to destroy me; and I ended up review-bombed.

Six books that I’d been crafting for four years were bombed with one-star reviews, including three that were unpublished 18 months prior and two that were not even out yet. As well as the one in question.

Needless to say, that little debacle somewhat knocked me sideways.

I’ve been trying to recover ever since. Goodreads took down some of the more hateful reviews and some of the one-star ratings, but they refuse to take down the bulk of them. Hence, a scar remains on my author platform that I can’t remove.

All I can do is try to move on from that.

So after picking myself up from the heap on the floor I’d ended up in after this horrible experience, I set about trying to rescue my books.

The book that got the mediocre review that I commented on did go out with flaws. I talk about how this happened in a blog post I wrote in September. Here’s a handy link if you’re interested.

But despite its flaws, it didn’t deserve to be destroyed the way it was.

Regardless, it was tarnished beyond redemption in my opinion, so I pulled it from the shelves and resolved to do some work on it to fix the flaws. I would also give it a new title so it could get a fresh start.

Keen to get as much feedback as I could to make improvements, I sought the opinions of beta readers.

Twitter helped me find some. Yay! The platform has some positives: a bunch of people read my novel and gave feedback. Now, if you ever do this yourself, I have one piece of advice:

If you disagree with feedback, only ignore it if it’s an outlier.

What I mean by this is that when you get feedback, lots of people will say lots of different things. Some you may read and think, “yeah, I thought as much”, other comments you may disagree with. I suggest you ignore these unless they are a common theme from different beta readers, or you will start changing your novel into something completely different and maybe even make it worse.

Now, getting back to the point of the article—I got lots of feedback and, as a result, decided what changes I would make to my story. One particular reader, however, was particularly critical. He made a lot of comments that I disagreed with that hadn’t been raised by others. That’s fine—everyone likes different stuff and has different opinions.

I thanked him for his feedback, which was rather detailed, and asked if he would be interested in reading my revised version.

I revised it, and he read it, and he came back with a load more rather critical feedback.

Now, here’s the thing. When someone takes the time to read my work and provide details as to what they think of it, I’m very grateful. They give up their time for free to do this, so whether or not the feedback is good, I still hold them in high regard for doing this.

When I got the second batch of critical feedback, I thought this reader deserved some of my time to explain how although the comments were useful, and that there were a few points I would take on board, I also wanted to explain why I wouldn’t be completely re-writing my novel to turn it into a different story, as he’d basically suggested.

Reply written, let’s move on.

Except this particular person didn’t want to move on. He seemed to be somewhat offended that I didn’t take all his points onboard. He kept dripping comments into my Twitter feed. Every time I referenced the Twitter storm of the summer, I was a whining victim. Every time I referred to my book, he liked to have a dig about how I couldn’t take feedback. This went on and on. I would have blocked him a while ago, except that I only usually block people who are hateful, and he wasn’t hateful. He always phrased his comments in a reasonable, respectful way, despite their negative connotations.

The Queen of Vorn was revised further and rebranded, and I asked for advance readers on Twitter. The lovely human being I referred to decided to create a pseudonym and sneak his way onto my ARC list. He got his free copy and then proceeded to slate it on Goodreads. His review is easy to spot; it’s the one that goes on about The Queen of Vorn in a review about Path to Power.

He also decided to write a blog about it on his website, going into great detail about how awful my book is.

I don’t know why this person became so obsessed with me. But I’m angry with myself for feeding his obsession. Every time I replied to his comments, I was feeding the beast without seeing him for what he is.

When I looked at his latest stating of my book on his website, it finally clicked. He’s a bully. And the worst thing you can do when dealing with a bully is react. So I realised he needed blocking, ignoring, and left to stew in his hatred of me and my books until he eventually got bored and went away.

He is just one bad apple, I guess. Besides him, surely there are positives to having loads of followers. Why would people seek fame if they didn’t want to be noticed? Being noticed is good, right? It helps people make money, doesn’t it? Um, I’ll come to that shortly.

I’ve been talking a lot about the negatives of having loads of followers, so I think it’s important to address the subtitle of this section a bit more concisely: What is the benefit of having loads of followers?

- You have an author platform. This looks good to publishers and agents, it you want to traditionally publish.

- You often get a lot of comments on your posts. Sometimes, I post questions about things I genuinely want to know the answer to, and I’ve had a lot of good answers at times.

- You meet people who are happy to read and review your book. Despite the person I mentioned, most of these people are decent and give helpful feedback.

- You become part of an online community of writers and readers and feel like you get to know some of your followers and create online friends, which is nice.

But as for selling books?

Err…

Whenever I try to plug my books on Twitter, the response is usually tumbleweeds. Sure, I may have found a handful of readers for my stuff on this platform. But in terms of the ratio of time spent tweeting stuff to profits for book sales, I’d be far better off using that time working for minimum wage and using that money to pay for ads.

The Platform Curse

If you have lots of followers, a lot of people can see you. I’m very much of the opinion that most people in this world are decent and good. But there’s a minority who are nasty and spiteful.

The more people who can see you, the more likely it is that one of these nasty people spots you. And if you do something they don’t like, they will gleefully set about trying to destroy you.

The sad reality of life is that hate spreads far quicker than love. I managed to collect hundreds of book reviews, ratings, and comments in a short space of time that were nasty and vindictive. But to try to get hundreds of good book reviews and ratings takes a lot of time, effort and patience.

We are all human, and we all make mistakes. You can get things right 99% of the time. But we sometimes make mistakes. And the more people that notice, the more likely it is that someone will be ready to sink the knife.

You can also find more blog posts and learn more about the author on her website:

www.charlottegoodwin.co.uk