fantasy

Progress.

/ Neil Bowers / Leave a comment

So, I’ve written the elusive novel that we all have inside ourselves.

I’ve written that novel, the sequel, the one after that, and then scribbled volume four.   

Half a million or so words taking a young twenty-two-year-old woman from Dromahair County Leitrim, taken her around the world, through deserts and across vast mountain ranges. 

Amy’s flown through thunderstorms, danced with lightning, had gunfights, swordfights tweaked the nose of many an assailant.

She’s done this in Egypt, The Sudan, India, Canada, North America, before finally coming back to Ireland as a 29-year-old whose heart has been broken too many times.

She’s danced with those she loved, lost them too. 

Revenge and vengeance have driven her; magic and a gossiping fairy accompanied her.

Evil men, cruel men, truly sadistic men have cut her, tried to kill her, imprisoned her and stolen her child from her, but by her own hand all who have stood against her have died.

Her story has been written.

The tales of her adventures neatly typed up.

Typo’s, run on sentences that go on and on and on, these where we’ve noticed them, these have been corrected.

Scenes have been polished, the superfluous removed, the remaining tied tighter than a drumskin.

It flows.

No gaps exist, no whatever happened to such and such left unanswered, the beginning meets the middle, and the middle neatly flows to the ending.

I love her tale, her adventures, her journey.

They have merit, and so I’m backing myself and self-publishing.

I looking to unleash Miss Amy Grace unto the world Q1 2026.

Pennies have been saved, the services of an exceptional editor booked, ideas for the cover confirmed.

The best possible version is coming soon, and with the clock ticking so too is your chance to be swept away by five feet and two inches of fierce determination under a crown of flame red hair getting ever closer.

She is worth the wait.

I’m excited.

You should be too!

Coming early 2026 – Amy Grace: Payne

What’s in a name? 

/ Neil Bowers / Leave a comment

It’s only a name, but then again it never really is, it’s always so much more.  Maybe that’s why writers struggle for untold numbers of hours picking just the right one for their beloved character. 

For me Amy Grace was only ever going to be called such, I felt an instant connection with the name.  John Newton’s words still resonating two hundred and something years later!

I’ve tipped my hat to hymns and pre-Raphaelite painters – John Fredrick Lewis case point. I’ve name dropped John Lilburne et others who were Levellers/Diggers from the English Civil War.  I’ve paid homage to Thomas Pain(e) a pamphleteer (blogger of the 1700’s) as one of the main characters in the Amy Grace sagas.  I’ve name dropped with such reckless abandon that to walk through ANY tale I tell, you’d do well to have a sideways glance at the naming of every character.

I reference so many aspects of my immersion in (pop) culture, that the more of my tales you read the more my musical and literary peculiarities become clearer.  My bent for history, mythology (fairy tales), art and music do indeed bleed into my stories – and why wouldn’t they?

So, when I found myself doing one of those self-dictated writing exercises where you just take an image and try to write about it, I found myself in a bit of a quandary… 

Walls of water rushed across the open fields; each wall chased by its replacement as an invisible army of artisans worked with manic speed to construct the next in line, and the next, and the next…  Lightning struck, but could highlight no gaps, thunder shook the air with a violence that stole the breath from awestruck bodies.  But nothing could compete with the walls of water for spectacle or violence. 

The storm was in ecstasy, the rain manifestation of its joy. The wind howled accompaniments to the booming thunder and flashing lightning, but nothing, nothing could hope to surpass the destruction that such a volume of falling water was bringing! 

The banshees wanted to ride the storm and scream their laments, but this was the domain of the rain, all others would have to wait their turn.  These hours belonged to the goddess of water and no challenge to her power would be permitted.  

Such power I thought must be feminine, must be the work of a female deity, and the simply must be one that I could name drop, there just must be such a suitable reference.  Rabbit hole entered, time spent and conversations with friends and colleagues steered towards the subject. 

[Top tip, don’t ask a writer what they’re thinking about unless you want to discuss something random/obscure and be pulled into the madness with them – don’t make eye contact, just grunt ‘was up’, get your coffee and walk away – it’s safer, it really is.]

Now this was only ever going to be a ‘for fun’ writing exercise.  I had no need for this scene; it was just me writing words for fun.

Background programmes ran most of the morning, little synaptic links came up with ideas, but no solutions.  Masculine gods queued for the job, the candidates numerous and plentiful.  The women frustratingly conspicuous by their absence….

I didn’t NEED to do this, this wasn’t (as already stated) a passage for a tale in progress – this was just for fun!

Anyway, after innumerable false starts and rejected names, I came up with Danu. 

Innumerable academic arguments seemed to exist as to whether indeed she did or indeed did not – she was therefore the perfect candidate.

Every trophy the wind picked up; the rain beat down.  This was her time and for Danu there would be no usurpers.

That was it.  Task complete a suitable name chosen.  

The passage was now complete; the storm was the work of a Celtic goddess called Danu – all was now good in the cosmos. 

All that energy invested for something that in all likelihood would only ever see the light of day in a blog post – her inclusion into a tall tale precarious at best.

This may explain why writing those 173 words took so long, and indeed why writers stand prouder at that little collection of words than a parent beaming at their tiny child and that first potato print painting…  

Peculiar bunch writers.

Hug those you love, remind them that indeed you do, stay safe, and continue to do your best to remain sane! 

Why?

/ Neil Bowers / Leave a comment

Back in the black and white days of yore, when dragons still roamed the land and the internet was dial up, all that time ago, I wrote my first book.

I scribbled words together as a rebuff to that contentious ‘best opening line’ debate.  Many enjoyable books have poor openings, and many a great opening line is the highpoint of an extremely poor tale.

It was and remains ever thus.

However, I thought to myself what if I could write an opening line, and then what if I could take a tale all the way from ‘once upon a time’ all the way to ‘the end’?

My foray, my toe dipping moment was agonised over, written, rewritten, and then rewritten again.

I quickly appreciated just how hard it is to write that killer hook.

My offer was – It wasn’t just an isolated cliché, it was more than that, it was a burst of three hot angry and buzzing 7.62mm clichés that struck him hard fast and square in the chest.  They hurt, they stung, they burnt, and just because they could, they hurt him again.

Now, the merit or otherwise of an opening line, I appreciate, is such a subjective matter that has as much to do with prevailing fashions, audience whims as it does actual artistic merit.

A good opening line, or indeed not, it taught me so many lessons beyond stringing the words together.

From this opening line I created a 45,000-word tale.

The resulting book we named after the punishment given to Sisyphus that had him rolling the stone to the top of the hill only for it to roll back down again time after time after time…  an apt metaphor I thought for the (futile) actions of NATO (et others) in the far away plains and mountains of Afghanistan. 

Sisyphus’s Burden set the precedent for all future tales insofar as it was a true ‘pantster’ creation.  It was a journey of discovery as much for the writer as it is for the reader.  This approach has remained with every other tall tale that I’ve created.  I may start with the vaguest of destinations in mind, but the route to be taken is never known. 

My next offer to the world was the result of a pleasant debate around the visual differences (if any) between SteamPunk and Goth – with a slight detour taken to discuss one of my favourite books (take a bow Mr Stoker) Dracula. 

Is this taking us anywhere?

It is, hold on, this is longer than a tweet, but definitely shorter than a book written for a long Russian Winter, so, yes, back to the plot…

If we’d cracked the opening line conundrum AND completed that oft quoted novel that we all have inside everyone of us, then book two was free of any and all constraints – and so it turned out to be.

Many say, ‘stay in your lane,’ or ‘only write what you know’ or more bluntly NEVER attempt to write from the point of view of a character you are not – i.e. a woman, a minority that kind of thing.  How these folk think fiction works – I don’t know, but these are genuinely touted mantras (shocking isn’t it!).

Never one to really understand or indeed accept the rules my next offering was written about a five foot and two inches tall woman.

I chose to write about a woman, because my setting (the late 1880’s) was most definitely a ‘mans world’ AND I chose my female character NOT to be the busty amazonian in short shorts and tight shirts, or that simpering woman always waiting to get rescued by a man, nope with Amy I wanted to avoid those tropes and cliches. 

She’s my attempt at an ‘every woman’ character, a woman that many could relate to.  She fails, she is cut, she is violently beaten and abused, but she survives.  And this theme of violence against women was one I wanted to get right, not to abuse, not to trivialise or titillate.  Cuts hurt, scars remain, and nightmares come back.

Risks are taken, and real-world consequences paid.

We added into our mix a dash of SteamPunk with an eccentric professor and a gifted flying machine, and we sprinkled this tale with a liberal dose of magic, fairy tales and Irish mythology.

The rules say that such a tale should sit around 80,000 words – volume one sits at 130,000.  You are also told NOT to write a series before you’ve managed to sell book one…  Amy and her adventures are four complete tales with a fifth in the works.

All of this may explain why I’m currently failing to succeed in the traditionally published market – an industry seemingly dominated by cold and timid souls whose idea of risk taking is commissioning yet another ‘Twilight Saga’ teenage romance by numbers missive…

Could be that, or indeed my tall tales are indeed without merit – could be option B.    

So, while we contemplate the many mysteries of the publishing world, while we stare at that knot that ties the oxcart to a wall, while all these things happen, while the sands of life trickle through the timer, while all of this (and long sentences) continues, I wish you all the best that life has to offer – stay safe and hug the ones you love!!!