Newsletter – May 2026

Facebook ad hell & another half a book written.

Shameless plug: The Paschal Moon is out, you can buy it HERE.

Facebook Ads
Now that I’ve climbed the enormous learning mountain how to write a book, it’s rather depressing to face another one; how to promote it. These days, organic reach from posting lots and getting lucky and going viral aren’t really a thing. You pay to play now, and if you dont, no one sees anything.

Facebook is the #1 platform for ROI on book sales (in this genre anyway), and along with paid Amazon promotion, they’re the two things to use. So I’ve been tinkering with different ideas, listening to podcasts, and scrolling through how other authors do it. I had the pleasure of dicovering the “billionaire mafia don” genre. Its a real thing, go look, the ads are all moody-but-misunderstood men in suits who insist on having their shirts undone, showing AI-distorted six packs.

Its a complicated world, ads, billionaire mafia dons aside, and I admit its a struggle to take it all in. But I’m doing what the advice says, chucking loads of stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, and then taking the stuff that sticks and doing variations of that, and then chucking that at the wall. And so on… bleh. I prefer writing.

Innismor – Slaine reborn… kind of
Which segways nicely to my other thing… It’s been a pretty steady word count on my new book, and this week I passed 50,000 words, which is halfway. Woop!

When I was a teenager, I loved the comic 2000AD, probably more than life itself. I still have some Judge Dredd graphic novels on my shelf to this day. One of the more lesser known characters from the comic was Slaine (IYKYK), a axe-weilding nutcase loosely based on the mythical Cú Chulainn, the hero of the pre-christian Ireland sagas called the Ulster Cycle.

I’ve always enjoyed Celtic stories, symbols, stone circles, megaliths, all of it. There’s an ancient mysteriousness to it that draws me in, and its myths and religions are more grounded to the earth and sky, the natural world, as opposed to messiahs and original sin.

The new series is set in an alternate past, where the Celts discover and settle in Iceland, rather than the Vikings. They call it Innismor, and live there for many centuries undisturbed and isolated from the Old World. They have a close connection to and method of harnessing the energy of the earth, something Iceland is famous for today. Its a medeval fantasy with a lot of violence and politics and jostling and feuding, set in a stable-but-fractured society thats watched over by a brooding, repressive religion. Awesome.

I’m aiming for something that appeals to lovers of the SFF genre, but with as much character driven humanity than maybe some fantasy books. I’ve read the genre since I was a child, and there are some brilliant, brilliant examples, but I do find a lot of it is more about the complexity of wizard names and the shininess of swords than the story itself. I’ve had several people say to me that they liked the Cambria Trilogy “even though they don’t normally do science fiction”, and I think that’s ultimately down to the characters, so I’m aiming for that.

Thanks for reading 🙂

Daniel

I finally got around to releasing my short story, which is free for subscribers to my newsletter.

The story is a prequel to my forthcoming Cambria Trilogy, set around 100 years before the start of Book 1 – The Fisher Queen. It briefly tells us about the early life of Finn, a quiet but very deadly man who appears the trilogy as a much older (but still very dangerous) character.

If you would like to read this for free, please click HERE. You will need to sign up to my newsletter, but I only send out short emails once a month. You can unsubscribe at any time.

With no idea how to start things off, and only the internet for (bad) advice, I thought I would start with some background and flavour of the trilogy I am writing to whet the appetite.

The Fisher Queen is the first installment of my trilogy, a series set on a future earth and mostly played out in country called Cambria. It’s “soft” science fiction, with a healthy dose of post-apocalyptic dystopian darkness thrown in.

What is soft science fiction?

Soft SF (often called social/philosophical SF) focuses on people, society, and ideas rather than technical details and scientific accuracy.
Hard SF asks “What if we developed this technology?” and explores the engineering in detail – like The Martian showing exactly how someone survives on Mars using real physics and chemistry.
Soft SF asks “What would society look like if…” or “How would people change if…” – it uses futuristic or speculative settings to explore human nature, culture, politics, psychology, and philosophy. The science is often background rather than the point.

The Fisher Queen is soft SF because:
• My fictional world has technology constraints, but I don’t go into enormous engineering detail of how that works. Life on earth is technologically behind our world, so much of the time it might feel more like an early 20th century setting, even though it isn’t
• The story explores how a society functions when it prioritizes collective happiness over technological advancement, how that works well in isolation, and then how it reacts to aggression and violence.
• My central point is philosophical: “Can humanity be happy?”
• Character relationships, moral dilemmas, and social structures drive the plot, not geeking out on uber tech (which I love, it’s just not that)

Sound good?
Great, then keep reading, you might even get to the end of this newsletter without TLDR’ing me. Here is my current synopsis of the whole trilogy (rather than Book 1 only), I’d love to know what you think:

Eight hundred years after The Reckoning killed eleven billion people, Cambria thrives as humanity’s grand experiment. A constellation of peaceful villages protected by ancient technology and built on a radical premise: that humans flourish not through endless technological advancement, but through community, purpose, and lives lived at human scale.

Tom Peters has never questioned his world. He trains for races across Cambria’s rewilded hills, works his Community Service and raises his adopted daughter Ada with fiancée Sita. In Cambria, doors have no locks. There are no cities and barely any technology. No armies and little crime. Peace isn’t just policy, it’s the air they breathe.

Then Ada is kidnapped.

The impossible happened: The Arc, Cambria’s protective barrier, is breached by a brutal regime from the harsh world beyond. Behind the throne stands an a-mortal from before The Reckoning whose centuries of manipulation and cruelty have left empires in ruins. Now his mortality has finally arrived, and he’ll hold Cambria hostage to force the ancient powers who created it to save him.

As the crisis deepens, Tom and Sita discover that defending paradise requires becoming people they never imagined. A society built on trust faces an enemy who exploits trust. A culture that abandoned violence must decide what it’s willing to sacrifice.

Can a peaceful people fight a war without losing themselves? Can utopia survive contact with those who would destroy it? And when the cost of victory equals the cost of defeat, what choice remains?

Thank you for reading, it’s much appreciated. Feel free to reply, I’m always interested to know what you think 🙂

My website is admittedly rather bare at the moment, but in my defense I have only just created it. Its initial purpose is primarily to create a place for people to signup to either my regular newsletter, or my inner circle newsletter. See the top of the home page for those links.

I’ll be adding more to the site over time, as my writing and publishing journey starts to take off in earnest.

I have completed the writing phase of my debut science-fiction trilogy, three books that are focused around a future society called Cambria. The dream of Raymond Fielding, a long dead survivor of the Old World, he creates a foundation where humanity can finally flourish, rather than continuing to destroy itself.

After centuries of isolated success, the Cambrian Experiment is suddenly and violently exposed to the rest of the world, to places and people that seek to destroy the utopian vision. All humanity is constrained by the global technology ceiling known as the Kafra Limits, but that does not stop violence, oppression and conquest.

The trilogy follows the fortunes of Tom, Sita and Ada, a Cambrian family thrust into a swirl of events that will ultimately decide the fate of their people and decide the underlying question: Can humanity ever be happy?

The first book in the trilogy, The Fisher Queen, will be released in 2026.

As of today, the three books are all drafted, Book 1 is now into beta reading stage, the other two are still with me in my own editing phase. More soon!