I am not a professional author. Having written two books and finding myself somehow in the middle of writing two more, I don’t feel like I can say I’m not an author anymore, but I am not a professional author. I am, however, enjoying the time consuming and moderately expensive hobby of learning to write and publish books.
This book is dedicated primarily to my son because he helped me figure out what it was about one day while we were eating lunch and I’m not sure I would have gotten there as quickly without his insight. From the mouths of babes.
It is secondarily dedicated to my wife much like the first one was. This time she was able to act as a plot consultant and a beta reader. She also did the cover art because she’s brilliant.
If this book is a success – which is to say if I finished it – it’s because of the excellent people at Symphony Entertainment and their writing sprint discord which kept me going many times when I just wanted to play video games.
Also, I feel like I owe a considerable thanks to that Lo-Fi girl music channel. Also The Blue Nile and Wolfclub, all of which were the soundtrack of my writing process.
I hadn’t ever planned on making a sequel to my first novella. Now I plan on making at least one if not two more of these. And probably some murder mysteries. Stay tuned.
The Original dedication lies below:
To Joey, the conversational ninja who realized what this book was about casually at a Wendy’s before I did.
To Traci, who is the best alpha reader because she’s the target audience.
To the writers of Symphony Entertainment who kept me going like Sulis taking up the wheel of the sun.
The original Cover art can be found below as well.
I know that the synopsis is hard to read, so here it is for the visually normal:
Decima Cordia was trained as a soldier. She honed her body as a soldier. She died as a soldier. She died for her friends. For the mission. But death is not always the end. Now she’s discovering that being the whisper of a memory haunting friends who can’t see or hear her has a few drawbacks. Without the body she turned into a weapon, what is she? Can she still be part of the team, or would she have been better off fading away on the winds of change?
Rose Pew is determined to save Decima, even if she’s already dead. They embark on a strange mission to take Rose’s sister and her curious powers across the nation to win back a woman she barely even got the chance to know. Can you pursue someone after they’re dead? How would that even work?
This cover was drawn by my ineffable wife. She clearly has a talent for drawing butts. (the butt is the thing I get the most questions about on the cover. If you have similar questions, I guess you’ll have to at least read the first chapter to find out).
Content Warnings for The Steel Ghost include: Abuse, Death, Violence, Descriptions of blood, Gore, Abduction, Death of a parent, and mild ableism. There’s also at least one moving pile of vomit.
Other content note: As noted elsewhere on this site, this is a bog standard fantasy book, but if I have to rate it I’d say it’s YA adjacent. What does that mean. It means my characters say fuck a lot, but they don’t actually fuck a lot (at least not directly. The closest we get is some fade to black stuff).
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