New Deals & New Media Recs

Hello, blog post time!

Book Releases & Deals

The Kickstarter is now LIVE for the A Coup of Owls 2025–2026 releases!

The collections on the docket are a Horror/Romance quartet of novelettes called Dark Paths coming out later this month, a Fantasy/Romance duo of novelettes called Light Paths scheduled for this December, and then a trans Romance called Summer Nights, Cigarettes, & Spearmint Toothpaste by James Edward Cook, scheduled for February 2026!

A piece of mine, Eyes of Magic, is part of the December collection — it’s an M/M fantasy romance that I think will especially appeal to fans of pathetic rogues who don’t know when to stop scamming and weird flat affect warriors who are at once painfully blunt and unhappily isolated. It’s all centred around food, cooking, and magical cuisine.

You can pledge to the Kickstarter in order to receive digital or physical copies of any of the above releases on their own or together!

For ADHD fans, my novel, Heart of Stone, is part of a BIG bundle for ADHD Awareness Month that’s running on itch.io until the 15th October!

Heart of Stone is a slowburn fantasy romance between an ADHD vampire and his autistic secretary in the 1700s. It’s agonisingly slow and sumptuous, all quiet banter and slowly getting to know one another, with some delicious intimacy scenes featuring vampire bites.

For just $25 you can get all the above books, all with ADHD main or significant characters, and primarily written by ADHD authors!

As well as jigging up my own local shop and sorting out paperback sales as well as eBooks — several paperbacks are going to be shipping out this week, by the way, the orders that don’t include An Uncommon Betrothal preorders — several of my paperbacks are now available to order through Waterstones.

Between the Stacks: Stories of Lusty Librarians, Amorous Authors, & Bawdy Bookstores, published by Carmine Pen Press, is now available in paperback — you can pick it up from Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, Amazon, or elsewhere.

My contribution to this collection is a horny take on the vibes in The Music Man, where the strict librarian is a fussy old gay man. A bit of banter and silliness and getting to grips with the different rhythms of a small Iowa town. There are several other excellent contributing authors, including Achilles King!

Dudes Rock: A Celebration of Queer Masculinity in Speculative Fiction, published by the Circus Collective, was released a little while ago on Amazon, but if you’re UK-based and you’re putting in a Waterstones order anyway, it’s also available to order through Waterstones.

I’ve also updated my events calendar — I’ll be trading at the Halloween Full Moon Market at The Wardrobe on Sunday October 12th, Meanwood Market on Saturday October 18th, both in Leeds, and the Manchester Queer Art Market at The Proud Place on Saturday November 29th.

I’ve booked our hotel rooms for BristolCon, and I’m very excited to see people in Bristol on Saturday 25th October and Sunday 26th October. I left it too late for us to be able to book a sales table this year unfortunately, but feel free to get in contact if you’re especially keen to buy particular badges or signed copies of books and don’t want them sent by post, and I can give them to you at the con.

I have reached out to a lot of libraries, bookshops, and university societies in Yorkshire and Manchester as well as in Bristol and Cardiff (near to my parent’s home), and as well as the upcoming launch of An Uncommon Betrothal at Wharf Chambers in Leeds in November, I’m planning to run some other literary and reading events in Leeds particularly.

If you’re somewhere in the UK and you’d like me to come along for a queer or trans event, or if you’re part of a literary or queer-focused group and you’d like to have me along, feel free to fill out my contact form, or reach out to your local bookshops, libraries, or events organisers and tell them you’d like them to stock my books or have me on for an event.

Remember to support your local libraries and bookshops where you can, you do a lot for authors when you request our books to buy or borrow directly, but just having our books available in certain catalogues will often then really widen how many readers come across our works!

Social media and advertisement and outreach is a constant battle, and I’m always saying how unspeakably helpful it is for readers to review books or talk about them on social media, but just the physical presence of our books on different sites or on bookshop shelves or in library displays will be enough to pique new reader interest and reach entirely new audiences.

(And the more requests you put through to your libraries, as well as the more borrows you have for books or how many times you visit your libraries in person to use their resources, the better their stats will look, and the better positioned they’ll be to get funding from their governing bodies! It’s win-win-win!)

Media Recommendations

I have just embarked on a play-through of Final Fantasy 7 — the remastered original rather than the remake, the first of the remakes is very good, I just don’t have the next ones yet and was in the mood for something more expansive. If you haven’t played FF7 before and you don’t mind an older game — released 1997, so it’s as old as I am — I wholly recommend it.

All the Final Fantasies are insane: my favourite of the series is Final Fantasy XII, which is about an empire expanding across multiple smaller territories and ultimately is about the threat of nuclear holocaust and the push-and-pull between the desire for safety that comes with goals of nuclear disarmament versus the allure of power and need for defence through a philosophy of readying oneself for mutually assured destruction.

A large part of the game’s map is heavily-inspired by Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and the effects of the Gulf War on Iraq, and despite its primarily white and all-blond main cast, a lot of the rest of the game draws on Mediterranean and North African geography and architecture. It’s fiercely anti-military and has some genuinely excellent anti-imperial sentiment, as well as really grappling with like… how much one can really trust the Divine Right of Kings even when it’s literally Divine and Magical, the allure of power and large-scale weaponry, where the lines are between defence, revenge, and militarism, and the lines between individual responsibility versus the immense weight of an army, a country, a government, a monarchy, an empire.

Final Fantasy X is also good — it’s about killing God — and Final Fantasy VII is about a group of eco-terrorists attempting to prevent greedy corporations from killing the planet by leeching it of its natural resources and in the process ruining the environment. Alongside anti-corporate sentiments and its themes of stewardship and ecological awareness, it explores themes of class and wide scale exploitation, environmental racism, military ideology, and the dangers of nationalism, and where every member of the main FF12 cast is blond, basically every main character of the FF7 cast has PTSD.

The MC, Cloud, joins the eco-terrorist group called Avalanche for a job and then ends up on the run with them and another few misfits — when he was fifteen, he joined the army. As a child, he was obsessed with a hero soldier called Sephiroth, who is god-like in his power and ability, and as a soldier he ends up working very closely with him — and he’s present when Sephiroth turns against the army, the corporation that bankrolls their operations, and fundamentally, the world at large.

It’s gay as fuck. Obviously, it’s a JRPG, and you have the option with Cloud to send him off on dates mainly with two of the female party members, Aerith or Tifa, or on bro-dates with the very sexy leader of Avalanche, Barret. These are the main three members of your party who make sense, by the way — Aerith is a flower-seller who turns out to be a victim of the same scientific testing that Sephiroth is a victim of; Tifa is Cloud’s childhood friend and a fellow member of Avalanche, she’s also trained in martial arts; and Barret is from a small coal mining town that was fucked up by corporate overtake, and he has a gun on one arm instead of a normal prosthesis so he can fight the people that killed his friends and hometown, and are killing the world. He is Black, and whilst he’s written in a way that’s definitely OTT in the writing of his style of speech and mannerisms and is to an extent written as a stereotype, he’s also a genuinely complex and nuanced and flawed character, just like the rest of the cast.

Then there’s Cid, who is an engineer, used to be an engineer for the main corporation in the game. And a ninja called Luffie who hunts materia, the source of magic in the universe, but is also a byproduct of the giant energy reactors.

Then there’s, um… Well. There’s a magical talking lion called Nanaki / Red VIII.

And a vampire gunfighter who wears a sexy red cape called Vincent Valentine.

And Cait Sith, who is a robot cat with a stuffed animal who fights using megaphones. You find him working at an arcade.

They all have their own plots and complexities, they have their own things going on, but that’s very much what those characters are. Like I said, all Final Fantasy games are insane.

But it’s genuinely very well-written and deliciously complex and with so much nuance to both its own story and characters, and also to its allegories and parallels, and I absolutely recommend it even though compared to a more modern style game the gameplay can feel like a bit of a grind. If you get the remastered edition instead of playing or emulating the original, there’s a turbo x3 speed option to help with the grinding, like there is on most of the older remastered FF games.

Prior to FF7, I was swapping around between playing Gregory Horror Show, one of my favourite games of all time, which is about being a lost soul stuck in a hotel in a strange purgatory, and in order to get out you basically have to spy on and steal from the other guests, and the original God of War.

I was playing Samurai Warriors 4 on the PS4, but I’ve actually played through all the story campaigns before, and just grinding for the unlockables wasn’t satisfying me, thus why I swapped to playing FF7. I do really like the Samurai Warriors series — more so than I do the Dynasty Warriors or Warriors Orochi series, similar games made by the same company — it’s a very silly hack-and-slash series that features heavily stylised and semi-fictionalised characters based on various legendary officers of Sengoku-era Japan.

TV-wise, I was watching Blue Bloods — it is a ridiculous cop show that centres on one family of mostly-cops. It is not very good, even by cop show standards — the writing is less than mid, and it is rich with pro-cop propaganda, lots of masturbatory allusions to military service and the evils of 9/11, et cetera, and so on.

Tom Selleck plays the current police commissioner of New York City, his father was the police commissioner before him. One of his sons is a detective in the NYPD, and the other one has just joined up as a police officer after the third brother was killed, and previously was a member of the NYPD; their sister is a prosecutor. The central premise of the show is that as the A- and B- plot runs between different members of the family, they sit down for a weekly dinner where they discuss the issues of the episode, and obviously they disagree or agree on different points each week, often to do with philosophies around policing, criminality, surveillance, and the law, et cetera. Like I said, it’s garbage.

I got to season 5, but there’s like a dozen seasons, and the writing has honestly gotten worse as the episodes have gone on, and it’s not a show that’s really good on its own merits, so I’ve now swapped to watching Farscape.

Farscape is a stupid sci-fi show with lots of puppets from the Jim Henson company and it rocks — it’s Australian, it’s sexy, it’s kinky, it’s ridiculous, it’s anti-fascist, everyone’s always gussying themselves up in leather and latex, the puppets are great, it’s so funny. I’m gonna go back to by Babylon 5 watch as well as soon, as I took a pause around S3, so I think I’m gonna swap between the two for a while.

I published a short review of Victor/Victoria (1982, dir. Blake Edwards) earlier in the week, which I saw as part of the Widescreen Weekend festival in the Pictureville cinema here in Bradford. It’s the British Film Institute Festival coming up, so we’re going to go and see the new Knives Out and Guillermo del Toro’s new Frankenstein, and then the week after next I’m also going to go and see one of the older Frankensteins, the first one starring Peter Cushing.

Now, in terms of newer movies I recommend:

The Man in my Basement (2025, dir. Nadia Latif) — Lorenzo and I just finished this one this evening, I was surprised at how low the reviews were for it. I feel like people maybe went in expecting it to be a psychological thriller with a very clear, more linear enemy, whereas this one is very much a thriller that explores and interrogates the whole white supremacist complex and the pain and agony of one Black man’s suffering underneath it. Corey Hawkins gives a truly sublime and deeply emotionally evocative performance across from Willem Dafoe.

Tootsie (1982, sir. Sydney Pollack) — I watched this one off the back of having finished Victor/Victoria, and I’m going to keep watching some more classic drag movies in the next few weeks, I think. This one is a surprisingly nuanced exploration of one struggling actor’s anxieties and the cause of his own isolation — him being an asshole — when in order to get hired on a daytime soap, he pretends to be a woman. It’s by no means a serious film, but there’s some real emotional weight behind Dustin Hoffman’s performance, and while there are absolutely homophobic and transphobic jokes, I was surprised at how few there were and how Hoffman’s character’s complex relationship with his womanhood and his female identity is played quite earnestly.

The Rabbi’s Cat (2011, dir. Joann Sfar and Antoine Delesvaux) — This one is bonkers, it’s set in 1930s Algiers, and is about a rabbi whose terrible tomcat eats a parrot one day and subsequently learns to speak. There is so much in this. The cat demands a bar mitzvah and keeps arguing with people about whether he counts as Jewish. The rabbi, his cousin who is a Muslim, a Russian Jewish refugee, and an insane tsarist go driving south across the continent trying to find paradise. TinTin makes an appearance. The Russian Jew punches out a phrenologist. There’s weird dream sequences. It’s funny. It’s very French, but it’s still really good.

THE LEGEND & BUTTERFLY (2023, dir. Keishi Otomo) — This movie was on my watchlist for a while and I’m sooo glad I finally watched it, it immediately jumped right onto my faves list. This is a gloriously fucked-up historical romance that really understands how to play with enemies to lovers silliness: within minutes of meeting Oda Nobunaga, Lady Nohime of the Mino has him bent in a pretzel and is spanking his arse as he shouts and begs their attendants to come help him. They go on a date together where they end up murdering a bunch of homeless people, and then they fuck whilst covered in blood. They’re so fucked up, as you would expect of these two legendary figures, and their story is horribly tragic, which I looooved.

Bulbbul (2020, dir. Anvita Dutt) — Fantasy horror set in 19th century Bengal, this is beautifully shot, and it plays so well with its ideas of legend and story, what makes power and what doesn’t, for a woman in a country house. It also has its share of tragedy, but it’s sooo good.

Blink Twice (2024, dir. Zoë Kravitz) — This is a more speculative fiction take on Epstein’s island, and it’s very, very well done. The thriller aspects are excellently executed, there’s a stellar cast, and it’s just excellently paced — you start off with this slow sense of dread and waiting for the other shoe to drop, and then as the truth starts settling in, the horror of it all just ramps up and up and up. Very satisfying ending.

Weapons (2025, dir. Zach Cregger) — I fucking loved this one, it has an interesting and slightly unusual format that serves it really well for telling its stories, it’s so creepy, and it doesn’t get too hung up on trying to explain exactly to the reader the hows and whys and wherefores of how the horror came about, to the extent that it ends up not being all that horrifying at all. This one has a low of follow-through.

Matewan (1987, dir. John Sayles) — This film is phenomenal. It works incredibly well as a period piece, set during a 1920s work stoppage at a coal mine in West Virginia, but as a study in character and identity, in the power of community organisation and how it’s challenged and interrupted by companies and governments, et cetera, it is just so well-written, well-shot, well-acted. And it has young James Earl Jones, too!

Ravenous (1999, dir. Antonia Bird) — Majorly fucked up cannibal horror that deconstructs the core cruelties and hungers central to Manifest Destiny and other white supremacist modes of power in America. Very homoerotic, crazy-good soundtrack, does explore Algonquian spirit horrors of hunger, though not in the cheap way of a film like, say, Antlers.

And a bunch more films I’ve watched the past few months and especially liked:

• The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (2019, dir. Chiwetel Ejiofor) — Biopic of a young boy in Malawai who saves his village from famine by innovating and using his education.
• RRR (2022, dir. S.S. Rajamouli) — Fantasy-historical rebellion against the evils of the British Empire in 1920s India. Very fun, very good music, quite rough on the Hindu nationalism and casteism though.
• Boys From County Hell (2020, dir. Chris Baugh) — Delightfully dry, wry, Irish, and MISERABLE. Really fun take on vampires, big recommend.
• Boarding School (2018, dir. Boaz Yakin) — Exploration of the ways in which Jewish boys are emasculated and the ways gay boys and/or transfeminine nonbinary are sexualised, and the intersections between those two exploitative attitudes. Really loved this one, also right into my top favourite movies.
• Freedom Writers (2007, dir. Richard LaGravenese) — Another true story, this one is heartfelt and genuine, though it is a bit white savioury in its attitude.
• Homebodies (1974, dir. Larry Yust) — Difficult to pick a genre for this one, but it’s messed up psychological thrills and comedy when a group of tenants refuse to leave their apartment block after it’s ordered for demolition.
• Joy Ride (2023, dir. Adele Lim) — American Asians slutting it up on vacation in China, and it’s sooo fun and so good and absolutely filthy, I loved it to bits.
• Tumbbad (2018, dir. Rahi Anil Barve) — Viscerally shot and extremely impactful period fantasy horror, fucking loooved this one. Some of the monster shots will stick with me forever.
• Chhorii (2021, dir. Vishal Furia) — This one is stupid as Hell but I loved it anyway. The movie is a serious statement against femicide but with very cheap fun horror thrills.
• New Jack City (1991, dir. Mario Van Peebles) — Dark and brooding crime thriller, very well-paced, anti-cocaine because of its negative impacts on the communities cocaine business most exploits, not just because drugs = illegal = bad.