My fantasy novel Fierce is now available for pre-order and that means that I can make Advance Reading Copies (ARCs) available for those that are willing to read and review it ahead of formal publication in May. Ideally I’d like people who can read and review it before the end of April 2024 so that there are some reviews available during the pre-order period.

About Fierce

Placeholder book cover for Fierce (image: James Kemp)

You can read the first chapter of Fierce elsewhere on this blog, I’ve updated it to reflect the current edit. Fierce was written very deliberately to the template of the Hero’s Journey. So the first chapter is the pre-adventure normal. The enticing incident is in the second chapter and crossing the threshold follows that.

Although I wrote twelve chapters, one for each of the stages of the aforementioned Hero’s Journey, I didn’t have a concrete plan. All the prep went into the world building for Skyss. Some of that is over on my wiki, and lots more is in my notebooks. This is the third novel I’ve written, although the first that has matured to a level for publication. The first draft was mostly written in 2016 as part of NaNoWriMo, and then finished off over 2017. It got polished a bit and some of the interesting gaps filled in over 2018 and again in 2019. The working title has changed a few times too.

In it’s current form Fierce is 85,774 words long and runs to 319 pages. The total wordcount for it, not including the stuff hand-written in my notebooks, is 125,455 according to scrivener, which also includes the short stories set in the same world:

Getting an ARC

If you’d like an ARC drop me an email with Fierce ARC in the subject line and I’ll send you either a PDF or an epub version.

There will be some paperbacks available in due course, but the layout is in progress and they won’t be ready for a few weeks.

Do please let me know where you can post reviews. At some point I’ll link to them all for readers. Note that the purpose of reviewing is to help other people decide if they’d like the book or not. So do please be honest with your opinions and what you did and didn’t like.

The world map for Skyss that provided the detail for the interim book cover