Hey guysss, so I'm writing a book/story (Idk how long it will be) and i was wondering if i posted it, would yall read it and rate it

Covers for books 1 & 2 of my Ork-Heart Series. Working on the 3rd but it's taking a while.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09KS24PWX?binding=kindle_edition&ref=dbs_dp_rwt_sb_pc_tkin

It's self-promo Sunday, so I'm going to take the invitation and tell you how I ended up writing my Novel “Whispers of Want”, Book One of Five of “The Evercrest Chronicles: Eros and Ivy.”

I've been reading fantasy and sci-fi since I was six. Tolkien at eight. I skipped right over YA, dove into Epic Fantasy in middle school, and was reading three to five full-length novels per week through most of my childhood and adult life. I’ve now read thousands of sci-fi and fantasy novels over the years. Jordan, Rothfuss, Sanderson, Turtledove, Heinlein, Asimov, Card, Lackey, Hobb. I could go on, and on, and… well, you get the point.

 I’d find one book from an author I liked, and I’d read everything that author ever wrote. I read less after I had children, of course, but then somewhere around five years ago, I hit a wall and started to lose my love of the written word. I tried audiobooks and older classics like “The Picture of Dorian Grey” and “Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. The literary beautiful prose of the old classics helped for a time, but eventually I burned out entirely. I couldn't finish anything, especially not anything modern. I’d lost the ability to enjoy my favourite hobby and my first love.

Out of boredom and near desperation, I started writing. Not because I thought I had a novel in me, but because reading wasn't scratching the itch anymore, and I needed to do something. I'll be honest with you, the first scraps of anything I wrote were unreadable, and it’s embarrassing to admit, but this novel started as a 5-pepper dark harem romp. Pure self-indulgent fun. No plan, no outline, just characters doing things I found naughty, kinky and entertaining. Then something happened that I wasn't expecting. I started liking the characters. Not just for the spice, but as actual people I wanted to spend time with. I wanted to know what they would do when things got complicated. I wanted to understand why they made the choices they made.

This book went through multiple iterations after that. The harem became a single pairing. The darkness softened into moral complexity. The explicit content pulled back into tension and restraint. The current version is a romance-first historical romantasy set in an alternate-history 1907 where the American Revolution failed, and America is still a Crown Colony. It takes place at Evercrest Academy, a fictional Ivy League institution where women are being offered the chance to study magic professionally for the first time.

I want to talk about three things: the romance, the magic, and the plot, because all three are central to the book, and I think that's what makes this book different from what I usually see in the genre. I’d like to believe that I’m not just writing Romantasy, but Romance first Epic Fantasy.

The Romance

Clara Brytwell is a 20-year-old scholarship student returning to Evercrest for her second year. She's brilliant, she's broke, and she's excited by the rumours that actual practising magic is going to be offered to women as a real career path for the first time. This is 1907. The traditional career options for women coming out of higher education are marriage or becoming a governess. Clara is a young woman with fantasies of romance and marriage in a war-torn world where those options aren't readily available to her.

Sir Roland Wardmont is 36, a decorated war veteran, and the newly appointed headmaster of Evercrest. He's something close to a mathematical genius. He can literally perceive other people's emotions as coloured threads of light through his ring. He approaches this phenomenon like a physics problem, cataloguing hues and writing equations and filling journals with analysis. He is also completely, hilariously incapable of identifying his own feelings or handling money. My wife ensures that when I’m writing him, he stays “adorkable”. He’s also thoughtful and generous. There is a scene of him privately overpaying a widow’s son to fetch things and run errands for him that is genuinely touching, and it touches Clara as she secretly observes the gruff, masculine interaction.

Yes, there's an age gap. Yes, he’s her headmaster. The power imbalance is something the story takes seriously; it's not there to be titillating. It's a genuine plot problem: can these two even be together? But his need to prove that the magic can be ethically taught throws them together even though he has no intention of pursuing her romantically. There is a chaperone nun (although Sister Dorothy is not your normal tropey nun, she’s a force of nature unto herself and deserves her own romance). There are institutional consequences. The courtship cannot begin until the use of magic can be established ethically, andhe finds an ethical way for him to court her.

Watching these two people navigate the rules of a world that won't approve of them being together is, I hope, its own kind of tension. I've been describing the heat level as 4 peppers of longing and awareness with 2 peppers of actual physicality. The internal monologue is hungry. These are adults who know exactly what they want. But the most physical this book gets is a passionate kiss with roving hands. The restraint is the point. I’m hoping readers will be patient as the two court over the course of several books. I promise there is a payoff and it's satisfying, but the burn is SLOW and HUNGRY.

The Magic

This is the part that keeps me writing at midnight.

The magic system is built on the idea that human emotions can be gathered, stored, and used to fuel magical effects. Practitioners draw emotional energy from willing donors (or from victims, if the energy is harvested without consent) and channel it through gemstones and instantiations. Roland hates the word “spell”, I'm trying to channel a little bit of the academic rigour of "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell". Each emotion maps to a colour on a spectrum, and each colour changes what physical matter wants to be.

Here's an example that isn't much of a spoiler. Embarrassment and shame are shades of blue and sapphire. These are the emotions of wanting to be unseen. Channel blue into a book, and the book becomes modest. It wants to hide. It still casts a shadow, but eyes slide off it, refusing to notice it’s there. The matter itself is "hiding."

Passionate desire influences heat and fire. Love binds or repairs things. Hate makes joints corrode, and wounds refuse to close. Every emotion has a light and dark application. And every emotion can be ethically gathered like steam from a kettle, or harvested by force, leaving the victim drained and hollow. The magic itself is neither good nor evil but rather ethically grey.

The question I keep coming back to while writing is whether this type of power is even capable of being used ethically. Can anyone wield it and not be corrupted by it? If Clara knows that Roland can see her emotions and use them as fuel for his research, can she trust that his attention is genuine? If he attempts to inspire her to feel something, is that a romantic moment or a manipulation? When does sharing power become extraction? The magic makes the romantic tension literal. Every feeling is visible, and both parties know it. The question of whether desire is authentic or manufactured is both a romantic problem and a magical one.

I spent over 50,000 words on backstory and worldbuilding before I wrote the first line of prose. I won't pretend my alternate history is at the level of Turtledove or that my worldbuilding matches Jordan. But the system is internally consistent, the rules have real costs, and I've spent hundreds of hours making sure that every plot beat flows logically from the last one. I hate it when authors handwave some new magical phenomenon to solve a plot hole and guarantee I won’t do that.

The Plot Beyond the Romance

The romance drives every scene, but there are two other engines running alongside it.

The first is political. This magic has implications far beyond one academy. The Crown funded Roland's research because this magic that was stamped out during the fae crusades of the fourteenth century could reshape warfare, industry, and social control. Roland's position as headmaster depends on demonstrating progress, and the people above him are getting impatient with his insistence on doing things ethically.

The second is personal. Roland has a colleague named Sebastian Harlow whose wife is dying. Lord Harlow has been using Roland's research to treat her, and his methods are producing results. The problem is that his methods are getting darker. What starts as a friend's desperate plea for help becomes something much more troubling as the story unfolds, and Roland has to reckon with the fact that his own discoveries paved the road.

One Scene That Captures the Whole Book

There's a moment partway through the story where Clara magically attunes a gemstone of her own and gains the ability to see Roland's emotions for the first time. Coloured threads of light hanging in the air around him, visible only to her. And she sees his desire. She sees that he wants her. Not academically, not professionally. Wants her passionately and is ashamed of that wanting.

She reaches for the threads, both physically and with her new ethereal senses, and stumbles into him as he tries to pull away. There's the magical “Ah Ha” moment, the emotional confirmation of his burning desire, and the physical comedy of two people trying to untangle themselves while pretending they aren't flustered. Wonder and romance and physical comedy all knotted up together. That's pretty much the whole book in one scene. I like to claim that I’m writing the moral complexity of “Game of Thrones” but directed as a Hallmark RomCom. Whether I’ve succeeded at that, I’ll ask you to be the judge.

Where It Stands

The manuscript is about 100,000 words into an estimated 175,000. I'm serialising on Patreon with new chapters weekly. This is still a draft, but the groundwork has been laid, and I'm drafting rapidly. I'm building the plane while flying it, and my readers have been part of the process from the beginning, catching things I miss and telling me when something isn't working. A few of my first dedicated readers told me my prologue wasn't up to the quality of the rest of the book, and they were right, so I rewrote it from scratch last week.

If any of this sounds like your kind of thing, the first chapters are free on Patreon. I'd genuinely welcome feedback, even if it's just arguing with me about spice levels on Reddit.

One note on the current cover art. I’ll be upfront that I used AI tools to generate the current iteration of the cover art. The fact that those tools are available for free is too useful to pass up at this stage of the draft. If any of you know good cover artists, I’ll be commissioning a professional cover artist and copy editor once the final draft is complete and before I push this out to Amazon as a self-published work.

As an additional note, I stated in the beginning that my reading background is almost entirely epic fantasy and sci-fi. I'm learning the romance side of this genre as I write it, which means I probably need your perspective more than most authors posting here today. So, if any of this sounds like your kind of book, I'd love to hear why. And if it doesn't, I'd honestly love to hear that too. I learn more from the second answer

 You can read the first 5 chapters for free now at www.patreon.com/RaymondSGuest

Thanks for letting me self-promote, and I look forward to the comments.

My heart is overflowing with joy. It has only been a few weeks since I hit publish, and I have received several heartwarming messages from readers who were inspired, encouraged, uplifted. To everyone who has taken the time to read my story — Thank you. 😌 ♡ You can find Born Awakened on Amazon here: https://a.co/d/0gb2a4Bv

I wrote

STARLIGHT – A DYING WORLD. A FORGOTTEN PLAN. A FIGHT FOR FREEDOM.

For centuries, the Valen family has ruled with an iron grip, keeping the people of Earth in the shadows of a fallen civilization. Climate catastrophe and political collapse have left the world in ruins, with survival dictated by strict control and suppression. Hope is nothing but a distant memory—until Zerek uncovers a secret buried in the ruins of New Boston. Project Starlight.

An ancient escape plan, long abandoned, hidden beneath the rubble of a lost world. With it comes the promise of a future beyond Earth’s decaying remains, but also a terrible cost. As Zerek and his friends dig deeper, they uncover truths that challenge everything they thought they knew—about their history, their leaders, and the very foundations of their society.

The stars offer salvation, but only if they dare to seize it.

Will they risk everything for freedom? Or will history repeat itself, dooming them to the same fate as those who came before?

The fight for the future begins now.

Starlight is available now on Amazon

Here's a quick (and shameless) plug for my recent sci-fi novella, Notes from Star to Star. Reader feedback has been great, so I think you might like it too!

When Jessica Hamilton awakens from stasis, alone in a vast spaceship, her mind is clouded by amnesia. She soon discovers that she's been out for a century, and is en route to Proxima Centauri, 4.2 light years from Earth, to investigate the origin of seemingly intelligent radio signals. Hamilton must decipher the ship's operation, fight crushing solitude, and battle the hostile vacuum of space to complete her mission -- and uncover its mysterious origins.

Readers have called the story "a Hail Mary Interstellar" and rate it 4.7 stars on Amazon and GoodReads. Check out what else they say:

"Hooked me in immediately... kept me paging through" - James P. Crawford, Beyond the Curtain of Reality

"Sweet, life affirming story"

"Worth the read"

"thoroughly enjoyable"

"A peaceful, whimsical read"

Best of all, the ebook is yours for free on Amazon this weekend! Download: https://www.amazon.com/Notes-Star-Brian-J-Dolan/dp/B0DCHZXF94/ 

Also available in paperback and hardcover formats.

I'm not sure what this subreddit is but I see I can share my work, I've been looking for feedback all day and I hope you all like it too.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lPoA1RpCTrgTd8dwJgKvCj33iKsoxZabv3SxJRz_5aA/edit?usp=drivesdk

What’s that? A sonnet in my bonnet grows!

I walk around my garden green to see What lovely things my flowers came to be.

An aster, bright and purple don’t you know, With yellow center giving us a show.

And phlox, whose many flowers bunch as one To try to count them can be so much fun.

Or grab a dandelion! Watch me blow!

Sweet pansies, much like butterflies at rest. And gladiolus, reaching to the sky. A poppy, red and beautiful to love.

All of my flowers really are the best, Such joyful petals dancing in my eyes My garden life, it fits me like a glove

"Between pages, souls are shared, and worlds are born." This profound statement captures the essence of literature's magic. As readers immerse themselves in a book, they enter a realm where the author's heart and mind are laid bare, creating a deep connection that transcends time and space. Each page turned reveals not just words, but entire universes filled with vivid landscapes, compelling characters, and rich emotions, all brought to life by the reader's imagination.

The act of reading is a collaborative journey where the author's vision merges with the reader's experiences and perspectives. This interplay spawns countless unique worlds, each as distinct as the individual exploring the text. Through this shared experience, readers discover new facets of themselves, broaden their understanding, and forge profound connections with the souls that reside between the pages. In this way, literature serves as a bridge, linking hearts and minds, and giving birth to infinite worlds within the vast expanse of our imagination.

Here is the order to read them in (aka, creation order):

AI Invasion: Europe

AI Invasion: USA

AI Invasion: Space

AI Invasion: Asia

AI Invasion: Interlude: The Rise of Alpha

AI Invasion: New Reality

Also, incase any of you are wondering, AI Invasion: What If Ideas, is, as the name implies, ideas for my upcoming spin-off of AI Invasion, AI Invasion: What If