This Friday, we're diving into some horror novels that center on witches. I'm hoping to put a few on your radar that you may not have heard of!

Crone by Keith Rosson

Thirteen years ago Eli Lamp's daughter went missing. Now, after a drug lord's son turns up dead, he must use his ex-detective skills to hunt down the killer. One who may be supernatural...

The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson

In the land of Bethel, the Prophet's word is law. They say that witches lurk in the Darkwood. When Immanuelle stumbles into the Darkwood one day, she learns secrets that may dismantle everything she's ever known.

Slewfoot by Brom

Could this even be a witchy list without Slewfoot? A new widow fights to keep her late husband's farm and her independence in a puritanical New England town. A mysterious creature from the dark wood takes an interest in Abitha.

Muneca by Cynthia Gomez

A woman has been left paralyzed by a mysterious illness, but Nati knows a thing or two about witchcraft, and she is sure the illness is a result of dark magic. Nati plans to break the spell and earn a handsome reward as well.

The Last Witch by C.J Cooke

An outspoken woman is accused of witchcraft and put on trial with several other women in town. Helena must find the courage to risk her life and other to stand up to a man destined to make her a monster.

Glass Girls by Danie Shokoohi

In a family of witches, the girls are given gifts and boys are destined to die. Alice thought she escaped this life and her abusive mother, but when her estranged sister shows up on her doorstep, her new life comes screeching to a halt.

Conjuring The Witch by Jessica Leonard

There are witches in the woods---or so the reverend of Steve and Nicole's church says. But Nicole takes a walk in the woods, she comes back changed.

The Good House by Tananarive Due

A woman's voodoo-practicing grandmother may have unlocked an ancient evil that is targeting her family.

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn

Narrated by a wax doll, The Wax Child follows a woman who---along with several other women---are accused of witchcraft.

The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

A tale of witches and monsters told over the story of three generations.

Chapter 13

Icarus ran a hand over his face. There was time to go back, sneak out the way they came, but if they did that he knew he would regret it for the rest of his life. This was all, however, his mission to figure out what was happening with this father. This was not Maren’s problem, this was his. 

“Mare,” he whispered, “you should go back. I’ll figure a way in. This is about my family, not yours. You shouldn’t risk everything for this with me.”

Maren studied his face, eyes bright, “You are my family, Icarus. If it were an answer to questions of my own, would you leave?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it again. No, he would not. He nodded and ended the debate, “This is a lot of people and only two of us. Probably more people coming down from above. What do you want to do?”

She shrugged, “I could shoot one of them. Cause a panic.”

“With only one way in and out, I have a suspicion they’ll know where it came from,” he tried to think and consider their options. None of them were good because they didn’t really have any, “We could just charge in? Doubt they’re expecting two priests to rush their magic door.”

Maren sighed and adjusted the shotgun strap so she could reach her satchel, “I love a good suicide plan, but I’ve put a lot of work into staying alive for thirty years, thanks.”

Icarus searched the ground as if something useful might appear there—a bomb, maybe, or a wild animal he could release. He ran a hand through his hair and paused, bending to pick up a healthy-sized rock. He tossed it into the air to examine its heft and caught it again, grinning at Maren. 

She frowned, “There is no damnable way that’s going to help.”

For all his flaws, he was a fairly good aim when he put his mind to it. Lots of practice in pubs winning free drinks off men who thought him too drunk to function during a darts challenge. He shrugged, “You have a better plan?”

“No,” she muttered, “I do not have a better plan.”

“If it alerts them and they rush, we dodge and hope for the best. Worst case, we wind up in one of the cells for a bit and we feign ignorance.”

“Yes, I’ve no doubt they’ll believe two priests who are widely disliked by their peers and don’t actually live on the grounds anymore just happened to wander into the wrong room several leagues underground,” she hissed and folded her arms. 

He nodded, “Precisely. Now, stand back, I have a miracle to perform.”

He crossed himself and took a moment to kiss the beads of his rosary, Maren’s eyes bored into him with the frustration of the Pale God Himself. He took in the chamber—the altar, the nuns, the candles, the guards. Winding up and angling himself, he tested the throw, pulled his arm back, and let the stone fly. His breath stopped. Maren stared. Both of them touched their small silver knives out of reflex. 

A clatter and thud. 

Two of the four guards pricked up immediately and jogged towards the farthest corner of the altar which gave them a much better chance. Maren made an unimpressed sound and Icarus glanced back at her, “What? They’re known for their battle prowess, not their brains.”

Shouting snatched their attention. Icarus’s throw had struck true—too true. A candle had toppled backward and struck the very old fringe of an ancient tapestry covering the wall behind the altar. It lit up like hay in a bonfire. Guards called out, the other two rushed towards the flames, all four of them fanning and scrambling to pull it down or put it out. The Sisters never stopped their prayer, didn’t even seem to notice they were in the path of immolation. 

Maren tensed, Icarus hissed a quiet victory cry, and they took off for the sigil-coated door. More shouting, more cries for water, and footsteps sounded from somewhere far behind them. Icarus’s legs bounded across the stone and he heard the sound of alarm from one of the guards, torn between stopping the flames and protecting the door. 

“Intruders!”

“Stop them, put this out!”

“To the door!”

“Shit,” Icarus growled and grabbed a massive iron ring. “Pull! Hurry!”

Maren was beside him and added her weight, dragging the door when it refused to budge. The clatter of halberds on stone, more yelling, more footsteps, more guards. Icarus added his own roar to the fray. The door groaned on protesting hinges and gave—not much, but enough.

“Go!” He shouted at Maren and shoved her through the gap. He caught sight of robes—another flock of priests rushing them from the far end of the hall. Two of the Warrior Priests had abandoned the fire and were trying to clear the rows of Sisters. 

He tossed them a less than holy gesture and slipped inside, grabbing the inner handle and pulling as hard as he could. Closing it, however, was much easier than opening it. He held it in place, fists pounding and weapons rattling impotently against the heavy wood.

“How can we hold it?!” Icarus called, but Maren was already handling it. 

Her palm dripped with blood and blue light trailed the air behind her fingers. He ducked in time for her to throw the binding sigil at the door and sear itself in with the pleasant sizzle of a campfire. It wouldn’t hold forever, just until they got their own sigilist down here or found another way to break down the door, but for now it would be enough. 

Icarus released the handle and took a tentative step back, then another, until he was standing beside her. She sighed, “You didn’t intend to set the fire, did you?”

“The Pale God works in mysterious ways, my friend,” he moved to clap a hand on her shoulder and immediately thought better of it. 

The scrape of metalon stone made both of them turn and remember they just crossed the threshold of a very well protected door into a very secret chamber deep in the bowels of the Church. Icarus lifted his hand to the hilt of his sword, Maren readied her shotgun. 

The chamber was not as big as he expected, but it was still large enough to cause an echo. Braziers lined the walls and cast enough shadow to make him second guess what he believed he was seeing. There was no furniture, no tapestries, no sigils or wards painted onto the inner walls. A generous ring of faintly glowing salt had been laid in the center of the room, anchors set into stone blocks in the floor—old and iron and thick as his arms. Heavy, dark iron chains led from each anchor and met at the clasp of a shackle-like cuff that would have swallowed Icarus’s forearm. 

Held by chains and salt and force was the prone body of a man. 

Forced to his knees by the tools of his imprisonment set low and taut in the ground underneath him. He wore tattered brown pants stained rust with old blood, chest bare in a lattice of scars and fresh wounds that broke and bled when he raised his head. Half his face was covered by an iron mask, seven-point antlers stretching from either side casting the shadow of a nightmare behind him. 

Maren inhaled, hand flying to her face. Icarus’s mouth went dry, eyes wide, and he forgot why he had come here in the first place. It was barbarism whatever this was, though he had no idea what exactly he was seeing. The man’s breathing was ragged and rasping, his mouth visible where the mask ended. Icarus spied half-rotted teeth glinting in the light when the man’s thin lips spread in a ghastly smile. 

“You should not be here, Father,” he said and bobbed his head in interest. His voice slithered and writhed and wormed its way into Icarus’s mind, flexing the air around his ears, splitting and refracting as if talking over itself, “A stranger… and yet I know you. Interesting.”

Icarus swallowed the sensation of broken glass spilling down his throat, “Who are you?”

It laughed, half choked and coughing. Icarus had to think of the man as an it because if he let it be a man, it meant something unspeakable was taking place in the bowels of the Church. He made a request to the Pale God to never let it laugh again.

“He does not know who we are and yet he stands at our threshold. This is a curious thing to us, yes it is,” the thing tried to move against its bonds, limited as it was. “You have questions, Father, do you not?”

Icarus took a step towards it and Maren touched his arm in a warning, but he shrugged her off, “I ask again - who are you?”

The creature in the man’s body grinned and slammed its fists into the stone, Icarus jumped. It stooped in a low crouch that demanded all of the slack in its chains. Somehow, even half-squatting, the creature seemed to take up the room, “I am what your priests call The Inquisitor. I am here to face your inquisition and answer your questions. So please, inquire.”

He was asking the wrong question, that was the subtext of its avoiding his question. Icarus stared at the thing and tried to make sense of it, “What are you?”

Maren had already strode a protective half-arc around the salt circle holding it at bay. He might be transfixed by the horror in front of him, but she was not. Her hand was in one of her pouches, blue light still danced along her fingertips, restless and chafing to be freed. 

The Inquisitor rolled its shoulders and stretched its neck from side to side. It turned its antlered head to him and Icarus tried not to buckle under the crushing gravity of its eyeless stare. 

“I am…” it struggled to find its words, “a tool, of a sort. Now, what are you, stranger priest?”

Icarus hesitated. He tried to focus, settle on anything that made sense to him. He opened his mouth and Maren cut him off, “Don’t. Do not give a demon your name before you know theirs.”

The creature clacked its blackened teeth, “Your companion is sharp. But what’s in a name, priest? What’s a name between friends? I am, after all, a friend to your Church. Which means I am a friend to you, thus you are giving your name to a friend and not a stranger. So I ask you again, what are you?”

“You first,” Icarus hissed. Maren was right, he knew better than to entreat with a demon unguarded. 

It laughed again, low and resigned, “Your brothers and sisters call me Inquisitor. This man I inhabit was called Athelde. Now, together, we are Mariusz.”

Brother Athelde. Mariusz. 

The words of the priest and the nun played out in his mind and he fired a look at Maren. She frowned, shaking her head in a vain effort to stop him from pressing on. He squared his shoulders and met what he felt were the demon’s eyes. She clenched her jaw and cursed him with the force of her stare when he would not meet it. 

“Does the name Ulrich mean anything to you?” Icarus gauged and stepped closer to the salt. 

Mariusz tipped its head left to right as if considering, then stilled. Its attention turned rapt and the muscles in its scarred and mangled body rippled like a heat shimmer off hot sand. It rolled the word along its tongue as if trying not to utter a curse, “Ulrich.”

Icarus held his breath and waited.

“Daedalus,” Mariusz paused to spit and the phlegm hissed against the consecrated stone. “The Deceiver. We know of him. You may inquire.”

It raised a hand and curled a too-long nail at Icarus. He suddenly regretted coming here, hunting for this, asking these things. He wished for one brief and childish moment that he could forget he ever had a father. Alas, Icarus was cursed with the thirst for knowledge and truth. 

“What do you know of Daedalus?”

“What will you offer to find out?”

Silence hung between them, Icarus glanced at Maren who was becoming increasingly adversarial about this exchange. 

“What do you ask?” Icarus, who knew better than to deal with demons, couldn’t help himself. They had come this far, risked this much. He had fought and dismembered an abhartach, for the Pale God’s sake.

Mariusz took him in, then tapped one talon against the stone, “Blood. Three drops. One to read you, one to know you, one to see you. Give me this and I will answer your questions.”

“No,” Maren warned him again, “do not give it anything. Whatever we’re looking for can be found elsewhere.”

“It cannot!” Mariusz snapped his head to look at her, mouth curved in a frown. “You wish to know of the Deceiver and there are none left walking this world that can give you the answers but me. So make your choice, Fathers,” it turned its head back to Icarus. “Three drops of the Azure Prince’s blood or the eternal dark of nothing.”

Maren stiffened and blinked at the honorific, Icarus recoiled. He knew the purpose was to tempt him into giving up something important, but what did he care about three drops of blood in the face of finally understanding the enigmatic mystery that was his father? He’d already given his soul for his netherism, there was nothing left for a demon to claim.

Before Maren could object, Icarus touched the tip of his silver knife to his finger and let three perfectly beaded drops of ruby red blood flow down the blade. He stepped to the very edge of the salt circle and allowed the knife to reach beyond its borders, letting each drop patter to the stone before pulling back. Chains rattled and sang when the Inquisitor strained to reach the offering, huffing and inspecting like a starving man inhaling the scent of a roast after a famine. A few heavy breaths passed, then it lunged towards the small dark stain and opened its jaws. A long, pointed tongue slipped free and licked clean the indent of rock cradling Icarus’s offering. 

The Inquisitor let out a long sigh, dropping flat to its stomach and arching its back. It writhed and strained as if it were a dog finding a particularly nasty scent in the grass. Then, it skittered back to the center of the ring and sat on its knees, head hanging, shoulders rising and falling as it breathed. 

It said nothing for a long, long time. So long, Maren caught Icarus’s eye and he shrugged, shaking his head. He had no better understanding of the workings of demons than she did. She opened her mouth to speak, but the Inquisitor interrupted her with a low, bellowing groan. 

It raised its hand and pointed an accusatory finger at Icarus, “You are the son of the Deceiver, he who seeks to tear the Veil. The Azure Prince. He who knows the Fire. You are Icarus, the Burning Horseman.”

Icarus’s heart stopped beating. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t do, couldn’t move. Mariusz’s devious smile had warped and changed, turning into a fanged snarl chased by a low, menacing growl. 

“You are the son of the priest who wants to break the world.”

One of the coolest parts of this whole "we're launching a publishing imprint" experience is seeing how a book cover comes together. We just kicked off this process with the team, including the author M.I. Minaeva and Bindery's Creative Director, Charlotte Strick, who is responsible for some truly iconic covers (👀 Annihillation by Jeff VanderMeer 👀).

Our first call was a real meeting of the minds. Charlotte gathered M.I.'s notes on inspiration, we threw out our ideas, and she came prepared with her own interpretation of the book's visual language. But first, a quick reminder of what your future-favorite-book is about, 'k?

“Combining the liminal architecture of Backrooms, the shapeshifting narrative of We Used to Live Here, the hospitality horror of The Shining, and the gothic dread of Shirley Jackson, Saint’s Hotel is a nightmare you cannot wake from. And the reason you cannot sleep.”

Here is what's floating around inside our brains.

We found lots of overlap between the book covers we have loved and M.I.'s selection. What's black and white and red all over? Saint's Hotel apparently. Strong central images, religious iconography, and archetypal palettes.

The story takes place in the phantasmagoric town of Sainte Verlise. Haunted reliquary vibes and gothic atmosphere.

And of course, the nowhere zone: liminal spaces. Liminal spaces everywhere!!

Our next step in the process is to narrow down our vision so we can start reaching out to artists and designers. We'd love to hear from all of you: what do you think of this mood? Does this look like a narrative world you're excited to enter?

—LPOTL (and the myrmidones at Last Press HQ)

A Complement of Scoundrels is officially out in the world!

That is an extremely exciting sentence for me to type. Our imprint’s first release and S.V. Lockwood's debut book is an actual physical object that people can buy and read and sniff and put on their shelves.

Some of you have asked what you can do to help the book now that it's out, so I wanted to put together some ideas. Obviously you can post about it, share the stuff I post, and be feral about it in Discord. But there are also a bunch of very simple, low-effort things that can genuinely help A Complement of Scoundrels keep finding readers after release week.

1. Recommend It When Someone Is Already Looking for a Book

This is probably the easiest one. If you see somebody asking for fantasy recommendations and Scoundrels actually fits what they're looking for, throw it into the conversation.

Fantasy heists, criminal crews, found family, revenge, steampunk. Are they fans of The Lies of Locke Lamora, Six of Crows, Arcane, Ocean's Eleven? If someone is looking for any of that, throw Scoundrels into the mix. And that can be anywhere people are talking books: Reddit, Facebook groups, Threads, Discord, TikTok comments, whatever weird little corner of the internet you happen to live in.

2. Put It Up for Your Book Club

If you're in a book club, buddy read, Discord reading group (other than ours, you hussy), whatever, toss Scoundrels into the voting pool. One of the coolest possible outcomes of publishing this thing is seeing little pockets of people reading and talking about it completely independently of me.

3. Text the One Friend You Know Would Like It

This sounds incredibly obvious, but personal recommendations are still one of the biggest reasons I pick up books. You know your friends (and how to manipulate them). If you read Scoundrels and immediately thought, “oh, this weirdo would love this,” send it to that weirdo.

4. Work It Into the Book Content You're Already Making

For the creators in here, you of course do not need to make a dedicated five-minute video about A Complement of Scoundrels.

BUT, if you're already doing:

• September reads

• recent fantasy releases

• books you read this month

• fantasy heist recommendations

• underrated fantasy

• indie fantasy

• books that deserve more hype

… just include it when it makes sense.

Carousels, wrap-ups, reading vlogs, shelf tours, recommendation videos. Those little appearances add up.

5. Make Something Weird About It

A Spotify Playlist, character art, fancast, a stupid meme that only cool people like us understand, an outfit inspired by one of the characters, a bookmark, pictures of your cat with glasses on reading it etc etc

6. Review It Somewhere

This is one I really want to add because it requires basically nothing and can make quite a difference. If you've finished Scoundrels, rate or review it wherever you normally track your reading.

Goodreads. StoryGraph. Audible. The retailer where you bought it. Wherever. It doesn't need to be five stars. Please don't give the book a fake glowing review because you like me (or a one star because you secretly loathe and resent me). Just give it an honest one.

For a debut author and an independent publisher, having actual readers leaving actual reactions gives somebody discovering the book six months from now a much better idea of whether it's for them.

Even a rating with no written review helps establish that yes, people have in fact read this strange and beautiful object we released into society.

7. Request It From Your Library

This is another really easy one that I think people forget about. If your library takes purchase requests, request A Complement of Scoundrels (you can also hit “Notify Me” on Libby and that provides a signal to them). Libraries buying books is good! Libraries putting books in front of readers who would never otherwise encounter them is also good!

8. Ask Your Local Bookstore About It

Same idea. If you have a local indie bookstore you love, asking whether they carry A Complement of Scoundrels or whether they can order it helps put the title on their radar. Please do not menace your local bookseller on my behalf. I know it will be hard for some of you, but a normal human interaction will suffice.

Booksellers discovering a book because customers keep asking about it is exactly the sort of grassroots thing that can help a book’s success snowball.

9. If You See It in the Wild, Face It Out

This one is both helpful and gives you the opportunity to feel like you're committing a very minor crime, unless you’re used to committing crimes, which, please don’t make us accessories to them (looking at you, Lyss).

A Complement of Scoundrels is already showing up in plenty of Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million stores, so if you happen to spot it on a shelf, face that bad boy out. Books with their covers facing outward are obviously a whole lot more noticeable than books where you're just staring at the spine (even though the spine is gorg), especially for somebody who has absolutely no idea what Scoundrels is yet. This is particularly true because of John Gwynne’s lovely blurb on the front cover, which instantly gives it credibility.

You do not need to reorganize an entire display, build a shrine, or get yourself banned from Barnes & Noble (which would be good content tbh). Just a little turn of the wrist.

10. Pass Your Copy Along

If you're finished with your copy and you're not somebody who hoards books like a dragon, let someone else read it. Give it to a friend or family memeber, drop it into a li’l free library. A book changing hands five times is five potential readers who now know the wrinkly-brained S.V. Lockwood exists.

I am extremely pro-book-hoarding personally and will be buried with my TBR, so I will not judge you if this is impossible, especially if your name is on the Thank You page.

11. It’s the Season for Gifting

We are entering the part of the year where everybody suddenly remembers they need to buy things for other human beings. If you know somebody who loves heists, revenge stories or just really doggone great fantasy books, maybe A Complement of Scoundrels belongs under their tree.

Books are also particularly good gifts because they're very easy to wrap and make you look thoughtful, even though all of us in the Discord know better.

Seriously, Thank You

I know I say this a lot, but I don't think I can really overstate how much all of you have already done for this book.

A “Kist Reads” imprint was a big goal of mine when joining Bindery and all of you made that happen. There is a real book sitting on people's shelves with Kist Reads printed on it. Somebody is looking at my picture in the back of the book and thinking “who is this pretentious fuck”, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted.

That's also because S.V. Lockwood wrote a damn good book and a whole bunch of people worked behind the scenes to turn that manuscript into the finished thing.

Now it's about helping the book find people who have absolutely no idea who I am. So keep talking about it! Keep recommending it when it makes sense. Keep posting your pictures and reviews. Get it into libraries and bookstores and book clubs and the hands of whatever friend you know is susceptible to a crew of goblins.

And if you've got another good, bonkers idea for getting A Complement of Scoundrels in front of new readers, drop it in the comments or bring it into the Discord. Let's see how far we can push this thing, HUZZAH!

An Inside Look at Eyes of Fractured Crimson & the World of Alkadin

Welcome to another Book Club Conversation with The Page Ladies Book Club!

This time, we’re stepping into the gritty, emotional, multifaceted world of Alkadin with author Travis Stevens, whose debut novel Eyes of Fractured Crimson kicks off the Love Lost series.

Magic, mystery, found family, morally gray characters, yearning, spice, tabletop RPG-inspired worldbuilding, and enough unanswered questions to keep readers theorizing long after the final page?

Yes, please.

We talked with Travis about where the idea for Ekocia came from, Jett’s mysterious crimson eye, the importance of found family, writing morally gray characters, building a magic system from familiar phrases, tabletop RPGs, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, his favorite fictional characters, his TBR, the future of the Love Lost series, and the deeply personal journey that brought him back to writing.

So grab your favorite reading beverage and settle in because this one is a deep dive.

✨ Meet Travis Stevens

For readers discovering your work for the first time, how would you describe Eyes of Fractured Crimson in three words?

Emotional, gritty and multifaceted.

And honestly, we think those three words make a pretty intriguing introduction.

🌎 Building Alkadin

What first sparked the idea for Eyes of Fractured Crimson and the world of Ekocia?

All of it started with a simple question:

“What happens when magic causes a cataclysm so large that it reshapes the world itself?”

I sat on the question for several days, considering what different cultures and personalities might think about that cataclysm. Some cultures and governments would shy away from all magic, others might lean into it in order to harness that power for their own agendas.

This led to a spiral of questions and the generation of the different countries of Alkadin.

Ekocia, where Eyes of Fractured Crimson primarily takes place, took a heavy-handed control position on magic but still allows its use for government purposes.

Erobis, where our gang of misfits ends up, is much more relaxed and often is the place refugees end up.

Kinneqar, where everyone’s favorite bisexual problem Rinko is from, has a total ban on magic use with punishment being execution.

The countries of Usathon and Votala haven’t been explored by Jett and crew yet, so I won’t spoil their stances too much.

All of that to say, I took basic human reactions to a perceived threat and extrapolated them out to what felt realistic and interesting.

If you could spend one day exploring Ekocia, where would you go first and what would you absolutely want to see?

In the country of Ekocia, I’d love to visit during the festival that takes place at the beginning of Eyes of Fractured Crimson.

In the broader continent of Alkadin, I would love to visit Vighram.

I can’t say too much about the city of Vighram without spoiling it, but let’s just say that sometimes truth is far stranger than fiction.

Fantasy readers love discovering a new magic system. How did you approach creating the rules and limitations surrounding magic in Alkadin?

I took several common phrases that everyone would know and twisted them into something more tangible.

“Time heals all wounds” suddenly turned into the deity of time also being the one who controls the flow of healing magic in the world.

“Love is blind” became magic that could literally blind its victims.

Sooner or later, these simple phrases evolved into an entire system that I slowly incorporated into the characters’ lives.

👁️ Jett, Secrets & Consequences

Jett’s crimson-colored eye appears to be at the heart of the mystery. What can you tease readers about what makes it so important without giving anything away?

In this world, exceptionally strong magic is often accompanied by some kind of physical difference in the person who is gifted.

Jett has heterochromia with a very unusual coloration but somehow has never manifested any magical gifts.

I mean, he does hear voices from time to time, but that certainly doesn’t have anything to do with it…

👀

We’ll just leave that there.

Jett has been forced to hide something that could put both his life and his father’s life at risk. What interested you about writing a character who has to live with such a significant secret?

This is a tough one, not because it’s hard to explain, but because it’s too easy to find examples of.

Many people across the world have been marginalized because of something they couldn’t control about themselves. What color skin they had, what culture they were born into, who they are attracted to all of these things are outside of human control.

I wanted Jett to have something so benign in our real world, something we might even think was beautiful, to be the very bane of his existence.

How did you balance Jett’s personal journey with the larger mysteries and conflicts happening around him?

This is a wonderful question.

So often we watch movies, shows or read books where everything in the main plot/conflict just sort of “happen” to the characters.

Don’t get me wrong, those kinds of stories are great sometimes, but I wanted Jett, Adelia and Sirene to make decisions that truly changed the world around them.

By making those choices along the way, there’s no option but to learn and grow from them as a person and in their overarching relationship.

Just like in real life, everything that happens to them is an opportunity for growth along the way.

❤️ Found Family, Romance & Morally Gray Characters

Your book features found family, strong female characters, morally gray love interests, and why-choose romance. Which of those elements was the most exciting for you to explore?

I love a morally gray MMC just as much as the next reader, but to have one be an ass-kicking FMC instead? That was very intriguing to me.

Equally interesting was the FFM polyamorous dynamic that just gets started in Eyes of Fractured Crimson. It will be one of the key focuses in future books in the Love Lost series.

I wanted the relationship to be a true equal triad where all members of the relationship have equal footing and are respected as members of the relationship and as individuals.

I wanted to focus on real conversations between them while still considering the fantasy world as well.

Found family is one of the elements readers are drawn to in fantasy. What does found family mean to you as a storyteller, and what makes those relationships compelling to write?

My circle is small and full of chosen family, so it comes very naturally to me to write found family in my works.

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately depending on your perspective, my life experiences aren’t unique.

So many of us were born into families that have severe dysfunction in them and turn to close friends and lovers to become what we need in our lives.

I think people read what they can relate to, even remotely, and so many of us have struggled with finding our people in the crazy world we live in.

Of course no one can relate to having true magic, but many of us can relate to having a neglectful home life and finding surrogate families outside of our bloodline.

Morally gray characters can be some of the most fascinating characters in fiction. What makes a morally gray character interesting to you rather than simply good or evil?

True good and true evil are extremely rare in humanity.

I’ve personally stared into the eyes of both in my career as a paramedic.

We’re all some shade of gray, especially from other people’s perspective.

I find the ones in stories of all kinds most interesting because most of the time we can see things from their perspective and understand their actions.

We may not agree with them, we may not have made the same decisions ourselves, but we can see the path they took to get to where they are.

My favorite thing about morally gray characters is when they do something horrific and potentially unforgivable for the most righteous reasons.

Casteel from Armentrout’s Blood and Ash series is one of my favorite examples.

I won’t spoil anything too much in case someone hasn’t read them, but his actions regarding those who threaten Poppy early on is perfect.

He executes his comrades for threatening her, attempting to harm her and one of them for simply throwing an insult in the wrong direction.

Casteel knows that if he doesn’t get his people to fear Poppy through their fear of what he might do to them, then she won’t survive.

So, he makes an example and does so in publicly brutal fashion.

I’ll finish this long ramble with a question:

How much evil is acceptable if you know the outcome will be righteous?

Now THAT is a book club discussion question.

What do you think makes a romantic interest memorable, especially when you’re writing characters who may not always make the “right” choices?

Yearning and devotion.

We all want to hear about characters who are absolutely in love and completely devoted to their romantic partners.

The setup to that, and what really sets many characters apart, is the yearning for each other.

Everyone loves to read about a character who can’t stop thinking about the last time they kissed their partner, or the last time they smelled their perfume.

As humans, we just want to be the center of someone’s universe because we understand that we are small, insignificant and without a doubt, not the center of our universe at all.

🧩 Creating Characters Who Feel Real

You’ve said you believe every character deserves a complex history and personality. How do you make sure your characters feel like complete people rather than simply serving the plot?

Allow me to peel back the curtain inside the mind of a madman for a moment.

Every character that has a name in my work is given a backstory.

It may be somewhat simplified but they at least get the following:

• Goals

• Personality traits and quirks

• Physical appearance

• Likes and dislikes

• A few paragraphs about where they come from and where they’re going

It sounds complex, and it is sometimes, but for the most part this could be a single sheet of paper with all the notes on them listed out.

I always leave room for adding more to their story if they end up being more important or on page more than I expected.

Plot device characters are essential, but if you start with “someone has to do this thing” and develop them further, you’ll be surprised how much they evolve.

When you're creating a new character, what usually comes first for you: their personality, their history, their role in the story, or something else entirely?

Usually, some combination of their role in the story and their history.

I use those two as a launching point for developing their personality.

Were there any characters who surprised you while writing Eyes of Fractured Crimson by becoming more important, complicated, or different than you originally planned?

Lorwa Copperfoot surprised me for sure.

I had a plan for her and the significance of the Copper Taphouse in the beginning, but she changed that for me about halfway through the first draft.

She’s going to be important throughout the series now and in a way that I definitely didn’t see coming, but I won’t spoil any more than that.

🌍 Worldbuilding & Controlled Chaos

Does the world come first for you, or do your characters tend to lead you into the world you eventually build around them?

I love to build worlds.

Generally, I spend time building a world and then creating interesting character(s) and then shoving them into the middle of a situation.

After that, I just write and see where they might end up.

I think that’s why my world feels so much more alive than other worlds do.

Are you a plotter, a pantser, or somewhere wonderfully chaotic in between? How much does your original plan change once your characters start getting involved?

I have a total of five things the trio of main characters must accomplish before the end of the series in order to fulfill the story.

How they get there, who they take with them and how long it takes to get there are all up to them.

Every day that we spend with Jett in Eyes of Fractured Crimson is another day that the bad guys are also working toward their goals.

I truly don’t know exactly what the ending of the series will look like because I don’t know when our heroes will finally face down the true villain.

Adelia is by far the most problematic character for my plans.

She’s unassuming, she’s allegedly just an apothecary’s daughter who happens to have some elven heritage.

Her destiny keeps throwing wrenches in everything I try to plan and I love it.

The chaos is where the magic truly happens.

🎲 When Fantasy Meets Tabletop RPGs

You have a background in tabletop RPGs. How has that experience influenced the way you approach fantasy storytelling and worldbuilding?

I absolutely believe being a DM of several campaigns over the years helped shape me as a storyteller.

As a DM, my job is to put myself in the shoes of many different characters.

This allows me to write in a way that gives each character, no matter how little they appear on page, a backstory and personality.

Every character with a name in my books has a completely fleshed out backstory, personality, and their own goals.

As someone with a tabletop RPG background, do you ever approach your characters or worldbuilding as though you're creating a campaign complete with backstories, rules, factions, and secrets?

Absolutely.

I don’t write LitRPGs, but the backbone of this story is built directly on the foundation of running a Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

The key to creating a world that feels alive is making sure that every person in it has their own lives before they show up on page.

It’s so in depth that I may, or may not, be working on a collection of interconnected but independent prequels…

👀

Tabletop RPGs often create unexpected moments because players make choices the storyteller didn't anticipate. Do your characters ever do something similar to you while you're writing?

One of the best parts about TTRPGs is the role the dice play.

A single bad, or good, roll can change everything about an encounter.

Rinko is the perfect example of how I use that chaos to create better stories.

There’s a moment where Rinko spots someone while playing lookout in the first half of the book.

I rolled dice next to my laptop to decide if he was going to be able to spot the incoming attacker.

He had to roll at disadvantage rolling twice and taking the lower result and he rolled two natural 20s on the d20.

That’s about a 1 in 400 chance of happening.

It was my job to figure out how in the world he was going to spot someone who’s an expert at using their magic to hide in plain sight.

So, suddenly, Rinko is someone who likes to smoke from a pipe from time to time.

Trust me, that will all make much more sense after you read the book.

If Eyes of Fractured Crimson were turned into a tabletop RPG campaign, what part of Alkadin would you most want players to explore?

I would love for players to walk through the halls of Vighram.

It’s one of the cities I’m most proud of creating and we don’t even get to see it in the first book.

When Jett gets there, be ready for me to ramble about the beauty and the culture that built it for a while.

⚔️ Writing Action, Romance & Spice

Your book combines fantasy, romance, mystery, danger, and spice. How do you balance those different elements without letting one overshadow the others?

It can be a bit of a trick to balance so many elements of the story.

I generally have a rough goal of how much of the book I want to have each element and then attribute each chapter to those goals.

I go back through the book as I’m drafting and award points for each chapter on how well it fills the category.

As a note, a chapter may receive points for more than one category.

If a chapter is strictly romance and spice, then it would get a point in each category while not adding anything to the others.

At the end of the first draft I double check the tally and make sure I don’t need to add or take away any scenes to better give the story a balance across the goals.

In fact, Eyes of Fractured Crimson was going to be much spicier, but after examining the overall work and comparing it to what I was trying to achieve I decided to cut some scenes.

Don’t worry though.

Those scenes still exist and will absolutely come back around.

When you aren't writing or reading, you can often be found training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Has that experience ever influenced the way you write action, physical movement, conflict, or character discipline?

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu has a funny way of working its way into everything you do once you’ve committed yourself to training.

It definitely influenced every fight scene in the book but it also worked itself into the confident aura that Marv and Sirene both have.

If you get the chance to talk to someone who has spent their lives training to fight, they generally try very hard to avoid fighting.

Marv loves the thrill of the fight but knows that every second that a fight goes unfinished could result in disastrous outcomes.

Sirene has a similar mindset but has her magic to help the process along, where Marv has a hammer.

What part of writing this book came most naturally to you, and what part made you want to throw your laptop across the room?

The conversations between Adelia, Jett and Sirene were the easiest to write by far.

I never struggled with writer’s block or anything like that, but their scenes were always easy and flowed like water.

The ending was the hardest part and it’s not even a contest with any other part of the book.

I didn’t want it to end there at all.

I wanted it to end about where chapter 5 of book two ends instead.

However, that break wouldn’t be nearly as impactful as where it does now.

I decided to make the readers a promise at the end of book one and answer that promise at the beginning of book two instead.

🔍 Questions, Theories & Secrets

You’ve said you want to create worlds that keep readers talking and theorizing long after they finish reading. What makes a story especially fun to theorize about?

When an author can lay groundwork all the way in book one of their series that matters in book six, seven or eight.

That is my favorite part of many current best-selling fantasy and romantasy series.

Right now the most talked about would be the “Maasverse,” since we are all anxious to get our hands on the next several books.

People are still pulling single lines from ACOTAR and creating full theories that have consequences into the entire universe she’s created.

My personal favorite right now is Mor from ACOTAR being a witch.

Personally, I think that’s what Eris is keeping secret for her and why Rhysand talks about her being the failsafe.

All of this is important because it forces the reader to ask questions.

I want my readers to feel the need to ask those kinds of questions, and I want to give them just enough information to feel confident they should ask them.

I want my reader to be the dog on a treadmill chasing after a treat that’s tied just out of reach.

The treat is the answer to all of their burning questions and it’s their job to keep chasing it and keep coming up with different ways to get closer and closer to it.

You’ve said that the best books are talked about and theorized over as much as they are read. What is the one thing you hope readers will be talking about after finishing Eyes of Fractured Crimson?

Why does the god of time want an emperor dead and why can’t he do it himself?

And now we have a question for the group:

WHY?!

Without spoiling anything, is there a detail in Eyes of Fractured Crimson that you especially hope readers notice or pay attention to?

Everything in quotation marks and italics is telepathic through a bond.

Consider that your official observation assignment.

💕 Looking Ahead: The Love Lost Series

What is something you wish readers knew about the Love Lost series before starting the first book?

The entire story is built from one question that exploded into a million others.

If magic in this world is tied to emotion, what happens when Love is lost?

What can you tease about what readers can expect next from the Love Lost series?

As the series progresses readers will get plenty of mystery, suspense and epic worldbuilding.

Readers should be ready to face down the most vile and evil antagonist I could come up with.

I’ll take you to Vighram as promised but we’re also going to some other amazing places, each with their own cultures and peoples.

The betrayals will cut deep and the pain will feel very real.

The romance is going to be sweet and spicy with lots of yearning and devotion.

Above all, I want the readers to understand that this is Jett, Adelia and Sirene’s love story.

They are end game, but that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be an easy road for them.

I’ll leave readers with a promise.

In my books, evil will never prevail but sometimes the cost is so great, it might make you question if it was worth it to defeat them.

📚 Travis Stevens as a Reader

What kind of reader were you growing up, and what books or authors helped shape your love of fantasy?

I was a ravenous reader as a child until about middle school.

My first dip into the fantasy pool was Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.

I was so invested in the world and I remember being instantly captivated.

I stopped reading for twenty or more years though and only in the last few years have I found my love for it again.

A couple years ago, my wife started reading again and I followed shortly after.

That’s when I found romantasy and I knew I had found my new favorite genre.

Like many other millennials, it started with A Court of Thorns and Roses.

From there it branched into the rest of the “Maasverse” and I’ve never been the same.

Those books will always have a special place in my heart but Jennifer L. Armentrout’s Blood and Ash series is where I found myself truly represented.

It’s my dream to get the chance to meet Mrs. Armentrout and thank her in person for putting this absolute gem into the world:

“Make sure she knows that I am the Chosen, the One who is Blessed…”

—Jennifer L. Armentrout, The Crown of Gilded Bones

What fictional character from another book would you love to drop into the world of Eyes of Fractured Crimson just to see what kind of chaos would unfold?

Carrion Swift from Callie Hart’s Fae and Alchemy series.

Definitely one of my all-time favorite side characters and I think him and Rinko would be a problem in the best way if they met.

If you could have one magical ability from your own world in real life, what would you choose?

This is a tough one.

If I could only choose one, then it would be Sirene’s shadow magic.

There’s so much more to it than what she could show in book one and I think many people will agree with me by the end of the series.

If your characters could sit down for dinner with you, who would be the most entertaining guest and who would you absolutely not trust around the silverware?

The same person for both questions:

Marv.

First, he might be tempted to use the silverware as a catapult to launch food at whoever happens to be annoying him at the time.

He would also have some of the best stories, but you’d have to get him drunk enough to tell them first.

What is your ideal reading atmosphere: complete silence, music, coffee-shop noise, curled up with a blanket, or something else?

If I’m reading a physical book I prefer complete silence.

Most of my reading is done via audiobook with my wife and I sharing a set of headphones.

We’re most likely to be listening while we are doing another project and it’s far easier for me to focus on auditory input than visual.

What is currently on your own TBR pile that you're excited to read?

I finished Shifter Awakened by ML White a few weeks ago and I’m waiting to get out of my drafting phase before picking up the next book in her series.

I don’t often gravitate towards shifter romances, especially those in a more YA style, but I thoroughly enjoyed Shifter Awakened and I can’t wait to dive back into the series.

⚡ The Page Ladies Rapid-Fire Round

Dragons or vampires?

Dragons.

Hero or morally gray antihero?

Morally gray antihero.

Found family or enemies-to-lovers?

This is like choosing between my two favorite things in the world…

Found family.

Magic academy or mysterious forest?

Magic academy.

Paperback or ebook?

Paperback.

Coffee or tea?

Coffee.

Annotate your books or keep them pristine?

Pristine.

One giant book or an entire series?

Series.

Character-driven or plot-driven?

Character-driven.

Would you rather live in your fictional world or visit it for one day?

Visit.

What fictional character would you trust with your life?

Adelia Neverin.

What fictional character would you absolutely not trust with your snacks?

Cassian from ACOTAR.

Honestly, we're going to need to protect the snacks.

✍️ Advice for Aspiring Authors

What is one piece of advice you would give to an aspiring author who is dreaming of seeing their own book on the shelf someday?

Stop worrying about whether or not you’re picking the perfect words, just write and hire an editor to help you later.

Simple.

Direct.

And probably something a lot of aspiring writers need to hear.

❤️ The Story Behind the Story

What is one thing you’d love readers to know about you, your books, or your journey that we didn’t ask?

I started writing when I was a young child in middle school.

It was a lot of fun and a great way for me to escape the realities of my home life at the time.

When my mother found out I was writing instead of watching my younger siblings, she deleted my files and smashed the family computer in front of me.

Twenty years later, my wife and I were talking about that moment.

I was recalling it and laughing about how crazy it was, somehow finding the humor in the madness.

My wife was horrified.

She and I have been together since we were 18 years old, we just turned 35 and somehow she still hasn’t heard every story of how I was treated.

She asked me a simple question:

“Do you still want to write?”

And I shrugged.

After considering it for several minutes, I told her that I did want to write again someday but I didn’t know when.

The next question she asked was so profound that it spurred me into action:

“Why are you letting someone who isn’t in our lives anymore have so much power over something you loved to do?”

The next morning, I opened the first Microsoft Word document and started writing.

After 67 days of being absolutely obsessed with creating this world, I turned Eyes of Fractured Crimson into the editor.

For weeks I was just a tornado of thoughts, notes and a flurry of typing.

I want someone who feels the same way I felt but maybe doesn’t have a person in their life like my wife to take that advice.

We don’t have to let the people who hurt us continue to do us harm now.

Write that book. Paint that painting. Sing that song. Play that music. Do what you love and set yourself free because you are worth it.

And we think that might be the perfect place to end this conversation.

🍂 Upcoming Events & Releases

Festival of the Turning Leaves

📍 Thorntown, Indiana
📅 September 26, 2026
⏰ 9:00 AM–5:00 PM

If you’re nearby, this is a chance to meet Travis and learn more about Eyes of Fractured Crimson in person.

🎧 Audiobook Release

The audiobook for Eyes of Fractured Crimson is coming October 2026, with the exact release date still to be announced.

It will be performed by Rebecca Cutler — @rebeccanarrates on Instagram.

📚 Book Clubs: There’s Something Special for You

Travis also offers discounts to book clubs that select Eyes of Fractured Crimson as their group read.

If your book club is interested in learning more, you can reach out directly:

📧 tstevens.author@gmail.com
📸 Instagram: @tstevens.author

Because honestly, this feels like a book that was made for discussion.

Magic systems? Check.

Mysteries? Check.

Found family? Check.

Romance and yearning? Check.

Morally gray characters? Absolutely.

Questions that will make everyone stare at each other across the table and say, “Okay, but what if…?”

Definitely.

🛒 Get Your Copy of Eyes of Fractured Crimson

Paperback & Ebook:
Purchase Eyes of Fractured Crimson on Amazon

Hardcover:
Purchase the hardcover through IngramSpark

The hardcover is also available through Amazon under a separate listing.

🔗 Connect With Travis Stevens

🌐 Travis Stevens' Website

📚 Travis Stevens on Goodreads

📸 Instagram: @tstevens.author

💬 Keep the Conversation Going

Now that you’ve gotten the full behind-the-scenes look at Eyes of Fractured Crimson, we want to know:

What are you most curious about exploring in Alkadin the magic system, the mysteries surrounding Jett, the found family, the romance, the morally gray characters, or the larger world itself?

And perhaps the most important question Travis left us with:

How much evil is acceptable if you know the outcome will be righteous?

That one might need its own Book Club Conversation.

What happens when magic reshapes an entire world and leaves behind secrets that readers are still trying to uncover?

For this month’s Book Club Conversation, we’re stepping into the world of Ekocia and talking with author Travis Stevens, author of Eyes of Fractured Crimson, the first book in the Love Lost series.

With gritty fantasy, found family, strong female characters, morally gray love interests, a developing why-choose romance, and a magic system built from familiar phrases turned into something much more tangible, Eyes of Fractured Crimson is the kind of story that invites readers to look closer and start asking questions.

We sat down with Travis to talk about the world of Alkadin, Jett’s mysterious crimson eye, tabletop RPGs, building a fantasy world designed for readers to theorize about, and the very personal journey that brought this book into existence.

And trust us… there’s plenty more where this came from.

✨ Three Words for Eyes of Fractured Crimson

If you’re discovering Travis Stevens and Eyes of Fractured Crimson for the first time, how would he describe the book?

Emotional. Gritty. Multifaceted.

Honestly, that feels like a pretty good introduction to what awaits readers in Alkadin.

🌎 Welcome to Alkadin

The entire world of Eyes of Fractured Crimson began with one deceptively simple question:

What happens when magic causes a cataclysm so enormous that it reshapes the world itself?

From there, Travis began exploring how different cultures, governments, and people might respond to something that fundamentally changed their world.

Some societies would fear magic and attempt to eliminate it. Others would embrace it and try to harness its power.

That thinking eventually grew into the different countries of Alkadin.

Ekocia, where much of Eyes of Fractured Crimson takes place, takes a heavily controlled approach to magic while still permitting the government to use it.

Erobis is considerably more relaxed and often becomes a refuge for those fleeing elsewhere.

And then there’s Kinneqar, where magic is completely forbidden and the punishment for using it is execution.

There are still other countries waiting to be explored, including Usathon and Votala, so Travis is keeping some of their secrets safely tucked away for now.

What started as a question about magic became an entire world shaped by very human reactions to fear, power, control, and the unknown.

👁️ The Mystery Behind Jett’s Crimson Eye

Jett’s unusual crimson-colored eye immediately raises questions.

In Alkadin, exceptionally powerful magic is often accompanied by some kind of physical difference in the person who possesses it. Jett has heterochromia with an extremely unusual coloration, yet he has never manifested any magical abilities.

Well… unless you count the voices he occasionally hears.

But surely those aren't connected to anything important, right?

Right?

We’re not saying you should start theorizing.

We’re just saying the evidence is sitting there.

💫 Found Family, Romance & Morally Gray Characters

One of the elements Travis found particularly exciting to explore was turning a familiar fantasy-romance dynamic on its head.

While morally gray male main characters are certainly nothing new to romantasy readers, Travis was intrigued by the idea of a female main character who could be just as if not more dangerous.

The book also begins developing an FFM polyamorous relationship that will become an important focus throughout future books in the Love Lost series.

Rather than treating the relationship as simply a romantic plot device, Travis wanted to explore it as an equal triad, with every member having equal footing, respect, individuality, and a voice within the relationship.

And importantly, he wanted the characters to actually talk to one another.

Imagine that. Characters communicating. 😂

The goal was to balance those real conversations and relationships with the fantasy world surrounding them.

🎲 From Dungeon Master to Fantasy Author

Travis’s experience as a tabletop RPG Dungeon Master has also had a major influence on his storytelling.

As a DM, he has spent years stepping into the shoes of countless characters, each with different personalities, histories, motivations, and goals.

That experience carried directly into his writing.

According to Travis, every named character in his books has a fully developed backstory, personality, and their own goals, regardless of how much or how little they appear on the page.

Which means that random character who says three sentences and disappears?

There might be an entire life story happening behind those three sentences.

And now we’re wondering what else Travis knows about everyone walking around Alkadin. 👀

🔎 Stories That Make Readers Theorize

One of Travis’s favorite things about fantasy series is discovering that something mentioned casually in an early book eventually becomes important several books later.

He wants Eyes of Fractured Crimson and the Love Lost series to create that same experience for readers.

The goal is to give readers enough information to make them question things, theorize, connect details, and wonder whether something they noticed three hundred pages ago might actually matter.

In other words: Travis wants readers chasing answers.

And if you’ve ever finished a fantasy book and immediately started searching for theories, rereading suspicious sentences, and interrogating your friends about what you think something means…

You may have found your kind of fantasy.

🏰 If You Could Visit Ekocia…

If Travis could spend an entire day exploring his own world, he’d love to experience the Festival of the Turning Leaves, which takes place at the beginning of Eyes of Fractured Crimson.

But if he could travel anywhere throughout the broader continent of Alkadin?

Vighram.

He isn’t giving away much about the city because doing so would spoil some of what readers will discover.

His only hint?

Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction.

And naturally, that only makes us want to know what’s hiding there even more.

✨ A Magic System Built From Familiar Words

Fantasy readers know that a memorable magic system can completely change how we experience a world.

For Alkadin, Travis took familiar phrases and transformed them into something tangible.

For example, “time heals all wounds” became a connection between the deity of time and the flow of healing magic.

“Love is blind” became magic capable of literally blinding its victims.

Those simple phrases eventually developed into an entire magical system that became woven into the lives of the characters.

It's a clever reminder that sometimes the most interesting fantasy ideas can begin with something we’ve heard a hundred times before.

💌 The Story Behind the Story

One of the most moving parts of our conversation with Travis wasn't about magic, worldbuilding, or romance at all.

It was about why he started writing again.

Travis began writing as a child in middle school. Writing gave him an escape from a difficult home life, but when his mother discovered he was writing instead of watching his younger siblings, she deleted his files and smashed the family computer.

Years later, Travis was telling his wife about the experience, remembering it almost as a strange story from the past.

His wife asked him a simple question:

Did he still want to write?

His answer was yes.

Then she asked something that changed everything:

Why was he allowing someone who was no longer in their lives to have so much power over something he loved?

The next morning, Travis opened a blank Microsoft Word document and started writing.

Just 67 days later, after becoming completely immersed in creating the world, he sent Eyes of Fractured Crimson to his editor.

And that is perhaps one of the most powerful things about this entire conversation.

Sometimes the thing we loved gets tangled up with the people or circumstances that hurt us.

Sometimes we convince ourselves that the door is closed.

And sometimes opening that door again starts with one person reminding us that what happened to us doesn't have to own what we do next.

Travis's message to readers is simple:

Write the book. Paint the painting. Sing the song. Play the music. Do what you love and set yourself free.

You are worth it.

🍂 Upcoming Events & Releases

Have Eyes of Fractured Crimson on your TBR? Here are a couple of dates to keep an eye on:

Festival of the Turning Leaves
📍 Thorntown, Indiana
📅 September 26, 2026
⏰ 9:00 AM–5:00 PM

Audiobook Release
🎧 Coming October 2026
📅 Exact release date to be announced
🎙️ Performed by Rebecca Cutler, @rebeccanarrates on Instagram

📚 Book Clubs, This One’s for You

If your book club is considering Eyes of Fractured Crimson for a group read, Travis offers discounts to book clubs that select the book.

Interested in learning more?

📧 tstevens.author@gmail.com
📱 Reach out to @tstevens.author on Instagram

Because we love a book that comes with built-in opportunities for discussion, theories, relationship debates, magic-system analysis, and at least one person saying, “WAIT. GO BACK. I THINK I CAUGHT SOMETHING.”

🔥 Want the Full Conversation?

This is just the beginning.

The complete Book Club Conversation dives even deeper into Travis’s creative process, characters, worldbuilding, magic system, future plans for the Love Lost series, and the questions book lovers really want to ask an author.

✨ Come join The First Editions and unlock the full interview!

If you love discovering new authors, getting behind-the-scenes conversations, digging into fantasy worlds, and having the kind of book discussions that turn into “okay, but hear me out…” theories, this is exactly what we created The First Editions for.

📖 About Eyes of Fractured Crimson

Eyes of Fractured Crimson begins a fantasy journey through the world of Alkadin, where magic has reshaped nations, relationships, and the lives of those who possess it.

With found family, dangerous magic, morally gray romance, strong female characters, and secrets waiting to be uncovered, the Love Lost series invites readers to look beneath the surface and keep asking questions.

🛒 Where to Find Eyes of Fractured Crimson

Paperback & Ebook:
Available through Amazon.

Hardcover:
Available through IngramSpark, with the hardcover also available through a separate Amazon listing.

🔗 Connect With Travis Stevens

🌐 Website: tstevens.author-pages.com
📚 Goodreads: Travis Stevens
📸 Instagram: @tstevens.author

💭 Now We Want to Hear From You…

What grabs your attention first when you pick up a new fantasy the magic system, the worldbuilding, the characters, the romance, or the mystery?

And if you could spend one day exploring any fictional fantasy world, where would you go?

The next Book Fairies book of the month is The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow!

Get it on amazon, kindle, or audible here.

Get it from my favorite women-owned indie bookstore here.

If you are not yet a Book Fairies member, you can upgrade your membership in your Bindery account. We hope to see you inside!

Happy reading!

October Book Club Options

Hey folks,

It's time for us to vote on what we'll read as a community throughout October!

We read Catch-22 by Joseph Heller for our September read, and I found it to be a well-written, satirical look at war, bureaucracy, the military-industrial complex, and the American psyche.

If you haven't read Catch-22 and are a fan of Kurt Vonnegut, I think you'll really enjoy it.

We've got six titles up for vote in October. As always, I combed meticulously through my personal collection to find stories that felt curious and intentional and would spark broad discussion in the community Discord.

The ability to vote, and tkae part in the discussion channels unlock at the paid tiers, so if you're a "Follower", you'll need to upgrade to join in with the rest of the community to discuss the book throughout the month.

Along with the book club discussion, becoming a paid member gives you access to the full Discord experience where we share book recommendations, set up buddy reads with fellow members, talk about pets, sports, and everything else cool humans chat about!

All that said, here are the titles we'll be voting on for our October book club read.

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor

Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his inborn, desperate fate. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Sabbath Lily. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Motes founds the Church Without Christ, but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with "wise blood," who leads him to a mummified holy child and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Motes's existential struggles.

Ginster by Siegfried Kracauer

Ginster is a war novel about not going to war; about how war, far from the front, comes to warp every aspect of outer and inner life and to infect the workings of language itself. The subject is World War I, but this novel by the brilliant twentieth-century sociologist, journalist, and film critic Siegfried Kracauer, first published in 1928, has as much to say about what it means to live under the sulking great powers and blood-imbrued satrapies of today as it does about the inflamed self-righteousness of late imperial Germany. In Ginster, as in Greek tragedy, massacre occurs offstage, arriving only as "news," but the everyday horror of a society engineered for the continual production of violence is not to be denied. Ginster, the Chaplinesque antihero, intent chiefly on saving his own skin, works hard to keep his distance from the war machine, and yet making a living, he discovers, is all about keeping it running. How different, in the end, is his dreamy self-absorption from the empty military language that has come to pervade every aspect of civilian life in the homeland?

May We Feed The King by Rebecca Perry

A curator spends her days reconstructing the past—selecting and carefully arranging furniture, fabrics, and fragments of daily life to bring medieval rooms back to life. Whether it’s a feast with spilling platters or a table for two littered with small hints of intimacy, it must appear as if the people have just left the room.

After accepting a commission to work on the private quarters of a medieval palace, the curator becomes absorbed in the story of a king almost forgotten by history. As she studies the traces he left behind, the boundary between her own life and his begins to blur.

The King is an unlikely ruler: a man with little appetite for power, hurried to the throne after the sudden deaths of his brothers. At court, doubts about his judgment are whispered from chamber to chamber. Then an unthinkable possibility emerges among the gossip: maybe someone else will take the crown.

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

In an extraordinary feat of narrative invention, Philip Roth imagines an alternate history where Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to heroic aviator and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh. Shortly thereafter, Lindbergh negotiates a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

When she was only twenty-three, Carson McCullers's first novel created a literary sensation. She was very special, one of America's superlative writers who conjures up a vision of existence as terrible as it is real, who takes us on shattering voyages into the depths of the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition. This novel is the work of a supreme artist, Carson McCullers's enduring masterpiece. The heroine is the strange young girl, Mick Kelly. The setting is a small Southern town, the cosmos universal and eternal. The characters are the damned, the voiceless, the rejected. Some fight their loneliness with violence and depravity, some with sex or drink, and some—like Mick—with a quiet, intensely personal search for beauty.

A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum by Emma Southon

In A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Southon examines a trove of real-life homicides from Roman history to explore Roman culture, including how perpetrator, victim, and the act itself were regarded by ordinary people. Inside Ancient Rome's darkly fascinating history, we see how the Romans viewed life, death, and what it means to be human.

Romulus killed Remus to found the city, Caesar was assassinated to save the Republic. Caligula was butchered in the theater, Claudius was poisoned at dinner, and Galba was beheaded in the Forum. In one 50-year period, 26 emperors were murdered.

Part cultural history, part true-crime investigation, and part portrait of everyday life in the ancient world, this entertaining bestseller explores everyone from emperors and aristocrats to slaves, gladiators, spouses, parents, and children, uncovering how Romans understood murder and why some deaths mattered far more than others.

The German Lesson by Siegfried Lenz

In this quiet and devastating novel about the rise of fascism, Siggi Jepsen, incarcerated as a juvenile delinquent, is assigned to write a routine German lesson on the “The Joys of Duty.” Overfamiliar with these joys, Siggi sets down his life since 1943, a decade earlier, when as a boy he watched his father, a constable, doggedly carry out orders from Berlin to stop a well-known Expressionist artist from painting and to seize all his “degenerate” work. Soon Siggi is stealing the paintings to keep them safe from his father. “I was trying to find out,” Lenz says, “where the joys of duty could lead a people.”

How To Vote

Voting will be live through Sunday, October 28th. We'll be using ranked choice voting to determine what book we'll be reading, which you can vote on here.

Have I read all the books listed in my September most anticipated post? No! Am I still going to get overexcited about October publications? Yes! Buckle up, because it's another massive month of releases.

What Feeds Below by Tatiana Schlote-Bonne (10/6) - For orphaned best friends Petra and Jade, guiding treasure-seeking tourists down into the Void is the only way to earn enough to pull themselves up out of the slums for good. Petra prefers to play it safe and take jobs only in the Void's upper levels, where the dangers are better understood, while Jade wants to risk a descent to the deepest and most mysterious Sixth Layer. Because the deeper they go, the better the payout, and the sooner their dreams can become reality. Bonus - this is a Bindery book, published by @Naomi Darling!

A Wall Is Also A Road by Annalee Newitz (10/6) - Gardenpath is a graduate student in biology who desperately wants to pass their exams with the highest honor possible: a prize given to scholars who discover something truly novel in the universe. Gardenpath also happens to be an amoeba from an ancient civilization that dwells in a vast network of towers between the stars. Seeking their prize, Gardenpath heads to a remote, dangerous planet that other researchers have dismissed as dead and uninteresting. There, they are surprised to discover a complicated ecosystem unlike anything they've ever encountered.

Strange Lights by Mira González (10/6) - Paranormal investigator and cryptozoologist Reggie has embraced her fate as parent to an adopted toddler, Eldi, a blood-sucking chupacabra with a fondness for goats. A rash of UFOs in the night sky and a couple of crop-circle-carving Roombas force Reggie into an investigation that attracts the attention of an old enemy, an anti-supernatural agency hunting for creatures like Eldi. To outwit them, Reggie must team up with Calvin: a podcaster-turned-werewolf whose charm is a real threat to Reggie’s rule against romantic attachments. Bonus - it's another Bindery fall release, from @Jaysen Headley!

The Girl Who Became King by Melissa King (10/6) - From award-winning chef, author, television personality, and activist Melissa King comes an intimate, captivating memoir about family, food, and finding her voice as a queer Chinese American chef.

The Four Wives And Five Deaths Of Richard Milford by Nafissa Thompson-Spires (10/6) - On the brink of the Great Depression and at the height of Prohibition, Richard Milford was an infamous moonshiner and womanizer who, it seems, finally crossed the wrong person at the wrong time. He’s dead and buried with only his women to mourn him, but a question remains: Who killed him, and why? Top suspects are his four “wives,” Lally, Sophronia, Georgette, and Vivianne. But as their stories burst to light, the very idea of a true story comes apart before our eyes.

As You Wake, Break The Shell by Becky Chambers (10/13) - Life on the resource-poor planet of Fortune is challenging, but for its inhabitants, it’s home. For two of them, Signy and Cora, this home might no longer be enough. Cora is a rorqual pilot, one of the few with the unique ability to navigate the massive, living ships that connect the scattered settlements of their solar system. Her bond with her rorqual, Colibri, is profound—a connection that is both her greatest gift and a threat to her career. It is that threat—the “mindbleed,” a dangerous side effect of her piloting—that brings her to Signy’s shop, and her appearance puts Signy in the danger she so fears.

Another Name For Red by Amber Blaeser-Wardzala (10/13) - Middle Sister is haunted by everyone in her community who has disappeared, as well as those who remain. With local authorities proving useless, Middle Sister decides to start an investigation of her own, beginning with the mysterious “Eric,” a white man from a neighboring town who Older Sister claimed to love, and who she swore loved her. Attempting to hunt down the correct white Eric in the haystack of Minnesota forces Middle Sister to seek help from the community from which she’s grown alienated.

Rottenheart by Kat Dunn (10/13) - Odette and her best friend, Cecilia, grow up between two grand homes, one in Hampstead and one in Suffolk, the ancient and imposing Herne House. Odette’s mother, Lydia, is almost parasitic in her neediness, but despite her, Odette and Cecilia come of age together—free to roam, to learn, and to love. When Lydia inexplicably sickens and dies, a dark veil falls. Odette’s father retreats to his study, while her aunt—the cold and cruel Claudine—increasingly takes charge of the household.

Stellar Smoke by Tanaïs (10/20) - Qamar is a musician hustling in a near-future metropolitan city. Struggling to pay rent and heartbroken after a breakup, she decides to return to the island ashram of her childhood. It’s time to finally settle the rift she has with her estranged mother, Veda—a brilliant scientist, actress, and one of the leaders of a now-dissolved cult called the Endless Temple. But when Qamar arrives, the land is verdant yet neglected, and, most troubling, there are no signs of her mother or sister, Palo. Behind a retina scan–locked door, Qamar encounters her mother’s last opus, a machine consciousness called VEDA (Virtual Experiences, Dreams and Afterlife), designed to reveal the story of Veda’s life.

Welcome back to If You Like This, Read That: Part 3. In this series, I pair books with similar vibes/content.

If you like Let The Right One In, read The Midnight Shift by Cheon Seon-ran.

Why? Both translated novels center on vampires. They feature kids making bonds with these vampires.

If you like Maeve Fly by CJ Leede, read Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

Why? Both feature unhinged women who aren't afraid to act out their darkest fantasies.

If you like Penpal by Dathan Auerbach, read Dear Laura by Gemma Amor

Why? Both center on stalking targeting children.

Hello, Sickos! The October polls for the History/Fiction Sickos Book Clubs are live! You can go vote on them in the appropriate Discord channels (scroll down and you'll see #fiction-vote and #history-vote). The polls run for 72 hours so you've got plenty of opportunity to bully and bribe.

If you're not seeing the channels, make sure you've linked your Bindery subscription to Discord via the Account Settings page. Those vote/discussion channels unlock at the Sicko plus paid tiers, so if you're a "Follower", you'll need to upgrade. Along with the book club forums you also get access to a ton of other channels for various genres, book recommendation requests, movies/TV, buddy reads and much more.

Back to the options... These are the 8 books across the 2 clubs that we're voting on.

FICTION SICKOS

Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Incarcerated people fight in televised gladiatorial matches for a chance at freedom.

James by Percival Everett

A reimagining of Huckleberry Finn that retells the journey down the Mississippi from the perspective of the enslaved Jim.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

A group of elite classics students at a New England college cross a line with deadly consequences in this dark academia novel.

She's a Doll by Barbara Truelove (a Bindery book from Ezeekat Press!)

After being murdered, a young woman possesses an antique doll and sets out for revenge against her killer.

HISTORY SICKOS

The Invention of Prehistory by Stefanos Geroulanos

How the modern idea of "prehistory" was created, and how theories about humanity's origins have been used to justify empire, racism, and violence.

Carthage Must by Destroyed by Richard Miles

The rise and destruction of Carthage, from its Phoenician origins and through the Punic Wars with Rome.

The Trojan War by Barry Strauss

A historian looks behind Homer's epics to ask what archaeology and ancient evidence can tell us about the real war that may have inspired the legend of Troy.

King of Kings by Scott Anderson

A narrative history of the 1978-1979 Iranian Revolution that brought down the Shah and transformed Iran.

That's it, go vote! (and make sure you've got your copy of A Complement of Scoundrels!)