My serial web novel, Silver Buckshot, is now complete: all 39 episodes worth!
Thirteen-year-old Princess Flavia has endured a lot recently. Polio crippled her legs and killed her mother, her father is sunk in grief, and her servants veer between negligence and cruelty. She takes refuge in her books and never complains. But she draws the line at being murdered. Fourteen-year-old Frank Barron conceals her when the shooting starts. This is no accident: a letter told him what to do. It’s signed, “Love, Flavia.” She has no memory of it. And she can’t tell the future! Can she?
You can read the whole shebang on Amazon’s Kindle Vella site. The first three episodes are free: the rest cost a nominal fee.
I wrote the book with the lofty intention of telling a rip-roaring adventure with fantasy elements balanced by realistic ones from my own experience. My dad had been lamed by polio when he was a kid, so I had a son’s-eye-view and wished a similar case on my heroine. I set the story in the year when I was the same age as my young protagonists. This gave me the zeitgeist for free. Since I spent my youth studying smartassery with diligence and zeal, I could bestow this upon my hero and turn the banter up to eleven.
I’m working on Book Two now. I’ll appear as new episodes in the same place as Book One, starting with Episode 40. But don’t wait! Book One is very much a complete, stand-alone story in its own right.
