Lord of Stariel: An Independent Route To Publishing

Hello and welcome to MythMakers. MythMakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding, I'm the director of the Centre and an author and today I'm joined all the way from the other side of the world by AJ Lancaster. AJ, tell us where I am talking to you. Where are you sitting at the moment? I am currently sitting in my office in the city of Hamster North which is at the North Island of New Zealand. Yeah, so it's literally across the world we're talking. Now AJ, I think it's about as far away from the UK as you can get. Yes, absolutely. Fantasy is bringing us together. So AJ came across my radar because I came across her fantastic series which will come to the Starriel series which will come to in a moment but you can't escape AJ. Anybody who comes out of New Zealand and meets a fantasy fan is always going to be asked about what their feelings are about Middle-earth basically becoming synonymous with New Zealand. I'm basically expecting you to be a cousin of Peter Jackson or something. Is this true? Oh yes, obviously we're all related to him. It's just like every New Zealander owns ten sheep. Yeah, that's this and we're all hobbits. It is one of those strange things that gets associated with New Zealand when you're overseas. Are you talking to someone from overseas? Is Lord of the Rings sheep rugby? One of those three depending on your audience. So for me, I'm going to commit sacrilege and say I actually like the movie Spill Up in the Box. No, I'm not. End of broadcast. Yeah, you can take that. I don't know what Tolkien did for the genre but it's not my preferred style. I guess I like a slightly more modern, slightly faster past thing whilst admiring all the work. He did inventing languages and all the kind of myth kind of level. In terms of New Zealand, it's a very strange thing because New Zealand is really beautiful and I feel like the movies really captured that and a lot of it does look like that. But Lord of the Rings you know places like the Shire, the land that Tolkien was imagining is clearly more England. Yeah, it is a disconnect, isn't it? Because I think I live somewhere much more like the Shire than the Hobbiton that was created, which felt... Have you ever been to New Zealand? No, I'd love to come. It is very charming. I suppose what I was thinking about was more, it's quite obviously it's a film set so it's relatively small and it doesn't have the network of villages that the Shire actually is and the pubs and the sense of rival communities and Buckland and all the rest of it, which is absolutely necessary for a film set whereas places I live near are very like that and I think you don't have to worry about being identified as a Hobbit because you know there's plenty of people over here too. Anyway, so I was wondering if you felt that the use of the Middle-Earth landscapes as being synonymous with New Zealand, kind of getting the way of your own fantasy, creative, you know, your imagination because you feel it's already been used in that way. No, not really because although the sort of movie has that sort of very iconic landscape, it doesn't feel like New Zealand if it makes sense. That would be an interesting challenge if I came and visited it, would I be walking around entirely the wrong lens? I think I might be, I reckon a lot of these package tours might you would see a bit or like you say you would go to the tourist set, it's Matamata, which is Hobbiton, it's when they voted. But something you said about the, you know like New Zealand doesn't have the little connections of villages or to other villages, it's that kind of weight of human history like, obviously New Zealand does have its own history and we have our own indigenous people but in terms of the length of human occupation like in England there are pubs that are 500 years old and it's not that unusual, but it is not the case in New Zealand, you know, we don't have, you know, it's debatable when Māori first came to New Zealand but say roughly a thousand years ago or so, but then if you go back much further than that, you know, two thousand years ago, there were people in England building things but there were birds here. And so I'm getting off point, but in terms of like you know like the flora and fauna they sort of, that's not so much in the movies, I guess because it wouldn't fit with the kind of tokeness, all our kind of bird life and like a little bit of the bush, but the spots they chose, they chose particularly to more represent kind of very English and European flora, flora and trees and things. So when I kind of watch the movies, although I can pick out particular landscapes, it's not, it doesn't kind of evoke kind of that feeling of walking through the New Zealand bush because it doesn't really look so much like that, it has a very different look. Well that's reassuring to know that they haven't edged out the fantasy potential for yourself as a writer, but let's come my neighborhood as it were because you told me that you wrote the first draft of the first book in your series, The Lord of Starriel, while living in Oxford. So did you find the city itself as a source of inspiration? I mean there's a lot of Oxford and Cambridge I think in your other city, in your book, well one of your other cities is called Knoxbridge. Yes, comingly disguised. There's no one, no one will ever guess. Yes I wrote the first draft, I had just moved to Oxford. I'd moved to Oxford in October and I think around 2014 and I was starting a new job in November and I needed a way to meet people. So I thought, oh I'll write a novel for national novel writing month which is November and so that's sort of where Starriel came from and it was very influenced by living in England by the kind of, November is kind of the weather's getting kind of colder so the kind of like, particularly like the lamps, the kind of old-style architecture that there's so much of around there in the beautiful buildings and I'd also recently been up to done a little bit of traveling up in Scotland. It's thanks the Lord of the North idea in the way. Yeah, yeah, well and I'd been rewatching an old series for a little while ago called Monica of the Glen, I don't know if you heard of it. Oh yeah, yeah. So which has as a sort of initial, it's a sort of set in modern times but the kickoff of the TV show is that the sort of black sheep with a family gets a call but his father's dead and goes back to the crumbling older state in Scotland and so I sort of had that in my head and this sort of season of the turn of seasons and I thought oh but it would be much cooler if it was magical and set further a go and this the main character was a woman. I think agent is great, you can look back in the way that our sort of magpie tendency is why you should be used like you watch something like Monica of the language is entirely entirely different. Yes, but you take the thing which sparks your imagination and turn that into your opener because you've got your wonderful main character Heter who was living a life of relative freedom down in the main city as a illusionist in a stage company answering the call to go back to the ancestral home to find out which of her family the Val stars is that right? Yes, it's going to be picked as the next Lord of Staryl. So let's that takes us to the location of your story. Your series feels it has the feeling of a historical fantasy but it doesn't have a specific location. It has in add its heart, a wonderful little wonderful concept of a little independent kingdom which has a foot in the Fey world and a foot in the human world and that really is a character in the book in and of itself in a very important way. You've began to mention that some of your imagery are like the lamps and the old buildings are taken from being there but what was the thought process behind setting it in this familiar but undefined world and then also the period that you pick which sort of maps maybe onto the interwar period in the 20th century possibly but then you might have a different view. I feel like my reasoning was not very deep and it was largely driven by cooler sedix where I you know things said in the past seem a bit cooler but also I really like the idea of plumbing so everyone can you know wash. So I didn't want to go like so far back that it was sort of pre pre that kind of era and yeah so one of the big things is they're running I sort of like that idea of like everything's kind of a bit old-fashioned still but they it's just starting to get some modern technology like electricity and fine lines and things but and I kind of wanted to do that sort of juxtaposition of where he just come from the sort of city, down south that the technology is kind of more entrenched and more developed but it hasn't quite made it out as far as the kind of older states that are still clinging onto the past and you know don't and that are a little bit more magical and where people are a little bit more suspicious yeah I sort of so I sort of I very loosely used the kind of Edwardian time period but I did play very fast and loose with historical accuracy and I have to admit that that's sort of driven by my own lack of desire to do huge amounts of research like I like looking a little bit up but I do I knew if I said it like in a very firm historical time period then that would entail checking you know checking dates and and what people would had access to at particular times and that would that would have been just a very different approach whereas I was more interested in kind of their aesthetics really and we do the fantasy through that I mean people are sort of looking for parallels I mean the Susanna Clark to Norrell Mr. Strange or Mr. Strange and Dr. Norrell whichever way around that book is it's very specifically in a Napoleonic war era and you know linked to history whereas her more recent book Pyreneesie is in more of a space that doesn't quite a timeless but old-fashioned place and yours is war on the that end of the spectrum than the I'm into the war if you sit it if you sit and in an an our world in a specific period of history then you kind of have to start you have to start considering like how real world historical events would have unfolded and I guess I was less interested in that it's an interesting path to take but it's a different part these sort of yeah and the reason why it's it's set in the past at all is because I really like this sort of place kind of old-fashioned social mores with this sort of heightened melodrama over what we would consider today very small stop stakes of like oh you know you have to you can't sort of break the social rules or people will you know gossip about you and and that sort of yeah sort of propriety worrying about that kind of thing is it's just a lot of fun so there's two main characters who who fall foul of that because Heta as a unmarried woman um I'm not going to donate plots of money here but she might what's thrown at her by the male lords is her female nists and her fitness as a woman to rule but also to conduct her life in a way that they do but what she does she gets centered for and I love the way that your heroine is just so unapologetic she's come from a world prior to that which was much freer this theatre world and she just thinks they're all ridiculous and I love the fact that so often her thoughts are oh gosh I'm I'm pushing it's oh just get over it kind of attitude and then her older brother Marius who is gay and struggling with those urges there in a way which hopefully now in most many parts of the world that's no longer that would just be accepted he's isn't in a period when he has to hide that and add an extra drama to his his character talking about the sort of relationships and use of gender I was really fascinated by the very natural use that you make of inter intersects characters in the Feywell they just are like Lamurkin oh non binary characters binary yeah is that something which was influenced by the debates going on in the outer world or did you just feel that was right for the you know how did that emerge as a theme I guess I've always found gender really interesting like to think about and play with and I have a lot of non binary friends so it's in perfectly natural to have some in the books but I guess I was it was one of the things I wanted to do with the Fey culture was in sort of contrast to the sort of human culture that is still quite sexist and very binary about what you know well that they are only women in men in that men and women have very particular kind of ideas about they should and shouldn't be I kind of wanted to contrast that with the Fey culture which has its own issues but one of the things that they are quite good at is that they don't think about gender in the quite the same way and so I sort of thought what if they if if gender is sort of not an issue for them in the same way that it is for humans at this point in time then it seems very natural that it would also be no big deal that there would naturally be non binary in trans Bay and that would just sort of that they wouldn't even necessarily have a word for that because it would just be as normal as any other kind of presentation yeah I kind of wanted to just feel very like not unusual yeah exactly that was so relaxing because it wasn't like a message novel it was one where this was just this is how the world is and it was nice to go there in your imagination and think it gives it sort of I mean one thing that I like there are there would obviously have been non-binary people in terms of humans as well but the story sort of doesn't focus on them and it would have been that would have been about harder to do in terms of they would have been pushing against sort of societal rules so the story would have been had to be kind of more about that if you had a couple of issues going on so maybe that as a next issue would have been another main character and it would yeah it was something I wanted to include but I yeah there's only so many things you can do in a book writing is about choices isn't it yeah so just thinking I'm not sure I've done a good job of giving the flavor of it I was thinking well what is it like I felt it for me without really quite unique but I suppose one story that came up to my mind was Cole Comfort Farm then if you know the story it's a it's a mid 20th century comedy novel where a female character goes to a traditional household and shakes it up and her presence there is in the real world but a comic real world similar period it kind of revolutionises the household and how your first book starts not the later ones felt a bit like that moment where you've got this catalyst coming into a traditional world the assumption is the lord ship is going to pass to Jack who's like that kind of a steady hand like close to being like the old lord but it's you know I don't think it's too much for a plot spoiler to say it doesn't happen like that um yeah so it has that fun and that feeling of a revolution happening within a world that's got kind of bit too close before you open out to the other worlds but I should mention of course that it's also um a lot a love story an inter-species love story do you want to tell us a little bit about win halloween your wonderful butler come steward come prince uh yes which is also a plot spoiler but it's it's fairly impossible to talk about the first book particularly without giving away but I don't think the the first book something's they're set up are relatively easy to see coming I feel like that's probably one of them um and yeah so there's sort of a twist that the the main estate uh that's called starryl uh turns turns out to be in addition to being a the human estate it's also a part of the fairy world um and and the the fairy have been absent from the world for several centuries for reasons that are later exposed um but they're just sort of started coming back and one of them has been present on their state and the guys are pretending to be a human butler and he's he's sort of he's been sort of childhood friends with he's the main character and then she went away to the city and sort of pursued her own life and she's returned um and yes they sort of have a uh a growing relationship over the over the course of the four books and do you want to spoil it too much yeah yeah but um I think one of the things I would say AJ and I really appreciated um is that your your plotting is excellent so there were a couple of twists in the very first book which one I thought oh I knew she was going to do that and then you turn the tables again and you think oh okay um she she caught me out there so so I would really recommend people if you want to read a really just a good story it's there but also your overarching plot which I can't say too much about because that would be serious spoilers but there is a release of information about why it all is as it is that comes gloriously to a head at the end of the fourth book um so you know um oh I thought it was it was great I really really enjoyed that the way you did that uh so when when you plot books out are you somebody who say starts with a character and just explores or a concept or do you have like your post-it notes or files and scrivener or whatever with it all mapped out in advance um I definitely don't plan it all in advance I I usually start with kind of something about the world and the setting and the character and then a lot of it sort of comes from the character kind of saying well what would they do in this situation if I throw this at them what happens how would they react um and then I sort of find out things as I go along um and then I do a huge amount of editing to make it look like I knew where I was going so I'm very grateful to either that work yeah that's one of the things I say to um people I'm teaching on the creative writing courses we run which is you may have written a scene where you mention in passing I don't know a box on a table or a thing on the wall and then when you're thinking oh I need something some foreshadowing of this thing oh remember that box I put in that scene and you go back and you and you make that the clue but you didn't think of it at the time when you first put it in there yeah that is one of the lovely things about writing as when it feels like your brain kind of secretly sit up a thing you didn't know setting up until you get there and then you're like oh that's why we put that thing in back then yeah um which doesn't always happen perfectly and usually you have to go back and kind of smooth it out a little bit but drop a few more hints or change something so that it's consistent um I have thought of another thing I wanted to say about the romance oh okay spill um I'm allowed to go back um one of the things I did really want to do with the romance particularly was I wanted to do a slightly untraditional uh kind of relationship dynamic to what I'd read in a lot of books at the time that I was looking at where I was reading a lot of romance books where the man was very like uh sort of in charge and commanding and sort of uh had lots of mistresses like the Bridgerton boys yeah yeah that's sort of like I guess the sort of classic sort of alpha male stereotype kind of thing I wanted to do I was like what if the guy was really like you know he's still confident but what if he was more what if he was more about like running the household and with her I wanted to do I wanted to make her kind of quite traditionally feminine in terms of you know being interested in uh clothing and her appearance and stuff whilst also being very kind of strong but not in a way that was like a punching people strong but like so that was sort of a gender dynamic thing I was interested in doing there yeah you didn't flip the roles so no that she's become the alpha male and he's become no it's more that they are individuals who aren't conforming to a particular prescribed role so if Heter better and this isn't a plot spoiler because very early on it's clear that she's you know she's had boyfriends and dated and had a sort of normal life before she comes back home to the so she has that experience behind her and confidence of not sort of being kept in the nursery really um and I think that that's good because it gives her she's not the sort of simpering virgin type not but I know that I don't also like a good classic alpha male and romance or a simpering virgin there is there is definitely a a time and a place for both of those those kind of uh character types can be they can be enjoyed um but not as Lord of Starrion we need yeah it was just it was just a thing I was interested in playing with so I was like I should say that I think that I would say quite again it's a plot spoiler say too much but I think you did that really well and um it doesn't feel basically you believe in the magnetism and the sexual attraction between them which could be the casualty here if if it wasn't right you you feel that they they get each other and they are that they're the pool together from based on this childhood friendship that's grown it's very convincing and sweet and lovely so yeah um I was looking and when I got to the end of the last book I read read I that was the point at which I read your little biography about yourself and you describe yourself as an independent writer so what's your journey to publishing been like and have you got any tips for listeners wanting to follow in a similar path because you're a bit less scary because I think they can understand how your writing journey started but um as it oh well I'm going to try a novel in a November and many people might be thinking that as well but you've done the steps beyond that spill all the beans on how that happened so before I wrote Lord of Starrion I had I had written I tried to write other things um that were more kind of epic fantasy style things uh and I that I've always kind of gotten lost in the boggy middle and so I thought I would this one I'm just going to write I'm going to write like a short simple straightforward standalone no epics um and it's never going to say the light of day um so it doesn't matter um so I can just just have fun this writes I mean it's fun for me and then obviously it is not a standalone and it is published um but that's sort of so I originally had no intention to publish it um and then as it sort of grew and I ended up writing I sort of I wrote I wrote drafts of all the books before I thought about publishing because I knew that I would need to know where this series was going um and so I and I and I am I'm self-published I'm probably sure to start so I'm self-published uh and the reasons I chose that were many in several there there are definitely advantages to going independent and there are advantages to going traditional um I decided it's that I decided self-publishing would to give it a go I had some advantages in that I have a background in editing and in publishing like I've done type setting and sort of production management um so I knew I knew some bits of the process I felt confident I could do to a good standard uh and that was sort of my my kind of commitment to myself I was like well if I'm going to self-publish that I wanted to be I wanted to be sort of indistinguishable from a traditional publish book for the people reading it you know I don't want it to feel like it hasn't had uh enough attention or enough polish um so it was quite a long process um and quite a lot of that was me leveling up a bit in my craft so the first book particularly went through a lot of drafts um and I had a whole crew of beta readers in your thanks yeah a lot of that was a lot of that was beta reading so getting getting other people to read and give their feedback and then letting us sit for a bit and going back to it and that sort of thing um how did you come up with your other design which is very strong um so I was just going to say like one of the key things when you're self-publishing is you is getting your covers right um because your cover is you're kind of single most important kind of marketing asset um so you want a uh cover that signals the genre really clearly uh so you go and look at other books that are sort of similar to yours which is a bit hard for me because at the time there wasn't that much that felt similar so trying to figure out what my sub-jonger I was in how best to signal that was a bit tricky but I eventually came down on that kind of look because there were sort of a couple of books that were doing kind of that sort of style of kind of that kind of my covers are illustrated but kind of in a very kind of cut out sort of look um and I found a designer I liked and uh did she turned out to be brilliant and has done all my covers um and I wanted them to sort of convey convey the kind of vibe of the book that it was was fantasy it was sort of historical feeling um that it was whimsical um yeah which so I'm very pleased with my covers and I I think they are a lot have contributed hugely to the success I've had with that series I think a lot of people took a chance at them because they saw the covers and were like oh what was that um yeah so yeah so my my advice for indie publishing would be yeah leave it up your craft as well as you can I'm interested about it I suppose um get a good cover that signals the genre and you know do research and watch what your what you think your audience is likely to to find appealing kind of what they're looking for in the same with the blurb and find like a group of like minded people to support you and bounce ideas off and and give feedback there's there's heaps of resources out there for indie authors now um lots of Facebook groups and discord servers and people on Twitter and um yeah so find find the group of those that works for you um and the other great thing about indie publishing is uh you can always change stuff because you have power which so you know you can uh set up a new pen name of the if the first one should work or or you can change the covers or you can you can change the whole book if you know you'd look at it later and think are actually I've improved so much since then and I sort of don't want this up under my name um and did you have a like a budget sorry this is quite techy questions in anywhere in the interest it did you have a budget for promoting the book or was it an organic growth for review um I did do a little bit of of of marketing but uh not a huge amount in the beginning I paid to list it on like a reviewing site the first book so to get it into the hands of like book bloggers and things um and I've run a few like sales promotions um but it was a very it was sort of very organic slow build like it wasn't it definitely wasn't a success straight out of the gate uh it took time around I think a rounding book three came out uh which is this is this is uh general received in de wisdom is there's something magical about three the number three I like that when you have three books out in a series um I don't maybe read this link I believe that they're going to finish this series off um so yeah it helped it helped once there was three books out but it's a lot of it's been word of mouth I've been very um fortunate to get some really good reviews and uh by you know various blogging sites and uh in places large and small that have all kind of helped as it's gone along the way um which has been really cool. Fascinating because I think that that's one of the areas where a lot of people are looking to see how do you know the the secrets of success and your organic word of mouth is still there um yeah you didn't yeah it really is it's not it's not going to give you I mean there are people that do go viral overnight but you don't have to go viral to success which is sort of reassuring um yeah and I think that's where the kind of attention to craft and and making the kind of package look appealing of the kind of cover blurb content really helps you out because that's going to get you the word of mouth um it also helps with what you've written appeals to people and that's a harder thing to I think try and do purpose three I think I was lucky in that I kind of wrote these books for me and it turned out that what I wanted to read there was other people that wanted to read it but there's also like six billion people on earth so with the right with indie publishing you mostly see our ebooks so you can kind of sell to people all over the world to even if your audience is potentially quite small you know that out of six million people it's not a lot of people six million people how many are up to now I actually came to your books because I I consume a lot of audio versions of things and I think it might even have been on one of the deals where it was so that worked you're one of your off sales um but also because Finty Williams was reading and she read my very first book she's Finty Williams is she probably gets annoyed by this but she's due to and an actress over here and so immediately I saw that name I thought oh um that's going to be well read so this is worth me trying so first question I suppose to you is what do you think of the audio adaptation the last book is read by somebody else isn't it um whether or not dissimilar voice so it's not jarring um and have you sort of thought about your listening audience and that impact on you because the received wisdom is that there's not people don't get much back from commissioning an audio book but maybe you've but that trend I have to take back my interview with the clients because my audiobooks are actually done by Podium so I have a publisher just to just as the audiobooks um oh that's interesting I've not heard that can you tell me tell us more tell us more um so they approached me they approached me I were like we would like to make audiobooks of your books here are our terms what do you think um so I talked to them about it um and decided that that would be good because I I wanted to have an audio that is as you say it's quite it's quite expensive to do it yourself if you're having to pay for someone to narrate them and I wasn't sure whether I could justify putting the costume um so I was happy to to let them do it and they they have a good reputation as an audio book publisher um and at the time I hadn't really listened to many audiobooks I felt I felt I didn't really have the expertise um to do it myself to judge what was needed um now I have listened to quite a lot of audiobooks have gone really into them um but when but at the time I when they sent me the recordings uh I was a bit uncertain I was like oh I don't know whether I'm going to be able to cope with hearing someone else read my book out out loud but I started listening to it and then immediately was just entranced I was like oh my goodness Funti has made the sound like sound quite good yeah how I'm like what kind of dark sorcery is this like like I was like oh I want to keep listening to find out what happens I've experienced most on a book of mine um which I probably too long ago now but it's called the ship between the worlds it's a middle grade fantasy about pirates yeah uh in a fantasy setting and I had two main pirate captains in it and the actor who took on the part had decided to give one of them a really broad glass region accent which I hadn't written into the script or the book at all um and then as soon as I heard it thought well obviously he has the glass region accent that was just waiting to be unlocked and so he sort of it's where you're no longer in control of your own book it was it was like getting to read alongside someone else and see how they were interpreting it as they're reading it which was um which was fascinating because you know normally you only get to know what you yourself think as you read something um but yeah that same thing of seeing how they do accents for the different characters that you haven't specified and being like oh okay oh valid yeah I hadn't really imagined that but yeah um yeah as I I I've really loved I've really enjoyed when he's um narration um I'm very pleased with it um yeah and it's it's really nice to have audiobooks um now that I as I said I listen to a lot more audiobooks generally um because they're so they're so convenient you can listen to them while you're doing other things exactly that's why for me you know it's the driving in the car thing um that's what I that's what I listened to so what next for AJ are you you mentioned in your notes at the end of the fourth book that you might do a fifth is that happening uh yeah so that is what I'm currently with him um it's so it's it's sort of I guess it's technically book five and then it does follow chronologically even though book four is very differently the conclusion of the series like it's done um but this book is about it's about another it's about a different character it's about hitter's brother who has sort of becomes a more prominent uh side character over the four books and in this book is sort of his book um with him as the main character uh and I'm trying to make it kind of self-contained and also kind of work potentially even if you haven't read the first four books which we'll see if I managed to do that successfully um uh and it's uh romance and also met a mystery because I thought that would be a good way to stop the plot from accidentally turning into four books which is what happened with the Lord Astarial um uh yeah and so that should hopefully I'm hoping to get that out this year um it's underway at the moment well all the best with that I look forward to reading it when it does come out um at the end of my podcast I always ask my guest to choose a fantasy world in which it's the best to be something so we've done all sorts of things from you know the best place to go for a drink like the best tabern um best place to be a warrior you know loads of things uh and I thought that picking up the wider theme of your book which has this love story between people of different sort of species if that you've had a thought where in all the fantasy worlds you've read or watched is a good place to be in love with somebody from a different race while species um I had to think about this over while because I I feel like the set up of most fantasy worlds is that it's there's usually tension between um another someone from a different species and I decided that there would have to be like fantasy romance because that way you would you would definitely get a happy ending with the person you fell in love with and I thought it would probably be a good idea for it to be like some kind of shift of romance shift of because yeah yeah then whoever you you fell in love with you'd also get the bonus of like there um you know if you fell in love with a werewolf you'd get kind of the sort of big extended family as well um so I have chosen uh Nellini Singh who is a New Zealand author who writes kind of paranormal paranormal fantasy romance um Sarah's uh I feel like her worlds even though a lot of bad things happen like uh the romance has always worked out happily and there's a lot of like extended family vibes so I decided that would be the best oh well thank you for mentioning shift of romance because I hadn't thought of those I was thinking oh maybe something science fiction was what I was thinking uh I mean it is yeah what does not science fiction but a speculative fiction yeah so I'm going to actually go I've changed my pick uh hearing you I'm I like Patricia Briggs Mercedes Thompson series which is uh the Mercedes Thompson is a car mechanic but also she is a native American coyote shifter and her relationship is with a more traditional werewolf shifter so you've got um and it's just it's so funny it's a brilliantly handled as well as the serious plot there's so much comedy in it but the um the the imagine imagining these different species and how they can come together she brings the hostility between coyotes and wolves into how Mercedes is accepted or not accepted in the pack which adds a whole dimension to a love story um you know the Romeo and Julia aspect without the tragic you know ending uh so I that so we've gone we've gone werewolf excellent werewolf or I think you know any things like side-changing series where they have werewolves but also like people with psychic abilities excellent this sounds good I haven't read these and I've read almost all there was of the um werewolf stories because I love a good shifter series yeah they're not all werewolves but they're all animals that they've changed your tunes absolutely that sounds that sounds great so thanks so much AJ for joining me today and just to we'll put a link to your books in the show notes so people can find them but just so if you've come to the end of this series this episode you're thinking I really want to go and read AJ's books now you just need to look up AJ Lancaster, Lord Astario and that will take you to the first book in this series so thank you so much AJ and uh all the best we've got five yeah thank you so much and thank you for giving me all the book us thanks for listening to MythMakers podcast brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy visit OxfordCenterForFatasy.org to join in the fun find out about our online courses in person stays in Oxford plus visit our shop for great gifts tell a friend and subscribe wherever you 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