CountryBoyWrites

Fiction.

[CountryBoyWrites @CountryWrites]

The Fellside Miracle

Jake climbs into the storm-swept Yorkshire Dales searching for a lost family heirloom. When the weather turns and a mysterious stranger helps him down the fell, Jake returns with more than his grandfather’s shepherd’s crook.

The Fellside Miracle is a story of perseverance, unexpected kindness, and healing found where earth, faith, and mystery meet.

https://t.co/YAMupVBfoY

[CountryBoyWrites @CountryWrites]

Present Perfect?

Captain Daniels finally learns how Continuity begins—not with machines, but with ordinary people choosing order over responsibility.

When Sergeant Jenkins reveals a terrifying secret, Daniels must return to Smith-Haven: protect the system, or the people it abandoned?

Present Perfect? is a dystopian science-fiction story about guilt, free will, and the courage to choose your neighbours over fear.

https://t.co/c3uKlSNXG2

[CountryBoyWrites @CountryWrites]

Future Continuous?

Captain Daniels and his team cross into a Smith-Haven stripped of noise, disorder—and humanity.

As the city closes around them, their only hope lies in the mysterious pyramid and the recording that first opened the way between worlds. But escape leads somewhere no less dangerous, where long-buried truths wait beneath a copper sky.

Future Continuous? is a dystopian science-fiction story about conformity, resistance, and the cost of choice.

https://t.co/FmexlHizE7

[Sending Grace @SendingGrace56]

Paint the picture. Tell the story. Again.

[CountryBoyWrites @CountryWrites]

Future Perfect?

They stepped back through the light expecting home. What they found was Smith-Haven… perfected.

Silent streets. Filtered air. Citizens who no longer argue. And a system that already knows their names.

Future Perfect — the next chapter in the Continuity sequence.

https://t.co/DquSIgai7I

[CountryBoyWrites @CountryWrites]

This week it’s Fiddling Friday, and I ask a question every creator faces: when should you stop?

I reflect on when to step away from a manuscript, why distance helps the editing process, and why reviews matter so much to independent authors.

There’s also news from the Chimera Cycle, a glimpse at the next Spectral Detective story, three fantasy book spotlights, and a promise of an upcoming Substack short story featuring a missing body, an abandoned boarding house, and a young Detective called Sam Mercer.

Read When to stop?

https://t.co/dEj2LefXua

[CountryBoyWrites @CountryWrites]

Future Imperfect

In the grey city of Smith-Haven, emergency crews struggle beneath a bureaucracy obsessed with speech violations. Then a blazing stone pyramid descends from the clouds and pierces the earth, tearing open the boundary between realities.

Captain Daniels and his team emerge beneath a copper alien sky. Where is their route home?

Future Imperfect is a dystopian science-fiction story about rigid systems, impossible choices, and the courage to step into the unknown.

https://t.co/Po7hCTxQfZ

[CountryBoyWrites @CountryWrites]

Chapter 28: A New Place

Twelfth Night ends Christmas at Blackthorn House — and ends Jack’s punishment.

But the stripped great hall brings more than a return to food. Lady Margaret Caldwell announces a new future for the surviving boys: Blackthorn can no longer hold them.

They will leave for North Wales, to Castle Caer Bryn Glas, under Lord Lucian Viterion’s rule.

For Jack, grief, pain, and suspicion give way to something dangerous and bright: hope.

A chapter of endings, formal judgement, hidden authority, and the first glimpse of a much larger world.

https://t.co/tsiBRXfmz0

[CountryBoyWrites @CountryWrites]

The Unbreakable Codex: The Voynich Manuscript

Arthur R. King investigates the Voynich Manuscript—the six-century-old codex that defeated two of the twentieth century’s greatest cryptanalysts.From Bletchley Park and wartime codebreaking to strange plants, unknown symbols and punched-card analysis, The Unbreakable Codex asks one question:Is the manuscript an elaborate hoax, a lost language—or something stranger?

https://t.co/0HxxaCaLhy

[CountryBoyWrites @CountryWrites]

Chapter 27: Lost and Found

Christmas returns to Blackthorn House, but peace does not.

Robert lies in the crypt, the Shuck is dead, and Jack tries to understand grief amid firelight, greenery, and festive cheer. Then Antony slips away, and a hidden secret comes to light: Dr Adler’s lost silver knife, buried for two years in Ten-Acre Wood.

What follows exposes betrayal, jealousy, and the cruel cost of disobedience.

A chapter of Christmas warmth, cold resentment, dangerous discovery, and the lesson that some wounds do not heal like the others.

https://t.co/skA9AEvI4O

[CountryBoyWrites @CountryWrites]

Rescue Hammer

He promised he'd call.

She didn't answer.

When Lila vanishes after a chance meeting and a spark of romance, everyone tells Mike not to worry. She's an adult. She's with family. Leave it alone.

But his instincts tell him something is wrong.

What begins as a missed phone call turns into a desperate search, a midnight rescue, and a courtroom battle over how far one man should go to save a stranger.

Would you trust your gut?

https://t.co/FOEOiLwPqC

[CountryBoyWrites @CountryWrites]

Chapter 26: Reckless End

Jack returns to Ten-Acre Wood with Lucian Viterion, to the place where Robert died.

What begins as an investigation becomes a summons. The Black Shuck answers Jack’s call, and Lucian reveals what a true Night Knight can do.

A chapter of cold moonlight, old power, vengeance, and painful truths.

https://t.co/WrgsGnFnRu

[CountryBoyWrites @CountryWrites]

MY BOY JACK: PREQUEL TO THE CHIMERA CYCLE

Born into shadow. Died on his first day. Came back... changed.

In 1639, at a hidden manor outside London, a secret Dominion experiment births something new: hybrid vampire children.

Jack Caldwell is the one who shouldn't have survived—yet his glassy skin, predator eyes, and impossible resilience mark him as the future.

A dark SF tale of power, instinct, and the monstrous cost of enlightenment. The Chimera Cycle begins here.

https://t.co/Kq8yUPWFjl

[CountryBoyWrites @CountryWrites]

Frillies Friday

How do you make historical fiction sound authentic without making it hard to read?

In this week’s newsletter, I explore the challenge of writing across two eras: seventeenth-century Shropshire in Lost Boy Jack and the world of 1945 in The Spectral Detective.

From pottage, tumbrels and dingles to rods, roscoes and niftic suits, I look at how period words can enrich a story—provided the reader can understand them without stopping for a history lesson.

Research builds the world. Instinct brings it to life.

#HistoricalFiction #WritingCraft #AuthorNewsletter #LostBoyJack #TheSpectralDetective #Worldbuilding

https://t.co/WJ0i2ygCp9

[Sending Grace @SendingGrace56]

My favorite chapter! Lovely Lady Caldwell, a Night Knight to hunt, Jack as bait, the Shuck is gonna be dead meat.

[CountryBoyWrites @CountryWrites]

Chapter 25: The Hunter

Jack wakes from fever into a changed world.

Robert is dead. The Black Shuck has marked Jack. And a new power has arrived at Blackthorn House: Sir Lucian Viterion, a Night Knight of the Dominion.

Cold, ancient, and utterly certain of himself, Lucian sees in Jack not a wounded child, but a living thread leading back to the creature in the dark.

A chapter of recovery, judgement, dangerous honour, and the moment Jack learns that survival can become its own kind of summons.

https://t.co/96I6JaHdMe

[CountryBoyWrites @CountryWrites]

Chapter 25: The Hunter

Jack wakes from fever into a changed world.

Robert is dead. The Black Shuck has marked Jack. And a new power has arrived at Blackthorn House: Sir Lucian Viterion, a Night Knight of the Dominion.

Cold, ancient, and utterly certain of himself, Lucian sees in Jack not a wounded child, but a living thread leading back to the creature in the dark.

A chapter of recovery, judgement, dangerous honour, and the moment Jack learns that survival can become its own kind of summons.

https://t.co/96I6JaHdMe

[CountryBoyWrites @CountryWrites]

Rooms with a View of the Past

Four travellers. One vanished hotel. And a roll of film that refused to remember.

Arthur R. King investigates the strange 1979 French hotel time-slip, where two British couples claimed they left a modern road near Montélimar and spent one night in an inn that seemed to belong to another age.

A case file in missing photographs, old uniforms, and a past that may have opened its doors.

https://t.co/6IsYv5TbrD

[Sending Grace @SendingGrace56]

This dreamer steps up into love and loyalty means not being complacent but singing out loud against bullying. It doesn’t just happen in high school folks.

[CountryBoyWrites @CountryWrites]

Chapter 24: Hunted

A reckless hunt reaches its terrible turning point.

Hungry, defiant, and certain of their own superiority, the boys return to Ten-Acre Wood in search of the Black Shuck. But the creature understands more than they guessed — their calls, their tricks, perhaps even their nature.

What began as a secret game becomes a lesson in fear, consequence, and the cost of mistaking instinct for wisdom.

A chapter of moonlit pursuit, dangerous pride, and the night Blackthorn’s strange children learn they are not the only predators in the dark.

https://t.co/iGOpbpnrv6