The greatest heroes in the Kingdoms of "The Last Goblin Queen" may not always be the ones who save the world.  Fantasy gives us plenty of heroes who wield legendary swords, command armies, cast impossible spells, or face down dragons. I enjoy those stories too. But when I was building the Kingdoms, I wanted room for another kind of heroism: the ordinary courage of being kind when it would be easier not to be. Kindness is often treated as a soft virtue. In the Kingdoms, it isn't. It can mean refusing to humiliate someone who has already been beaten. It can mean listening to a person everyone else has dismissed, or giving someone another chance when you have every reason to walk away. Sometimes it means putting yourself in danger for someone who can never repay you. None of this requires a magic sword. It requires choice. That distinction matters to me. The Kingdoms has monsters, ancient powers, and people who would love to tell everyone else what they must become. But none...

The Ogre Kingdom has no great halls lined with books, no royal archives where generations of parchment gather dust. The Clans move with the seasons, across mountains and grasslands, following herds, work, and weather. Shelves of books are not much use to a people who are always on the move. So they carry their history with them. The Ogre Loremasters are among the most respected people in the Ogre Kingdom. A Loremaster spends decades training their prodigious memories, learning to hold millions of lines of lore and knowledge and retrieve it with perfect precision. Family trees. Ancient treaties. Laws. Songs. Legends. The deeds of ancestors whose names have been forgotten by everyone else For the Ogres, memory is more than a talent. It is a responsibility. Castles can fall. Treasures can be stolen. Borders can shift. But as long as the Loremasters remember, the Ogre people remember who they are.

I don't much care for Chosen Ones. Not because destiny is uninteresting. Quite the opposite. I find the idea fascinating... and deeply dangerous. The problem is what the Chosen One story can imply: that some people matter more because destiny says they do. That greatness is something bestowed rather than earned. That the rest of us are spectators, waiting for the special person to save the world. I don't believe that. In the Kingdoms, I want heroism to be a choice. I want ordinary people to stand up because they decide something is worth defending. I want courage to belong to anyone. I want knowledge, kindness, stubbornness, loyalty, and sheer bloody-minded determination to matter more than prophecy. Because if there is one thing I believe about stories, and about people, it is this: Nobody needs to be chosen to choose.

If you enjoy brooding, dominant, obsessively possessive heroes, that's perfectly fine. Different readers want different things from fantasy romance. But those particular tropes are not what I'm interested in writing. In the Kingdoms, the man who insists that he knows what is best for a woman, ignores her boundaries, treats jealousy as proof of love, or confuses possession with devotion isn't the romantic hero. He's the villain. The Last Goblin Queen stories are deliberately built around a different idea of romance. My heroines are strong, independent women who don't need to be conquered, rescued, or controlled. They choose partners who respect their judgment, their boundaries, and their freedom. They argue. They challenge each other. They depend on each other. And they remain equals. Because I think healthy relationships are sexy. For me, the fantasy isn't finding a powerful man who can dominate you. It's finding someone powerful enough to stand beside you ...

I love fantasy, but I’ve always wanted to know what happens after the dragon is slain. What do people do when the tyrant falls? How do kingdoms rebuild? What happens when heroes have to raise children, preserve knowledge, repair broken institutions, or simply figure out how to live together? That is the kind of fantasy I want to write. In The Last Goblin Queen , Goblins are not monsters waiting in the darkness. They are scholars, merchants, priests, queens, knights, parents, and children. Heroes fight battles, but they also write books, challenge traditions, fall in love, raise families, and argue about what their society should become. I’m interested in love stories that continue after the wedding, in heroes who remain curious after they have won, and in characters who believe the world can be made better without pretending that doing so is easy. There are dragons, ancient mysteries, magic, and epic adventures here. But ultimately, I’m writing about people, and about the difficult, ho...

The Kingdoms are home to no shortage of creatures that might, at first glance, earn the label "monster." Look closer, though, and something more interesting emerges: not a single one of them is supernatural. They are, every last one, the product of ordinary evolution — shaped, as all living things are, by the pressures of their environment. In the Kingdoms, that environment simply includes six Elements: Fire, Stone, Water, Crystal, Metal, and Void. Bind an animal to one of these across enough generations, and nature does what nature always does. It adapts. Not all of these bound creatures are (necessarily) dangerous, and some have been domesticated. Elementally bound creatures in the Kingdoms  range from Rocktoads (Stonebound toads) to Embermanes (Flamebound horses), from Shadow-wings (Voidbound bats) to Coppercrawlers (Metalbound centipedes). What looks fantastical at first glance is, on closer inspection, just another animal doing what animals do — surviving, brilliantly.

Gada is a Goblin mercenary. Eleanor is an Elvish bard. Both carry the weight of their pasts. Who will say 'I love you' first? "The Last Goblin Queen: Harmony and Resonance" is free on Kindle this week until Saturday. *This Promotion has ended*  

The answer is: sort of. The Kingdoms has no pantheon of gods walking the world, throwing lightning bolts, or personally choosing the outcome of battles. Instead, each of the five Kingdoms is bound to an ancient oversoul tethered to one of the Elements. These are the beings known as the Sacred Flame (Flame, Human Kingdom), the Mountain Goddess (Stone, Goblin Kingdom), the Allforge (Metal, Ogre Kingdom), the Lady of Mirrors (Crystal, Elvish Kingdom), and the Storm Goddess (Water, Naga Kingdom). Each oversoul is centered on a sacred place where its presence is strongest. Around those places grew the monastic traditions that preserve their teachings and tend their shrines — not to please the oversoul, but to stay in step with it. These gods cannot step into the physical world or reshape it by force. Instead, they interact through dreams, visions, moments of inspiration, and the occasional glimpse of a possible future. They don't reward virtue or punish cruelty. The gods have no particu...

Sorcery is possible in the Kingdoms, but rare. Few choose this path, and fewer still walk away from it unscathed. To practice sorcery, one must replace a portion of their soul with pure Element — Fire, Stone, Water, Metal, Crystal, or Void. This grants the sorcerer a measure of power over that Element. But every use carries a risk: the Element may consume a little more of the sorcerer's soul in the exchange. Power grows with each taking, and so does the danger of losing oneself entirely. A sorcerer whose soul is fully consumed becomes a Demon — a being of pure Element where a person once stood. Unlike dragons, another form of Elemental creature, demons retain some trace of their former intelligence, even their personality, though warped now and bent entirely to a primal force. And yet, there is someone who always chooses this path. Each one certain that they will be the exception — the one who masters the Element instead of being consumed by it.

  A map of the lands of the Kingdoms from "The Last Goblin Queen" (not necessarily drawn to scale).

For the people of the Goblin Kingdom, a teahouse was never just a place to drink tea. Visitors to Goblin City remember the inns and taverns. That's where merchants haggle over contracts, caravaners bed down for the night, and travelers trade stories before moving on. Ask a Goblin where the real heart of the neighborhood is, though, and they'll point you to the teahouse. A Goblin teahouse can be almost anything. In one neighborhood, it's a shaded courtyard and a handcart pouring tea into whatever mugs customers happen to bring. In another, it's a sprawling hall that's stood for centuries, its stone worn smooth by generations of hands. What they all share: none of them are really businesses. They're common hearths. Most homes in Goblin City are cozy but small, often with barely more than a kitchen nook. Goblins are relentlessly social, and daily life spills out into the neighborhood teahouse, where a simple meal and cups of strong Goblin tea can be had for a coupl...

The world of the Last Goblin Queen has two moons. How they move against each other shapes how the different Kingdoms keep their calendars and time their festivals. The Greater Moon dominates the night sky, glowing with a silvery light. It has a 27-day cycle from full moon to full moon. The Lesser Moon is smaller and quicker, racing across the sky with a bluish glow. Its cycle is just 18 days. Put those two cycles together, and you get a double full moon (or double new moon) every 54 days. Most years bring six of these double full moons, but every fourth year, a seventh sneaks in. So next time you spot "moons light" in the Kingdoms stories, know that it's not a typo — it's just how the sky works there.

Three Kingdoms short stories, "Embermanes", "Coppercrawlers", and "Nyra the Forsaken" are currently available for free on Amazon and Kindle e-books. "Embermanes":  The Spring Horse Market in Bridgemark is the last place Gada wants to be noticed. A road-worn goblin mercenary with more scars than silver, she only needs a bed for the night—and a sturdy mare she can afford. But when a razor-tongued Elvish bard named Eleanor turns their first meeting into a public sparring match, Gada’s plans for a quiet, anonymous stay go up in smoke—almost literally. Because the market’s prize attraction is an Embermane colt: a rare Flamebound horse coveted by nobles… and dangerously mishandled. When panic sparks into fire, Gada runs toward the flames with bow in hand, while Eleanor answers with music that reaches deeper than sound. Together, they must keep a blazing miracle from becoming a catastrophe—before a single frightened creature ignites the entire fair. In ...

When Alchemy allows lead to be transformed into gold, what do people use for money? In the Kingdoms, the answer is simple. The most valuable materials are those that cannot be altered by Alchemy: dragon scales and Alchemist's Glass. The highest valued currency is, quite literally, the scales of dragons. Dragons are beings of pure Element (Stone, Fire, Crystal, Water, Metal, or Void), making their scales completely immune to the effects of Alchemy. No alchemist can create them, duplicate them, or transform them into something else. That doesn't mean adventurers can simply slay a dragon and spend its scales. Each Kingdom regulates its currency by acid-etching genuine dragon scales with the Kingdom's official glyphs and sigils, certifying them for use as legal tender. Even so, dragon scales are extraordinarily rare. Most people in the Kingdoms will never see one in their lifetime. They are reserved for diplomacy between Kingdoms, major commercial exchanges, and the storage of ...

Armor is, at its heart, a conversation between a craftsman and violence — a negotiation over who yields and who endures. In the Kingdoms, that conversation is conducted in very different dialects, because each of the great Lineages has developed its own branch of Alchemical practice, and each has found its own answer to the ancient problem of protecting the body without surrendering the ability to move in it. The Elves: When Silk Becomes Steel Elven Alchemy is built around a technique called Amalgamation — using Alchemist's Flame to fuse unlike substances into something that carries the properties of both. For armorers, this opens possibilities that no conventional forge work can match. One of the most celebrated product of Elven Amalgamation is armorcloth: silk and steel, combined at the Alchemical level into a single material that is as hard as iron plate but drapes and moves like fine fabric. No buckles, no joints, no vulnerable gaps at the elbow or knee. An Elven warrior in arm...

In the Last Goblin Queen stories, all five Lineages — Goblin, Human, Ogre, Elf, and Naga — are almost entirely vegetarian peoples, with the occasional fish eaten in some of the more coastal communities. So when the stories describe something as made of 'leather,' where does it come from? In the context of the Kingdoms, 'leather' is a class of fabrics — not a single material. The most common variety, particularly in the Human and Ogre Kingdoms, is a thick barkcloth derived from pounding fibrous tree bark into flat sheets, soaking it in plant resins and tannins, and finishing it with ash. For applications like armor or scabbards, barkcloth leather is often layered into multiple sheets and coated with lacquer. The Goblins make sporehide: a tough, somewhat spongy fabric cultivated by growing sheets of specialized fungi on trays of sawdust. The result is durable and leathery, but needs to be rubbed with oil occasionally to keep from cracking. Sporehide almost always comes in...

Starting this Wednesday, 6/17, through Sunday, 6/21, "The Last Goblin Queen: Dragons of the Crystal Forest" will be availble for free and e-book though Amazon Kindle. Download "Dragons of the Crystal Forest" and leave a review!

In the setting of the Last Goblin Queen, there are five Lineages: Human, Goblin, Ogre, Elf, and Naga. Only Humans are capable of having children with other Lineages. While inter-Lineage marriages are rare among the Kingdoms, still how do the Lineages remain distinct over the centuries without becoming a gradient of different Lineages? In the Last Goblin Queen setting, it is only possible to be half-Human or 100% one Lineage, like a single-gene or single-chromosome trait. So the children of a Human and a Goblin would be half-Human, half-Goblin (called a Hobgoblin). The children of a Hobgoblin and a Human would all be entirely Human, and the children of a Hobgoblin and a Goblin would all be entirely Goblin. This leads to a number of possible romantic outcomes... The children of two Hobgoblins would be, on average, 50% Hobgoblin, 25% Human, and 25% Goblin. The children of a Hobgoblin and an Ogre would all be half-Ogres. For a Hobgoblin and a half-Ogre parents, on average, one third of the...

Every world has its true believers — and in the Five Kingdoms, none are more fervent, or more dangerous, than the Redcaps. The Redcaps began as a fringe movement, the kind of faction that serious people dismissed and cautious people avoided. Their central conviction was simple, and simply absolute: the Goblin King is no mere ruler. He is a semi-divine figure, chosen and sanctified, whose authority over Goblin society is total and unchallengeable. For generations, this belief kept them on the margins — muttering in border towns, nursing grievances in the Kingdom's forgotten corners, waiting for someone worth believing in. They found him in King Gannon. Gannon never formally endorsed the Redcaps. He didn't have to. What he offered was something more valuable: silence. As the Redcaps filtered into Goblin City and began making themselves felt in its streets and neighborhoods, the King looked elsewhere. Their excesses — the harassment, the intimidation, the slow poisoning of civic l...

 Among all the Lineages of the Kingdoms, none are more elusive than the Naga. They are the least populous of the Lineages, and often the least seen. Many live their entire lives without ever meeting one in person, which has allowed myth and misunderstanding to grow around them in equal measure. Naga are striking in form: humanoid from the waist up, and serpentine below. Their bodies are covered in scales that shift in pattern and color — bands of green, gold, scarlet, or amber catching the light as they move. Their eyes are most often a deep red, with narrow slit pupils that seem to measure the world with unsettling precision. Naga are renowned for their mastery of poisons and toxins. This is not simply a matter of warfare, but of deep biological and alchemical understanding. Naga healers, alchemists, and artisans work with compounds that other Lineages approach only with caution. Their knowledge of subtle chemical interactions is unmatched, and often feared. Naga Alchemy tends tow...