Chasing Driftwood Books

30/07/2025

A monster in the bay. A girl no one believes. A forgotten woman with nothing left to lose.

Check out your next Summer Reaad!! 📚

The Dowager's Dream, is available in paperback from https://www.feedaread.com/books/The-Dowagers-Dream-9781835971406.aspx

or from amazon as an e-book on kindle or in paperback.

Blurb:

In a crumbling mansion on the north coast of Scotland, the Dowager grows old; exiled there by her son, she dreams of her girlhood and waits for death. When her tenants keep talking of a monster in the sea, the Dowager becomes obsessed by the strange creature that might be living in the bay beyond her windows.

The Kirk Minister, Mr. MacKenzie, prides himself on being a man of the enlightenment and refuses to countenance such superstition among his flock. Even when his daughter, Mary, sees the creature, half-woman half-fish, trapped in the ice of the frozen burn, the Minister dismisses it as an absurd fancy although all his parishioners know Mary to be the most truthful of girls.

Mary grows as obsessed with the sea monster as the Dowager and along with her overwhelming desire to see the strange creature once more, she begins to develop other secret, passionate yearnings that fill her with shame.

Kirsty MacDonald, maid-of-all work at the Manse, claims the sea monster must portend disaster and she is right for the Laird has grand plans to improve the estate. He brings in an ambitious young land agent, William Patterson, to evict all the tenants from their crofts in order to turn the land over to an army of sheep.

What no one expects, the Laird least of all, is that the tenants will find an ally in the Dowager but in standing up to her unscrupulous son, she knows she will have to pay a terrible price.

05/06/2025

Here is the second part of Miriam Hastings extremely thoughtful and well written response to the rise of AI in creative writing!

Miriam Hastings, Part 2 Miriam’s award-winning novel, The Minotaur Hunt AI and the Pathetic Fallacy. by Miriam Hastings. One of the main problems of AI is the limited concept of intelligence …

03/06/2025

K.M Allan has a new release - check out the amazing review so far!

Writing and Editing Checklists is out now & I’ve been blown away with the love you guys are showing it!

The post sharing & support has made my day, and the Kindle version has even popped up at number 1 and number 2 on two different Amazon AU Hot New Releases charts! Thank you! 🙏🏻 ❤️

23/05/2025

Miriam Hastings is the latest of our authors to respond to the use of AI in creative writing. This is the first part of her response and the second part we'll post next Friday!

Our AI discussion continues this week with responses from award-winning author Miriam Hastings… Miriam Hastings – image belongs to the author What is AI? For this blog post, Chantelle A…

02/05/2025

Continuing our interviews with authors responding to AI in creative writing, this week we have Chantelle Atkins-Author Page's views on the topic.

Chantelle Atkins Continuing our exploration of what generative AI in creative writing means to authors, this week we have author Chantelle Atkins giving her views on the topic. image belongs to Cha…

25/04/2025

Our next few blog posts will concern the rise of AI in creative writing. We've asked our authors how they feel about AI and the future of writing. Our first post is from the award-winning author Kate Rigby - Books.

Kate Rigby For the next few weeks we will be diving into the topic of AI and it’s potential impact on authors. We’ve asked our authors the same questions in order to gauge their views a…

26/03/2025

Today’s post is all about YA author K.M. Allan - Writer 🥳🥳🥳🥳

K.M. Allan is an identical twin, but not the evil one. She started her career penning beauty articles for a hairstyling website and now powers herself with chocolate and green tea while she writes books and blogs about writing.

When she’s not creating stories, she reads, binge-watches too much TV, spends time with family, and takes more photos than she will ever humanly need.

Her modern fantasy series, Blackbirch, features lost memories, haunting nightmares, premonitions, magical abilities, friendship, found family, first loves, dark secrets, and cliffhanger twists. All four books have been a hit with readers, receiving multiple 4 and 5-star reviews, and reaching the top 5 on Amazon’s Hot New Release bestseller list upon each release.

🌲 🌲🌲🌲🌲🌲🌲🌲

Blackbirch book one, The Begining, introduces us to the mysterious town of Blackbirch, a place no one forgets. Except for Josh Taylor…

The fatal car crash took more than 17-year-old Josh’s parents. It stole his memories and returned him to his birthplace, Blackbirch, a tourist town steeped in a history of witchcraft.

Amongst friends he’s forgotten and a life he doesn’t want, Josh is haunted by nightmares so believable he swears the girl in his dreams is real. Kallie is so captivating he ignores her blood-stained hands, but he can’t overlook the blue glow summoned to her skin.

Kallie says it’s an ancient magic they share and a secret worth hiding, because as Josh discovers, they aren’t the only gifted ones.

To restore his memories and find the true cause of the car accident, he must learn what’s real. And what secrets Blackbirch has buried in its woods.

Reviews 🌟 🌟🌟🌟🌟

“I devoured this book! The intrigue grabs you from page one, and this air of mystery and magic carries throughout the whole story.”

“Blackbirch: The Beginning has the kind of smart, sharp prose that makes it stand head and shoulders above the usual YA read.”

“…a cliffhanger ending that made my jaw drop…”

“Blackbirch: The Beginning is the kind of book that will make you stay up late reading it and then invade your dreams.”

“K.M Allan weaves you into the story at a visceral level – creating a sense of place and a feeling of dread, that follows you right through to the closing pages.”

25/03/2025

Today we celebrate the wonderfully talented Kate Rigby - Books!! 🤩🤩🤩🤩

Kate Rigby has been writing for several decades. She was late-diagnosed with autism and ADHD in her sixties and it's been a life-changer. It's made massive sense of her life, particularly her writing one. She has created a new blog to chart her journey called 'authisticwords'. She also uploads some of them to her YouTube channel: TheBubbity

She realized her unhip credentials were mounting so decided to write about it.

However she's not completely unhip. Her punk novel, Fall Of The Flamingo Circus was published by Allison & Busby (1990) and by Villard (American hardback 1990). Skrev Press published her novels Seaview Terrace (2003) Sucka! (2004) and Break Point (2006) and other shorter work has appeared in Skrev's avant garde magazine Texts' Bones including a version of her satirical novella Lost The Plot.

Thalidomide Kid was published by Bewrite Books (2007).

She also received a Southern Arts bursary for her novel Where A Shadow Played (now 'Did You Whisper Back?').

In 2011 she embraced the digital world and now all her titles have been kindled or rekindled and most of them are back in paperback.

Details about Kate's work can be found at her website:

http://kjrbooks.yolasite.com/

Or her blogs can be found at:

https://authisticwords.blogspot.com/

http://bubbitybooks.blogspot.com/

Kate is a prominent poster over on TikTok, too. Submitting a multitude of interesting videos about neurodiversity, as well as sharing some of her own experiences, writing, and poetry.

We highly recommend a follow!! 😁😁

https://www.tiktok.com/?_t=ZN-8uyTIvTsB7u&_r=1

20/03/2025

Next up we have Miriam Hastings 🥳

In her work, Miriam Hastings is concerned with exploring the position and experience of the outsider. Her first novel, The Minotaur Hunt, was published by the Harvester Press and won the MIND book of the year award in 1988. A revised edition is now available in paperback and on Kindle, with a new afterword by the author.

Her collection of short stories, Demon Lovers, was shortlisted for the Scott Award (Salt Publishing) in 2010. Three of these short stories are available on Kindle as The Doll and other stories: Strange tales.

Her historical novel, Walking Shadow, set at the time of the gunpowder plot, has been published on Kindle and also as a paperback from FeedARead. Her most recent novel, The Dowager's Dream, is now available in paperback and as an e-book on Kindle.

The Dowager’s Dream is a surreal fantasy set on the north coast of Scotland at the time of the brutal clearances in the Scottish Highlands. The novel was inspired by the (largely imagined) lives of Miriam’s great great-grandmothers, Margaret MacKenzie and Christine Patterson, and also by an account written in 1809 by a minister’s daughter, describing a mermaid she had seen in Sandside Bay, Caithness. Although The Dowager’s Dream is set in the early years of the 19th Century, the themes of dispossession and ethnic cleansing will resonate with the contemporary reader.

You can find the rest of Miriam’s works here:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/author/B00D1WEVO0

18/03/2025

As early this month marked International Women’s Day, what better month than to celebrate all our phenomenal female writers 🤩 ✍️

Kicking it off we have Chantelle Atkins!!!!

Chantelle Atkins was born and raised in Dorset, England and still resides there now with her husband, four children, and multiple pets. She is addicted to reading, writing, and music and writes for both the young adult and adult genres.

Her fiction is described as gritty, edgy and compelling. Her debut Young Adult novel The Mess Of Me deals with eating disorders, self-harm, fractured families and first love.

Her second novel, The Boy With The Thorn In His Side follows the musical journey of a young boy attempting to escape his brutal home life and has now been developed into a 5 book series. She is also the author of This Is Nowhere and award-winning dystopian, The Tree Of Rebels, plus a collection of short stories related to her novels called Bird People and Other Stories. The award-winning Elliot Pie’s Guide To Human Nature was released in October 2018.

A Song For Bill Robinson was the first in YA trilogy titled Holds End, followed by Emily's Baby and The Search For Summer. Recently, she has co-authored the Fortune's Well YA trilogy with Sim Alec Sansford. The Day The Earth Turned books 1-4 are her latest series release. Followed by the amazing The Boy series spin off, At Night We Played in the Road. And her follow up to her first novel, The Mess of Us, which has received multiple glowing reviews.

You can find all of Chantelle’s books at the link below! 😁

https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/author/B00J7ACVCY/about

04/03/2025

Last week's blog post sings the praises of the humble blog!

With the unpredictability of social media why maintaining a blog is vital for authors in 2025 Image by Werner Moser from Pixabay I started my Wordpress blog way before I published my first novel in…

25/02/2025

“A great fast paced read!” ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“You will love this book!” ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“Amazing paranormal mystery!” ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“‘I don’t belong in your world, Harper Andrews,’ Gideon repeated, almost as if he had read my thoughts…”

Blurb:

Plagued by strange dreams and questions about her past, Harper Andrews is leaving the comfort of her college campus behind to go in search of answers. Answers she believes are hidden in the town of Denver Falls.

What will she find? What will she lose?

And who is the mysterious shadow that haunts her dreams?

Welcome to Denver Falls... We hope you enjoy your visit.

mybook.to/WelcomeToDenverFalls