What Lies Below #

Releases November 11th 2025 #

How do you rebuild when your life has fallen apart?

WHAT LIES BELOW is an epic fantasy at a personal scale. Iason Tohr is a grave tender who has lived a long life away from society. After his brother-in-law is murdered and his home burned, Iason and his widowed sister are miraculously granted refuge at a gorgeous chapel in the middle of the woods.

The assignment is almost too good to be true—the order was signed by the ever plotting, High Vicar Agustin. The siblings find themselves embroiled in a paranormal nightmare that threatens their home and their mortal souls. Confronted by ghosts, undead knights, and an oppressive faith hellbent on erasing their culture, the siblings must face their grief and learn how to be a family if they hope to survive Agustin’s cosmic conspiracy.

Development #

Progress |xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx–| 90% #

• (X) Initial concept: 2021
  • ~30,000 words
  • Scrapped. Characters and ideas recycled into first draft.
• (X) First draft: 2022-2023
  • ~80,000
  • Edits done as I went. Thought I was done, but realized it had that “obviously self-published” vibe. No bueno.
• (X) Second draft: 2023
  • ~120,000 words
  • Completely rewritten using first draft as a basis. Two characters added to expand the narrative. Major issues sorted out in rewriting.
• (X) Third draft: 2024
  • ~130,000 words
  • A large scale developmental edit that took most of my writing energy for 2024. Major plot restructuring and content expansion. Getting closer, but some early readers reported several errors in the text. Come on, James! Gosh!
• (X) Fourth Draft: Feb to March 2025
  • ~129,000 words
  • A thorough copy edit correcting said pesky errors. Restructuring sentences and rearranging paragraphs for clarity. Some cutting.
• (—) Fifth Draft: March to June 2025?? (We’ll see)
  • ~127,000
  • Line by line proofread of the proof paperback. Classic pen markup calling out sentence restructuring, word swaps, and a lot of cutting. Adverbs be gone!