Where do I start?
Should I tell you how this story lived in my head for years before I had the courage to actually start writing it back in June 2025? Should I mention the fan fiction I wrote long before that, based on characters and worlds I'd loved as a reader? I could spend a long time on the past, but I think it makes more sense to tell you where I am now and if you have questions, you can always ask.
Right now, Riftguard is sitting at just over 180,000 words. Which is daunting, because I need to cut it down to at least 160,000 before it goes to my editor this September. I'm finishing the last three chapters, the finale of Book One, and I've already mapped out Book Two and the rest of the series, which I'm hoping will run to at least eight novels. There's a big story to tell here. Not just Saiya Wildthorn and Corin Dravehall, who you'll meet first, but a whole cast of other protagonists and antagonists who get their own arcs further down the line. There will be highs and lows, but at its heart it's a fantasy romance, a genre that's finally being put on the pedestal it deserves, instead of laughed off as something less than literature.
Stories have always been about going somewhere else. A different world, a different time, sometimes a different life. As a lifelong reader, I've never quite thought of that as escapism — or not only escapism, though these days the temptation to escape from the state of the world is real. I think of it more as a way of understanding: why people do what they do when bad things happen, and how we see ourselves through the stories we choose to live inside.
So, Riftguard. At its heart, it's the story of a woman who is no longer young or naive, but still has so much to live and fight for. Sound familiar to us 30-40+ women out there?
When Saiya Wildthorn wakes after death, she is conscripted into the Riftguards: soldiers reborn to hold back the monsters pouring through rifts in the fabric of the world. Behind the black walls of Vaerngard, the Reborn are trained to be weapons, not people.
But as ancient magic begins to stir and Riftguards start to vanish, Saiya uncovers fractures beneath the fortress's unbreakable image. Secrets coil through the ranks. The Council watches too closely. And her commander, Corin Dravehall, feared, brilliant, and brutally controlled — is not the cold weapon the world believes him to be. They are drawn together as the truth is discovered. I won't say anymore.
It's a story of resurrection, elemental warfare, and slow-burn forbidden romance — about power, sacrifice, and what it means to choose yourself in a world determined to own you.
Riftguard exists because of a group of women I met years ago on a book fan site. They have been my rock - through my old life working in London, the birth of my daughter, the strange loneliness of early motherhood during the Covid years, and every chapter since. They've given me reasons to smile, and more importantly, hope in what I could become. Somehow they believed there was something worth reading in the things I'd written before, and they kept telling me - gently at first, and then less gently - to actually write the book I'd been dreaming about for years.
So I did. Every week, I sent them a new chapter. Many of those chapters have since been rewritten as the story evolved, and even now I'm editing as I work on the final three. What started as an idea has grown into a monolith of a world, something I have loved building, and that I hope you'll love stepping into.
Thank you for being here at the start of this. Going independent is terrifying and exciting in equal measure. There are so many wonderful authors out there, and I can only hope to earn a fraction of the attention they receive but this isn't about fame or fortune. It's a passion, and I want to keep doing it.
Having my life turned upside down - leaving a job I loved in the city despite the challenges of the corporate world, becoming a stay-at-home mother, struggling to find a role that fits around the realities of raising a child - has been its own kind of identity crisis. But I wouldn't change any of it.
I still have a voice. I still have dreams. And I hope becoming a writer is one I get to keep.
- Tasha