The Alleys of Olde Architecture: Volume I—A Key for Every Lock is available on Amazon! Click here to visit my Amazon author page.

Both eBooks and paperback versions are available.

If you read and enjoy A Key for Every Lock, please leave a good review on Amazon! Good reviews are the best way to help this story reach a wider audience.

Elevator Pitch:

When her father is arrested in the middle of the night and confesses to a crime that cannot possibly be true, fifteen-year-old Alley a’Door has one day to climb to the top of the mountain, free her father, and clear his name—but how do you save a man who is dead-set on orchestrating his own execution? Over the longest day of her life, Alley and her friends will race against the clock to climb the great Stair, unraveling the mystery of her father’s cabalistic testimony and the truth behind his cryptic warning that their city—the only home she has ever known—is not what it seems to be.

Due to its length, The Alleys of Olde Architecture will be published in three volumes. (See below for more details.)

Volume I—A Key for Every Lock is available on Amazon.

Dark, Gothic Fantasy

Volume I—120,000 words

Complete Saga—515,000 words

Copyright 2021

Stuck-in-a-broken-elevator Pitch:

The Alleys of Olde Architecture is a Grimmly-Gothic Fantasy Saga, but there are no elves or dragons or cataclysmic battles between the Armies of Good and Evil. Where there are shadows of those old, familiar things, they are cast in a new light… or shoved into the background where you hardly notice them at all.

Okay, if that is what it’s not, then… what is it?

It’s BIG. The three-part saga is slightly longer than The Lord of the Rings, but the pace is breakneck and every page is brimming with eerie wonder, weird humor, beating hearts, and the subtlest traces of magic you can never quite put your finger on.

It is really fun! Before you begin to wonder if this is another dark, brooding tale of woe and desolation, stop right there! The Number One Priority when I was writing was to make this fun to read—even when Alley is knocked down, dragged out, and can barely manage to climb another step. The story is a roller-coaster of phantastic action, tantalizing mysteries, extravagant settings, and unpredictable characters who dance around tired old tropes like trip-wires.

It is a fantasy, but ‘magic’ and mythical monsters take a backseat. Alley lives in a Grimmly gothic city stuffed full of strange wonders; if she sees a minotaur or a manticore walking down the street, she hardly thinks twice, and neither will you. What does it take to get her attention, besides a good-looking boy? A ship in the night, arriving unannounced, unloading a thousand unlabeled boxes and crates? A sword that cannot lose in single combat? A key that can open any lock? A lock that cannot be opened by any key?

It is PG-13. It is my firm intention never to write anything I would not be comfortable reading aloud to my own family. There is very mild language in this story (the word ‘ass’ is used once, in reference to a donkey; ‘hell’ is used a handful of times, usually in phrases like ‘hellspawn’ or ‘all hell breaks loose.’) Most characters spew made-up maledictions when they curse. There is zero sex, nudity, or ‘adult situations,’ but there is a fair amount of violence, though never glorified; a few characters get their heads cut off, for example. No torture or other graphically disturbing rubbish. Villainous miscreants do commit some atrocious acts, much of which is only hinted at. There are no modern political or ideological overtones.

It is hard to categorize. Content-wise, the story straddles the line between YA and Adult Fantasy. (Note: ‘Adult’ does not mean inappropriate; it just means not exclusively geared toward a younger age-range.) YA novels tend to focus heavily on ‘teenage issues,’ whatever those are. Adult Fantasy tends to be broader in scope, with wider, more complex worlds, entire encyclopedias of secondary characters, and, if not darker, then perhaps deeper emotional themes, whatever that means. Well, this story stars a fifteen-year-old girl and she has crushes on boys and worries about how she looks and how she is going to find her way in the world and other relatable, teenage concerns… but her emotional arc is complex and dives pretty deeply into the cosmological whirlpool… So, what is it? Simply put, it is itself, and undefinable. Just like a fifteen-year-old girl, or so I imagine.

It is ambitious. Without giving anything away, this book nearly broke my brain to cobble together. You know that feeling when you are doing a jigsaw puzzle and nothing seems to be fitting, and then a bolt of ultraviolet lightning literally strikes your table and every piece starts glowing, and they slide themselves together and form a perfect picture, only the mosaic is actually a mirror of your own twisted soul as though seen from outside your body, and before you can look away you realize you are the puzzle? I am not saying that is what I accomplished, but that is what I was aiming for. I sincerely hope that when you finish reading this book, your brain hurts—and your heart is soaring like a hot air balloon spiraling over a volcano, and you flip back to the first page and start reading it all over again!

It is unique. Of course, every author thinks their book is one-of-a-kind, but if I had to render a comparison, I would say… imagine Diagon Alley designed by Tim Burton, then stretch it three miles into the sky on a mountain in the middle of the sea and fill it full of creatures from Guillermo Del Toro’s cutting room floor. Drop in a teenage girl as clever as Katniss Everdeen and cutthroat as Arya Stark, send her on an adventure that feels like Fablehaven was put in a rock tumbler with His Dark Materials, populated with characters that might be equally at home in Gormenghast or The Phantom Tollbooth, cap it all off with a four-dimensional Rubix Cube Conclusion—then run the whole thing through a blender in Neil Gaiman’s secret, underground laboratory, and voila: you have The Alleys of Olde Architecture.

It is a love letter to the English language. I love puns you never notice and long-forgotten words that look like old, familiar faces when your eyes pass over them, and have done my best to make sure that every page has at least one example, if not more, of the sort of joyful, creative flourishes that made me fall in love with a good book for the first time. Part of this project involved developing a homemade dictionary with 3,000+ words gathered from medieval lexicons or snippets of Shakespeare or The Phrontistery of wherever else I could find them, and though I did not squeeze every last one into this book (I do have some self-restraint), you will find a number of wonderful words you will wonder how you ever did without.

Ultimately, it is an adventure—and reading it ought to be an adventure, too. There is in these pages the promise of a new day, and bright, shining hope and selfless love and all the best things in life, but there is hardship and struggle, also, and deep pain, and death. I guarantee you will laugh. You may cry. You may get so frustrated you slam the book down and go walk around the block, seething… and then you will come back, burn through two more chapters, and stand up and cheer for Alley when she finds her courage! Like all adventures, though, it will come to an end… but if you are anything like Alley a’Door, and if you pay attention, you may begin to wonder if there really is such a thing as an ending, after all…

Why split the story into three volumes?

The Alleys of Olde Architecture was conceived and written as a cohesive story, told in seven acts. It would be nearly impossible to publish the whole thing in a single volume; imagine two or three of the longer Harry Potter books smashed together and you will have some idea of the challenge, not only to the publisher, but to the reader.

The seven acts are structured such that the story can be neatly subdivided and ‘packaged’ in three volumes:

Volume I—A Key for Every Lock contains Acts I, II, & III.

Volume II contains Acts IV, V, and VI.

Volume III contains Act VII.

Even splitting the seven acts up, challenges remain. The whole saga still makes for a long read and publishers can be risk-averse to signing on for a ‘series’ from a first-time author, but where there is a will, there is a way.

The Story So Far:

Status-in-a-Nutshell: Complete! Ready to read! If you are an agent or a publisher, call me!

After nine-and-a-half years, The Alleys of Olde Architecture is finished! Hurray! Anyone and everyone who is interested is welcome to read it—in fact, nothing would make me happier!

Until I can get a traditional publisher to sign on, however, the only way to get this story out there is to self-publish it and try to rack up sales. If you are interested in checking it out, Volume I is now available on Amazon. If you read it and enjoy it, be sure to leave a good review!

What’s Next?

Finishing Alleys was the easy part—now, I need to get it published! That process will probably take a while. In the meantime, I will try to rack up online sales and good reviews, which can sometimes help in landing an agent and/or a publisher.

I will publish Volumes II and III on Amazon in a few months.

I also need to finish five more face-melting illustrations and a mind-blowing cover, which is going to be my most ambitious art project ever. But hey, no sweat!