Suneé le Roux's Blog

Why Dragons Keep Turning Up in My Stories (and My Favourite Literary Dragons)

When someone asks me what my favourite genre is, I always reply: “As long as it has a dragon in it, I’ll read it.” There’s just something about these scaly, winged beings – wise, dangerous, sometimes wicked – that I can’t resist.

So it’s probably no surprise that my own books ended up featuring dragons too.

(Though, since I’m a plantser – somewhere between plotting and discovery writing – even I was caught off guard when dragons suddenly appeared in my stories. They’re now firmly part of my Mythical Menagerie lore, and I wouldn’t have it any other way!)

My Favourite Kinds of Dragons

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post listing some of my favourite literary dragons. Of course, Smaug made the cut – he deserves his place in the dragon hall of fame – but while Tolkien’s creations embody pure evil, I’ve always preferred mine a little more complex.

Still dangerous, of course, but not outright malevolent. Think Ursula Le Guin’s Kalessin rather than Smaug.

Dragons in the Mythical Menagerie

Minor spoilers for the series ahead!

Angharad – The Red Welsh Dragon

Angharad helps Ambrose with the small matter of an asrai’s curse. Like Smaug, she lives in a cave surrounded by treasure – but unlike him, she becomes Ambrose’s protector. Her fiery mark saves him from more than a few scrapes down the road.

Kentigern Mor – The Loch Ness Dragon

Later, on a quest for a spriggan, Ambrose meets Kentigern Mor, a sinuous blue dragon who makes his home in Loch Ness. Is he the legendary Nessie? Possibly. He’s certainly grumpy enough about all the humans poking around his lake. When Ambrose offers him peace and quiet, Kentigern is more than willing to strike a bargain.

Longshen – The River Dragon of Taiwan

And now – much to my delight, and entirely unexpectedly – while working on Book 4, Ambrose encounters another dragon. Longshen is a river dragon from Taiwanese tradition. The moment I learned about these creatures, I knew I had to include one. Whether Longshen proves to be a help or a hindrance on Ambrose’s journey… well, that remains to be seen.

Do you love dragons as much as I do? Drop your favourite literary dragon in the comments—I’d love to see which ones make your list! And if you’d like more behind-the-scenes lore and sneak peeks from the Mythical Menagerie, make sure you’re subscribed to my newsletter.

From Myers-Briggs to Enneagram: What I’ve Learned About Myself as a Writer

How do you feel about personality type tests?

Personally, I’m a huge fan – which makes total sense because, according to the Myers-Briggs test, I’m an INTJ (spoiler alert: we like taking personality tests, lol).

Myers-Briggs is a personality assessment that sorts people into 16 types based on how they prefer to focus attention (introvert vs. extrovert), take in information (sensing vs. intuition), make decisions (thinking vs. feeling), and approach life (judging vs. perceiving). It’s designed to highlight natural strengths and tendencies rather than measure ability or intelligence.

As an INTJ (The Mastermind), I’m someone who’s strategic, independent, and future-focused. People from my type naturally see patterns and long-term possibilities. They’re logical and decisive, preferring efficiency and planning over spontaneity, but may come across as reserved or intense.

I’ve only recently started diving into the Enneagram, a personality system that identifies nine core types, each based on deep motivations, fears, and desires rather than just surface behaviour. It helps people understand not only how they act, but why they act that way, offering insight into personal growth, relationships, and stress patterns.

In this system, I identify as Type 5 (The Investigator). This type is defined by a drive to understand the world and feel competent through knowledge. Fives are curious, analytical, and independent, but they can also be withdrawn and protective of their time and energy, fearing they won’t have enough inner resources to cope with life’s demands.

More specifically, I’m a Type 5w4 (The Iconoclast) – someone who is analytical, private, and deeply curious like a core Five, but with the Four wing’s creative, individualistic flair. They often blend sharp intellect with emotional depth, making them insightful, original, and sometimes a little withdrawn or eccentric.

ChatGPT tells me that as a writer with these personality types, I combine strategy, depth, and originality:

Strategic Vision (INTJ): You’re skilled at seeing the bigger picture, structuring complex plots, and weaving long-term arcs with purpose.Analytical Depth (Type 5): Your curiosity and need to understand mean your worlds, systems, and characters feel well-researched, layered, and believable.Creative Uniqueness (4 wing): You bring a distinct voice and imaginative flair, infusing your work with originality, symbolism, and emotional resonance.Focus and Discipline (INTJ): Once you commit, you can work methodically toward finishing large projects without losing sight of your goals.Insightful Themes (5w4): You naturally explore profound questions about identity, truth, and human nature, giving your stories intellectual and emotional weight.

It also says say my main challenges might be:

Perfectionism & Overplanning: You may get stuck refining outlines, worldbuilding, or systems instead of drafting, because you want everything “just right” before starting.Isolation: Both INTJ and 5w4 lean toward independence, which can make it hard to share your work early, seek feedback, or feel part of a writing community.Emotional Withholding: While you think deeply, you might struggle to put raw emotion on the page, favouring intellect over vulnerability – but readers often crave both.Creative Restlessness: The 4 wing can make you long for uniqueness, so you may abandon projects if they feel too ordinary or similar to existing works.Energy Management: Type 5s guard their inner resources; long writing sessions or deadlines may leave you mentally drained if you don’t pace yourself.

This assessment is pretty damn accurate, and if you’re still reading this I bet you know more about me now than you really wanted to! But I think this is a good exercise for anyone who wants to understand themselves better and to know what they’re really good at and what they might need to work at improving.

Or maybe that just my INTJ-Type 5 mentality, and you might find this extremely boring and pointless, hehe.

One place my INTJ side really shows up is in the way I plot the Mythical Menagerie series. I can’t help but think in terms of patterns and long-term arcs, which means I’ll happily spend hours untangling timelines so that events across different books overlap seamlessly. For example, in Keepers’ Bane and Council’s Prize, I had to make sure the characters’ paths crossed without contradicting the larger story. That kind of big-picture planning is both a puzzle and a thrill for me – definitely the strategist in action.

On the other hand, my Type 5w4 side tends to come out most strongly in my flash fiction. Stories like The Moonveil Bloom or Fortune Teller’s Fate lean heavily into atmosphere, symbolism, and emotional resonance. I love taking a single haunting image – like a flower that only blooms under moonlight, or a seer faced with nothing instead of visions – and building a story around it. That mix of curiosity and creative flair scratches both the Investigator and Iconoclast parts of my personality, and it’s probably why those short, lyrical pieces feel so different from my longer novels.

I know that one of my personal weak points as a writer is getting people right, and I’m hoping to deep dive into the Enneagram some more to see if I can learn to understand my characters better. Hopefully that will help me to get my future books pretty close to perfect.

And that’s all an INTJ-Type 5 can ask for, isn’t it?

Have you completed any personality assessment tests? Where do you fall on the Myers-Briggs or Enneagram types? Are there any other personality systems you think would be useful for me to look at?

Release Day: Myth Maker (Mythical Menagerie Book 3)

If you’ve been waiting to see what happens to Ambrose – and the creatures inside the Repository – after that cliffhanger from Myth Keeper, then your time has finally come! Today is a book birthday – hooray!

The fate of the mythical world hangs in the balance – and Ambrose Davids may be the only one who can save it.

When a deadly creature escapes the Repository and begins stalking the streets of London, Ambrose is strangely hesitant to act. But when a friend’s life is threatened, he’s forced back into the world he thought he’d left behind to hunt down the beast before time runs out.

One mission leads to another, and soon Ambrose is facing more than just mythical monsters. With his sister missing and his past catching up to him, he sets out on a desperate journey across Europe – one that leads him to the elusive and dangerous Twilight Market, a place where myths are traded like coin and nothing comes without a cost.

Can Ambrose reclaim what was stolen before it’s too late?

Meanwhile, deep inside the Repository, newly appointed Keeper of Exotic Animals James Davids is discovering that power comes with a price. Forced to collaborate with a ruthless researcher, James finds himself overseeing experiments that promise profit at the cost of the creatures’ wellbeing.

As pressure mounts from the Council and the creatures grow restless, James must decide whether he’ll be a protector… or a pawn.

Grab your copy in e-book, paperback or hardcover from your favourite online retailer NOW!

Rebranding the Mythical Menagerie Series

So, you know in the old days, before the joys of e-books and online shopping, where you still went to an actual bookstore and bought physical books? It almost feels like a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…

Anyhoo, at the risk of showing my age here, I used to frequent a physical bookshop back in the good old days. And because I live at the bottom end of Africa, we’d have to wait extra long before the books finally arrived here – even longer for the right format and size, if you’re as finicky as I am. You’d need to grab them when they landed on the shelf, otherwise they’d be out of stock and you’d be screwed.

So there I was, quietly freaking out about The Wheel of Time (long before online fandoms) and collecting each instalment as they appeared, ooh’ing and aah’ing over the pretty covers and debating with myself (before the Internet, kids) whether that was really how I pictured Rand and wondering if I could secretly be Moiraine.

And then BAM! Book 10 hits the shelf and – what is this fresh hell?! – they’ve changed the cover design!

I’m telling you, twenty years later, and it still stings.

(And in case you were wondering, I do have Book 14, but only on Kindle. Will the madness ever end?!)

All of this is to say, you’ll understand that when I decided to rebrand my books, I didn’t do so lightly. I console myself with the thought that people only buy e-books nowadays and no physical copies of my books are gracing anyone’s shelves (which also makes me a little sad. Let’s say no physical copies, YET). At least with e-books, a rebrand doesn’t sting as bad.

Although I really LOVE my existing covers, the market wants what the market wants, and I have to do what I can to get these books noticed by more readers. This means they need to conform to genre expectations.

So, while I was in the trenches with the final instalment for Book 3, I also designed a whole new set of covers, not only for the first two books but also for the next two (yes, this is going to be a 4-book series – if all goes as planned! – but I’ll keep Book 4’s cover under wraps for now).

What do you think of the new covers?!

Myth Maker, book 3 in the series, will be released on 1 September 2025 and is now available for preorder from Amazon and all the usual online retailers.

Grab your copy NOW! Go on, you know you want to!

My 2024 in Books

I live by the saying “you are what read” and I think it’s incredibly important to never stop reading. The hour or so of reading time before bed every night is my absolute highlight of every day (unless the book is bad, but still, hehe) and I’m always incredibly grateful to the stories that help me escape normal life and adventure into magical worlds.

Last year I read 46 books, and I’m happy to say that this number has increased to 59 (although, to be fair, quite a number of them were short stories and novellas). It’s not really a numbers game for me, but I do like to brag a bit, I’ll be honest, lol. And while I usually challenge myself to read something specific, 2024 was just about reading whatever I felt like. It was pretty liberating, I won’t lie, and I’ll do it again in 2025.

So without further ado, let’s have a look at the books that shaped my reading year.

(PS: If any of these books interest you, please consider using my affiliate links. They won’t cost you any extra, but I will get a small commission to fuel my book-reading habit. Thanks!)

Books About Travel

Wow, I can’t believe I only read this one! (I didn’t like it either, which might be what put me off reading more about travel this year.) The book was organised by longitude and latitude, which I found really impractical and annoying, and there weren’t many ideas I found interesting in it either. Disappointing.

Books on Writing and Marketing

A bumper year for writing books! And although most of them were ultimately disappointing, I was dazzled by Subscriptions for Authors and Become an Unstoppable Storyteller, both of which inspired me to take my flash fiction writing further. Honourable mention also goes to Writing the Shadow and The Successful Author Mindset, which offered up some good food for thought as well.

Other Non-Fiction Books

This year, I discovered that my favourite historian on television has also written numerous books! I quite enjoyed Venus & Aphrodite (although it felt a bit short and rushed), but I absolutely devoured The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and it has sparked quite a few story ideas and, ironically for the neglected travel section of my reading list, inspired lots of travel must-go’s.

Books that were Okay

Reading is subjective, and although some of these have rave reviews on Goodreads and Amazon, they just didn’t do it for me, for whatever reason. Don’t let that deter you though – you might just love them.

Books that I Liked

I really liked all the books on this list! This year I delved into romance with Emily Henry (and although they’re a bit spicier than I’d prefer to read, they were a lot of fun!) and I tried out horror with Joanna Penn, which is not normally something I’d read either. Marissa Meyer and JA Andrews are both insta-buys for me, and I enjoyed the follow ups to Miss Percy’s and Emily Wilde’s adventures.

Books that I Loved

All of these books delighted me and I recommend you grab them and add them to your TBR as well! The Fate’s Forsaken series was epic fantasy like I haven’t enjoyed in a long time, and Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series just blew me away. Alix Harrow is also an insta-buy for me, and it was on her recommendation that I tried out The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, which instantly shot HG Parry into my insta-buy list and I have two more of her books already waiting on my to-read list for next year.

As you may have guessed, The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door is also my book-of-the-year recommendation (followed closely by Starling House) – so if you’re looking for a good period fantasy with a touch of the fae in it, then go read it!

Have you read any of these books? What did you think of them? What was your favourite book of 2024? Do you have any recommendations for books I should read in 2025?

Looking Ahead to 2025

As you may know, I’m a great believer in setting goals to work towards at the start of every new year. If I didn’t, I’d spend my days in a haze of reading and playing PC games, and although that’s great in general and good enough for many people, in the long run it makes me feel like I haven’t done anything with my life. We have a limited amount of time available to us, and I don’t want to look back on life one day and regret the things I haven’t done.

Janus, Roman god of doorways | Adolphe Giraldon, Wikimedia Commons

And on that semi-morbid note, let’s see how I faired with my 2024 goals.

2024 Primary GoalsPublish Becoming Keeper

Yes! My Amari origin story, Becoming Keeper, was released in March 2024 in both e-book and paperback. It’s had some good reviews from people I’m not even remotely related to (lol) and I’m hoping that readers of the Mythical Menagerie series will enjoy this little prequel as much as I did writing it.

Write and edit 3 instalments for Mythical Menagerie Book 3

Sort of. The year slipped by in a blink while I was busy writing and editing Part 1 of Book 3, and in November I talked myself into taking part in NaNoWriMo again (which, as usual, I didn’t win). I did, however, manage to first draft the entire Part 2 and half of Part 3 in that month, which opened my eyes to how much I can get done in a short time if I put my mind to it (and not go on holiday or get sick in that same month, sigh).

Complete the Mythical Menagerie story bible to date

Yes! I started off doing this by hand, but in the end I cheated and dumped my books into ChatGPT and asked it to create a story bible for me. This has been very handy in an unexpected way, because now Chat knows my entire story and is very helpful with brainstorming ideas and providing descriptions in Ambrose’s voice (or at least, close enough so that I can easily edit what it suggests).

(PS: If you want to know how I use AI as an author, you can read more here .)

Write a monthly flash fiction piece

Yes! Surprisingly, I still manage to come up with a story idea every month and my newsletter subscribers seem to still enjoy them, which gives me endless amounts of creative satisfaction.

Publish Book 3 in the Reverie Flash Fiction series

Yes! A Song of Reverie was released in November 2024 and is available in e-book, paperback and hardcover from all the usual online retailers. It hasn’t sold a lot of copies as yet, but maybe in the new year I’ll figure out how to market flash fiction – which is an underrated art form, if you ask me.

Monetary goal from writing income

Not even a little bit! But I realise now that how much money I make with my books is out of my control and I can’t set that kind of goal and hope for success. I dipped my toe into Facebook marketing for the first time at the end of this year and did see some money come in from that (although I made a loss with advertising and still need to figure out how to make it profitable).

2024 Secondary GoalsGrow my email, Facebook and Instagram following

Yes, but meh. My total active email subscribers went up from 244 to 265, Facebook followers went up from 149 to 153, and Instagram followers went down from 307 to 301. I realise that once again, the numbers are out of my control and I should reconsider how I phrase this goal.

Grow my beta reader list

No. While I’m still currently only working on the Mythical Menagerie series, my beta readers need to be people who’ve read the first 2 books, so new betas will be hard to find at this point. I’ll revisit this goal once I start a new series.

Read John Truby’s Anatomy of Genre

Yes! And what a disappointment it was.

Complete the Maggie Stiefvater writing course

No. Maybe I’ll get round to it this year, but I have other things to focus on first.

Complete the UK 2023 blog posts on my travel blog

No, damnit. This will be a goal for next year again, with the increased pressure of adding a new set of vacation posts to it as well, lol.

Publish an audiobook

No. But I did complete a LinkedIn training course on the basics of audiobook creation, and I have more of an idea of what’s involved in making an audiobook now.

So it seems like I did pretty well with my primary writerly goals in 2024, and I’m well pleased with what I managed to achieve this year. My secondary goals fell by the wayside a bit, but it doesn’t bother me too much. They’re stretch goals, a bonus if I achieve them, and as such I still count 2024 a huge success.

So what’s in store for me in 2025? Well, as I said earlier, NaNoWriMo showed me how much I can get done if I make more time for doing it, so this year will be all about increasing my writing productivity. Let’s face it, all the social media and admin that fills up my free time under the guise of “marketing” isn’t really getting me anywhere, and the best thing I can do is to knuckle down and get more books out. I really want start writing other things, but I’m committed to completing the Mythical Menagerie series first, so that will be my primary focus this year.

2025 Primary GoalsDouble down on writing time (and use my available time better)Publish Mythical Menagerie Book 3Write a monthly flash fiction pieceEstablish a Ream subscription serviceSetup direct sales on my author websiteRelease an audiobook2025 Secondary GoalsWrite regular posts on my travel blog:Complete the UK 2023 seriesComplete the SA Roadtrip 2024 seriesImprove my social media presence with regular posting

And that’s it! As always, I’m ready to make the most of the year ahead and I can’t wait to get writing. I hope you’ll join me on my journey into 2025 and beyond.

Do you set goals or make New Year’s Resolutions? How did you do in 2024? And what do you have planned for 2025? Let me know in the comments below.

Release Day: A Song of Reverie

Against all expectations, I still manage to write a weird little fantasy story every month, and people seem to enjoy them – which makes me endlessly happy! And I’m also quite happy to announce that the third book in me Reverie Flash Fiction collection, A Song of Reverie, is now available for purchase.

You can grab your copy in e-book and paperback format from all the usual online retailers, or in hardcover from your local Amazon store. Grab your copy here!

(And if I were you, I’d get myself a physical copy, because each story comes with a gorgeous custom image! Just look at the examples below!)

Here’s the official book blurb:

Let the melodies of magic carry you away in this spellbinding collection of tales.

Step into worlds where dreams and reality intertwine, and the echoes of forgotten songs guide you through realms of fantasy and wonder. Each micro story in this collection opens a portal to a universe brimming with enchantment, stirring your imagination like notes whispered on the wind.

These tales – fleeting as a breath yet powerful enough to linger in your mind long after the last word – span from whimsical to dark and dreamlike, offering the perfect escape when time is short but your thirst for adventure is boundless.

Prepare to be spellbound by stories that resonate like long-lost melodies, calling you to rediscover the magic of imagination.

Whether you enjoy your fantasy high, dark, whimsical or low, there’s a story in this collection that’s just right for you, and they’re short enough that you can read one before bedtime every night – perfect!

Grab your copy of A Song of Reverie today!

How I Use AI as an Author

AI usage is a hot topic in the writing world, and rightly so. As a reader, I can completely relate to not wanting to be bombarded by a flood of low-quality books generated by lazy prompters, but as a writer I am thrilled with the plethora of AI tools now available to help me make my writing life easier and more fun.

But before you burn my books and unfollow me on social media, let me explain how I use AI, and perhaps then you’ll agree with me it’s not as bad as you think it is.

Editing and Critique

I run every story or blog post I write through ProWritingAid, which acts as a proofreader to help me catch grammar and other language issues.

For my fiction writing, I also make use of the critique function on ProWritingAid and I sometimes throw the story into ChatGPT and ask for a critique, mostly as an ego boost (it’s really validating to read good things about your work before you have the courage to unleash it upon the world), but also because it often points out some areas that I can improve upon, which I then choose to action or ignore.

Non-Fiction Writing

I can see an LLM like ChatGPT being very useful in generating lists of topics for non-fiction writers. The only non-fiction pieces I write are the ramblings on this blog and entries on my travel blog. Since both depend on my own thoughts and experiences, I don’t really use AI much, although I can see myself asking it for writing-related blog post ideas in the future.

Fiction Writing

I use ChatGPT extensively in my fiction writing for brainstorming and initial research in my fiction writing. How I use it differs for my flash fiction and my novel writing.

Flash Fiction

I write a monthly flash fiction piece, and sometimes I have a very clear idea of a story, and sometimes I just vaguely know that I want to write something with a dragon in it, for example. When that’s the case, I ask ChatGPT to give me 10 ideas for stories that relate to XYZ. Sometimes I can grab one of those ideas as is and run with it, but usually I take a bit from one of its suggestions and mix it up with another one of its suggestions, or it just sparks another idea that I like better.

Once I have a story idea, I sit down and write it and might chat to ChatGPT about specific elements of that story – for example, in a recent story I wrote about a whale I asked it how a boat’s passing may affect a whale, and what kinds of laws exist against illegal whaling. Other times, I might ask it to give me some sensory details, since I’m a more plot-driven writer and don’t always stop to smell the roses!

If I’m really stuck, I might even upload the story I have so far and then ask it to suggest endings or write a paragraph where XYZ happens. In this case, there might usually be a really good sentence or two that ends up in the finished story (after some tweaking), but I’ve never taken more than that and pasted it as-is into a story. (By the way, I have tried SudoWrite for assisted story writing, but I found the ideas it came up with never meshed with what I had in mind, so I don’t use it as part of my process at all at this point.)

I’ll write another blog post at a later point to show exactly how this process works for me, if you’re interested.

Novel Writing

For longer pieces of writing, I mainly use ChatGPT as a research partner to help take my ideas further. As an example: in my Mythical Menagerie series, I write about a man tasked with tracking mythical creatures, so I might ask the AI to give me 10 examples of mythical creatures found in London. I would then pick however many I needed and delve deeper into the lore and see how they can connect to what I have in mind for the story’s plot. I don’t ask the AI for plot ideas, however.

After I’ve written a particularly difficult scene, I might paste it into ChatGPT and ask it for a critique on how I can improve it, especially if I want to work on something like sensory details.

In both types of story writing, you can be 100% assured that any actual writing comes from me and if there were words contributed by the AI, they are very minimal. When I’m struggling, I might use ProWritingAid’s rephrase functionality to suggest a better way of saying something, but in almost all cases I’d use a sentence at most (and usually just a few words instead) generated by the AI.

On the non-writing front, I’ve also started uploading my novel chapters into ChatGPT to create a story bible, although I might move this over to NotebookLM (which I hear is especially good for this purpose). My hope is that the AI will tie everything together to create character biographies and plot summaries to help me keep all the details of the series straight.

Book Covers, Social Media and Other Images

I know AI art is a very controversial subject, but as someone who can draw beautiful stick figures and not much more, I love the creative freedom it gives me to bring the images in my head onto a digital canvas. In my defence, I would never have commissioned or bought non-generated art anyway, so no one is worse off for me now using the tools at hand. I still envy artists who have the creativity and skills to create art, but unfortunately I’m not one of them.

I use Midjourneyextensively to generate images for inspiration, whether that’s character portraits or scene ideation. I also create images for my flash fiction that I use in my newsletters and on social media and other places, as well as inside my physical books.

To date, I’ve generated images for the covers of two of my books using Midjourney (I’ve also played with Dall-E ages ago), although I still work with a human cover designer when I can’t manage my vision for the cover on my own. Additionally, I also make use of the generative inpainting function in Affinity Photo to alter or extend images as needed.

Conclusion

I imagine the list of AI tools might grow as more things become available in the future, but for now, I’m thrilled with how AI has improved my author experience.

The world has changed and AI is here to stay, whether or not people like it. As someone who has a day job in IT, I know AI is merely a tool to be used – how it’s used depends on the human behind it. The way I see it, you can either hate AI and avoid it, or you can figure out ways that it can help improve your life.

Do you use AI tools similarly? Do you have any others that you can recommend I look into?

Release Day: Becoming Keeper (A Mythical Menagerie Prequel)

Today is a special day, because it’s release day for my Amari origin story! If you’ve read the other books in the Mythical Menagerie series and you’ve been wondering how Amari became the Keeper of Exotic Animals, then Becoming Keeper is for you.

All Amari wanted was to pass her exams. Instead, she found her life’s calling.

In the hallowed halls of Oxford University, Amari, a studious yet conflicted third-year student, teeters on the brink of academic accomplishment. Her journey to complete her degree is marred by more than the weight of her final Philosophy paper. Her heart is adrift, entangled in a web of disinterest, her attention fractured across unrelated elective subjects.

To make matters worse, Amari must choose between her academic aspirations and her moral compass when her research supervisor’s ambitious attempts to produce a miraculous healing serum take a treacherous turn, leading to the creation of horribly mutated monsters.

When the nefarious scientist acquires the blood of a mythical creature, Amari must find the courage to thwart her supervisor’s obsessive experiments before another innocent creature is harmed and untold havoc is unleashed upon the world.

As the clock counts down to her submission due date, can Amari foil the scientist’s sinister plans, protect the mythical creature, and find the crucial time to craft her life-defining paper?

Wow this fast paced prequel is fantastic.

Goodreads reviewer

Another blooming wonderful read in The Mythical Menagerie Series. Once I started it, I couldn’t put it down.

Goodreads reviewer

Grab your copy in e-book or paperback from your favourite online retailer today!

Meet the Characters from Becoming Keeper

The latest prequel to the Mythical Menagerie series, Becoming Keeper, is now available for preorder! If you’ve ever wondered how Amari became the Keeper of Exotic Animals, then this one’s for you.

Since I love playing around with Midjourney to create images to put up on my writing inspiration board, especially for characters, I thought I’d share some of them with you, along with a brief introduction to each of the important people in this story.

Amari Kerubo

Becoming Keeper is my Amari origin story. In the books from the Mythical Menagerie series, she is the Keeper of Exotic Animals, and Ambrose calls her a “force of nature”. But she wasn’t always the powerful, confident woman we see there. Once upon a time she was a lonely student in a foreign country, just trying to pass her exams while figuring out what to do with her life. As the story opens, she desperately needs to write a final Philosophy paper to meet the requirements for a degree path her family had chosen for her, but she’s distracted by her best friend’s latest crusade and her supervisor’s morally dubious research experiments. As the story progresses, Amari needs to make choices that will affect the rest of her life – but is she making the right ones?

Doctor Clarke

Amari’s Biology supervisor is on the cusp of a breakthrough in her research, and she will do whatever it takes to achieve her goals.

Professor Bottenfeldt

A kindred spirit and fellow mythology enthusiast, Bottenfeldt can usually be found in the library, doling out advice and keeping an eye on his favourite student.

Becca Rothfuss

Amari’s best friend and college dorm mate, Becca is a pampered law student who’s always campaigning for the latest cause. At the moment, she’s passionate about animal rights.

Tristan Ford

Becca’s new boyfriend prefers action over academics and is on a mission to flush out rumours of an animal smuggling ring operating in Oxford.

Phumlani Mahlangu

Also originally from South Africa, Phumlani is an IT geek who loves gaming and has some serious hacking skills.

Professor Harris

Amari’s Philosophy lecturer is also her student advisor, and he’s not impressed with her performance. The university’s reputation needs to be upheld, and that means Amari is on thin ice.

Bill Dawson

A pet shop owner who’s not overly fond of “tree-huggers”.

Well, turns out it’s quite hard to talk about characters without giving the plot away! But I hope this has made you a little curious about the book, and if it sounds intriguing, then please do check it out at your favourite online retailer. It will be available in both e-book and paperback on 20 March 2024!