A grounded fantasy book set
Charles Mandrake is a character-first portal novel series. It's written for readers that want to feel part of the story, and focuses on found family at its center with no romance.
The coffee at Mel's Over Easy has been fresh since six a.m. Dock workers sit at the counter, Mrs. Maple and Ms. James share the paper over omelettes. No one knew what was about to happen.
The Charles Mandrake series is written for readers who want more than tropes or romantasy. You want to feel every moment, know every character, and get completely lost in a world that feels real enough to live in. If that sounds like exactly the kind of book you've been looking for, you found it.
The Series
Book 1
East Bay is a small town. Charles, Anna, and Todd are three friends that feel like you've known them for years. And when you step through the portal with them, you'll taste the coffee at Emera's tavern, hear the city's history from the librarian, and learn a new world one detail at a time, right next to them.
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Book 2
You thought you were going back to Skelderheim. So did the trio. Instead, you land on the Central Steppe, in the middle of a vast expanse with nothing familiar in sight. When a nomadic tribe takes them in, something about Anna doesn't quite fit the way it should. Or maybe she fits too well. What gets revealed next changes everything.
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Book 3
The trio is home. East Bay. Mel's. Everything exactly as they left it. Almost. A wounded warrior and a young girl have crossed the portal with them, and not everyone who wants to follow stopped at the threshold. When Skelderheim arrives in East Bay, normal was never coming back.
Learn MoreJUST RELEASED! – Azaya’s Skelderheim, Book 1:
Azaya is seven winters old, runs messages in Merchant’s Ward, and holds the Operator’s personal seal in her satchel. The adults around her are building something: a new city, a new time system, a new way of doing things. Azaya is in the middle of all of it.
This is Skelderheim at street level. Family dinners. Civic problems solved over coffee. A child who grew up on the docks learning what it means to have a home.
Azaya and the Streets of Skelderheim is the first book in a new Skelderheim series, a found-family story set in a city that never stops moving, told by the one person who knows every shortcut.
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This isn’t meant to convince anyone to switch tools. Plenty of writers use Scrivener, Sudowrite, Word, Google Docs, or something else entirely. This is simply the workflow I’ve settled into with Obsidian. Using Obsidian for Writing – I do 70% of the Writing on Mobile Phones Full manuscript writing. My main phone is a current-ish […]
Read MoreThis is the second post that walks through my process of writing a book as I am writing it. It’s a guide to what I’m thinking while a go through chapter creation, and how I work. Drawing From Other Sources There are parts of writing that have been influenced by things I’ve seen in other […]
Read MoreJuly 15, 2026 I picked up the pen again and started in on Azaya’s second book. Right now, the working title is “Azaya and the Central Expanse.” Rather than talk about the book directly, I’d like to share with you some of the actual process I’m going through in writing a book as I’m writing […]
Read MoreThis is the first post that covers one of a few of the methods I used when writing the series. It contributes in making the story across all media feel lived-in and like a place that you could actually visit. Throughout the Charles Mandrake series, one of the most apparent feelings that readers get is […]
Read MoreBuilding a Fictional Town Site that Feels Real The East Bay Maine site started out when I decided that I was going to write Charles Mandrake, Book Zero, “East Bay.” The original thought was that I was going to write the origin story for the Trio, Charles, Anna, and Todd, but the project took an […]
Read MoreAzaya and the Streets of Skelderheim is done, and it was surprisingly easy to write. Once I got started, the story seemed to create itself, and one chapter just flowed into the next. – View the Streets of Skelderheim site Azaya has a long arc that begins at the end of Charles Mandrake and the […]
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