Tag: Argana Zeit

Argana’s Flat

Cross section view of a top floor flat

I’ve always loved floorplans. It’s an affection that started when I was a kid, running table RPGs for my friends and family. Having a dungeon map behind my GM’s screen, forcing the players to painstakingly replicate it in their own notes. All that squared paper. All those conveniently right-angular tombs. It wasn’t so much that Osthack the Destroyer wanted to rule the world, as they just really wanted to own all the setsquares.

And of course there’s castles, because every time you visit one, there’s a poster somewhere with a reconstructed floorplan on it, the hypothetical sections rendered in dashed lines. You can gaze out into the air above the ruins, and imagine the towers that once, er, towered there.

Anyways, I’ve spent years now writing about Argana’s flat, on the top floor of a Victorian end-terrace. The more I re-read the older stories, the more I wanted to see it laid out. So, here you go, that’s what I sketched up!

Patty Scholes

Next in my series of occasional Character Sketches is Patty Scholes. Yeah, she’s the matriarch of the Scholes clan, collecting the waifs and strays of Trotterwell … the question is, are all her brood technically human?

Red-haired woman with a rolling pin.

We first meet Patty properly in No Fae Back Now, but she was originally a background character in Argana Zeit Collects Snow Toads. Ever since her first mention…

“…Patty was well known around Trotterwell, for both better and worse. Patty herself was big-hearted, but whether her family consisted of pesky delinquents or the high-spirited go-getters of the future was largely a question of who you asked.”

… I’ve wanted to bring her back in a bigger role. So, when it came to the novel, I knew she had to get in there. She distrusts authority, takes no nonsense from anybody, and has a formidable talent for dealing with unruly teenagers.

Like MacGillycuddy, we get the feeling that there’s some wild secrets in her back story -and there are! I’ve got 15 pages of flashbacks in my ‘deleted scenes’ bucket. One day, one day!

Akira Pixels

So, I went off and sketched Akira Pixels for you. But if prefer your headcannon version, you go right ahead and keep that 😉

Picture of young excitable man with spiky blue hair

Not that Akira is his birthname. We met his mum in Argana Zeit Rings the Other World, and she spilt the beans. He had the good fortune to appear in the first Argana Zeit story, where we discover that he’s the eccentric, wannabe entrepreneur owner of Brink Hall, a crumbling mansion outside of town. I’ve always enjoyed writing him, because he’s an easy conduit for new problems. That, and I find delusional characters inherently funny.

I wasn’t expecting him to become a mainstay – which is true of all those first-story characters. Argana Zeit and the Haunted Busker was meant to be a one-off short story. And yet, some 420,000 words later, I’m still writing her adventures. And Akira hasn’t quit yet, continuing to enthusiastically throw a spanner in the works in the name of a quick profit. Long may he carry on!

( Reposted from my mailing list )

No Fae Back Now

Book cover 'No Fae Back Now' featuring young woman and dog.

Who do you call when you find a boy with no face in a magical coma? Well, since government cutbacks mean there’s no occult police division any more, you’re going to end up in the capable* hands of Argana Zeit, amateur paranormal investigator. Sure, she’s flaky, but what she lacks in organisational aptitude she makes up for in attitude and intuition. But when a monster trashes a nearby housing estate and the local entrepreneur spins up his demonic cryptic scam, things are going to get a lot weirder than she and her ghost-sensing dog can imagine.

Ah, the Argana Zeit novel. I can’t believe I never made a post about this, although I put it in my social media feeds! It’s been out a year and a half now, and picked up a steady 4.5 stars average on Amazon.

Oh, and this is the new jumping-on place. It’s the best introduction to the characters, because here they’ve got the room to breathe that the short stories never allowed them. It doesn’t replace the short story collections, but there’s no need to read them first.

*Every blurb is allowed one outright lie, and this is it.

Where is Trotterwell?

With the blatant exception of her hometown of Trotterwell, every location that Argana visits is from the real world. They’re places that I’ve been, and that I love. But you may be less familiar, so I’ve drawn this map to help you out. Although there are more villages and sites of note than shown, this has the broad sweeps.

To give you an idea of scale, it’s around 20 miles from Buxton to Bakewell. But the roads are narrow and there’s a sheep around every corner, so it takes longer to drive than you’d imagine!

Also, I was inspired to draw it because my fantasy author mates have brilliant maps in the front of their books, and I’m envious 😉

Map of Peak District showing location of Trotterwell

Oh, and this marks my first use of the zoom plugin. Give it a go!

Why Argana Zeit?

I wrote a submarine horror novel. It took three years and genuinely gave me nightmares, which was possibly my first clue that I wasn’t cut out for penning terror. I duly sent it off to agents that I admired, or at least had heard of, and waited for the advances and royalties to roll in.

As that wait grew unaccountably longer, I figured I’d write something short, as a bit of a pallet cleanser. I’d been watching Columbo* and really wanted to do something with clues in it. I had this paranormal investigator character from a comic I’d half drawn years earlier, so I blew the dust off, and threw her in a story. That was Argana Zeit and the Haunted Busker.

When the replies finally came in on the submarine novel, they were all delightfully polite variations on ‘this is very imaginative, but you haven’t got a clue what you’re doing’. I rediscovered that manuscript recently, the same way you find a rotting vegetable at the back of the fridge hiding behind the cheese box, and about as appetising. I’m eternally grateful that no one was foolish enough to publish it.

But that’s okay. I enjoyed writing Argana so much I came up with another seventeen adventures, and probably more by the time you read this. They’re undeniably cosy stories, set in a green-leafed world where nobody ever dies on camera, the swearing is mild, and the paranormal threat is undermined by the chaotic humour of the background characters. It’s this way because – the aforementioned nightmares aside – when I started writing in 2020, I needed an antidote to the strong possibility that the world was about to end.

It didn’t, though, and fortunately neither has Argana Zeit.

*It’s to Columbo that Argana owes her terrible driving and tactically dishevelled look.

Argana Zeit and the Haunted Busker

This is where it all started!

Argana Zeit is a Paranormal Investigator, or at least, wishes she was. She is the closest thing the small town of Trotterwell has, so when a brawl in a shopping centre has occult overtones, constable Fred Berkshire calls her in to help out.

Included in Paranormal in the Peaks, available here.