Tonight I will be live on BBC Radio Ulster show ‘The Ticket’ hosted by Kathy Clugston from 6-7PM, UK time, for NI Book Week to discuss my writing, so if you’re having a night in tonight, feel free to tune in.
Rainbow over Belfast while on a River Lagan book-promo-photo walk
I’ll be reading an excerpt from Matthew’s Twin, book 3 of my Belfast Ghosts series, which also happens to be my personal favourite of the trilogy.
Rainbow over the River Lagan and Harland and Wolff cranes
Today is also the start of my Halloween break from work, and like all horror authors, Samhain is my favourite festive holiday, so talking about my ghost horror books is a great way to get me in the spirit (er, cheesy pun intended) of the spooky season.
Samhain is nearly upon us. With less than a fortnight to go until Halloween, I’m getting into the festive spirit by watching all of my favourite horror movies, reading new spooky books and wearing my Samhain-themed clothes and jewellery, pretty much everyday. I have enough Halloween clothing to last for ten days in a row without having to mix and match, ha ha.
Ever my own publicist, I’ve been focusing lately on marketing my Halloween-appropriate Belfast Ghosts trilogy, which also happens to contain two of my bestselling books. My latest video was filmed at the Thompson dry dock in Belfast, where Titanic was fitted in Harland & Wolff shipyard in 1911/12. The titular character in Belfast Ghosts book 1, The Blue Man, was a shipyard worker at Harland & Wolff before he met his doom. My video got a lot of traction on Tiktok over the weekend, and I thought it was befitting of a horror author for the number of plays to reach 3,600 views: with 666 being the noteworthy part of the number there. A coded spooky message from the universe to a humble horror author, perhaps? Perhaps not: it soon surpassed that number, currently reaching over 9000 views at the time of this post being published. But it was fun for a spooky screenshot which I shared on my social media ‘stories’ over the weekend.
If any of you reading this post are fellow horror fans, I’m sure you feel most at home during the spooky season, as I do. There’s something fun about being scared; I love nothing more than settling down on a cold autumnal day and watching horror movies with my family. Yep, in my household, we’re all horror lovers. We read scary stories aloud to each other, and can’t wait for Halloween. Finding ‘666’ isn’t necessarily a ‘Halloween’ thing, but it enhances the atmosphere of the season, adding sinister thrills. Great for the imagination. I find horror story inspiration in everything.
Forthcoming Bindweed anthology – White Witch’s Hat
I haven’t been posting much on social media this week, mainly because in between my day job in secondary education and typesetting the manuscript for White Witch’s Hat, the second of our biannual Bindweed Anthologies, I haven’t had a lot of time left over. I’ve been busy juggling creative writing projects, though not my own work.
Actually, that isn’t entirely true. White Witch’s Hat, the title of the forthcoming anthology, is another colloquial name for convolvulus arvensis (common Bindweed). Such a spooky moniker inspired me to write a seasonal horror story set at Yule, and after it was finished, I decided to open for submissions from other ghost horror authors, making it into a themed collection. My titular story, White Witch’s Hat, is in the collection, containing spooky seasonal ghost stories by 21 authors from all corners of the world.
Regarding my job teaching creative writing, my new students this year are very motivated, and generally as a group, much more extroverted than last year’s group. After the taught half of the lesson, where I go over narrative viewpoint, characterisation and so on, I give them writing prompts and they spend the second half of the class working hard on the computers in the library. At the end of every session, I ask them to either print their work, or if they have no printer credits, to email it to me. This gives me a week to go through their WIPs and give feedback.
Have I been working on any of my own projects? Not for now, but half-term break will be coming up, and the Samhain season always inspires me. I’m sure my imagination will get the better of me soon.
Can you believe it’s only 3 weeks until Halloween? As a Samhain fan, I certainly can (erm, the rhyme there was unintentional). In the library where I work, I decided to do a spookometer rating system to let readers know what to expect with the horror books. For fun, I put my own books to the test. So, how do the books in my Belfast Ghosts trilogy rank?
Based on reader reviews on Goodreads and Amazon, here’s the order of scariness:
The Fairy Lights – not so scary
It seems that readers don’t find The Fairy Lights scary at all. One review mentioned that it was a bit creepy at the start, but that’s not the same thing as scary. The story takes a more psychedelic turn later in the book, and apparently is more fantastical to readers than frightening. As the author, I can live with that. It is, after all, a Yuletide paranormal romance as much as a ghost story.
The overall impression I get from reviews of Matthew’s Twin is that it is, by far, the goriest of my books, but maybe in terms of the sheer psychological threat, not the scariest. There’s a lot of graphic medieval fighting, and there is a lot of supernatural body horror, but I’ve been told it isn’t the scariest of my Belfast Ghosts trilogy. It is, however, my personal favourite of the series.
I’ll admit that re-reading The Blue Man leaves me on a psychological downer, lol. It’s very sinister and I’ve been told that it’s not only the scariest of my Belfast Ghosts trilogy, but actually my overall scariest book so far in my back catalogue. Is that because it’s the most realistic? That what happens to Megan and Sabrina in the story could, potentially, happen to any of us? Maybe.
On a final note, as an author, of course I want people to be reading my books. But displaying my own books in the display as pictured above was just for my promo pics and videos for online marketing. My actual library display included all of the recent scary books I’ve been reading with my son, who like me is a horror fan. We’ve been making our way through the Goosebumps series and also been reading a few other spooky books by Mary Hooper. Here’s a pic of the final library display with my spookometer ratings that my son helped jointly devise.
Five months have passed since my last keto diet post back in May 2025 this year, when I blogged about how I had restarted keto as a spring detox after winter carb-bingeing. If you’re used to my keto posts, you’ll know that as much as I’d love to stay low carb all year round, seasonal eating always gets the better of me in autumn and winter. In between Christmas work-dos, comfort eating when I’m ill and craving stodgy carb-heavy foods in the colder months, during the five years since I first lost 42lbs, I found my weight yo-yoing by around 15-17lbs a year every year, up in winter, down in summer.
Now, anyone with even a basic understanding of the human anatomy would know that weight loss and gain swings are not good for the body. Between 2020 to 2025, I subjected my metabolism to annual crash keto dieting in the summer months to get bikini ready, and overindulging in winter. I tolerated my disordered eating from September to February, knowing that from March to August I’d work hard to lose it.
But not in 2025. This year, my body hit a plateau. Ketosis didn’t work. 16-8 fasting didn’t work. From May to July, I got no results despite a strict diet. My body reached a ‘settling point’ and my weight wouldn’t budge. To say I got despondent was an understatement.
It’s October, which means spooky season is coming soon. Of course, I had my Mabon decorations up at the autumn equinox, but this month it’s socially acceptable to start wearing all of my Halloween themed clothes and jewellery without scaring the ‘normals’; not that such a thing would deter me anyway.
Autumn reads: time for a new seasonal display
With Storm Amy here in Northern Ireland today, schools have shut across the country, which means more reading time (I’m currently reading Junji Ito, and working my way through the Goosebumps series with my little literary one), writing time (chipping away at ghost novel WIP#7) and editing time this weekend (I’m working on the manuscript for the next Bindweed anthology, White Witch’s Hat, due for release in November).
Yesterday was National Poetry Day. Ordinarily I would have posted a video excerpt from one of my poetry collections to celebrate, but I’ve been tired from being flat out at work and feeling a bit under the weather with a cold/flu/covid/something else draining on top of it.
Anyway, a stormy weekend provides the perfect excuse to stay indoors lounging about with a book. The only thing is, I’ll have to resist the temptation to just stick on Netflix instead. Oh well. If it happens, I won’t beat myself up.
It has been a busy first month back for the new academic year in secondary education. Like last year, I’m teaching creative writing, a part of my job that I really love. It’s always exciting to see what the new sixth year students will bring to the sessions. I love the chance to tailor the lessons depending on their individual needs, especially to help with troubleshooting when they’re stuck on a project.
At the start of any group, after discussing the term plan and objectives, I always give out a questionnaire to my students to gauge interest in various aspects of the course. This year, one of my students wrote a note in the comments section, complete with smiley face, to say thanks for providing the opportunity for such an exciting and interesting enrichment group. I’d say I’m the one with the exciting opportunity: a chance to read work by the next generation of authors. A shared love of creativity and passion for writing is what drives me, and I can’t wait to see what this fresh new cohort of writers will bring to the table. For any fellow creative writing teachers out there, wouldn’t you agree?
Title: The Wabi-Sabi DollAuthor: Leilanie StewartPages: 339Genre: Dark Psychological StoryRating: 4/5 Book Blurb: After fourteen months of living in her home from home, Tottori, a town by the coast on the Sea of Japan, Londoner Kimberly Thatcher should have been settled in her job. She should have been happy with her new boyfriend Naoki. She should have been moving on with […]
It’s a weekend celebration for me this weekend as my recently released 6th novel, The Wabi-sabi Doll, is currently in the Top 10 Hot New Releases chart on Amazon US for Kindle eBooks in the category of psychological fiction. Hurray!
Additionally, it’s sitting at #38 for hardcover sales in psychological fiction through Ingramspark. Woohoo!
Why book marketing is always a mystery…
As much as I think I understand what readers want, I don’t. I’m an author, not a marketing expert, but as my own publicist, I try to gauge what my audience wants. As you might know, I wrote The Wabi-sabi Doll primarily because of reader demand; in other words, a handful of reviews mentioned that they wanted a follow up to Kimberly’s story in Japan. Most of these reviews were on Amazon UK. As a result, I was expecting to make it into the top 100 charts in the UK – but I’m not. My UK sales over the past week have not been enough to compete with all the new psychological literary fiction books released over this side of the pond. Oh well! I’m thankful to my UK readers who have bought copies regardless.
…and an unexpected surprise
I didn’t expect sales in the US to be so strong. This was an unexpected and happy surprise. It’s interesting that my psychological literary fiction books sell better in the US and my ghost books sell better in the UK. Does that mean we’re a spooky bunch over here? I’m in good company then I guess!
The Wabi-sabi Doll is officially published today! This is book 2 in the Buddha’s Bone series, but can be read as a standalone novel. It’s available from the following major online retailers:
The series follows Kimberly Thatcher, a Londoner who travels to Japan to teach English, escaping her abusive ex-fiance, and suffers a worse fate at the hands of a fellow English teaching colleague. The sequel picks up with her in a new romance, but dealing with the PTSD from her traumatic first year. If you like dark psychological literary fiction, give this book a go.
Leilanie Stewart 