Will Greatwich

"In the Hills, the Cities" (Barker, 1984)

Thank you, I'm really glad you enjoyed it!
I love the Alan Garner comparison. I haven't read him since I was a kid, but I DO vividly remember a scene in Weirdstone of Brisingamen with a character crawling through lightless tunnels deep beneath the earth. So it probably did have a distant influence.

Landing in the middle of a venn diagram that includes Piranesi, Black Company, and Alan Garner, but in a very Australian sort of way, I can't recommend this book highly enough. I loved it, and I hope you — who are reading this post — read it and love it too. willgreatwich.com/house-of-the...

thanks, that's awesome!

thanks, I'm really glad you enjoyed it!

military theorists emphasise that even the best strategy will fall apart if the soldiers on the ground are not motivated to fight. that's because no plan survives contact with the anomie

The Night-Bird's Feather by Jenna Moran. would need to be a cartoon though

I really like the line in Aladdin when Robin Williams sings "who sent those goons to their lords? Why, Prince Ali" because it implies the film is set in a polytheistic universe where a range of different deities can take charge of the souls of the dead

The Changing Land is part of what I think of as my "Wiz Biz" canon - my favourite stories of capital-W Wizards - alongside Bellairs' "The Face in the Frost", Hugh Cook's "The Wizards and the Warriors", and Ashton Smith's "The Double Shadow"

easy... I'll simply attach a cage to my drone that releases a small pigeon, diverting the eagle's attention

I haven't read the short stories, but I loved "The Changing Land". Didn't realise until after reading that the character had a history behind him.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies - Another Tide by Will Greatwich At the university I had studied radical repositioning: the art of situating myself in another’s cultural viewpoint. I considered myself an open-minded woman, an opponent of cultural hegemony. Yet, pre...

Archives w BCS #432: "Another Tide" @gnipahellir.bsky.social, BCS #420, Aurealis Award winner. "situating myself in another’s cultural viewpoint. Yet, presented with a real enemy of the empire, I found myself sinking into the role of bourgeois scold." www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/anot...

Great deal! This book is awesome if you didn't already know!

greatly underrated game. "vaporwave + Cthulhu" sounds like such a stupid combination but somehow they make it fit perfectly

You can read this award winning story for free, right now, on the internet? what a time to be alive!
www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/anot...

2024 Aurealis Awards Winners Congratulations to the winners of the 2024 Aurealis Awards, presented today in an online ceremony. A recording of the ceremony will be available soon at our YouTube channel. Thank you so much to ev…

My story "Another Tide" won the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novella! It's my first award win! I'm totally chuffed!
aurealisawards.org/2025/05/04/2...

Reading 'Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City'. Buckets of fun

make a TV series out of Dancers at the End of Time you cowards

finished this the other night and it was an incredible read: beautiful, evocative (particularly if you like birds) and high stakes on a small enough scale that you can feel what the events are doing to everyone involved - especially as it becomes clear what's going on and the choices thereby forced

2024 Aurealis Awards Shortlist Announcement Now in its 30th year, the 2024 Aurealis Awards, Australia’s premier speculative fiction award, attracted more than 830 entries across 15 categories, including 34 nominations in the tri-annual…

My novella "Another Tide" got nominated for an Aurealis Award!
aurealisawards.org/2025/04/15/2...
(you can read it here if you haven't already: www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/anot... )

sounds great, cheers

Just finished the excellent #HouseOfTheRainKing by @gnipahellir.bsky.social. What an amazing debut novel. Anyone with an interest in mythology or #OSR #TTRPGs should go read it ASAP. Thanks for the recommendation @throneofsalt.bsky.social

listening to this song as a kid in Australia in the 90s I had no fucking clue what it was about and I still don't

I read House of the Rain King over the weekend. Wonderful book. Feels like Gormenghast and The Black Company had a love child nannied by Name of the Rose, but it's also wholly its own thing. Tells a self-contained story well but left me wanting to hear more about the people and the world.

y'all this is one of the best books i've read in a long time, please check it out. stayed up until midnight finishing it out, it's that good.

Did an interview with Melbourne writers' collective Meridian Australis about House of the Rain King and my short stories: meridianaustralis.au/an-interview...

thank you! it means a lot to hear that!

The cover of my novel House of the Rain King. It shows a monastery surrounded by floodwaters and birds. Around the cover are little arrows pointing to words that say "Feather Cloaks" "A bloody spearhead" "The pinion-stone" "sacred books" "a skeletal hand" and "a bag of cockle shells"

Made a little graphic to show what's in my novel.
Some writers I know think these graphics are cringe, but I kind of like them.
However, I wasn't keen on listing a bunch of tropes, so instead I listed some significant Objects that appear in the book.
All Objects' significance is guaranteed.

Bookpost Special: House of the Rain King (Disclosure: Author gave me an ARC and asked me to write a review.) House of the Rain King is a good fucking book. That’s the short versi...

lovely review of House of the Rain King from RPG blogger Throne of Salt: throneofsalt.blogspot.com/2025/03/book...
"it’s D&D as fuck without being married to the trade dress of D&D... it feels like a book that a D&D adventure would be based on, rather than a book that is based on a D&D adventure."

To be honest, even as I hit publish I thought, "No one will buy this." I'm the kind of reader who will put a book on my TBR and then buy it 2 years later. So I'm incredibly flattered that people are taking a chance on an unknown author and reading the whole book within a week of its release.