The Phillip Drayer Duncan Newsletter - April 2026

Anyway, not to change subject, since I know you’re only here for the majestic junk in my trunk, butt (lol) there are other things we should discuss. Namely…

It’s nearly time for Fun With Friends!

And yes, you should go have some fun with your friends, but that’s not what I’m talking about. The italics are to indicate it’s a title. A book title. More specifically, the 8^th book in The Blade Mage Series.

No, this is not an April Fool’s joke. It’s nearly time. I’m still waiting to hear back from a few of you wonderful beta readers, but once I do, it’s all systems go. So, unless something terrible happens, Fun With Friends! will come out this month.

Stay tuned for an extra email on launch day!

What am I working on?

Blade Mage Book 8 – Fun With Friends! - We’re almost there! Can’t wait for you to get to read it!

Mad Maudlin – Still pounding away on this beast. Apparently, it has more HP than I anticipated. I’d really hoped to be done by the end of the month, but I fell short. I’ll have to settle for having made great progress. It’s weighing in at just over 100,000 words and I’ve still got a way to go. I’m stomping into the final stretch, though, so hopefully I’ll be done soon. But I might get slowed down a little because…

Blade Mage Book 9 - ??????? – I haven’t decided on a title yet, but I’m planning to get started writing it in the next few days. Writing two books at once??? What madness is this??? Well, I have something special planned for book 9 which sort of lends itself to writing it alongside another book. Whatever could that mean??? For the moment, let’s just say that…

Oh, screw it.

You’re signed up for the newsletter. You get the inside track. So…

FOR YOUR EYES ONLY – Don’t go sharing this with the hungry masses. It’s for you alone, since you actually read my silly newsletters. And thank you for that, by the way.

For book 9, we’re breaking the format. I’ve got something special planned, which I’m hoping you will love, but because of this different sort of thingy madingy…

I will not be writing it alone.

Yes, you heard that correctly. My partner in crime, the brilliant and wonderful J.H. Fleming will be co-writing book 9 of The Blade Mage with me. Boom. Put your party pants on. It’s going to get wild.

Spirits of Salt and Sea – Speaking of my dearest J.H., I’m also just about to start editing the second book in her Mari series, which I’m super excited about. I did the first one for her a few months back. It was fantastic. It’s a gaslamp fantasy following a young witch in training. In book one, Mari’s teacher goes missing and she and her witch friends have to unravel a big mystery while battling a weird-ass monster. It was awesome. Keep an eye out because I believe these will be coming out later this year.

Where are we going to be?

We have a couple of events coming up where we’ll have a table:

April 18^th – The Moth Market – Joplin, MO

April 26^th – NWA Makers Market – Fayetteville, AR

After that, we’ll be at the Ren Faire! We won’t have a table there. Nor will we be there in any official author capacity this year. But, well, I guess if you make it to the Oklahoma Renaissance Festival in Muskogee, Oklahoma, we’ll be there for most, or some, of the weekends.

Conventions:

June 19 -21 – Sooner Con – Norman, OK.

What's going on in life?

Other than my aching butt?

The Mystery of the Traveling Trash Can

Yesterday, we decided to work at a coffee shop for the day. The day before that was trash day, so I realized I probably needed to bring down the trash can on our way out. Now, if you’ve been reading these for very long, you may remember that we have a driveway the devil would frown at. Sketchy as futz. From the bottom, you climb a steep hill, cross railroad tracks, go up an even steeper hill, where you enter a 55 mph highway with blind corners on either side. Too much fun!

Anyway, right at the top of the driveway, beside the highway, is a tiny stretch of gravel where I set the trash cans to get emptied each week. Our poor trash dude has to stop his truck in the middle of the highway to get our trash. Also sketchy but he likes to live on the edge, our trash man.

As I pulled up the drive, I didn’t see the trash can. No big deal. Probably just rolled down the hill and is sitting in the ditch between the highway and the railroad tracks. Happens sometimes. Except when I walked up there…no trash can.

Scratching my head, I walked all the way to the top, thinking maybe the wind blew it into the opposite ditch. Nope. No trash can. It was nowhere in sight. It was just…gone.

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot?

Did someone steal our trash can? That seemed absurd.

But absurdity wasn’t done with us.

I got back in the car and pulled out the drive, checking both ditches as I went. J.H. was every bit as flummoxed as I was. Where could it have gone?

We got an answer about a quarter of a mile up the highway.

When you pull out of our drive and hang a right onto that highway, it climbs up a rather steep hill. Basically, the highway was built on the side of a small mountain for some reason. There’re guardrails on our side and a narrow ditch followed by hillside on the other. No houses or places to stop for about half a mile until you come down the other side.

Roughly a quarter of a mile up the hill, right at the peak…

There was our trash can.

Sitting in the opposite ditch, still full of trash bags.

What in all the hells?

Our first thought was that someone had hit it and dragged it up there with their car, but…

It would have been all busted up, right? The trash would have been everywhere.

Could the wind have pushed it?

I answered that one myself as I dragged the heavy bastard down that narrow ditch and all the way back to our house. The answer: Hell no. It was too damned heavy. No chance it was the wind.

An animal?

No way. The only animal big enough to pull off something like that would have been a bear, which I don’t think we have in our area, and it would have torn through the trash.

So, what does that leave?

Well, best guess… There is a surprising amount of foot traffic on our sketchy highway. Which is weird, because there are no sidewalks and we live between two towns. Despite that, it’s not rare to see some colorful characters go strolling by. There was this one guy who used to walk along screaming at himself. Or at passing cars. Or…I don’t know what he was screaming at, actually. But he screamed a lot.

Anyway, that’s my best guess.

Some random passerby thought to themselves, “Hey, here’s a trash can. Guess I’ll take this with me.” Then they proceeded to drag our heavy-ass trash can up that steep mother of a hill. Somewhere near the top, something like logic kicked in and they realized they were hauling someone’s futzing trash can up a hill for no reason, then pushed it off into the ditch.

Nothing else makes sense.

So, I guess what I’m really saying is…

Stay off drugs, kids!

The Tile Job in the Bathroom.

We got all the tile in! And while I’ll be happy to never tile again for the rest of my life, I think it came out pretty good!

A Thieving Bird and my father, who has become Cinderella

My dad says he reads all of these, so we’ll see. I’m sure he’ll have some colorful commentary about being referred to as Cinderella.

So, last year he retired and has been coming up with ways to stay busy. One amusement he’s found is tossing peanuts off his back deck for the birds. In the months since he began this, he’s collected a flock. Like, the birds show up in force. Sometimes hundreds. Jays, cardinals, titmice, grackles, and so on. He even has a rabbit who’s addicted to the sweet peanut action. And worry not, animal lovers, he’s been on top of how much is safe to feed them. In fact, he tried to switch to healthier treats, but the animal kingdom wasn’t having it. Peanuts, damn you! Give us sweet, salty nuts!

One day last week, I needed a change of scenery. Had to get out of my office. It was a nice day, so I thought… Why not set up on my dad’s back deck? I used to do it all the time when I still had a grown-up job. I’ve taken loads of Zoom calls back there, annoying my co-workers when trains went by so I could have a view out over the creek. (Yeah, people always say that it’s a river, but no, technically it’s a creek. It’s more about length than girth. Tee hee hee.)

Anyway, not long after I got set up, I had rather strange occurrence.

I saw a blur of motion beneath me.

Some critter shot out from beneath my bench seat and landed on my futzing foot.

Scared the ever-living shizz out of me. By the time I realized it was a bird, the little bugger had flown off again.

A short time later, this titmouse came and landed a few feet from me, right on top of the peanut bag.

Then he just sat there, staring at me, like… Do you not see that I’m here? Are you not aware that you should be feeding me peanuts, peasant?

Then the little punk squawked at me and dipped its beak…

And lifted out a peanut!

The little tit-thief had made itself a hole in the bag so it didn’t have to wait for my father. It could get peanuts whenever it wanted.

But instead of just grabbing its peanut and flying away, it just stood there, staring at me with the stolen peanut in its mouth. Like… See what you’ve made me do? See what you’ve forced me to become? Now, get off your ass and feed my friends, peasant!

Finally, it flew away.

An hour or two later, we repeated the dance. It landed beside me, squawked me to shame, then ganked another nut. And off it went.

What have I been reading?

A lot of LitPRG and progression fantasies read like lonely geek fetish fantasies. Sorry, it’s just my opinion. It’s also the truth. As much as I’ve enjoyed some of the LitRPG and progression fantasy I’ve stumbled across, there have been others that I’ve found unreadable, some of which are very popular. None of which get mentioned here because I’m not in the business of shitting on other writers’ works.

But damn…

So many read like they were written by thirteen-year-olds who just discovered their pee-pees yet somehow have a lifetime of bitter rejections to froth about. Like, the main characters have the personality of a pet rock but suddenly enter some video game world and at the snap of a finger they’re the cleverest person in the universe, the most powerful, they kick and/or get all the ass while popping off super snappy dialogue straight out of Duke Nukem. I’m not a fan.

Unsouled was NOT one of those books.

Just to be clear.

The main character is a kid growing up in a society run by soul magic. Except…his soul doesn’t seem to have that magic. So, he’s kind of an outcast among his people and even his family. But he has a hell of a lot of want-to and refuses to give up. He has to become clever. I dug it.

Zade by V.L. Stuart

At least I think that’s title.

And I think that’s the author.

She’ll probably let me know if either is inaccurate. The reason I’m not sure is the same reason I don’t have cover art to show you. Nor links. The book isn’t out yet. I got a sneak preview because V.L. Stuart is one of us! One of us! One of us!

But seriously, V.L. Stuart is one our wonderful Blade Mage beta readers. She is a wonderful human and an author herself. She also told me she’d bail me out if I got arrested. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about. Zade is her latest book and I believe it will come out sometime in the near future. You know, I probably should have gotten some details before I blabbed about her book on here. Probably should have checked that she wanted me to blab about her book.

Ah, well.

Anyway, I’m about a third of the way through and it’s damned fun. It’s a dystopian setting where some real a-holes have developed a drug for controlling people in the post-apocalyptic world. And it’s one of those where you’re reading along and then… Boom. All of a sudden you’re on a roller coaster and things are racing along. Once she’s closer to release I’ll post a link and stuff. Or you can check out her website or follow her on Amazon.

The main character begins the tale not knowing who he is or where he came from, but is currently a slave working under cruel masters. I’m not sure what culture Steve was envisioning, but I was getting some Egyptian-type vibes, which made for a cool switch-up for a fantasy setting. That also could just be me.

At any rate, I think I’m about halfway through and while it’s not constant murder, mayhem, and my brand of toilet humor, I have remained engaged and quite curious about where it’s heading. And I like the main character. Tagging off my rant above, Steve also doesn’t present a fully-baked, amazingly awesome, master-of-all main character, but rather a young man trying to figure things out for himself. I dig it.

Anyway, I’m not super in love, but it is quite intriguing. The premise is certainly cool. I may be the last one to this party, but if you don’t know, in this futuristic world, they’ve digitized consciousness. So, they can load your latest saved “stack” into a new body, or a new “sleeve.” It covers some interesting ground with this. When someone dies, they can plug into a new body, sure, but also, if you get in trouble for crime, the punishment can be to leave you offline for years, all while letting someone else run around in your meat sack. It’s an interesting premise.

The main character has been dumped into a new sleeve to investigate a murder. This uber rich, super old dude supposedly committed suicide. He has backups made of his consciousness to ensure his immortality and is brought back to life with all his memories up to a day before his suicide. He’s not convinced he killed himself and wants the main character to solve his murder.

I haven’t finished yet, but so far I’ve enjoyed it.

What have we been watching?

Peaky Blinders

We finished it! Finally marched our way to the end. And I must say…

Seasons 1 – 4 were futzing awesome.

Seasons 5 and 6? Eh, not so much. Not for me, at least. I’m not saying I hated them or they aren’t worth watching, but…I felt like the show kind of lost its identity somewhere along the way. I described it like this…

Seasons 1 through 4 were gritty genre fiction.

Seasons 5 and 6 tried too hard to be high-brow literary fiction.

That’s how it felt to me, at least.

So, now we can watch the movie that just came out. We’ll see how that goes. I’m hopeful it’ll get back to the gritty roots it came from.

Final Thoughts

My butt still hurts.

I’m going to get up and move around now.

But stay tuned for news about Fun With Friends!

-Phill