M C Neuffer – författare

5000 Word Short Story. A modern-day gothic horror. Take a ride with a writer drifting between realities on the dismal coast of Oregon as he tries to finish his novel. Visit Litton house, a three-story, layered monstrosity yielding to the onslaught of time. Writer Sam Becket travels from San Francisco to a cottage on the rocky coast of Oregon, self-isolating to get away from the coffee house fakes and pretenders to finish his latest crime novel. He has two strikes against him when he takes on his new residence. One is a mild case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, the other a fondness for martinis. Robert Farnell, resident of Litton House, may be his third.

August 1953, Fillmore, California. Some wounds, some windows never close. A gritty, fast-paced ride through dust and decisions. Two men, Connor and Gentry, combat veterans, separated by layers of society. Connor, a common man, left behind in the post-war upward surge. Thomas Gentry, an FBI agent in San Francisco. Each man has a need to help Artie Stamper, a mutual friend, taking different paths while struggling with poles apart personal demons, being pushed toward transformations, punching through lives with the women they've chosen in a shifting American landscape.A rarely told story of men who came from other places, lured by California's promises, falling like raindrops, absorbed in the California dust. Combat veterans. Soldiers who never stopped being soldiers

1950 San Francisco Noir Detective StoriesBLONDE GAMBIT - Since the end of World War II, wealthy Matt Mathews has used his spartan, third-floor detective office to take interesting cases to ward off idle rich boredom. When beautiful heiress Suzette Gamble strolls in and asks Matt to find her missing fiancé, the case turns into more than finding a needle in an urban haystack. Caught in a web of intrigue from high society to seedy bars and grungy alleys, he threads together sparse clues and sketchy rumors. The Mob is not happy when he sticks his nose into their business. Blonde Gambit is written in the time-honored noir style reminiscent of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.PANDORA'S BOX - Matt is called to investigate the theft of top-secret technology by Naval Intelligence. Teaming with his Wife, Christine, they dig deep into international espionage theft rings that threaten national security.

Heat and Light: Future — Space — TimeGene "e;Hornblower"e; Bonner bought a ship because he missed the cold dark. He got considerably more than that.The ship has an AI that can jump instantaneously across the galaxy. The two academic passengers who boarded at Ambigon Station aren't human. And buried somewhere in deep space is a dimensional rift that, if left unclosed, will quietly unravel everything — the universe included.For billions of years, extra-dimensional beings called the Zees have been working the problem from their side of the looking glass. They've run out of time. What they need is a human captain with a fast ship, a marine engineer who treats her tools like family, and a rock-hopper crew member who's better in a bar fight than he has any right to be.What follows spans galaxies and billions of years: a heist in deep time to steal a ship from a civilization two billion years dead, a standoff with machine intelligences who want the universe dissolved on their terms, a corporate predator who's been hunting them across the stars, and the moment when saving everything costs more than any of them expected.Heat and Light is told through four voices — a reluctant hero, an ex-Marine, a man who dies and comes back newer than before, and a being who was born human for the first time aboard a Surron starship. Together, they're enough to save the universe.Whether that's enough to save themselves is another question.Hornblower Series — Book 1

StarLighter: Diary of an ExplorerDwella is an Explorer of the people — a lone wilderness scout trained from childhood to sense life from miles away, cast silent messages, and read the earth under her feet. She has walked the wild for years, guided only by her instincts, her spear, and a wolf companion named Theta. She does not believe in magic.Then a dead Explorer's medallion begins to sing.A mountain cave deposits her in a desert on another world entirely — a planet of starships, military bases, and a civilization that has been waiting, for thousands of years, for someone exactly like her.

Where have all the stars gone?Living ten billion years in the future, twelve-year-old Darby has plans to follow in the footsteps of her explorer uncle Max and her lost father, to see the universe, or what's left of it. She uses her unique talents to clear her path. Spaceships, AIs, and a once human friend are her tools. Twenty years later, her final destiny is not what she or anyone else could have expected.Excerpt"e;Uncle Max says, even at twice the speed of light you can't outrun your past or your future. Mom says not to listen to him. We're the last, but everyone says the final thing is a long way off. Max isn't so sure. He told me he's looking into it."e;

Tommy is good at watching, not good at remembering. He doesn't know your name. He may never look at your face. But Tommy Blue knows when something is wrong — and he will make it right.Something is gathering in Harrison, Arkansas.A series of brutal, inexplicable murders has left the town reeling. Sheriff Ray Cobb, near retirement and carrying quiet grief, is working the case. A reporter is investigating a string of disappearances that may be connected. In the woods, in the nursing home corridors, in the red-lit nights Tommy alone can see, something ancient and malevolent is hunting the vulnerable.

In this sequel, Riley's life continues, from the near to very far future, from the sub-arctic Yukon where she wants to lead a solitary and rustic  life to forget, to a places in the universe that may not be in space or time

Book 2 Sequel to HEAT and LIGHTScience Fiction Action Adventure. Far in the Future. The goal is universal peace and advancement; a very tall mountain to climb for the Foundation and the Peacekeepers. Even with the biggest hammer in the cosmos, they need allies. Standing in their way are scattered wars and genocides; wars that have no real cause. Someone is playing with our universe. They plan to make that stop; forever."e;The cost of breaking library rules can be very severe. Every species, who applies to the Foundation for information transfer, on a specific and limited topic, is provided a copy of Rules for Emperors, Warlords, and Despots, along with a short demonstration video featuring one of our ships turning an uninhabited moon into a gas cloud in less than two seconds. My ships are the enforcers. The Bears are the ultimate pacifists. I don't tell them everything I do."e;

One ordinary evening in New York City, twenty-five-year-old Riley Patterson opens her apartment door and comes face-to-face with herself.Same clothes. Same groceries. Same scar on the same finger.What follows is not a descent into madness — it's the beginning of something far stranger in time and places unimagined.

Fiction Writer Power Tools Vol 3 continues to go deeper than prescriptive rules to reveal the underlying mechanics that separate competent fiction from exceptional art. Drawing on decades of teaching experience and a systematic approach refined through intensive critique work, this compendium explores twenty two sophisticated techniques that most craft instruction glosses over. This isn't another book of writing exercises. It's a diagnostic manual for serious writers who sense their work should be better than it is, who want to understand why their favorite authors' techniques succeed, and who are ready to move beyond rules toward principles. For writers across all genres—literary fiction, thriller, romance, horror, science fiction—who want sophisticated tools for solving problems that have resisted intuitive fixes.Topics Covered:Architecture of Subtext & Unspoken ConflictChildren's Interiority & DialogueFemale Social Codes in FictionMale Social Codes in FictionInternal Identity NegotiationNarrative Questions & Reader EngagementPassive Voice: Beyond the Broken RulePerfection as Enemy of Good EnoughPersonification in FictionReader EngagementStrategic Use of SarcasmThematic Development & IntegrationUnreliable NarratorsWorldbuilding Through Natural ExpositionWorld Building via Character Experience

Maritime ThrillerWhen the sky is falling, do you save your friends or the world?Newly promoted Lieutenant Jennifer Slaughter takes her ship and six crew on their maiden voyage off the coast of Maine as part of the Marine Fisheries Patrol. When they pull away from the dock, her primary concern is the last-minute addition of a rookie to the crew. Patrica Lambert's file is thin, with unexplained gaps. Will Lambert make the grade?Jennifer soon learns her vessel has been bought and paid for by the Department of Homeland Security and has no recourse when federal agencies want a hand in her operations. She and her crew are called to action when terrorist plans threaten U.S. cities from the sea.

Lord of the Oaks, Irish Druid Culture, Lore and Legacy begins in County Meath. A farmer plows around a hawthorn tree that stands alone in thirty acres of tilled ground. Forty minutes away, a motorway curves around an unmarked earthen mound because a county council quietly rerouted it. No archaeologist lobbied for the mound. There is no historical protection. Ireland simply went around.Ask yourself what kind of belief -- not doctrine, not creed, but something older and quieter than either -- would have to persist across twenty centuries of invasion, famine, conversion, colonization, and modernity to still have that kind of grip on a practical man's hand as it reaches for the wheel.That question is Lord of the Oaks.Written for the curious reader rather than the academic, Lord of the Oaks traces the full arc of Irish Druid culture from the Neolithic builders of Newgrange — who aligned a passage tomb to the winter solstice sunrise with precision that modern engineers marvel at — through the Iron Age Celtic world, into the rich and largely uninterrupted Druidic tradition that flourished in Ireland long after Rome had suppressed it everywhere else, and forward through Christianity, the Viking fracture, the slow forgetting, and the living echoes that reach into the present day.Ireland is the heart of this book because Ireland was the last stronghold. When Rome was dismantling Druidism across the Continental Celtic world, Ireland stood outside Rome's reach — a wet, green island where the old knowledge kept growing, kept deepening, kept finding new ways to make itself indispensable. The result was a civilization in which the people who carried wisdom sat at the table with kings as equals and were sometimes feared more. A world in which a poet could stop a war with the right words spoken at the right moment.Lord of the Oaks does not pretend to certainty where the evidence runs thin. The Druids chose not to write -- a radical philosophical position, not illiteracy ­— and what survives comes through enemies, conquerors, and Christian monks, each with reasons to shape the story. This book reads those sources the way a good detective reads a witness statement: not for what they say, but for what they reveal about the person saying it.

Fairies and Fae are not what you think they are.Before Tinkerbell. Before Disney. Before the flower fairies of Victorian illustration, there were older things in the hills. Beautiful, terrible, operating by their own unforgiving rules, indifferent to human concerns in the way that the very old and very powerful are indifferent. This is the fairy tradition that writers working at the highest level of the genre have always known. Fairies and Fae gives every fiction writer the keys to writing in that tradition.Drawing on anthropology, folklore, neurology, literary history, and the craft of fiction itself, this book traces fairy mythology from its roots in the Celtic heartland through Norse, Germanic, Asian, African, and indigenous American traditions revealing the cross-cultural patterns that make the fairy one of the most durable and psychologically potent figures in world mythology.What you'll find here:·       The deep psychology behind fairy belief, Why the human mind, across every culture and century, has needed to populate the liminal spaces of experience with beings that operate by their own alien logic·       The world map — Celtic Sidhe and Seelie Courts, Norse alfar, Arabian jinn, Japanese yōkai, African spirit traditions and their diaspora transformations, with specific attention to what makes each tradition distinct and what it offers writers·       The Rulebook — iron, bargains, names, fairy food, time distortion, and the other cross-cultural laws that define fairy beings, with analysis of why these rules feel universally true and how to use them without making them feel mechanical·       The darkness — the changeling, the fairy lover, the Wild Hunt, the Fairy Queen, and the traditions that serious modern fiction has reclaimed from Victorian sanitization·       The history — from Shakespeare's watershed treatment in A Midsummer Night's Dream through Spenser, the Victorian catastrophe, Yeats, Tolkien, and the current romantasy explosion·       The hoaxes — the Cottingley Affair, the Fairy Investigation Society, P.T. Barnum to internet memes, and the anatomy of why we want to be fooled·       The craft — a dedicated section on building internally consistent fairy rule systems, writing genuinely alien fairy characters, using court structures as plot engines, and signaling to readers what kind of fairy story they're inThis is not a beginner's guide to fantasy tropes. It is an authoritative reference for fiction writers who want to work with the fairy tradition at full depth — recovering the power that was there before the miniaturization, before the wings, before the belief that fairies exist to delight children. That older tradition is darker, stranger, and far more useful to serious storytelling.

Fiction Writer Power Tools Vol 2 picks up where volume 1 left off..Fiction Writer Power Tools Vol 2 goes deeper than prescriptive rules to reveal the underlying mechanics that separate competent fiction from exceptional art. Drawing on decades of teaching experience and a systematic approach refined through intensive critique work, this compendium explores twenty two sophisticated techniques that most craft instruction glosses over. This isn't another book of writing exercises. It's a diagnostic manual for serious writers who sense their work should be better than it is, who want to understand why their favorite authors' techniques succeed, and who are ready to move beyond rules toward principles. For writers across all genres—literary fiction, thriller, romance, horror, science fiction—who want sophisticated tools for solving problems that have resisted intuitive fixes.Topics CoveredCharacter TopicsCh 1 - Setting as CharacterCh 2 - Character Rituals in FictionCh 3 - Character Undiagnosed PatternsCh 4 - Antagonist as ProtagonistCh 5 - Enemy in the MirrorCh 6 - Ensemble Antagonist CastsCh 7 – Anthropomorphs in AllegoriesStructure TopicsCh 8 - First Chapters - Genre-SpecificCh 9 - Inciting Incidents & Strategic SetupsCh 10 - Raising Stakes ProgressivelyCh 11 - Scene Building w/ Psychological FrameworksCh 12 - Cliffhangers and Chapter EndingsCh 13 - Crisis and Climax ConstructionCh 14 - Theme Development & IntegrationCh 15 - Satisfying Endings & Resolution TypesProse TopicsCh 16 - Genre Conventions & ExpectationsCh 17 - Exposition Through DialogueCh 18 - Overwriting & Reader OverloadCh 19 - Under-Writing Starves the ReaderCh 20 - Period & Historical Fiction DetailCh 21 - Techniques and DevicesCh 22 - SymbolismCh 23 - Universal Themes in Genre Fiction

Stop Following Rules. Start Understanding Systems.Most craft books tell you what to do: show don't tell, start with action, create conflict. But they never explain why techniques work—or how to diagnose what's broken in your own writing.Fiction Writer Power Tools goes deeper than prescriptive rules to reveal the underlying mechanics that separate competent fiction from exceptional art. Drawing on decades of teaching experience and a systematic approach refined through intensive critique work, this compendium explores eighteen sophisticated techniques that most craft instruction ignores:This isn't another book of writing exercises. It's a diagnostic manual for serious writers who sense their work should be better than it is, who want to understand why their favorite authors' techniques succeed, and who are ready to move beyond rules toward principles.For writers across all genres—literary fiction, thriller, romance, horror, science fiction—who want sophisticated tools for solving problems that have resisted intuitive fixes.

He watched the Northmen burn Lindisfarne when he was seven years old. His parents never came back from the fire.Rescued by an Irish monk and carried across the sea, the boy called Miach grows up inside the walls of a monastery in Meath—learning to grind oak-gall ink, copy scripture in the Irish hand, and survive the bruising social world of boys who belong to the land he has only borrowed. When he takes his vows and receives the name Brother Michael, he carries with him a survivor's understanding of what the Northmen actually are: not demons, not instruments of God's wrath, but men who cross open water for gold, and who will not stop.As the raids intensify across Ireland—longships pushing up the Boyne and the Liffey, monasteries burned from Iona to Armagh—Michael rises from scribe to illuminator to the unlikely delegate sent to argue the Irish church's case before Rome. He journeys to the scriptorium at Kells, where the Book of Kells is still being written and may be destroyed at any moment. He crosses the Alps. He stands before Pope Leo in the Lateran Palace and speaks for a tradition that the rest of Christendom regards as quaint, peripheral, and possibly heretical.And in the end, an old abbot dictates his life's account to a young scribe named Rolic—not because he wants to be remembered, but because the words deserve to survive.Hammered Whispers is historical literary fiction grounded in meticulous research: the daily rhythms of Irish monasticism, the making of illuminated manuscripts, the political fractures within the early medieval church, and the Druidic tradition that Christianity never fully displaced. It is the story of one man's long reckoning with survival, beauty, faith, and the stubborn insistence that the written word is worth dying for.In principio erat Verbum. In the beginning was the Word. And the Word would endure.