I’d just started the process of redesigning the Fionn mac Cumhaill Series book covers this week when these arrived in yesterday as part of a historical post. About eight years ago, I’d commissioned some covers and the artist came back with the attached images. At the time, although I was really impressed with her design skills (she did the first Liath Luachra book cover and one or two more) I felt these images were very ‘genre dated’ – harking back to the misogynistic, old-style, fantasy covers of the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties. It’s also worth noting that there was absolutely ..read more

Monoliths by Jonan Booth Remmers. Obviously, we have many variations of these back home, particularly around the Cork-Kerry area. People tend to forget however, that what we see today are little more than the ‘bones beneath the skin’. Most of these structures are the remnants of something that existed thousands of years ago. They don’t look the same today as they were when they were first embedded into the land ..read more

You can’t really understand ‘mythology’ if you don’t have the culture and the historical context – one of the reasons Western-based “internet mythology” remains an ‘entertainment’ or a false promise of mystic wisdom, rather than actual ‘knowledge’. When it comes to ‘mythology’, one of the biggest mistakes people tend to make is an enthusiatic and frenzied focus on individual events and records rather than the longer term patterns. It’s a basic scientific principle that nothing makes sense unless it’s repeated (ie. it’s reproducible) and that truth holds just as well for ‘mythology’. The attach ..read more

It’s almost four years ago now, since the pre-production work started on a television series based on ‘Liath Luachra: The Grey One‘. The series (to be produced by Graisland Entertainment) was renamed ‘Liath: Celtic Warrior’ and I confess I wasn’t particularly enamoured with the new name – it simply doesn’t make sense from an Irish perspective. That said, it wasn’t my production and, with screen adaptations, you really just have to step away and accept that it’s a completely different product. Sadly, the sudden arrival of the Covid pandemic knocked the production off its feet and it never real ..read more

After a hectic, but production poor 2023, I’m proactively returned to creative mode. At the moment, my key focus is on finishing ‘FIONN: The Betrayal’ – the fifth book in FIONN mac Cumhaill Series and, probably, the second last. This particular work has been a lot harder to write than most other books in the series thus far. That’s not really a surprise as it’s also the first book to start reeling in all the different plotlines spread across the FIONN series (and some elements from the overlapping Liath Luachra books). For that reason, it’s a lot more ‘talky’ and includes far more character de ..read more

It’s hard to believe but it’s now coming up to ten years since I first started publishing books on Irish culture and Irish cultural belief systems. Back in 2013/14, I’d originally planned to write (and publish through a mainstream publisher) a non-fiction book related to Irish Fenian stories. What I ended up discovering through my research however, completely upended my plans (both in terms of WHAT I decided to publish and HOW I published) I started off with BEARA: Dark Legends in 2014, as it was closest to my heart. After that, I published FIONN: Defence of Rath Bládhma which subsequently wen ..read more

A lot of people tend to forget that Fionn mac Cumhaill also held a reputation as a talented poet (which has a whole bunch of relevant associations) and the Fenian narratives are strongly linked with what’s generally referred to as ‘nature poetry’. A number of ‘nature poems’ are actually attributed to Fionn (and I’ve a bridge to sell you if you believe that). This one is a 9th century poem (in Irish and English) which was translated by the German philology scholar, Kuno Meyer, back in the early 1900s. Note, this was written in 9th century Irish, so it’s quite different to modern Irish. I have t ..read more

‘Darthuala’ – a variant name for Deirdre (as in Deirdre of the Sorrows) – by British artist Henry Tidey. Tidey produced this sometime back in the 1980s. The painting was based on James Macpherson’s somewhat fraudulent representation of Gaelic works which, amusingly, makes this ‘a reinterpretation of a misrepresentation’. It’s quiet surprisingly how common this is, even in contemporary society. Actually, perhaps even more so ..read more

I’m testing a new cover for ‘Liath Luachra: The Consent’ – a long-short story that follows on from the last Liath Luachra book (the Metal Men). I won’t be publishing a new Liath Luachra book until the end of 2024 at the earliest, so this was intended as an additional story for those who wanted more. The story concerns Liath Luachra’s reconnection with her old leader Bressal Binnbhéalach (Bressal of the Sweet Tongue) who was last seen in Liath Luachra: The Grey One. I have to admit, I really enjoyed writing the interaction between the elusive Liath Luachra and the predatory Bressal but, older n ..read more

I was trying to explain to someone yesterday about how I ended up having four different book series on the go at the same time. Beara: Dark Legends was my first book but it’s the type of book that takes ages to write (not linear and it’s actually two different – but interlinked – stories) so I started the Fionn series. After two books from that series, I wrote the first Liath Luachra book as a prequel but it ended up being more popular so I wrote a second one. Since then I’ve written two more Fionn books and have a fifth coming out early next year. That series will finish with the sixth book ..read more