Raving Toy Maniac

(RTM note: we are over the moon for Adrian, and couldn't be more proud of him if we had sat in the room with him while he was writing!)

December 2012 - In 2009, Adrian Faulkner took an important decision and stepped down from Action-Figure. Every day for over a decade, he'd been bringing news and reviews to the toy collecting community.

"My passion had always been fiction," Adrian explains, "and the plan was that one day I would go back to that. I'd spend all day talking about other people's creations and then never get any time to spent creating my own. The day I stepped down, I felt I'd made the worst mistake of my life. I felt literally sick. Then out the blue, I got a phone call and the most amazing pep talk from Hugo Stevenson of Stevenson Toys telling me why I was going to succeed. It was just what I needed."

Three and a half years later, and Adrian's first book has been published. The Four Realms is an exciting Urban Fantasy novel featuring Vampire genocide, shape-shifting cephalopods, kick ass elderly protagonists and shotgun wielding centaurs. Published by the renowned small press, Anarchy Books, the novel has already received plaudits from industry heavyweights such as Andy Remic and Gail Z Martin.

But it's not just one member of the toy collecting community that has benefitted from the deal.

"I always remember Matt Cauley doing those incredible drawings of the toy collecting community in the style of Batman the Animated Series. I vowed then that if I could, I would get Matt to do my book cover. When I got the publishing deal, and was talking things over with my publisher they were very open to Matt doing the cover. He really delivered and even the publisher has said it's their best ever cover!"

And as for the toy industry? Is there any looking back?

"I do miss it sometimes," Adrian says, "especially around ToyFair or San Diego Comic Con where I see all the fun my friends are having. Then I remember the twenty plus hour days and the weeks of wall-to-wall work posting coverage and don't feel quite so bad."

The Four Realms is currently available on Kindle from Amazon.com (affiliate link) with Epub version available from The Robot Reader due early in the New Year.

Half-vampire Darwin stumbles across a corpse on the streets of London, and in a pocket discovers a notebook in a mysterious language. Divided between human ethics and vampire blood lust, Darwin finds himself both condemner and saviour of a race who’ve never considered him one of their own. Now, he must try and lead the survivors to sanctuary in New Salisbury before Mr West completes his genocide of the vampires in his quest to obtain the book...

Maureen Summerglass is eighty-two years old, a prisoner in her ramshackle home. She is afraid to let people enter in case they discover the oak door in her cellar. Threatened with homelessness and retirement from her job as a gatekeeper between worlds, Maureen breaks protocol when the death of a close friend is covered up… and enters the city of New Salisbury to search for his missing notebook. There, she discovers a world unlike the one of myth and fairy tale she imagined, and instead one of black market economies, brand names and tuk tuks. As she investigates, not only is she in extreme danger, but discovers she may be the first human female able to use magic...

Title: The Four Realms
Author: Adrian Faulkner
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Length: 120,000 words
Published by Anarchy Books
Release Date: 26th December 2012
Cover by Matt "Iron-Cow" Cauley
Mobi ISBN: 978-1-908328-52-6
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-908328-53-3