Kell Shaw
Kell Shaw
Kell Shaw is an author and avid tabletop roleplaying gamer, whose lifelong passion for fantasy—especially Shadowrun, the Lord of the Rings, and the World of Darkness—inspired him to create the Vestiges of Magic urban fantasy universe. Kell’s fascination lies with the modern world colliding with magic, and his stories explore the lives of individuals caught between these realms.
August 2026
September 2026
Top Words
- spfbo
- kill
- benedict
- jacka
- reflections
- richard
All posts (26)
This is a crisply written book. It’s short and pacy, and I loved how it got straight to the action. (It's also another entrant in the SPFBO XI contest.) Amara is a seamstress, and a threadwitch, with the ability to awaken memories in cloth. This means that someone could use a cloak or jacket to listen to memories or...
This is the first novel by AM Kvita. Overall, fun, a touch of cozy, with queer found family tropes. I had some world-building hang-ups, but it's more of a character piece. Our protagonist, Joan Greenwood, comes from the ruling witch family of New York, and yet she's got a distant relationship with them. While Joan...
I’m a messy reader. I’ll start a book, put it aside for a bit, and either abandon it or look at it again a few months later. Or I’ll pick up a book and binge it, and its sequels, in a matter of days. What I’d like to do is track these books so I can see how much I read. My Kindle would automatically post to...
Well, here I am on Easter Sunday, past the first quarter of the year. From my writing/publishing perspective, I’ve made my major goal, which was to finish editing and entering beta feedback/rewrites on The Demon’s Peace and submitting it to the editor for more editing! It’s in decent shape, and I’m on track for...
Daughters of Darkness by Samuel Chatman is a comic book in prose form, which mixes technology-based superheroes with standard urban fantasy tropes like vampires, werewolves and demons. (It's also another entrant in the SPFBO XI contest.) In this alternate reality, America is divided in two: there’s the evil American...
I know a few self-published authors who are quitting the business. It's not the writing that's the hard part, it's selling the books, it's marketing, it's managing their own online shop, it's struggling to find readers and fans for your books in an age of instant social media gratification and AI slop. It’s dealing...
This is a review of an indie book from the SPFBO XI competition, which hooked me from the first preview chapter. Summary: Two young outsiders, each with a mysterious heritage, get involved in court intrigues in an Indian-themed fantasy world and quickly find themselves out of their depth... The story opens with a...
A very slow film festival Have you heard of the Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off Contest? (SPFBO)? Now it its eleventh year, it's a contest where three hundred self-published books are selected at random to participate in a book death match! I entered my latest book, Reflections Upon the Anniversary of My Descent...
I've changed my website again! Last year, I was tired of how bloated and ad-soaked Wordpress had become, so I moved to Joomla. And while that was a fantastic CMS, it felt a bit like driving a huge truck. I wanted a website that was a bit more cozy, and that I could understand what was happening under the hood...
Knights on campus! Brianna's mother has died, and to escape, she goes to college with her best friend Alice. While still processing her mother's grief, Brianna stumbles onto a secret society on campus. An order of people descended from the knights of the Round Table can call upon powers to fight back an incursion of...
Quadruple Feature! It takes a while for a series to get good, to reach a level where you can't wait for the next book. It all varies, of course, depending on who you ask. Discworld doesn't kick off until the third books, Equal Rites, Dresden Files hits a home run also with the third book (IMHO), Grave Peril. I'd...
Time for one of those end of year/start of year posts. By way of introduction, or re-introduction, I'm Kell Shaw and I write books and short fiction in the secondary world urban fantasy Vestiges of Magic universe. I'd like to dig more into my fantasy world and creative choices this year in bloggery, so stay tuned...
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