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Sudden Death comes out on Monday.

Before it does, I want to answer a question I get asked more than any other about this series. Why polo?

The sport of kings

Most people in America have never watched a polo match. I hadn't either, not properly, until I started writing about it. Growing up in England, though, I knew exactly what polo meant, because it was always on the news with a royal attached to it.

Prince Philip played it for years. King Charles played well into middle age, and Princes William...

A few months ago a reader left a review of Line of the Ball that I haven't stopped thinking about. They liked the book, and they liked Julian and Mason. They also asked the one question the book never answers: how does a ranch hand from a small Texas town get good enough at polo, fast enough, to ride for Briarcliff?

It was a fair question. I went back and checked. Line of the Ball opens with Mason at the fence at Diamond Back, a man in a suit watching him ride, and by the end of the chapter...

In polo, sudden death is how the final ends. This season, it's how it started.

That line has been sitting on my desk for months, and on October 6 I finally get to hand you the book that goes with it. Sudden Death, the third Windward Cup Dynasty novel, is seventeen days away.

I'm going to be careful here, because this is a book I'd hate to spoil. What I can tell you is that Julian and Mason are building something of their own at last, a club with their names on the gate and everything they have...

A reader emailed me last month with one line. You knew I loved her and you did it anyway.

She was right. I did know. And I want to tell you why, because the answer is the whole reason I write the way I do, and it might tell you whether my books are for you.

The tiger

Every character I write starts with an object, not a backstory.

Mason Caldwell, the cowboy at the center of the Windward Cup Dynasty, has a small plastic tiger. His mother bought it for him at a zoo when he was a boy, on the one...

I have been keeping something back for a few weeks, and this is the week I get to stop.

The Bear Hunt stories have new covers

When I first put The Bear Hunt out into the world, I made the covers myself, in a hurry, because the book was ready and I wanted it in your hands. They did the job. They were never quite the books.

So this summer I commissioned illustrators to draw Augie and Wes properly. I gave them a short brief and a long one. The short one was two big bearded men in their forties, a...

There is a lot to cover this week, so let me start with the part somebody has been waiting on.

The signed hardback of The Hollow City goes to Debb

When The Hollow City released, I said that anyone who posted a review on Amazon or Goodreads would go into a draw for a signed hardback copy. That draw has been made, and the winner is Debb.

Debb, thank you. Your copy will be signed and in the post next week, and it will be winging its way to you from there.

To everyone else who reviewed the book, you...

I ran a design contest for the new Bear Hunt Story covers. Seven hundred and eight people entered.

I want to tell you what happened, because somewhere around entry four hundred I stopped looking at book covers and started looking at something else. A kind of collective answer to a question I hadn't asked out loud. And the answer was wrong in a way I found genuinely interesting.

The brief

Five books. A contemporary M/M romance series set in the Cascades. Two men who fall in love in their...

The Hollow Clock Saga finishes tomorrow.

On 29 July, The Hollow City goes live in every format: Kindle (on sale at $2.99 for a limited time, and free with Kindle Unlimited), paperback at $14.99, and hardcover for anyone who wants the complete trilogy standing together on a shelf.

You already know the shape of the story if you’ve been here for the first two books. The clock stopped. The cathedral fell. The lie still stands. Cal has one last descent left to make, and the city has one last...

Four days. After three books, a prequel novella, and more hours inside Hollowmere than I can honestly account for, the Hollow Clock Saga finishes on Wednesday.

I want to say something about what it took, because I think the making of a book is worth more than the marketing around it.

The Hollow City was the hardest of the three to write, and the reason is structural. A finale has to pay off promises made years earlier by a writer who was, in several respects, a different person. Every thread...

Why don't you publish traditionally?

I get a version of this question every few weeks, usually from a reader who liked one of the books enough to look up who wrote it. Why isn't this published by a real publisher? Why is one person doing all of this alone?

I want to answer it honestly, because the honest answer isn't romantic. It isn't a story about rejection letters and finally proving everyone wrong. I never queried an agent. I never sent a manuscript to a publishing house and waited by the...

I get asked sometimes why I put it right there on the front page. Queer love, every genre, always a happy ending. Not tucked into an author's note. Not something a reader discovers three books in, once they've already decided to trust me. Right there, first thing, before anyone has even clicked through to find out what Hollowmere is.

Here's why. I grew up on stories where people like Cal and Fen didn't get to keep each other. Where the queer character was the one who got sacrificed for the...

Hi everyone,

I have a surprise for you.

After keeping this one close to my chest, I’m thrilled to announce that Line of the Ball — Book One of the Windward Cup Dynasty — is out now.

This is my first full dive into high-heat M/M sports romance, and I turned the heat up significantly. Expect steamier scenes, intense chemistry, and that slow-burn-to-inferno energy. It’s still classic Elias Keane storytelling — queer love, found family, and characters with real weight — but this time the spice is...

Happy 4th of July everyone,

There is a particular kind of quiet before a book goes out into the world. The manuscript is finished. The files are locked. All that is left is the waiting, and the hoping, and the small daily work of making sure the right readers find out a new door has opened.

That door opens on July 29, when The Hollow City, Book Three of the Hollow Clock Saga, finally reaches shelves.

If you have been with this series since The Hollow Clock first pulled back its curtain, thank...

I knew how this book ended before I knew how it began.

That happens sometimes. A character walks into your head fully formed and walking toward something, and you spend three books finding out what. Callum Vane arrived that way. I met him in The Hollow Clock with the lamps already burning and his hands already dirty, and I think some part of me knew even then where the road went. I just didn't want to look at it too closely.

Now I have. The Hollow City is out on July 29, and it is the end of...

There's a particular feeling that comes with stepping back into a place you built. Not quite the way a reader returns to a world, though I hope you feel some of that too. More the way a person returns to a house they once lived in. You know the floorboards. You know which doors stick. You know what's buried in the garden.

That's what writing The Hollow City felt like. A return.

If you've been with me since The Hollow Clock, you remember how Hollowmere works. The lamps have to be fed. Someone...

There's a moment in every Hollow Clock story where the soul-lights flicker on across Hollowmere — that first pale glow before the color blooms into something alive. I've always thought of it as the moment the city exhales. Things are about to begin.

That's the feeling I wanted to name the First Light Club after. Because this is about new beginnings, too.

Why I did this

I've been writing as Elias Keane for a little while now, and something I've noticed — and honestly been moved by — is how many...

The Origin of Everything

A few weeks ago, when I told you I had begun The Hollow City, I asked you a question I had never asked anyone before. Hollowmere runs on bound souls. Coal existed. Gas existed. So why would a city choose the dead over the easy fuel sitting right there? I said I had always known the answer and never told you, and I asked whether you wanted the story of it — a short, dark prequel about the choice that doomed everyone who came after.

You answered. More of you than I...

Finishing the Record

I have begun the third book. Its name is The Hollow City, and it is the end of Callum Vane's story.

I want to say that plainly, because I made a decision about this book that surprised me, and the decision is the whole reason it exists in the shape it does.

For a long time I thought the third book was a leaving story. After everything that happens in The Hollow Cathedral, the obvious next move is out, onto a ship, across the water, into the cities my characters have only...

The Distance Between Places

I was born in Midlands, England. I lived in New Zealand for eight years, then in Ontario for five, and I write now from near Portland, Oregon. They are not the same place. But the rooms are similar, places where the landscape teaches you to be quiet, where the weather has opinions and the mountains are old, where strangers will sit beside you without speaking and you will both feel less alone than when you arrived.

Bear Country, the third book in The Bear Hunt...

As we get nearer to the release of my new book The Hollow Cathedral I am running a Goodreads Giveaway promotion where 50 lucky readers will be able to win an electronic copy of the book.

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/439524-the-hollow-cathedral

The release date is 05-16-2026.

It is also available on Amazon for Pre-Order.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GXQVWHVK

A Steampunk horror set in the City of Hollowmere where the clock may have stopped but the screams have not.