Celine Domenech (she/her) grew up in various countries of Europe, and is a citizen of two. She wrote her first book as a student, and has been a copywriter for many years.
Paul Newman (he/him) grew up in the UK, and is a professional software engineer, but he spends most of his evenings falling asleep in bed with a book.
Paul and Celine are always working on projects together, which vary from DIY to crochet and, of course, writing.
AUTHOR LINKS:
Website: theshadowofphaedrus.com
Instagram: @the_shadow_of_phaedrus
TikTok: @teanytraumas
Facebook: @theshadowofphaedrus
The Dead Shadow on Amazon UK
The Dead Shadow on Waterstones
The Dead Shadow on Barnes & Noble
Read a Sample: read.amazon.co.uk/sample/B0FK5NL7WW
A recording of the first chapter, read by the authors:
Book Elevator Pitch for Readers/Book Clubs:
After a magician vanishes, a shaman, a clairvoyant, and a Shadow team up with an Earthling girl. They want answers. She wants revenge. But someone wants to stop them!
Your first book, The Dead Shadow, came out in 2025 with Cranthorpe Millner, and is the first in a YA cozy fantasy mystery series, The Shadow of Phaedrus. How did you come up with the idea for the series and start working together?
The Dead Shadow is the result of 10 years of thinking, chatting, writing, erasing, proofreading, rewriting, and querying. During that time, we also figured out how to plan and write as a duo.
Initially, the idea was a fun magic fantasy story with a main character who has a sarcastic vibe. Fantasy is a category with a lot of tensions, and, as such, there are often elevated emotional states from the get go, which also makes it tough for us to connect with characters. So, we wanted a character that felt more in sync with our mindsets. Once we decided on this, everything moved on surprisingly fast.
We were constantly chatting and sharing thoughts on what the world of our sarcastic main character could look like.
Wouldn’t it be cool to have a world with different magical lights? Wouldn’t it be fun to have magical Shadows instead of wands? How about magicians becoming magical Shadows after they die? How about a magical world order that isn’t what it seems to be? The ideas never stopped because each was racking their brain to make the other one laugh.
The more we talked, the more the story took shape. Before we knew it, we had a magical world with challenges, a long forgotten magical order, and an epic quest that would take our heroes through 8 books to resolve. By that point, we couldn’t even remember who had the first idea; we both wanted to write it!
However, here’s the thing: writing as a duo turned out more challenging than we expected. Talking about the story all the time didn’t actually mean we knew how to write it as a tandem. There were many attempts (and failures!) before we finally came up with a strategy that worked forth of us.
Do you have any advice for people starting work on a collaborative project?
For us, the main thing was spending a lot of time talking about the world and its characters, and developing them together. As an author, you are constantly striving to communicate the image in your mind’s eye to your reader and so it felt important to us that we had the same ideas and images in mind. When we talk about our world, our ideas tend to flow freely – without discounting anything as silly or irrelevant. The more we talk the more we shape and develop ideas into someting common that we both love and understand.
That said, not being afraid to let go of your ideas if your co-author’s are better is also important (kill your darlings, and all that). Having a common vision isn’t easy, of course, and even now we still have slightly different views of who are characters are and exactly how places look.
We’ve mentioned it on podcasts before, but as we were writing The Dead Shadow we found that a simple scratch pad (Trello, for us) of characters, places, chapters, and signficant plot points helped us to stay on track. We also included reference photos and images of people and places, that we both felt comfortable with.
You can’t be pantsers when you are in a collaborative project. You need to both be plotters from the start, so all ideas are included and everything flows meaningfully.
What are your main influences for this series, and what vibes should readers expect?
We spotted influences after we’d aleady written The Dead Shadow, usually after someone else pointed it out to us. Since a lot of readers have been comparing The Dead Shadow with Pratchett, we’ve been using it to describe the vibes of the series.
A comparison to Pratchett instantly sets the scene: It evokes humour. It paints low emotional stakes with feel-good characters. It also calls for slight neurodivergent-coded behaviours that highlight the absurdities of the world and its rules (such as is the case with beloved characters like Granny Weatherwax or Death). In a way, Pratchett has been such a big part of growing up that we didn’t even notice his influence until others mentioned it! But, now it’s been said, we can’t deny it!
We’ve also both loved Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimeus series for a long time. Bartimaeus‘s specific tone has been a source of inspiration for the character of the Shadow.
People should expect feel-good, comedy fantasy vibes with no romance and, in the words of readers, a “hug with crazy banter”.
Tell us about the neurodivergent rep in this series – you were even praised in the press for its inclusion, so how did you go about developing your characters and ensuring the representation was sensitive and relateable?
We’d love to say that we carefully plotted out different charactersitics and carefully wove these into the narrative with style and a deep intellectual understanding. However, we largely just tried to write about people who felt real, in a way that was relatable to us. Given our own neurodiversities it was, somehow, inevitable that they came out the way they did.
As we edited and re-drafted, it was fun to note some of these and play on them – Helena’s tendency to smash through the middle of a conversation with whatever she has floating through her mind is a trait we are familiar with. Equally, the way she can redivert the entire plot into whatever she believes to be important, is also something we do!
Similarly, Rhode’s way of observing her surroundings to blend in while still not realising she stands out is also, unfortunately, a trait we have frequently observed in ourselves too!
Finally, Pamphilos’s hyper-fixation on understanding the magic of his world is another well-known neurodivergent trait. We instinctively wrote characters we could understand, and it so happens most of them turned out to be neurodivergent in a way or another.
The key was probably to allow develop the characters naturally, as real people, and let them speak in their own way. The real world we inhabit is full of sparkling neurodivergent minds, so it was inevitable that many of our characters would represent this.
Talk us through your setting for the series and the worldbuilding you’ve done. There are Nekros magicians, Earthlings, clairvoyants, and Shadows… oh my! How did you create this world and what was the most challenging part of worldbuilding for you both?
We started with two ideas: Different magical colours and magical Shadows. Then the rest was trying to make sense out of it for ourselves.
How would a world with different magical colours evolve? The first answer that came to us was: it wouldn’t be a peaceful evolution because people are inevitably going to try to decide between themselves over the “superior” colour (which, if you remove magic from the picture, is a statement hits closer home than we’d like).
So, we needed borders that would reflect how the different territories ended up after centuries of forgotting the origin of the magic and its history. So, this is how we ended up with eight different magical lands and one non-magical territory, the Earth lands.
Additionally, while magicians at the time of the story have forgotten where everything came from, the words they use to refer to their magic and their everyday lives are memories from this distant past.
The most interesting and at the same time most challenging past of this immense world was ensuring that each magical light and each character would end up with a name that hints at their place in the story. So, all names are taken from Ancient Greek or even before and they all carry a meaning. It was really a lengthy research process, but at the same time, the language nerd of our duo had a fantastic time with it!
Introduce us to your main characters we meet in The Dead Shadow, and who we’ll follow in Book 2. How did you develop them, and what makes them compelling to write?
In many respects, Rhode is the central character of The Dead Shadow as it is her story, of seeking revenge for her brother’s death, that we follow.
Her guides, mentors, and occassionally raving supporters are many: Pamphilos is a respected shaman who has spent many years travelling the magical lands, seeking to understand the problems that plague the magical world.
His constant companion is Twig, an owl who spends most of the plot finding furry things that go squeak, or rather, went squeak.
Alexis is an old magician of the Dynamis clan. He is a well-known and influential figure.
His sarcastic Shadow is our narrator and is a proud and powerful Dynamis Shadow, as he might mention. Possibly several times a page.
Helena, Alexis’s daughter and clairvoyant, can speak to any Shadow and spends much time doing so. This leads to unexpected insights, which are often received with surprise as she blurts them out mid-conversation with zero context. She is often found arguing with the Shadow as he attempts to narrate the story, which is her way to break through the fourth wall, for this reason both the Shadow and Helena are incredibly fun to write.
We also get to meet another character, Elpis, who Rhode wants to find to avenge her brother.
We spent a lot of time talking about these characters, wondering about their back stories, about their dreams, their hopes, and what moved them. The more we talked, the more we exposed them to a variety of situations until finally, we knew them by heart. The more we got to know them, the more we fell in love with them.
Tell us about Book 2, and what readers can expect: if you can give a teaser, please do!
The Dead Shadow introduces a magical world that may feel clear and organised at first, but that hides a lot of magical troubles. Book 2, The Glass Pigeon, starts where The Dead Shadow ends and continues the story of Rhode, the Shadow, Helena, and Pamphilos. We also see Elpis, a blind character who chose self-hatred and isolation to atone for her faults, realise the extent of her powers.
We will see a lot more of Elpis in Book 2, but for now, one thing we would like to share with readers who found Elpis’s story in The Dead Shadow sad: her name means hope. Elpis still has a long story ahead. Here’s a brief extract from The Glass Pigeon:
Like This? Try These!
YA – YA Fantasy – YA Horrormance – YA Horror
Author Spotlight: YA Fantasy Author John North
Meet John North, author of exciting YA Dark Fantasy Adventure series, Gorgon. The first book, The Crimson Witch, is out now!
Author Jamison Shea on Monsters, Monster Lovers, and Monstrous Media
Eldritch Girl welcomes Jamison Shea to chat about monsters and their books, I Feed Her to the Beast duology and new release, Roar of the Lambs.
Author Spotlight: YA Horrormance Author Nicole M. Wolverton
Meet Nicole M. Wolverton, a Pushcart-nominated writer of (mostly) speculative and horror fiction for adults and young adults. She is the author of A MISFORTUNE OF LAKE MONSTERS, a young adult speculative novel (CamCat Books, July 2024), and THE TRAJECTORY OF DREAMS, a 2013 adult psychological thriller (Bitingduck Press).
#AmReading Shout Out! Paranormal Debut SOUL’S CHOICE by Kerri Davidson (@bagoflettuce)
If you’ve been playing or lurking on the hashtag games on Twitter for the past few months (highly recommended if you want to find forthcoming books to keep an eye on), you might have seen some intriguing tweets about this book already. Soul’s Choice is a YA paranormal novel without the usual ensemble cast of…
Leave a Reply