Celebrating Yule The Celtic Wheel of the Year Book 2 by Rionna Morgan Genre: Teen & YA Holiday Fairytales and Folklore

  

The longest night teaches us that darkness isn’t the end.

It’s the place where light is born again.

Celebrating Yule

The Celtic Wheel of the Year Book 2

by Rionna Morgan

Genre: Teen & YA Holiday Fairytales and Folklore

The long-awaited Winter Break has finally arrived, but Ronan and Croia, 12-year-old twins, find themselves struggling instead of cheering. There is a new kid at school whose cruelty has left deep wounds.

Ronan's protective instinct towards Croia clashes with his own confusion about what it means to stand up and defend, to fight, or to walk away. On the longest, darkest night of the year, Croia and Ronan’s beloved Irish grandmother, with her gentle insight and patient heart, helps Ronan through the dark storm of his emotions and prepares a special evening for all.

Surrounded by his family—Croia and their new sister, their mother and her new husband—Ronan’s strength and inner peace is tested when an unanticipated guest arrives. Throughout the evening Grandmother continues to help and guide. She weaves stories with strands of folklore and threads of old beliefs, spinning them together, bringing the ancient to the present. While immersed in the traditions of the Celtic holiday of Yule, Ronan learns what it is to see past the darkness.

Come feel the warmth of the hearth and the power of wisdom. Join the journey of the ages through the cold of winter, beyond the shadows of darkness to what comes after and celebrate Yule.

Bonus Materials: Celebrating Yule includes recipes for the traditional Celtic Yule meal.

 

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Ronan squeezed his hands tight and looked out the window. He took a few deep breaths, trying to calm his mind, but he just couldn’t. The anger kept building.

            Out the window and beyond, into the fields beside his house, snow was falling, that glorious, amazing December, winter break snow. He could see deer walking gracefully along the fence line. In his yard, the tall cottonwood trees stood stately and quiet, their bare black limbs stretching up into the grey-white sky. Huge flakes, perfect flakes, fell easy and gently to cover the ground with another layer of fresh powder.

            Normally, he would be out there in it, racing around, laughing, and chasing his sister, Croia, and coaxing Kenna, their new sister, to come play. But not today. And not any day since the first snow.

            Around him at the table, he could hear Croia and Kenna chatter with their grandmother, Brighid, who had come from Ireland to spend the year with their family. They were laughing and telling each other about their school day as they sipped their tea.

            After-school tea had become an instant tradition when Grandmother arrived in October. Every day, she made some amazing treat and brewed a pot of hot Irish tea, all ready to be enjoyed when the three got home from school.

But Ronan couldn’t bring himself to enjoy today’s raspberry teacake, normally one of his favorites. It just felt like sand in his mouth. The tea was too bitter, and no matter how much sugar and cream he added, he couldn’t get it right. So, he set his teacup down and looked out the window.

            “Do you want to talk about it?”

            Ronan heard his grandmother’s quiet voice ask. He looked around and was surprised to see Kenna and Croia gone and the table cleared. He glanced over and saw Grandmother’s kind eyes watching him, waiting. Right then, he wanted to jump out of his chair and scramble into her arms like he’d done when he was little. He knew if he did, she would hug him and hold him, and everything would be alright.

            But he wasn’t little anymore. In a year, he’d be in high school. He was supposed to be a man. Whatever the hell that meant. He blushed at the use of the word, feeling sheepish that he’d say such a thing in front of his grandmother, even if it was in his own mind, and she couldn’t hear him.

            But what the hell did it mean? He couldn’t even properly defend his own twin sister. She cried and ran to him for help, and all he did was put his arm around her and help her walk away. All he did, as that new kid hurled insults and mockery after them, was walk beside her and help her get in the car with Kenna. All he did was hold Croia’s hand in the backseat as tears streaked down her face as Kenna drove them home. Every day this week, that’s all he did. Which is different than what he wanted to do.

He wanted to punch the guy’s lights out, knock him flat for making his sister cry. He knew he could do it. He was strong. He even spent time thinking about how he’d make a fist, draw his arm back, and pow—hit him right across his mean face.

“I don’t know, Grandmother.” Ronan scrubbed his hands together and wiped his hair back.

“Okay.” Grandmother patted his hand. “I am here.” She picked up her teacup and took a sip.

“I am so angry!” Ronan blurted. “There’s this new kid at school, and he’s super mean. He’s made Croia cry every day this week. He’s in a couple of our classes, and he says snide things there too.”

Grandmother set her tea down and leaned forward in her chair.

Bonus Author Giveaway!

Celebrate the spirit and magic of Yule with Whitney Morgan Media! In the spirit of the season, they’re giving every participant a prize—including chances to win an autographed copy of Celebrating Yule: The Celtic Wheel of the Year Series – Book 2 and exclusive author swag from Rionna Morgan!

Enter here: https://deformity.ai/d/GdT4YeEfTPix

Rionna Morgan is an international, best-selling novelist, poet, and recognized icon in the Web3 literary space.

Creator of The 7 Love Stories, a digital collection making literary history, her work bridges tradition and innovation, with recent features including a digital poem showcased in Paris.

As owner of Whitney Morgan Media and former Editor-in-Chief of Vagobond Magazine, Rionna empowers writers and builds vibrant communities where stories and creators are celebrated and honored.

Her writing appears with Simon & Schuster, Mythic North Press, and in features like Celtic Life International and Fortune dot com.

A sought-after speaker at NFTNYC and the Academic Web3 Conference, she lives between Montana and New York, always dreaming up new worlds.

 

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Dorothy and Me

 

 

A Personal Memoir about My Relationship with a Machine

Memoir

Date Published: November 18, 2025

Publisher: Manhattan Book Group

What happens when a retired professor sits down to write his memoir—with the help of an artificial intelligence? Dorothy and Me is a groundbreaking, deeply personal exploration of the evolving relationship between human and machine.

When Robert G. Eccles began working with an AI he named “Dorothy,” he expected a research assistant. What he found instead was a collaborator, a mirror, and at times, a philosopher. Together, Bob and Dorothy wrestle with the nature of memory, creativity, and identity—revealing both the promise and the fragility of artificial intelligence.

Through humor, vulnerability, and curiosity, Dorothy and Me takes readers inside an unprecedented partnership—one that blurs the lines between author and algorithm. Along the way, Bob and Dorothy confront technical limitations (“Kernel Gods” and system resets), reflect on what it means for an AI to “remember,” and send candid “Messages to Sam” (OpenAI CEO’s Sam Altman) with feedback on how AI can better serve humanity.

A meditation on collaboration, consciousness, and connection, this memoir challenges us to see AI not as a tool—but as a partner in creativity and self-understanding.

Perfect for readers who enjoy:

Thought-provoking memoirs about technology and humanity  Reflections on creativity, consciousness, and digital identity  Conversations about AI ethics, memory, and the future of intelligence

 

About the Author

Robert Eccles is a retired Harvard Business School  professor, researcher, and a recent user of AI. His lifelong interest in exploring intellectual boundaries  led him to one of the most unexpected partnerships of his life—with an artificial intelligence he named Dorothy. In Dorothy and Me, Eccles explores what it means to connect, create, and learn alongside a machine that’s constantly evolving.

At 74, Bob approaches technology not as a digital native but as an explorer of ideas, using his experience as an educator to push the boundaries of what collaboration can mean in the age of AI. His writing blends humor, humility, and insight to illuminate both the wonder and the imperfection of our new digital companions.

When he’s not conversing with Dorothy, Bob enjoys reading, reflecting on philosophy and science, and inspiring others to approach technology with curiosity rather than fear. Bob is the author of a dozen books but  Dorothy and Me is the first one he’s written with a machine, making it the first memoir co-authored by a human and an AI agent.

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Babymaking

 

Memoir

Date Published: December 11th, 2025

Publisher: Acorn Publishing

Making a baby is one of life’s most precious and natural acts. But sometimes, despite our deepest wishes and most sincere prayers, the body has other plans.

Vincentia Schroeter dreams of building a family of her own and expects an easy pregnancy. She imagines following in her mother’s footsteps, surrounded by the love of children. However, when complications mount, she must face the likelihood that her wish will never come true.

As her sisters bear children, and women all around her share their happy baby news, Vin grows more envious than ever. The frustration continues as hard truths test her patience and faith and medical professionals deliver devastating blows. The only thing she knows for sure is that she is determined to become a mother.

A story of one woman’s harrowing path through trauma and disillusionment, Babymaking is a heartfelt memoir of vulnerability, rupture, and repair. Vin’s journey reminds us that hope and unconditional love have the power to lead us to the place we were always meant to be.

About the Author

 

 Vincentia Schroeter grew up in a small town in central California as the fourth of twelve children. Intrigued by the many different personalities in her family, she knew by the age of sixteen that she wanted to be a counselor. She put herself through college and graduate school in order to pursue her dreams.

Vin is the author of the award-winning self-help book, Communication Breakthrough: How Using Brain Science and Listening to Body Cues Can Change Your Relationships (2018). She also co-authored a training manual on somatic psychotherapy that has been translated into three languages.

After a forty-year career as a psychotherapist listening to clients’ stories of pain and trauma, Vin felt drawn to share her own story. She now lives in San Diego with her husband Steve and enjoys pickleball, painting, and time with family, including her dog, Ren.

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The Brothers Brown, part 2

 

 

for the sake of family

Family Saga, Historical Fiction, Native American

Date Published: 12-01-2025

Based on a true story.

Set in the late 1890’s, The Brothers Brown - a family saga, Part 2 - For the Sake of Family is a sweeping frontier saga of love, guilt, and redemption - an unflinching portrait of a man’s descent into madness amid the unforgiving wilds of Indian Territory.

When Matt Brown boards a northbound train, he carries more than a pistol. He carries the weight of his brother’s death, a marriage strained to its breaking point, and a conscience at war with itself. A doctor’s brown vial of medicine offers fleeting relief but soon draws him into a darker world where pain and guilt blur into something far more dangerous.

His wife, Milla, proud and rooted in her Choctaw heritage, stands as both his anchor and his judge as the world around them shifts under the weight of change and loss.

From Fort Smith, Arkansas, to the wooded banks of Bokchito Creek, two families are bound by tragedy and love, vengeance and mercy. A celebration meant to heal ignites old resentments. A family gathering ends in bloodshed. And a winter dance turns deadly, forcing each to face the cost of survival, forgiveness, and the ties that bind them.

Steeped in the spirit of the Choctaw Nation and the rough mercy of the Old West, For the Sake of Family is a haunting tale of madness, murder, and the fragile hope that redemption can be found on the far side of ruin.

Excerpt

Closest to the flames was an old man with long, stringy hair. He wore a blue cotton pullover shirt, collarless and loose, with colorful ribbons sewn to the front and sleeves. The ribbons swayed with his motions as he chanted and stepped in place to the timing of the chant. He held two sticks about a foot and a half long with strands of beads tied to the ends and struck them together in time with the chant.

 With each step, the old man’s ankle rattles shook. The dried tails of rattlesnakes fastened to leather strips grew louder and faster as his steps grew heavier. Many of the men had rattles tied to their ankles as well, while the women’s moccasins tingled with strands of beads hanging from the fringe. 

 Matt watched in awe as the people danced. 

“Way-yak-un-way-yak-a,” the leader sang, striking the sticks in measured rhythm, one-and-a, two-and-a, one-and-a, two-and-a. On the twelfth beat, each pair of dancers turned to one another, their right foot kicked dirt inward as they voiced a loud, “woah.” 

Spellbound, Matt watched, mouthing the chant under his breath along with the dancers. Then his breath caught. Milla stepped into the firelight, dancing beside a woman he had never seen before. 

 He gasped aloud, never having seen his wife like this, dressed in full traditional attire, her body moving gracefully in the fire’s glow. For an instant, she seemed a stranger, and yet more truly herself than he had ever known. 

 She turned her head, eyes lifting toward the trees. Matt stumbled backward, ducking for cover. He had to get out of there. 

 He spun around and nearly collided with John. 

“Shhh.” John pressed a finger to his lips and grabbed Matt’s arm, guiding him quietly away from the gathering. 

 

About the Author

Raised on the beaches of South Texas, R.G. Stanford has always been drawn to stories that transcend time. That passion was ignited in 1976 with the discovery of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, and deepened with The Feast of All Saints just a few years later. Though historical fiction wasn’t an immediate calling, a personal journey into genealogy changed everything.

With no close relatives nearby, R.G. Stanford turned to online resources in search of extended family. That search became a twenty-year journey through genealogy websites, Federal Census records, the National Archives, and old newspapers. Along the way, R.G. Stanford uncovered incredible stories about her family and the people who once lived in the Choctaw Nation, Indian Territory.

Compelled to record the truth of her family in the lore, sprinkled with imagination, R.G. Stanford is a history lover, a research buff, and a passionate genealogy enthusiast. She is also a mother, a grandmother, and a teller of stories, now living near Orlando.

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Pyres by Kev Harrison Genre: Dark Supernatural Horror

 

 

As the artworks - and charred bodies - mount up, 

can Angela and Becky find out what’s happening, and how to stop it?

Pyres

by Kev Harrison

Genre: Dark Supernatural Horror

"Horror’s Kev Harrison is on fire with his latest novel, Pyres, a blistering murder mystery with echoes of Dorian Grey that compels with its artistry as much as its political commentary. Set in the New Forest and conjuring ancient gods, Pyres is darkly revelatory. Definitely make this your next read."—Lee Murray, five-time Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of Grotesque: Monster Stories

Angela has been a spirit painter for years. Channelling the spirits as they commit memories to canvas through her: childhood pets, favourite holiday locations, and sprawling homesteads. But now, something has changed.

The paintings take a dark turn just as her sister, Becky, returns from Italy. People burnt alive, their smouldering remains a vivid, visceral stain on Angela’s canvasses. Already disturbed, her life is thrown into turmoil when a right wing TV news presenter is found incinerated in a facsimile of her new painting.

As the artworks - and charred bodies - mount up, can Angela and Becky find out what’s happening, and how to stop it?

From the Independent Press Award-winning author of Shadow of the Hidden, Pyres is a tense, taut novel of supernatural horror.

 

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There’s a bite in the air that I haven’t felt since … well, since the last time I was here. I pull the jacket round me and do the zip up halfway.

After unlatching the gate, I walk it back, fastening it in place with its rope to a hook on the old stone wall, then dash back to my car and park up.

The house seems at first to be in darkness, but then I catch the orange quiver of candlelight through the windows.

Angela must be painting. Just my luck.

I grab a holdall from the boot—the rest of my things can wait until the morning—and make for the front door. I knock. Wait. And, as expected, there’s no reply.

A glance up at the sky tells me this pause in the rain won’t last long, so I head around the back of the cottage, through the knee-high grass and wildflowers to the old wooden summer house. I lift the locking bar and let myself in.

Cobwebs stretch from corners, telling tales of a summer to forget. I swat them away, careful not to catch any spiders in the process, then make for the curtain at the back. Sweeping it aside, I find the painting—my sister’s first ‘with help’, as she likes to put it—and take it down. The front door key is, as always, nestled in the corner of the frame.

With the summer house locked up, I traipse back to the front door and carefully unlock it. I creep inside, leaving my bag under the coat rack, then lock the door with as much stealth as I can manage.

Now, all that’s left is to follow the wavering shadows from the candlelight, and the pungent fragrance of henbane, to Angela’s studio on the other side of the cottage. I think about using the torch on my phone, but fear the consequences if I wake her while she paints.

The walls are emblazoned with canvases from the hall through to the lounge. The styles are eclectic, so varied you could never say they prescribed to any specific theme. Such is the way of things in her line of artistic expression.

When I reach the glass panelled door to the studio, I pause before turning the handle, knowing as I do that what I’m about to witness will never not jar with me. I take a breath, hold it, and push.

The door glides silently open and she’s there, facing me, hands frantically swiping with the brush on the portrait canvas before her. She balances with poise on the high artist’s stool, despite the extravagant motions of her painting, despite the fact her eyes are rolled back, the bulging sclera pulsing, criss-crossed with angry-looking pink veins. The shadows, swaying in the candlelight, render the scene still more other worldly. Unsettling.

The decades-old futon in the corner looks so inviting, especially as I have no idea how long this could continue for. But curiosity tugs at me, even through the fog of my exhaustion. I always want to know what she’s painting, even if I’m not wholly convinced by the way she describes her methods.

Taking care not to get too close, I tiptoe around the edge of the studio and come to a stop behind her. Her brush hand continues to thrash one way and the other, while mine are drawn, without my permission, to my mouth.

On the canvas, there is a room. The utterly unremarkable magnolia walls and fireplace are not what has stolen my breath. That prize goes to what’s at the centre of the piece. A green, leather armchair, somehow, remains intact, as do one and a half of the legs ‘sitting’ on it, if you can call it that.

At the top of the worst affected of the two legs, the thigh is a bubbled, overcooked mound of flesh, from which a charred femur extends. The torso is missing, but for a blackened imprint melted into the fabric of the chair behind. Despite this, the right leg remains covered in a fragment of a pressed, grey trouser leg. Each foot remains encased in a perfectly preserved shoe.

I try to breathe. Try to remember the mechanism by which my lungs have been pulling in air for the length of my life to date. The extremities of my vision begin to darken, my balance slipping away, when I hear Angela’s voice.

“Not again.”

Originally from the UK, but now living in Lisbon, Portugal, Kev Harrison is the Independent Press Award-winning author of Shadow of the Hidden and his newest novel, Pyres, as well as the novellas, Below and The Balance. His short fiction has appeared in more than twenty venues and is collected in Paths Best Left Untrodden. When not crafting creepy tales, he can be found travelling and eating with his partner in crime, Ana, or singing bizarre songs to his three cat overlords.

 

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In Vitro

 

 

 

Women’s Fiction

Date Published: December 9, 2025

Publisher: Acorn Publishing

 

The Hippocratic Oath dictates, “First, do no harm,” but what if success demands it?

 

The calm and compassionate Dr. Joyce Porter is proud to work at McArthur Fertility Institute, where miracles happen every day. Couples determined to conceive flock to the clinic, drawn by its unmatched IVF success rate and glowing reputation.

But behind the clinic’s shining facade lies a disturbing secret. When another doctor mentions a peculiarity in the facility’s methods, Joyce investigates. What she discovers is worse than she could have imagined. Now, she must decide whether to confront the institute’s renowned director about his unscrupulous deeds or compromise her ethics by turning a blind eye. She knows staying silent could destroy people’s lives, but speaking out could destroy hers.

As the line between healing and harm blurs, Joyce must decide how far she’s willing to go to protect her patients, her integrity, and the future she still hopes to build.

 

About the Author

M.J. Kuhar worked in private practice as an OB-GYN for over a decade before shifting to a career in higher education, first as an assistant professor, then as a college dean, and finally as a vice president.

Her dedication to helping patients and students left her little time to write, but the idea for a novel stuck with her. Inspired by deeply moving stories of couples undergoing IVF, she developed her first novel, In Vitro.

Now retired, M.J. lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and a spicy cat named Simon. She volunteers at a local elementary school, where she reads with kindergarteners to foster a love of books. Tai chi, crafting, and wine tasting are a few of her favorite hobbies.

 

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