Lloyd Hall's Blog

I’m so pleased to share that Edelweiss was recently awarded 5 stars by the Reader’s Favorite book review! It means so much to be recognized and I’d like to give a special thanks to Reader’s Favorite for recognizing Edelweiss and for writing such a lovely review!

“Author Lloyd Hall beautifully blends science fiction, romance, and mystery. Olivia and Ava's relationship is thoughtfully created, full of emotion and youthful sincerity. Edelweiss is an entertaining, thrilling, and thought-provoking story that will entertain you until the last page.”

I’m so excited to announce the next book in The Wardenclyffe Series, EDELWEISS. This Queer YA Sci-Fi will be releasing February 2026! Preorders and ARCs available now!

After moving to the snowy city of June, Olivia quickly finds there’s more to her new home than meets the eye — uncovering a maze of tunnels, lost ancient tech, and a mystery involving June’s workforce of androids. Yet, despite these enigmas, she’s more captivated by her new classmate, Ava. As they delve deeper into the secrets of June together, Olivia navigates the ups and downs of her first crush, unaware that their adventures could put the entire city in danger.

You can add the book now on Goodreads!

Also a special thanks to LGBTQReads for helping with the cover reveal! Check out the full reveal over on LGBTQReads.com!

As the third book in The Wardenclyffe Series moves closer to completion, I’ve been continuing to learn more about the world of bookbinding. From the beginning of my bookbinding journey, I’ve always had an end goal of being able to bind one really nice edition of all the books in my series together. So far I’ve been primarily focused on the binding of the books themselves, but now I thought it was time to branch out and learn some new skills. When I bind the final version of the series, I want it to have a really nice slipcase to help protect it so I thought it would be good to start learning how to make one.

I decided that I’d start by making a slip case for the first two books in my series. I managed to source some really beautiful Japanese paper for the insides of each slip case that matched the overall color of the two books’ covers. And although you’ll hardly see this detail, it’s important to me that it’s there since I’ll know what’s inside. I also managed to find some nice book cloth in similar colors to each book so the slipcases would blend seamlessly with the spines of the books themselves.

I debated going back to these slipcases and adding more details onto the outside, but ultimately I decided I liked the more minimal look to them. Especially when you see the contrast with the details of the actual covers when you pull the books out of the cases. I think when I do the full series I’ll probably look for some fun decorations I can add to the slipcase, but for now I’ll keep these as they are. I’ll also have the third book soon so I’ll likely make another slipcase for that one to match the first two books, just have to source some really nice green book cloth first!

I think my next big bookbinding project will be learning to do some hand tooling with gold foil. I’ve already got a foil stamping machine which is great for embossing text onto covers, but I’d love to be able to design and make some fun patterns on the covers themselves. Luckily I’ve got a shiny new set of tools to help me with that endeavor! Hopefully one of my next updates I’ll be able to show off some of my progress in that area!

I recently had the chance to sit down with the incredible Siris Says podcast to discuss my creative background and how it ultimately led to me writing The Wardenclyffe Series. I talk a lot about why I chose to self-publish, where some of the inspiration for the series came from, and even share some details about the upcoming new upcoming book!

I hope you’ll give the episode a listen! You can find it on Apple Podcasts or watch it on Youtube! Thanks so much to Siris for the interview!

Even before I released the first book in the Wardenclyffe Series, I had already outlined all of the books I knew I wanted to write in the series. All their own standalone stories, which connected together to form an even bigger picture of the world in which they take place. I wanted to write a series where you could pick up any book and enjoy it without having read the others, but if you did read the others, you’d start to see the connections between them like characters from one story appearing in the others, or events taking place at the same location, hundreds of years apart. I found that having detailed and thorough outlines helped me figure out how all the puzzle pieces of the stories fit together.

After the first book was released, I took a month and wrote the first draft of the third book in the series before going back to start editing the second book. And I did the same thing again this year, almost two full years later. After the release of the second book, I took a month to participate in NaNoWriMo and motivate myself to finish the first draft of book 4 in the series. And very fortunately I was able to come out of November with that first draft!

So now as the year comes to a close, it’s almost feels like I’m at the halfway mark with the Wardenclyffe Series. The first two books are fully published and out in the world, and I have first drafts of the last two books just waiting to be edited. And I know it’ll probably be another couple of years before I finish everything, but it feels exciting to start to see everything come together. And nice having a sense of where the series is going as I start thinking about editing book 3!

I’ve always has a certain fascination with abandoned places. There’s just something so cool about seeing old places being reclaimed by nature. Living back in Connecticut, I remember exploring so many abandoned places like old factories with their roofs caved in, long stretches of highway covered with graffiti, and even an entire abandoned town. Each one of these places stuck with me and I found myself searching for similar things in every area I went to. As well as falling down the internet rabbit hole of cool abandoned places around the world.

And naturally when writing a post-apocalyptic story there was a lot of opportunity to bring my love of abandoned places into the series. We get to see remnants of the world before the apocalypse like old buildings now being reclaimed by nature, forgotten technologies, and so much more. All of which take inspiration from my love of abandoned places. But I think one of the biggest things that was always missing for me while exploring places like this or looking at old photos of them was I only ever saw them in their ruined state. All these places used to be alive. People lived or worked in them, spent years building them, long before they were abandoned.

One such place was Hashima Island in Japan. Sitting off the coast of Nagasaki, this concrete manmade island, nicknamed “Battleship Island”, had been featured prominently in almost every single blog about abandoned places and even showed up in some popular movies. All the old concrete buildings, long fallen apart and crumbling to pieces, are now completely overgrown by plants making it feel truly like something out of a post-apocalyptic setting.

Just after publishing Mercury, I had the chance to go to Japan and actually take a tour of the island in person. And while the visuals were just like I had imagined (concrete buildings overgrown with plants), the tour really opened my eyes to what life had actually been like on the island before it was abandoned. I got to learn about the history of the island as a mining outpost, what it was like to live and work there, how families spent their free time, what it was like to be on the island during a storm, and so much more. Suddenly it wasn’t just an abandoned island, but rather it was an island with a full and rich history before being abandoned.

When I was writing both Wardenclyffe and Mercury, that was exactly the feeling that I was trying to evoke with all the abandoned places. Not just that they were abandoned, but that there was also a rich history that had come before in each of them. And that by seeing a glimpse of the ruins, readers would get a sense that they were just seeing a small part of a much longer history.

I think my trip to Hashima Island really helped open my eyes to what I really want to show in my stories when I talk about these abandoned places. And now I can be a lot more conscious of it while editing the next two books in the series. And hopefully when there are more abandoned places in my stories, they feel just as rich and full of history as their real-world counterparts.

This past week I celebrated the launch of the second book in the Wardenclyffe Series, Mercury! It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly two years since the last book came out and even harder to believe that I’m halfway done with the Wardenclyffe series! Feels like only yesterday that these stories were nothing more than vague ideas scribbled down on post-it notes around my apartment.

I want to thank everyone who helped make the book launch for Mercury such a success! I had a lovely launch party at Books Inc in Mountain View, CA and they now have a number of signed copies of Mercury and Wardenclyffe which can be found over on their site! Thanks so much to everyone at the store who helped support the event and thanks to everyone who showed up to support me! Especially as an indie author, it always means so much having people come to my events!

Also to everyone who’s written an advance review of Mercury ahead of this launch, thank you SO MUCH for helping to get people interested in the story! Word of mouth means everything to a self-published author and it makes me so happy to be able to launch the book with some wonderful early reviews!

After my last book release, I took a short writing retreat to a cabin in northern Maine to work on Book 3 in the series, and came out of that trip with the first draft done. But as it’s sat tucked away in a drawer for two years and I’ve grown as a writer since then, it’s going to need a fair amount of polishing and editing before it’s ready for the light of day. But now that Book 2 is officially out, I think I can take some much-needed rest and just enjoy having the book out in the world! But once I’ve rested up, trust me, it’s right back into working on Book 3!

Back when I was in 5th grade, one of my favorite things that we studied was Ancient Greece and Rome, and even to this day it’s been something that’s stuck with me. I remember learning about Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns and how to identify each, even learning a little song and dance to remember the column types. But the part that probably stuck with me the most was learning about the Greek and Roman gods. Each person in the class was assigned their own god to learn about for that module, ultimately culminating in a class play where we acted out scenes from Greek mythology.

When we started learning about Ancient Greece, the god assigned to me was Hermes, and as we moved on to study Ancient Rome and got to pick a Roman god, I picked Mercury because of how attached I had become to Hermes. I loved the winged shoes and hat, I would even try to run everywhere as quickly as I could, pretending I had wings of my own on my feet. The next year in school I even began my journal with a letter saying that if we were going to study Ancient Rome again I’d want to be Mercury.

The obsession ran deep, and if a book like The Lightning Thief had been out when I was in 5th grade, I would have definitely been obsessed with it too. However, when I started writing books of my own, I found a lot of the things I had learned about in Ancient Rome creeping into my stories. In Wardenclyffe, all the towns have fountains with statues of the greek gods in the middle of them, reminiscent of a statue of Mercury we had in my house growing up.

And the inspiration came back in an even bigger way in my second book, Mercury. With even the very name being a reference to the same god I studied back in 5th grade. But it went deeper than that. When designing the setting of the second book, a colony ship drifting in space, I wanted to imagine something a little different than the traditional spaceships with their metal corridors and futuristic look. Instead of that, I imagined a ship styled like Ancient Rome, still with plenty of sci-fi elements, but also some things to make it feel like the inhabitants had brought a piece of the Earth with them. So we get living quarters modeled after the stone streets of an Italian city, complete with little cafes and tables lining the streets, and transportation systems named after bridleways and chariots and other things you would’ve seen in Ancient Rome. And scattered throughout the ship are large marble statues of the ship’s namesake, Mercury.

I think one of my biggest joys of writing is to be able to take the things I’ve loved in my life, like studying Ancient Rome in 5th grade, and weaving them into the stories I write. In a way, it’s like I get to share pieces of all my memories with anyone who reads the stories.

As someone who’s been involved in a variety of design fields, from video game design to fashion and costume design, the look of the Wardenclyffe Series was something very close to my heart. As important as the story in each book is, I didn’t want to forget about the layout and design of the physical books themselves. After all, I think the look of a book can tell you a lot about what the story is going to be like.

When I first began the design for Book 1 in the series, I wanted to take some inspiration from some of the books that I had loved growing up. I looked at everything from the sizes of books, interior layouts, cover designs, and everything that goes into making a book. And even though I was only working on the first book, I wanted to set up a style that I could use for the entire series as I worked on the other books.

I knew I would be publishing both a hardcover and softcover edition of every book so I decided to start by figuring out the best size for each one. For the paperback, I looked at some of my favorite paperbacks, specifically the 1994 edition of The Chronicles of Narnia. Each book is a small, easy-to-carry size, perfect for a paperback novella. So once I got my final cover design, I printed it out on printer paper and wrapped it around my copy of The Magician’s Nephew to get a sense of how it would look at that size. The more I held it, the better it started to feel so I ultimately decided on the 4.25” x 7” size for the paperback.

Now, for the hardcover, I took inspiration from a slightly different place. As I talked about in my Self-Publishing blog post, my grandfather was also an author who self-published his own books. His were beautiful hardcover books with matching dust jackets that he would print at his small printing press up in northern Minnesota. So for my hardcover, I decided to print it at the same size as all three of my grandfather’s books, complete with similar-style dust jackets.

The next major piece of the books I wanted to look at was the exterior design, including things like the covers and spine design. I’ve always loved the look of old, leather-bound books with the embossed covers but unfortunately, that was not in my budget for self-publishing my own books. That being said, I did still want to take inspiration from those types of covers, even if it wasn’t going to be in leather. Abby Spence, who painted the beautiful cover, was able to include so many details that paid homage to the classic book covers like intricate border designs and highlights of gold/yellow that remind one of gold embossing.

And while each book is a part of the series, the stories themselves are standalone, all about different characters and their own adventures. And I wanted the design of the covers to reflect that. They all have similar border details and a unique central image that helps tie the look of them together, but each book also has its own, unique color palette to help make it stand alone. It’s a tough balance between making each book look cohesive with the others, yet still unique and individual but one I feel was accomplished.

The other thing I wanted to focus on was the interiors. Despite it being science fiction, I was going for a more classical look with the books in the Wardenclyffe Series. I’ve always admired books from the late 1800s and early 1900s that had beautiful black and white etchings in them, ones like Alice in Wonderland and, of course, the Chronicles of Narnia. Once again I found an incredible artist, Minna O., who helped me create a series of beautiful black and white illustrations, once for each chapter.

I cannot express how happy it made me to finally hold the finished books in my hands. Everything came together exactly as I had pictured it for the first book and I knew I’d found a style I’d be happy with going forward for the others in the series. Hopefully it won’t be too long until I can see all the books in the series laid out together as a matching set!

I got the opportunity to work in theatre starting at a very young age and it’s something that’s stuck with me throughout my life. I began as a set builder for middle school productions, sometimes also helping out with lighting and sound for the shows too. When I went to college I studied game design and fashion design but even my senior fashion collection was all inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Unsurprisingly, when I graduated I ended up working in theatre again, this time in the world of costumes.

I was brought on as an overhire stitcher for the premiere of a musical called Holiday Inn at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut. I found a passion for theater and would end up spending the next couple of years working at various theaters in Connecticut helping with everything from running wardrobe for shows to designing the costumes myself.

After years of working in costuming, when I transitioned to writing naturally some of that came with me. In theatre, I use costumes to help tell the audience about who the character is as a person. And in writing it’s exactly the same. The clothing a character wears in a story can give so many hints about who they are as a person. Like tiny subtle worldbuilding. For example in my first book there’s Bit, an android who spends her life working and repairing old machinery and equipment, what would she wear? In my mind, a denim jumpsuit covered with oil stains from the machinery she works on. It instantly tells you a story even without any other information about the character, you know they prefer something functional and they do some kind of mechanical work that leaves them stained with oil.

Similarly, you have the character of Roger who wears a faded boxy red uniform. What does this small costume detail tell you about the character or the clothing? Perhaps the outfit doesn’t fit properly because it was a hand-me-down. Or maybe there’s no one left making the uniforms so he had to take whichever was the closest size. Either way, the faded red color gives the impression that wherever it came from, it’s old. Old enough to have been worn in the sun for a while and faded from its original vibrant color.

Years of working in theater has also made me truly appreciate the designs of the theatrical spaces. In book two of the Wardenclyffe Series, the character of Lucy explores The Proscenium, an old theater on her colony ship. This particular location in my story has its own real-world counterpart - Steinert Hall, an abandoned theatre buried under the streets of Boston.

The name of this place was first mentioned to me because I happened to be doing a fashion show in the venue directly across the street from it and was looking for a cool place to do a photoshoot for my first collection. I was instantly intrigued, a theatre buried under the city? That sounds absolutely incredible. I did a little digging and found out that it was abandoned in the 1940s and was owned by the piano store in the building above. After managing to get in touch with the building manager, I was given a chance to briefly walk though the space and despite only being there for a few minutes before being whisked away, the impression that old room left has stuck with me to this day.

Being owned by the piano store up on street level meant this old theatre had basically become a storage space for old pianos. The boards of the floor were rotting, construction lights hung around the room rather than the lighting fixtures I imagine must have hung in the hall at one point, beautiful old paintings on the walls were now peeling off, and there was a thick layer of dust over everything in the room. The only thing I could think to myself was that this space must have been incredible back in its prime. But that’s kind of the beautiful thing about writing, isn’t it? I can take an abandoned theatre like that and breathe life back into it with writing.