C Gockel Writes

Want to keep reading for free (or close to it)?

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I Bring the Fire Omnibus eBook and The Defiant audiobook

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You can read (and listen to!) most of my books through subscription services:

  • Everand* (formerly Scribd) – ebooks + audiobooks
  • Kobo Plus – ebooks (no Kobo device needed—the app is free)

Both offer 30-day free trials—so if you’re a fast reader, you could get through quite a bit at no cost.

Learn more about KoboPlus and Everand. 

Or Read & Listen Completely Free

You can also find my books at your local library:

  • Libby / OverDrive
  • Hoopla
  • CloudLibrary
  • BorrowBox

If your library carries ebooks or audiobooks, there’s a good chance they have my books—or can request them.

Find Libraries that Offer Libby/Overdrive

If Your Library Doesn’t Loan eBooks or Audiobooks

You may be able to get a library card at a larger library system for a modest fee. Here is a website that lists libraries with non-resident borrowing priveleges.

A quick note

I’m a big library user myself and often enroll in various subscription services (books add up fast—and so do growing kids’ expenses).

However you choose to read—buying, borrowing, or listening—I’m just glad you’re spending your time with my stories.

*Everand isn’t currently featuring Magic After Midnight.

Featured Sci-fi: The Forever World by Ethan Rhodes

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Featured Sci-fi: The Forever World by Ethan Rhodes

START THE SERIES FREE—Books 2 & Book 3 are only 99¢ Each in US & UK
Click for current price: Amazon US, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia

On a routine border patrol, pilot Zane Lucas encounters a mysterious cluster of drones. When he reports it to the Scorpius head office, they quickly sweep it under the intergalactic rug and place him on leave.

That same night, Zane is contacted by an estate lawyer from the distant planet Earth and learns he’s the sole beneficiary of a person he’s never met. Determined to get answers, he finds himself thrust into a dead man’s quest, along with a resourceful colleague, Julia Rossi.

Zane’s mission is tied to an old myth based on The Forever World book.

His father used to read it at bedtime, before he went missing during a bloody war with the Gral twenty years earlier. Their alliance is on the brink of collapse and the revolution is just beginning.

Can Zane find The Forever World, if it in fact exists?

Would this fabled planet help restore the balance?

Time is running out, and the drones are multiplying.

Featured Sci-fi: Rebirth (The Evolution Gene Book 1) by Aaron Hodges

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Featured Sci-fi: Rebirth (The Evolution Gene Book 1) by Aaron Hodges

FREE as of September 4, 2026
Click for current price: Amazon US, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia

Apple, B&N, Kobo, GooglePlay

America has fallen. The Western Allied States rose from its ashes—and it does not forgive.

Eighteen-year-old Chris never thought of himself as a traitor. He doesn’t get the chance to argue otherwise. Taken in the night, he wakes in a facility buried deep in the Californian mountains—and he isn’t alone.

Elizabeth Flores has been running her whole life, ever since the night soldiers took her parents. With a brutal winter closing in, she risks everything to reach Sacramento. The hunters find her first.

Now they’re both “volunteers” in the Praegressus Project—a government initiative to enhance the human race. Stripped of their rights, Chris and Elizabeth must work together to survive the torturous experiments. Every day is a test, and every mistake has a cost. The regime doesn’t waste resources on failures.

But only the lucky ones get to die.

Featured Fantasy: The Wizard’s Cat (The Wizard’s Butler Book 2) by Nathan Lowell

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Featured Fantasy: The Wizard's Cat (The Wizard's Butler Book 2) by Nathan Lowell

A New Release I Missed! (Loved the first book, The Wizard’s Butler)
Click for current price: Amazon US, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia

It started with a dandelion.
Innocuous. Ubiquitous.
Who knew it was a warning?

After claiming his big bonus, things are coming up roses for Roger Mulligan. A job he loves. A house that feels like home. Money in the bank. A solid roof over his head and job security.

But when he finds a dandelion on the pristine grounds of Shackleford House, he starts down a twisted, garden path. Old man Shackleford says the fairies have a problem, the pixies keep falling down on the job, and the house seems to grow weaker by the day.

He’s soon tossed into a confusing mixture of fact and fantasy, accompanied by Shackleford’s cousin and – of all things – a stray cat. Surrounded by the fantastical, it’s hard to tell magic from mundane.

Featured Sci-fi: The Trilisk (The Trilisk Ruins Book 1) by Michael McCloskey

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Featured Sci-fi: The Trilisk (The Trilisk Ruins Book 1) by Michael McCloskey

FREE as of September 3, 2026
Click for current price: Amazon US, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia

Apple, B&N, GooglePlay

Telisa Relachik studied to be a xenoarchaeologist in a future where humans have found alien artifacts but haven’t ever encountered live aliens. Of all the aliens whose extinct civilizations are investigated, the Trilisks are the most advanced and the most mysterious.

Telisa refuses to join the government because of her opposition to its hard-handed policies restricting civilian investigation and trade of alien artifacts, despite the fact that her estranged father is a captain in the United Nations Space Force.

When a group of artifact smugglers recruits her, she can’t pass up the chance at getting her hands on objects that could advance her life’s work. But she soon learns her expectations of excitement and riches come with serious drawbacks as she ends up fighting for her life on a mysterious alien planet.

Featured Fantasy: Ghouls Just Wanna Have Fun by Christine Pope

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Featured Fantasy: Ghouls Just Wanna Have Fun by Christine Pope

New Release
Click for current price: Amazon US, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia

Apple, B&N, Kobo, GooglePlay, Christine’s Store

All Phoebe wanted was a fresh start. What she got was a roommate forty years past his expiration date.

Clairvoyant Phoebe Finch has spent her whole life learning to ignore the things only she can sense — the grief soaked into old houses, the secrets people don’t say out loud, the occasional opinion from someone no longer technically alive. Burned out and done with all of it, she buys a dilapidated Victorian B&B in the foggy coastal town of Madrona Cove and plans to disappear into a quiet life of sanded floors and fresh paint.

Then she meets her permanent houseguest.

Lanny Olsen died in 1988 at the age of eighteen and has never left the building. He’s loud, nosy, stuck in the decade that killed him, and convinced his death was no accident. He wants justice, and he’s decided Phoebe is going to get it for him, whether she likes it or not.

She doesn’t. But the more she pokes at the forty-year-old cold case, the more she realizes Lanny might be right. The town closes ranks. The handsome local archivist, Theo Lindgren, knows far more than he’s letting on. And somewhere behind Madrona Cove’s lavender beds and wellness retreats, someone is still protecting a very old, very ugly secret.

Phoebe just wanted to renovate a house. Instead, she’s about to renovate the truth…one buried clue at a time.

Ghouls Just Wanna Have Fun is a completely standalone paranormal cozy mystery — no prior books required, just a fresh start, a stubborn ghost, and a mystery that won’t stay buried.

Featured Fantasy: Nocturne (The Fourth Talisman Book 1) by Kat Ross

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Featured Fantasy: Nocturne (The Fourth Talisman Book 1) by Kat Ross

FREE as of August 31, 2026
Click for current price: Amazon US, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia

Apple, B&N, Kobo, GooglePlay

Nocturne, a wilderness of eternal night where magic reigns supreme.
Solis, a wasteland of endless day where ancient kingdoms vie for power.

Nazafareen is a Breaker, a mortal who has the rare ability to shatter spell magic—although her talent carries a price. With the memories of her former self erased, she comes to Nocturne hoping to start a new life under the triple moons of the darklands.

But when an assassin forces Nazafareen to flee to the sunlit mortal city of Delphi, she finds herself embroiled in a deeper mystery whose origins lie far in the past. Why was the continent sundered into light and dark a thousand years before? And what really happened to the elegant but ruthless creatures who nearly reduced the world to ashes? The new Oracle might know, but she’s outlawed magic and executes anyone caught practicing it. Nazafareen must hide her powers and find a way out of the city—before it’s too late.

As the net slowly tightens, something ancient and vengeful begins to stir in the arid death zone called the Kiln. A dashing daeva named Darius is pursuing Nazafareen, but so are a multitude of enemies. War is brewing again. Can she stay alive long enough to stop it?