June, 2025 - The Word Guardians

In previous blogs, I’ve talked about the main protagonist characters of the Word Guardians, so I thought it’s about time I did the same for the ‘bad guys’, the Controllers.

Who are the Controllers? I hear you ask

In a nutshell, the ‘bad guys’ of the Word Guardians series who just want power. Their goal is to ultimately build the empire that they want, and their motivations are many. In Book 4, Lost Beginnings, this includes righting something the main antagonist sees as a previous wrong. In the first trilogy of books, one of the antagonists wants to be seen, recognised and acknowledged. To reach their goal they will go to extremes and twist reality to suit the storyline to get what they want.

How do Controllers control?

Remember that readers form the realms from their mind’s eye, from the words on the page. Well, it turns out that there are other influences that can help form the realms and storylines too. Controllers hang out in the realms, to influence what readers see in their mind’s eye. In Book 1 excerpt, A visit to Victorian London, McVale tells Yas that readers typically ignore things that don’t make sense to the story that they are reading. And that’s true. But Controllers are clever. They tweak storylines and influence ideas just enough that it serves their agenda while not tripping this sense of what might be expected in the story.

And that’s not all. There’s Shadow Readers, telepaths and Controllers masquerading as Guardians too.

Enter the Shadow Readers

In Book 3, The Shadow Readers, Yas and Sam find the Police Commissioner acting under the influence of something magical. Created by a Controller and inserted into a reader’s imagination while reading, the Controllers found an additional way to assert control over people in authority, to shape the world to serve them and their desire for power.

The telepaths

The telepaths are impacted a little differently. In Book 2 The Twisting Tales and Book 3 The Shadow Readers, there’s Akoni, Yas’s adopted brother, who is urged by Controllers to go and influence others to cause civic unrest. He joins protests and encourages others to action so that the Police Commissioner can then stamp down and restore order. In Book 4 The Lost Beginnings, the main antagonist has a link to the minds of individuals through which he can influence others in the outer world, to create chaos that then he can swoop in and control.

Masquerading Controllers

The masquerading Controllers are a little difficult to spot. Yas, Sam and other Word Guardians must constantly question who they can trust, as I touched on in the blog How do Word Guardians determine the truth. As well as operating in the Shadows, Controllers operate in plain sight, playing games to earn trust and then seeking to gain what they want through that relationship.

Ultimately, Controllers must show their hand at some point and are unmasked. The question (as Vickers pointed out in Book 1 The Battle for the Peacekeepers) is you must determine how much you trust someone until you really know who they are.

So, who are the Controllers you’ll meet in the series?

You’ll meet Controllers who primarily operate from the shadows, through telepaths and those that are masquerading in plain sight and some who are a mixture of all three. Whichever mode they use, the motivation is the same: power and control. So, buy book 1 using the link below and watch for the red flags as to who might be a Controller or not.

The Word Guardians book series

I’d love to hear about your thoughts on Controllers in the series too, either by sending a comment below or by using the contact form.

The journey is the destination

That old adage of ‘the journey is the destination’ came to me while I was thinking about my answer to ‘where I would go?’. While stepping through to a destination sounds exciting, what you visit and do while there is equally important.

If we just visited a beach, looked out at the sea and then return to our own world, it’s pleasant, but have we really experienced the place? If instead we spend time there, the place starts to become a part of our story, and our experience is richer as a result.

What I’m trying to say is that why you choose to visit somewhere, what the intended story of your visit is and what your experience becomes, is important.

We see this in the Word Guardians realms also. Each realm is formed by readers in the outer world unconsciously collaborating. Their imagination powers magical ink which builds worlds, creates actors and enables stories to play out. When Yas and Sam visit realms, they interact with these worlds and change the storylines. If it fits with what a reader in the outer world might expect to see, then it becomes part of the story.

So, what’s a better way to travel?

I started out in this blog by thinking about how we could avoid the inconvenient parts of modern-day long-distance travel. And I stand by that. Travel takes effort and its toll on us.

If we had the ability to step through a doorway to a destination, that would be amazing, but I don’t believe it’s the complete answer. I think that by being more intentional about the stories we’d like to have when we visit somewhere, that’s an important part of it too. Whether planned or not, that forms a story that we’re part of forever.

Both Yas and Sam, typically have a purpose in mind when visiting a realm but then the story often unfolds in unexpected ways. How they take opportunities and adapt to the changing stories, that’s their story and one that I feel privileged to have been able to imagine and write. To learn more, please buy book one using the link below.

I’d love to hear about your thoughts on travel too. Feel free to send a comment below or by using the contact form. And to journey with Yas and Sam through the realms, read The Battle for the Peacekeepers, available at the link below.

Month: June 2025

Introducing the Controllers, the Word Guardians ‘bad guys’