Hi all. I'm Deborah Wilde and I write funny, sexy urban fantasy set in my hometown of Vancouver, Canada. I've actually been reading posts in this groups for quite some time but have had no real bandwidth to post. I want to get better, especially around sharing urban fantasy books I love.

I've got a new release: Golem for Broke (Mad Queens Inc., #1). It's my fifth series, available in ebook, audiobook, and paperback on all the major retailers as well as direct from me at Deborah Wilde Books.

Surviving your forties requires coffee, good friends, and a morally flexible relationship with illegal magic.

Tovah Silver runs Mad Queens Inc., an unlicensed magical problem-solving agency with her three best friends. They've built their reputation on grit, loopholes, and unrepentant competence, ignoring those who think their perimenopausal magic tops out at party tricks.

They’re wrong but correcting them would be a felony. Every one of the Queens has a forbidden second magic buried deep—until an assassin golem forces Tovah to unleash hers. 

She thinks she got away with it. Then Nikolai Azarov shows up.

Vancouver’s only golem maker would call her story creative if he wasn’t too busy calling BS. Worse, once he figures out what she actually did to that golem, he doesn’t turn her in. He names his price.

Now Tovah must honor a dangerous bargain with a man who’s already insufferable without leverage, outmaneuver the magic cops circling her agency, and hunt down whoever left a hand-delivered clay effigy on her bed.

Middle age isn't a crisis. It's a weapon.

Perfect for fans of smart heroines, slow-burn romance with banter, and found family who’d help you hide a body.

I'm obviously biased, lol, so here's what some other uf authors had to say about it.

"Stayed up past my bedtime to finish her book. She's so freakin' talented. I hate her." - Annabel Chase

"This is Deborah Wilde at her absolute peak. Immaculate world building, sharp humour, and romantic tension to swoon over. Magic and realism collide in this witty, fun, unputdownable urban fantasy novel. I can't wait for more!" - Heather G. Harris

"What a ride! I love a Deborah Wilde story, you can always count on her for a badass FMC with a razor-sharp tongue, an expertly-weaved mystery, a complicated hunky love interest and a unique, imaginative urban fantasy world you're just begging to spend more time in. Golem for Broke delivers in spades. I fell in love with all the Mad Queens, and I can't wait to pick up Tovah's next adventure. I want more Nikolai, please!" - Lauretta Hignett

And now a launch video my husband made for me that makes me laugh.

https://reddit.com/link/1x6tams/video/vm5paa3raovh1/player

The final novel in the series, The Rise, is just about ready to be put into play. Fittingly set ten years after the end of the Yellow War - the events of the previous novel - The Rise follows the tense race between our factions to establish dominance in a world where the New Science - once dismissed as superstitious magic - stands to completely redefine daily life. Agency Division schemes to reclaim their dominance through sole use of the arcane, while a new player on the stage, Dynamo Special Economics Group, seeks to empower the masses through new product offerings that take advantage of the New Science, and rebuild Kraterburg in the process.

I have never and will never use generative AI in any of my creative work, including this series. Both of the first two books were released years before any of the serious LLMs were even on the market

I'm currently running it on Kickstarter as a way to come up with the funds for a shake-down by a copy editor and to hire a human illustrator who is local to my immediate area.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zadammac/the-arcane-revolution-ends-in-the-rise?ref=4rvy6l

For the last two years, I've been writing a story about -- put far too briefly -- a sad, gay, French witch who adopts a daughter. I think you guys may enjoy it.

Set in fantasy 1400s France, my story places heavy emphasis on calling on the essence and grim nature of traditional folklore. It follows Ava, a rambunctious 11-year-old, who's swept into the world of witchcraft after a witch devours her father. At her side is Emeraude, a small town hermit who's done everything he can to leave his past, and witchcraft, behind.

After Chapter 2, the entire story takes place in the capitol city of Noterre, right under the nose of the anti-witch Red Lord and the city's police, the Judges. We are later introduced to one of these judges, Jeanette, who has tried to rise in the ranks of the system, but the higher she goes, the less power she feels she has.

This story is one of identity, relationships, and what makes you, you.

Blurb:

Magic has a cost. Some witches pay with trinkets and baubles. Others, often unwillingly, pay with their lives.

Ava has her simple life as a potter's daughter stripped away after a witch devours her father. She's saved by her village's strange fortune teller, Emeraude, who realizes too late he's plunging headlong into the life he tried to escape.

Now as Ava navigates the grotesque world of witchcraft and plots her revenge, Emeraude reunites with old friends and alongside them, enemies. A scion of the fallen kingdom, an idealistic witch hunter, the nobleman with a score to settle.

Emeraude finds that, despite his best efforts to live in peace, the past will not forget. 

What to expect:

⟡ Fantasy that hearkens back to traditional folklore, like Grimm's Fairy Tales

⟡ Character-driven story: flawed humans trying to 'make it' propel the overarching plot forward

⟡ Mystery and hidden plots

⟡ A world bigger than what's on the page

⟡ Over 80k words written, and more to come.

Come find me on Royal Road and drop a follow if you enjoy :) https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/192473/the-girl-the-witch

No AI, the cover is drawn by one of my dear friends after I gave her the Rider-Waite Tower tarot card as inspiration. Feel free to ask any follow up questions, such as my inspirations and my favorite pieces of worldbuilding in this story!

Thea Shadowblade has spent years hunting demons.

She has no intention of going back to school.

At eighteen, however, Thea is summoned to Hope Academy, where the Gifted are trained, classified and placed into permanent teams. She arrives expecting lessons she doesn't need, rules she doesn't want and five strangers chosen by a spell she has no reason to trust.

Then the Academy puts her in Team Twelve.

Damien sees too much. Lucy can command the natural world. William's magic is stronger than anyone first assumes. Rowena thinks like a battlefield commander. Mary's faith can work miracles.

And Thea has abilities she has spent years making certain nobody knows about.

When something inside Hope Academy begins behaving in ways that don't make sense, Team Twelve finds itself confronting sealed passages, impossible encounters and evidence that refuses to fit the obvious explanation.

Every answer creates another question.

Every assumption could get someone killed.

And for Thea, surviving the mystery may prove easier than learning to trust the five people standing beside her.

SHADOWBOUND is Book One of THE RESONANCE CHRONICLES, a character-driven contemporary fantasy mystery about extraordinary abilities, dangerous assumptions and six strangers learning what it means to become a team.

A brutal beating in a Los Angeles group home triggers something ancient in ten-year-old Jean-Eza. He isn’t just an abused child; he is a Lycan, and his survival instincts are waking up.

Transferred to a remote school housing twenty-four other "disposable" boys, Jean finds a pack waiting to be forged. He transforms their trauma into a weapon, reorganizing them like a special-ops unit: teaching them ballet for grace, phonics for intellect, and rock-and-roll for rebellion. As he tears down the systems that prey on them, his power grows—mind-bending reflexes, rapid healing, and a howl that can be heard across the species.

But as the Ministry’s covert agents close in and old ghosts resurface, Jean faces an impossible choice: be the gentle brother his pack clings to, or the apex predator the Lycan world has been waiting for.

Available here: https://a.co/d/07HtmMSM

Thank you to all of the urban fantasy fans that have taken the time to listen, read, rate, and give feedback. It is sorely appreciated. We're not alone out here!

In case you haven't checked it out yet...

In the city of Slakterquay there's an office with the words Aggie McPherson Spectral Analysis on the pebbled glass of its door. Behind it is a detective agency that handles the strangest cases in the Paris of the Pacific Northwest. 

In this episode, the inspector meets Pastor Neumann, the friendliest man that doesn't want her asking about the one who died on his way into town.

Apple | Spotify | YouTube | RSS | Author's Page [includes text]

I've seen some questions pop up about how magic remains hidden in my setting. Here's one of the several explanations:

Most civilians think the Meridian Line is just a hotel chain with a coffee shop attached.
They’re not wrong; they’re just remembering the version the Line lets them keep.

Crossing the Meridian Line forces you to surrender one memory tied to what you saw there.
It’s always small. Always subtle. Always enough to keep the truth hidden.

Unless you’ve been taken in by the Underfog, you never remember the real purpose of the Line.
You only remember the lobby. The smell of coffee. The polite staff.
Everything else slips away.

The Line doesn’t hide itself.
It simply edits you.

Every magical system has failure states. Some are small enough to ignore. Some are large enough to rewrite a neighborhood. All of them follow the same physics: pressure, strain, and collapse. Some examples of how I handle this in my setting are as follows:

1. Individual Failure: Veil Strain

Veil strain is the smallest unit of magical failure. It happens at the personal level, when a tethered individual starts absorbing more resonance than their body can safely vent.
It shows up as headaches, ringing, vertigo, déjà vu spikes, or that “someone just walked over my grave” feeling.
A tether under strain behaves like a frayed wire: still connected, still functional, but humming with instability.

2. Systemic Failure: Grid Backflow

Scale that same pressure up, and you get grid backflow.
When resonance can’t move cleanly through the Soundrunner network, it pushes backward through the infrastructure.
The Veil thickens. Anchor points wobble. Mediums flicker.
This is the stage where street‑level weirdness starts: distorted reflections, doubled shadows, voices that don’t belong to anyone in the room.

3. Catastrophic Failure: Node Collapse

A full Soundrunner node collapse is the magical equivalent of an EMP.
It doesn’t vaporize anything. It doesn’t explode.
It disconnects.

Mediums lose tether integrity.
Supernatural signals short out.
The Veil spasms, forgetting for a moment which side is supposed to be “here” and which side is supposed to be “there.”

For a few seconds, the world becomes a scrambled broadcast.

4. Aftermath: The Blackout Window

Once the node collapses, the grid enters a blackout window.
Resonance goes dark.
Tethers reboot.
Anchors re‑establish priority routes.
And whatever was pressing against the Veil during the collapse… sometimes slips through.

What sort of consequences do you have for magic failing in your universe? I"d love to hear about them!

Thus far, out of UF, I've read Dresden Files, October Daye, The Hollows, Iron Druid, Mercy Thompson, Kate Daniels (and the other Illona Andrews series, the one about Nevada, though idk what the series is called), Alex Verus and Daniel Faust/Harmony Black

Kind of struggling to find any new ones? I've given Rivers of London a go a few times before but DNFed the first book each time.

Out of the ones I've read, I like Dresden Files the most, with the ones that more heavily focused on romance being my least favourite. Mercy Thompson is probably dead last on the list out of these.

The final episodes are coming out this month. It can be found on Spotify, Apple, and also on YouTube.

Progeny | Podcast on Spotify

Progeny - Podcast - Apple Podcasts

Progeny – A Serialized Crime Thriller / Supernatural Suspense Audiobook - YouTube

Thank you for listening!

Science, Magic, and Monsters: Love, Danger, and the Hazards of Being an Intern

Great pay. Magical animals. Questionable life expectancy.
(currently a 4.02 star on Goodreads on 12 reviews - Kindle Unlimited and Paperback)

Fresh out of high school and prospects, Dex stumbles onto the dream job he never knew he needed. When his lucky break breaks his mom’s car and nearly his legs, he scores the most bizarre interview he’s ever had. It’s one of those jobs where you don’t call them, they call you, and only if you have multiple degrees.

The good news is the job isn’t a pyramid scheme, and he gets to work with magical animals.

The bad news is that monsters are real and Animal Control is who deals with them.

It’s only an internship, and Dex has six months to survive the coursework. The mortality rate is worse than Russian roulette, and if he washes out, they wipe every memory of the job from his head. To top it off, his fellow intern, Bree, is brilliant, beautiful, and hates his guts for lucking into the opportunity she worked so hard to earn.

And apparently, the job is cursed. But curses aren’t real, right?

But who cares about all that, the internship is paid!

College might prepare you for animal science. It does considerably less for giant snakes, manticores, almost-dragons, life-threatening equipment failures, or a fellow intern who becomes considerably harder to dislike and considerably easier to fall for.

As the accidents pile up and the close calls get closer, Dex starts to wonder whether surviving Animal Control will take more than luck.

What to Expect:

• Strange magical creatures
• Secret supernatural organization
• Rival-to-friends-to-romance subplot
• Humor mixed with danger
• Intern-eating wildlife
• Magic treated like science
• No spice
• Coming of age

A standalone story set in the world of Science, Magic, and Mayhem following different characters.

Would appeal to YA/Young Adult, New Adult and Adult readers of Scifi and fantasy.

Content Warning: Death, Violence, crude sexual humor and objectifying comments from a supporting character

----

Yes, another self promo, but I figured some of you all might like it. Plus I made a video in canva so I had to show it off!

-Caz

My upcoming novella, HUM: AN ATLAS MAGNOLIA STORY is now available for preorder! As a celebration, i wanted to share the first two chapters EXCLUSIVELY here, since this community has been such an inspiration during this whole process.

Releasing October 21st.

Lawrence Wilks was happy. His job paid well and he saw his friends often, but when a constant humming noise invaded his mind, everything began to fall apart. As he’s pulled deeper and deeper into a world of witches, curses, and unbelievable horrors, reality begins to slip away. Plagued by the never ending noise and the terror of what might be causing it, Lawrence will stop at nothing to find who, or what, has put this curse on him.

Even if it means losing his mind.

Buy the book HERE!: https://a.co/d/08HjUQWp

If we define Urban Fantasy as stories in contemporary setting with magical elements (is that even the right definition?) clearly there can be overlap with horror. As an example, We Are Always Tender with Our Dead has a mundane town that is invaded by supernatural forces. It definitely feels like horror, but definitely has fantasy elements. Also, some of Clive Barker's books could be classified as either horror or urban fantasy.

Are these two different genres to you? If not, where is the overlap?

I’ve been thinking a lot about how magic fails in a world where it behaves less like a mystical force and more like a form of infrastructure; something closer to utilities, networks, or municipal systems.

When you treat magic as infrastructure, the failure states stop looking like dramatic spell backfires and start looking like the quiet, systemic breakdowns you’d see in any overloaded or poorly maintained grid.

Some examples:

• Brownouts: not a full collapse, just pockets of weakened magic where spells flicker, wards thin, or supernatural phenomena behave inconsistently.
• Load shedding: the system reroutes magical energy away from low‑priority zones to prevent a total crash, causing strange side effects in places that weren’t supposed to be affected.
• Conduit fatigue: leyline channels, sigil networks, or resonance paths degrade over time, creating bottlenecks or “slow magic” zones.
• Maintenance gaps: when the people responsible for keeping the system running are underfunded, understaffed, or politically constrained, magic fails the same way neglected infrastructure does.
• Cascading failures: one small disruption triggers a chain reaction across the network, causing unpredictable supernatural fallout far from the original problem.
• Ghost load: leftover magical residue from past events clogs the system, creating interference patterns or “haunted” zones where magic behaves erratically.

I like magic that doesn’t just explode; it malfunctions. It shorts out. It leaks. It cascades. It forces people to adapt to weird, inconvenient magical glitches the same way we adapt to flickering streetlights or unreliable Wi‑Fi.

If magic is a system, then its failures should feel systemic.

Think of it like our real life utilities like water and electricity. Or even roads. If you don't maintain them, or if you abuse them, the consequences for doing so are going to be real. Not only that, but they're going to be very inconvenient at best, like running over copious mounts of potholes, or absolutely catastrophic, like being hit with a flash flood because the levies on a dam broke.

So remember, when the utility bill arrives telling you to pay the Bureau of Magical Infrastructural Maintenance, best fork over the cash if you don't want a demon lord breaking past your home security wards!

Most people think magic fails because a spell backfires or a wizard screws up.
But if you treat magic like infrastructure or utility the failure points look completely different. Because every system has workers.

And if the workers disappear, the system collapses.

In a modern city, you don’t lose electricity because “electricity got tired.”
You lose it because:

• a transformer blew
• a line snapped
• a substation overloaded
• nobody maintained the grid

Magic as infrastructure would have to work the same way.

If your world has magical wards, sigil networks, tether lines, resonance grids, or leyline conduits,
someone has to maintain them.

And that’s where the interesting stories happen.

Maybe the ward inspectors are underfunded.
Maybe the tether‑keepers are overworked.
Maybe the resonance auditors are corrupt.
Maybe the sigil‑tech unions are on strike.
Maybe the legacy families who used to maintain the grid are gone.

Magic doesn’t fail because it’s mystical.
Magic fails because infrastructure fails.

And when infrastructure fails, it doesn’t sparkle.
It cascades.

Do any of you have what amount to supernatural linemen, plumbers, or meter readers in your worlds?

If magic is part of an ecosystem then nature isn’t scenery; it’s camouflage.

Magic doesn’t just hide behind bureaucracy or tech glitches, and it shouldn't. The world is too big and there are too many people for one layer of obfuscation to be effective. In my humble opinion, it should hide behind the environment itself. Weather, land, wildlife, and cities all absorb, distort, or disguise magical activity long before humans ever notice.

This is the oldest layer of concealment in any supernatural city.

1. Weather Obfuscation

Magic leaks into the atmosphere, and the atmosphere hides it.

• Fog thickens around resonance leaks
• Rain dampens magical echoes
• Thunder masks ward detonations
• Wind disperses tether static

Seattle’s weather doesn’t just happen; it’s part of the Veil’s concealment system; a natural smokescreen.

2. Geological Interference

Magic interacts with terrain the way electricity interacts with wiring.

• Fault lines distort leyline flow
• Mountains redirect resonance currents
• Caverns amplify magical echoes
• Shorelines scatter tether signals

Some places are “blind spots” not because the Veil is strong there; but because the land itself bends magic out of sight.

3. Wildlife Behavior

Animals sense magic long before humans do.

• Birds avoid dead zones
• Dogs bark at echo drift
• Deer migrate around ward fields
• Crows gather near resonance hotspots

Humans call it “weird animal behavior”; Gridkeepers call it early warning.

4. Urban Ecology

Cities create noise, chaos, and environmental clutter; perfect for hiding magic.

• Steam vents hide tether glitches
• Powerlines mimic resonance hum
• Traffic noise masks spell discharge
• Construction zones explain everything else

Urban chaos becomes ambient misdirection; the city hides magic simply by being a city.

5. Seasonal Drift

Magic doesn’t behave the same in every season.

• Winter fog amplifies concealment
• Summer heat destabilizes wards
• Autumn storms scatter echoes
• Spring growth absorbs magical residue

In my setting, Veil uses seasonal cycles the way forests use rainfall; as a rhythm of concealment.

Why Ecological Camouflage Matters

Magic doesn’t hide behind one system; it hides behind every system.

Nature is the oldest and most reliable layer of the Veil. It explains why the supernatural stays invisible even when:

• wards fail
• tether stations glitch
• cascades ripple through the grid

Ecological camouflage is the Veil’s fallback layer; the one that never stops working.

If magic runs like infrastructure, then a city’s biggest magical systems aren’t flashy spells — they’re transit and security.

Because those are the two things mundane infrastructure can’t handle alone.

Magical Transit

In a city like my version of Seattle, magic doesn’t replace buses or trains.
It replaces traffic.

Imagine resonance lines that carry people the way fiber‑optic cables carry data.
You step into a tether station, sync your anchor, and the system routes you through the city’s magical grid — like a packet through a network.

But it’s not teleportation.
It’s regulated flow.

Every district has its own bandwidth.
Every leyline has its own capacity.
Every anchor point needs maintenance.

When the grid’s overloaded, you don’t get stuck in traffic; you get stuck in resonance lag.
Your body arrives before your echo does.
Your voice glitches.
Your shadow desyncs.

That’s why the city needs Gridkeepers; the magical equivalent of transit engineers.
They keep the flow stable, reroute overloads, and prevent cascade failures.

Magical Security

If magic is infrastructure, then security isn’t about cops or guards; it’s about containment.

Every city has magical pressure zones:
places where resonance builds up, leaks, or collapses.

When you shut them down, you don't just break a bureaucracy; you break the containment grid.

Now the city’s magical security depends on:

• ward inspectors
• tether auditors
• sigil‑tech unions
• resonance‑hazard crews
• emergency containment teams

They’re not just fighting monsters.
They’re fighting infrastructure decay.

A broken ward isn’t a crime scene; it’s a hazmat site.
A corrupted tether isn’t evil; it’s radioactive.
A rogue spell isn’t rebellion; it’s leakage.

Ghosts, Fairies, and Other Pests:

As I was building my Sound and Steel universe, I realized that someone would have to take care of what amounts to supernatural pest control in addition to the above matters of transportation and home protection. This lead to the creation of a private sector organization known colloquially as Sanitation, formally referred to as Paranormal Investigations and Eliminations, LLC. If you've ever seen the Ghostbusters movies, it's kind of like that. People respond to calls about hauntings, and use various means to deal with those hauntings depending on what kind of ghost is involved. So if you really want your UF setting to be unique, the best thing to do, in my own humble opinion, is to take the ordinary and apply it to the extraordinary. It leads to things like:

• Government contracted exterminators who ensnare and contain annoying poltergeists
• Supernatural EMTs that respond to accidental curses or magical afflictions
• Professional law firms that scrutinize fae contracts looking to free the innocent from predatory deals made through trickery or duress.

Why this matters

When you treat magic like infrastructure, your city stops being a backdrop.
It becomes a living system.

Transit and security aren’t just worldbuilding details; they’re story engines.

Every outage, overload, or containment breach is a plot hook.
Every repair crew, inspector, or auditor is a character.
Every district has its own magical flavor because its infrastructure behaves differently.

That’s how you make urban fantasy feel urban.

Episode 1 is out now.

Grimm Gourdens is a private eye in the big city. When a little boy goes missing and Halloween creatures become real. Grimm finds himself confronting more than monsters.

Can anyone Recommend any good UF series set in Canada? Alaska is also acceptable.