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Welcome to Praenèste!
We are T.S. Austen.
We—Tim and Sarah Austen—are a married writing team based near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. By day, Sarah runs a music studio, Crescendo Music Academy. Tim works in marketing and draws a comic strip. Tim holds two master’s degrees, one in English literature, from Villanova, where he studied the Irish novel.
Together we created Praenèste, an original fantasy world full of heroes, villains, and magic. This website is a place where we post original short fiction, artwork, and blurbs from finished and in-progress novels.
We write compulsively.
Tim co-created Praenèste with a friend when he was nine or ten years old. Thirteen-odd years later, in the midst of two simultaneously graduate degrees at Villanova, Tim found himself shipwrecked on Praenèste’s god-forgotten shores. He was grateful to find a fellow traveler there, Sarah, whose expertise and patience have made exploring Praenèste for the past eight years an absolute joy.
While we have updated many of the original world’s features and inhabitants, the nature of our projects set in Praenèste have been, firstly, to remain as faithful as possible to the spirit of that original creation and, secondly, to explore the themes and stories of our childhood imaginations from an adult perspective.
Ready to embark? Check out our novel, Fury’s Ashes. It’s about a young socialite hellbent on reforming her city in her sister’s name and a wandering assassin seeking vengeance for his husband’s murder who team up to take down a magical cult leader.
The novel is unpublished, complete at 91,000 words, and we’re currently seeking representation for it from a literary agent.
There are also a couple of short stories, as well as original artwork throughout the site. Consider reading some of our material and subscribing to the email list. It means a lot!
Thank you for reading!
T.S. Austen
**Disclaimer: no part of this website or our works, visual or written, was created with the use of AI.