Hugo
Writing as William Stronnar
Fiction
Faction
Bio
I am a 56 year old private chef, occasional builder and collaborative writer. My CV is littered with lots of fun things that make most employers look elsewhere. I have written numerous novels, scripts and essays over the years but none have been as ambitious as The Third Trust and Market Town Series.
With Anton Lytle, I have created a parallel universe that has huge scope but it would probably still be rattling around in my head if it wasn’t for the advances in AI. Mostly I go on long walks with Jasper and come back with a new chapter ready to be honed.
Collaboration Process
I use AI as a research partner, drafting collaborator and structural sounding board. Every creative decision — story, character, theme, voice, editorial judgement — is mine. The AI extends what I can do; it does not replace what I think.
My process works like this: I walk, I think, I come back with a chapter or an idea fully formed in my head. Then I sit down with the AI tools and hone it — testing structure, deepening research, refining language, building out the historical framework that holds the fiction together. The manuscripts are developed across multiple sessions, each one building on the last. The Workshop pages on this site document that process in full.
AI Platforms Used
Anthropic
Claude · Cowork
1 title published · 1 in progress · 114,800+ words · Workshop available
Published Titles
Fiction
Market Town: Book One
Before AI there was Anton.
In the summer of 1959, a young operative disobeys a direct order and takes control of Glasgow’s criminal underworld without firing a shot.
When Maggie McRae, daughter of Glasgow’s most powerful crime boss, is abducted, the balance holding the city’s underworld together begins to fail. Anton Lytle, a young operative trained by the Third Trust, is ordered not to intervene. He disobeys. Acting without sanction, Anton enters Glasgow alone, aware that any misstep could ignite the violence he is trying to prevent.
What follows is not a rescue, a vendetta, or a mission — but a silent takeover that permanently alters Britain’s underworld. Anton positions himself between rival criminal families, the police, and a terrified public, refusing spectacle and using leverage where others rely on fear. His authority does not come from title or force, but from his willingness to absorb risk personally and act decisively where institutions hesitate.
The novel closes with Anton and Maggie travelling south to Stanwell Coombe, a Cotswold market town that offers apparent refuge. What appears to be retreat is consolidation. Taking his grandfather Arthur’s working estate at Temple House as a template, Anton begins to see a different use for this small town and the criminal revenue streams he now controls. The violence has stopped, but nothing has been resolved. Anton Lytle has crossed a line: from operative to power, from asset to variable. This is only the beginning.
93,269 words · 94 chapters + Epilogue · v33
Read the free sample (Chapters 1–2) →
Book Structure
94 chapters + Epilogue spanning Salisbury Plain, the Cotswolds, Glasgow and London.
Locked
Chapters 3–99 + Epilogue
Subscribe to access all chapters, plus the Workshop and Archive.
Subscribe to access the full novel →
Fiction
Market Town: Book Two
Before AI there was Anton.
For Anton Lytle, taking Glasgow without firing a shot was the easy part — getting to the altar on time is proving much harder.
Three years after taking Glasgow, Anton Lytle is building two things at once: an agrarian counter-state at Stanwell Coombe modelled on his grandfather’s Temple House, and a marriage to Maggie McRae that will make a public declaration neither of them can take back. The Trust backs the land acquisition on one condition — Anton assumes control of Little Rissington, a former RAF base where medical research and early computing are already underway.
In Glasgow, Doyle is crucified alive the morning after his acquittal. The Marr twins appear at Rogano and are seen off by Goda, whose wartime debt over their mother proves sharper than any threat. In London, Maggie navigates the IRA obligations she cannot discharge and a medical establishment that does not want her. And in the Cotswolds, a fourteenth-century water rights covenant surfaces that gives the twins legal leverage over Stanwell Coombe’s most essential resource.
The novel runs three parallel arcs — the wedding, Maggie in London, and the battle for Stanwell Coombe’s water — converging at the close. Nothing is resolved. Everything is in motion.
In progress · 30,000+ words drafted · Draft
Read the draft sample (Chapters 1–3) →
Fiction
Faction
The Market Town Series
Before AI there was Anton.
Ten books spanning 1959 to 2030. The story of Anton Lytle, the Third Trust, and the question that runs beneath every page: can power ever be used cleanly?
The series follows Anton from a military training facility on Salisbury Plain to the threshold of artificial intelligence — through Glasgow’s criminal underworld, the agrarian counter-state at Stanwell Coombe, Whitehall’s corridors, and the long reach of an institution founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1780 and designed to outlast any government or revolution.
Phase I: Analogue Ascendancy
Books 1–3 · 1959–1975
Phase II: Whitehall Rupture
Books 4–6 · 1975–1990
Phase III: Divergence
Books 7–8 · 1990–2005
Phase IV: Augmentation & Legacy
Books 9–10 · 2005–2030
Pipeline
Graphic Novel
Fiction
Faction
The Minories Child
A Graphic Novel Series · In Development
He was buried alive in a rich man’s contract. He’s been running the City ever since.
Londinium, 43 AD. A wealthy Roman merchant commissions a limestone eagle for his tomb. His contract with the quarry includes a final clause: a slave child, buried alive beneath the plinth. The child’s name is Silvanus. He is ten years old. He doesn’t die.
Silvanus becomes immortal — a shapeshifter stalking the centuries, changing his face to match each era while the power beneath him stays the same. Roman priest. Medieval ward. Victorian gentleman. Modern financier. For 1,900 years he has accumulated wealth and influence across every age of the City of London, hiding in plain sight at the heart of the world’s oldest financial district.
In September 2013, the real Eagle and Serpent sculpture — a 1,900-year-old Roman masterwork — is unearthed at a building site in the Minories. Then they find the tomb. The equilibrium that has kept Silvanus in check for two millennia shatters, and the buried memories of what was done to him come roaring back. Now a shapeshifter with centuries of accumulated power and a ten-year-old’s fury begins to take his revenge on the City that was built on his bones.
Twelve issues. Three arcs. Real archaeology. Ancient revenge. Based on the real Minories Eagle, discovered September 2013, City of London. Seeking artist collaborator.
Fact
Faction
Breakfast in Baku
In Development
When Pope Urban II issued his decree at Clermont Ferrand in 1095 he began a process that is still ongoing today. Unarmed pilgrims became armed pilgrims, pilgrims became crusading knights, knights became soldiers, soldiers became private contractors. And one thing never changed — innocent people dying for someone else’s financial gain.
Breakfast in Baku follows the Crusader Route, the BTC Pipeline to Baku and the never-ending trail of destruction that Pope Urban II initiated.
Fact
Y Pont Goch / The Red Bridge
A Play · In Development
In 1864, Peter Rees Jones left Newcastle Emlyn in Wales for London with £14 in his pocket. He went on to found Peter Jones on Sloane Square and laid the foundations for the social and employment policies that John Lewis still uses today.
The narrow gauge railway from Newcastle Emlyn once crossed the River Teifi. Now all that remains of that bridge is a span of red steel that stops halfway across the river — beautiful, accidental, incomplete. A work of art that no one intended.
Peter died a highly respected man. His sons, Sydney and Morley, were not chips off the old block. Sydney died from alcohol-related illness aged thirty-two, leaving a young wife and a one-year-old son, Basil. Into that gap stepped another man — Arthur Samuel — who adopted Basil and carried on where Peter had left off. With honour, dignity and determination.
Y Pont Goch is set in a single railway carriage. Peter Jones is visited by all his male descendants and by the one man who held the family together when it should have fallen apart. A play about masculinity, fatherhood, addiction, and the secrets a family carries that can remain hidden for generations.
Fiction
Just Another Day
A Screenplay · In Development
In a stunning revelation, documents discovered among the private papers of the late Pope Francis suggest that the long-disgraced Professor John Day may have been telling the truth all along.
Sources within the Vatican claim a cryptic letter, addressed specifically to Day’s descendants, calls for his convictions to be overturned and urges President Trump to grant a full posthumous pardon. While the contents of the letter remain tightly guarded, whispers from within the Holy See hint at a dark secret buried for decades — that Professor Day’s controversial claims about the Turin Shroud were not only accurate but deliberately suppressed by the Church.
Day had long maintained that the Shroud was far more than a relic — it was evidence of a covert project to clone the man whose image is seared into the ancient cloth. Branded a heretic, a fraud, and a criminal, Day died in disgrace. But if these latest revelations prove true, the world may soon have to confront a truth more extraordinary — and more terrifying — than anyone ever imagined.
The story begins in 1997, when a series of devastating earthquakes struck Assisi. Frescos were destroyed. Behind some, older works were revealed — a discovery that made headlines. But behind others, Professor Day found something that should have been impossible: frescos that were younger than the ones that had concealed them. Paintings that did not record the past but anticipated the future. What they depicted, and what it means for the Shroud, is the reason Day had to be silenced.
Originally written in 1997. Being updated for contemporary production.
Editorial Status
The editorial ladder tracks each manuscript through the platform’s four levels of review. This author has chosen to make the editorial status visible.
Market Town: Book One
Revision Recommended
114,443 words · 103 chapters · Full Draft v11
Level 1
AI Analysis
Complete
Level 2
Reader Review
Pending
Level 1 analysis completed 16 March 2026. 4 critical issues, 8 notable, 12 minor observations identified. Author review in progress.
Why show this? The platform’s founding principle is transparency. Making the editorial status visible demonstrates that the author is investing in quality — and that the platform’s editorial ladder is not theoretical. It is in use.
