Archive for My Books

My Books

New Book Release

Clouds & Curses book cover. A bluish background with ornate designsI made an executive decision yesterday and decided to just launch Clouds & Curses, Tales of Rydding Village book 3, instead of trying to do a fancy preorder campaign. I had all these ideas of what I could do, but with everything else that’s going on, I had a feeling none of it would get done, so I might as well get the book out into the world. People could discover and buy it, and I could promote it when I got a chance. If I delayed so I could set up pre-orders and do a big launch, there was a real chance that I might not get around to promoting while I move to and set up the new house, but the book wouldn’t be available to sell. This way, I can get it out there before things get crazy.

The seller agreed to the repairs I asked for based on the inspection (mostly things that came from the updates they made to the house, not things that come with an 80-year-old house), so things are moving ahead. I could be in possession of the house as early as next weekend, depending on when they get things fixed and when they set a closing date. That means I need to start packing. I saved the good boxes from the last move, and since the new house is so close (a 5-minute drive, 20-minute walk), I’m going to just make multiple trips — fill the boxes, load up my car, drive over, unload boxes, bring them back, repeat. I have a room that won’t have any furniture going in it yet (it’s going to be an exercise/craft/storage room that can double as a guest room with an inflatable bed) where I can stash stuff to get it out of the way for when movers bring in the furniture.

I’m also going to have to make decisions about blinds/curtains and get a washer and dryer, since those don’t come with the house.

But back to the book … this is the one that I’ve said was in part a mash-up of situations from Persuasion, Sense & Sensibility, Hope Floats, and a dash of Wuthering Heights. That’s the new romantic plot. We also continue with our other characters and delve deeper into the mystery of what’s going on in the village. It’s longer than the other books in this series have been.

I’m planning more books, but I don’t know when I’ll get to writing the next one. I have research to do, as well as plotting (I’ve started doing character development), and life is going to be crazy for probably a month or two as I upend my life for the second time in a year, and then I’ll have a lot of work to do to get settled in. It’ll be just the right time to be working on landscaping and maybe planting a garden. I’m having a really hard time focusing right now.

The book is currently (as of the time I’m posting this) available at Amazon (e-book and paperback) and Apple, and as I get more links I’m adding them to the book’s page, so keep an eye on that to find it at the place you like to get your books.

My Books

In the Cold

I somehow lucked out and managed to move north and into the mountains in time for the coldest winter in fifteen years. The temperatures have been below average for almost the entire month. There’s been snow on the ground for nearly three weeks. This week it was below freezing all week, with temperatures in the single digits overnight.

It hasn’t been too bad, aside from the fact that I live in a basement where the cold comes up through the floor. I’ve dealt with that by covering as much of the floor as possible. I don’t want to buy carpets for a place that’s meant to be only temporary, so I’ve used things like exercise mats, beach towels, and the big moving blanket my mover left with me. The walls are more than a foot thick, and they’ve put new windows outside the original wood-framed windows, so the place is pretty well insulated. The weak spot is the back door, which is the original 100-year-old door with a window in it. I resorted to “redneck weatherproofing” there, stuffing plastic bags into the gaps around the door and stacking the cushions from the patio furniture against the door to block the drafts, as well as putting a second layer of curtains over the window. That seems to have worked pretty well.

I’ve spent the week bundled up in warm clothes under an electric blanket, so I was pretty comfortable. There was also baking (since the oven helps warm the house while producing something to eat). I did not try to venture out because I don’t have the clothes for this. My coats and sweaters are fine, but I need to get better pants or find a good base layer. I got some snow boots last week that should help keep my feet warm, but I haven’t tested them yet. I’d rather endure this for a few weeks than have 105-degree temperatures for a month and around 100 for another couple of months.

Much of the snow is gone from my front yard, aside from the places where it got piled up by the snow plow, but the back yard is still totally covered in snow. It looks like a different world depending on which window I look out. I got the fun experience of shoveling snow last week. It took a lot of effort to dig my car out enough to move it from behind the wall of snow left by the plow.

But it’s going above freezing this weekend, and I’m hoping to get outside a bit more. I like cool weather, I just am not crazy about freezing weather. We had a reasonably warm day last Friday, and I went out to the Frontier Culture museum to go walking. There was snow on the ground, but the paths were clear. It was fun walking around looking at the snow without being too cold.

The other thing I did this week was update my website. I’ve added some photo galleries to the pages for the Rydding Village books, with some visuals of my inspiration for the village and some looks at the crafts mentioned in the books. I got to see a wood-fired brick bread oven in action, and I put the photos on my site. Maybe that will help you visualize the things happening in the books.

Tea and Empathy

Bread and Burglary

My Books, writing

Starting the Next Book

I started writing Rydding Village #3 this week (title remains to be determined). I did the character development for the new characters last week and started plotting, then got a bit more into plotting this week, but then I decided that I needed to really “meet” the main characters for this book before I made more plot decisions, so then I started writing the first scene. I don’t know if it will remain the first scene or if this scene will even remain in the book, but it’s my current starting point.

The main couple in this book is made up of a character who appeared briefly in the second book and a character who has been mentioned but who has not appeared. At the moment, I know a lot more of their backstories than I know about what’s going to happen in the book. I’ve worked out a whole story that happens long before the book, which made me feel like I knew more about this story than I really did, so when I set out to outline this plot, I realized how vague it was. Maybe I’ll write that story and use it as a newsletter subscriber bonus at some point, but for now it’s mostly for my own benefit to explain why things are the way they are now.

This book is also going to start getting into the mystery of what’s going on with the village, why it’s abandoned and why it seems to be a magic magnet.

I don’t have a publication date planned yet. I’m a bit behind schedule because I always get overly optimistic about what I can get done. The plotting/planning took longer than I expected. As I said, I thought I had the whole book in my head, but when I started actually outlining, I realized that what I had was all backstory, not story. That often happens with my “shiny new ideas,” but this time it’s a book I need to write, not a distraction. I hope it means these characters will feel really vivid and come to life for me as I write them.

Next week is when the writing will begin in earnest and I start with things like target word counts.

My Books, TV

Returning to The Office

I recently stumbled, quite belatedly, onto The Office Ladies podcast, in which Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey (Pam and Angela on The Office), who became best friends during the process of making the series, do a rewatch and dish on the behind-the-scenes info about the making of each episode. I was aware that this existed, but I’m not really a podcast person. Then the episodes that are on YouTube showed up as “recommended” for me, and it turns out that they’re perfect for listening while I do Sudoku, crossword puzzles or online jigsaw puzzles. And that got me started rewatching the series to catch the things they mention. I did a partial rewatch a few years ago but got sidetracked before I finished it. Now I’ve been going back and looking for the things they point out in the podcast.

I actually watched this series in the first place because when they showed Pam in one of the promos, I immediately said, “That’s Katie!” and had to watch to see who this character was. The series premiered a couple of months before the first Enchanted, Inc. book was published, so it had already been entirely written and edited and the review copies had even been printed. That means The Office in no way influenced my series. But it was like seeing my own character that I’d already written come to life.

Her hair in the first few seasons is different than I see Katie. I think Katie looks more like Pam did in later seasons when she didn’t have the long, curly hair (which is ironic, given that I have long, curly hair), and Katie’s probably a bit spunkier than first season Pam. But Pam otherwise fit my description of her being like a girl next door, hair that wasn’t quite blond and wasn’t quite brown, eyes somewhere between green and blue, the kind of person whose description could apply to half the population. She even dresses a lot like I imagined Katie dressing. I guess first season Pam was more like Katie before she gets the job offer, when she’s in her original job at the beginning of the book, before she gains a bit more confidence and gumption from realizing that she has something special about her.

Then there was the office setting. I’d tried to do more of a workplace comedy at first, something a lot like The Office, but with magic — except there was no US The Office at the time, and I didn’t see the British version until later, so I didn’t have a good frame of reference. That idea mostly went by the wayside as the magical plots took over and the characters came to life. Before I decided that Merlin would be the boss and he’d actually be a good boss, I had the idea of the boss being someone more like Michael, mostly because I have had that boss (he even had the same first name). He wasn’t quite that stupid, but he was really big on the whole “having fun” thing and liked to have parties, only ours were usually after work, which forced us to stay late at the office or go to work-related events on weekends. He once came up with this whole incentive program where you set your goals for the week, and if you hit them, you got to leave early on Fridays, but then he’d plan either mandatory meetings or office parties for Friday afternoons, so you couldn’t actually leave. His whole life was the office, and he tried to make it that way for the staff.

I ended up not using that in the book. The only thing that remained from that original character was the bit about Merlin reading all the fad management books, though I ended up using that to show how he thought they were kind of dumb instead of constantly adjusting course based on which book the boss had just read. That came from a different job where the upper management of the company seemed to go through a different management trend every year. When I moved, I finally got rid of some of the stuff they handed out for each year’s theme.

Now I’m so far removed from the working world that I can look at this series almost as a fantasy show set in a strange, unfamiliar realm. It’s funny to look at it now and remember that feeling of deja vu as I remembered my former boss but also saw one of my characters come to life. It’s been about 20 years since they filmed the pilot episode, so Jenna Fischer has aged out of the role of Katie, but that was definitely the type I had in mind as I wrote.

My Books

Release Day!

Bread and Burglary book coverIt’s a release day birthday for me. Bread and Burglary goes on sale today as an e-book. The paperback should be on sale at Amazon tomorrow (August 8), and it may take a little time to get picked up by other systems. Amazon changed their way of handling paperbacks since my last book, so my usual timing for setting up the paperback so it would come out at the same time as the e-book turned out to be off. I don’t currently have any plans for audio. That’s beyond my budget right now, so the series needs to either sell well enough for me to make the kind of money I’d need to invest in audio and show that it would be profitable in audio, or well enough for Audible to see it as a good bet and buy the audio rights.

I don’t have huge plans for my birthday, other than going out to buy some cake. I’d thought about having a big day out and playing tourist at one of the big historical sites nearby, but there’s a chance of storms this afternoon (both the outer bands of Debby and a front coming in), and I don’t want to be driving through the mountains in a thunderstorm, so I’m sticking closer to home. I’ll see what strikes my fancy once I leave the house. A book I put on hold at the library is in, so if it’s looking like a rainy afternoon, I may pick up a takeout lunch and spend the afternoon curled up with a book. The perfect birthday!

Enjoy the new book. In the coming weeks, I’ll post some behind the scenes stuff and maybe a recipe.

My Books

Rydding Village Book 2

Bread and Burglary book coverAfter a bit of a delay caused by my move across the country, followed by another delay due to my procrastination about getting a book cover made, I’m pleased to announce that Bread and Burglary, book two in the Tales of Rydding Village series, will be published August 7, and the e-book is currently available for preorder. There will be a paperback on release day, but they don’t let you preorder those.

This book follows up on Tea and Empathy, continuing with the development of what’s going on with Elwyn and Bryn from that book, but also focusing on Lucina the baker. We find out why she has so much trouble sleeping, and finding out that the guard who stayed to become the new apprentice smith is from the homeland she had to flee doesn’t help matters. Things get even worse when items begin disappearing from people’s homes, and of course the newcomer is the first suspect. Lucina worries they’ll start to wonder about her, too, if he’s the thief, so the best thing she can do is try to clear his name. Meanwhile, he’s homesick and excited to meet someone from his homeland.

It’s my usual mix of mystery, magic, and a hint of romance. And this one will make you hungry because there’s a lot of baking. I did a fair amount of baking while I was plotting it and writing the first draft. I wrote the first draft before the move, then started revising it while I was waiting for my furniture to be delivered to my new home. Without Internet or a television, I didn’t have a lot else to do, so I spent a whole day reading the draft and making revision notes.

I already have the next book planned and partially outlined, so I hope to be able to get that one out before the end of the year.

I set August 7 as the release date because that’s my birthday. I figured I’d be sure to remember it, and it gives me something else to celebrate. I don’t know what I’ll do for my birthday, since I don’t know a lot of people here and it seems like most of the places downtown are closed on Wednesdays. Celebrating a book release helps make the day special, no matter what else I do, but I’m pretty sure cake will be involved. Buying the new book would make a great birthday gift for me. I have dreams of making it at least onto the top ten list of one of the Amazon categories.

My Books

Twenty Years Ago

Enchanted, Inc. book cover, showing cartoon fairy and frog prince in business attireOn Monday (July 22 if you’re reading the archives), it will have been twenty years since I got the book deal to have the first two Enchanted, Inc. books published.

I wrote the first book in the fall of 2003, got an agent in early 2004, then spent some time making revisions that my agent suggested. The book went out on submission to editors in late May. I’d been published before and was used to dealing with publishers, but I still was rather naively optimistic. I was so sure that the idea was clever and perfect for the market, so I had high hopes of the book being eagerly snatched up by publishers.

That wasn’t quite the case. Rejections began trickling in. By the time July rolled around, I was starting to get nervous. There were some positive signs, though. A number of editors loved it and had passed it on to the next level for consideration.

Then in mid July, one publisher announced the intention to make an offer on it. Since it was still with several other publishers, that triggered an auction. That’s when all the editors who are interested in a book have to make offers by a certain time, and then there’s negotiation as the agent lets all the interested parties know what’s on the table. A big part of it is money, but other things can also come into play, like whether they’re willing to go for a multi-book deal, the payment schedule on the advance, what promotion will be involved, and publication date. You might be willing to take a lower advance to get the book published faster, for instance. There might be conference calls with the editors to discuss their vision and plans for the book so the author can figure out which editor they want to deal with.

The auction was originally set for July 21, but there was a schedule conflict, so it was moved to July 22. As soon as the auction was announced, more rejections rolled in as publishers declined to participate. I was beginning to wonder what would happen if you had an auction but nobody came. At least I still had that initial publisher, right? Except they couldn’t make an offer because the executive who needed to sign off on it was out of touch. But then an offer came in from Ballantine Books. My agent didn’t think the other publisher could match it, so we took that offer. I’d sold my book in a two-book deal, so it was guaranteed a sequel.

There have been times when I’ve wondered if maybe we should have waited on that other publisher. They were going to publish it as fantasy, while Ballantine was publishing it on the mainstream side of the house as chick lit. The chick lit market tanked not long after the second book was published (but fortunately after I got another two-book deal for books three and four), but the urban fantasy market was just taking off.

I celebrated the book sale by buying a pair of shoes, the shoes now known as the Infamous Red Stilettos. I’d spotted them when shopping with a friend around the time I landed an agent, and I was drawn to them about the same way Katie was in Once Upon Stilettos. I didn’t have the money for them, but I told my friend that if I sold the book, I’d buy those shoes. When I called her to tell her I’d sold the book, she told me we were going shoe shopping. It was during that shopping trip that I made a quip about the shoes being magical, and that was when I came up with that storyline for the next book (I already had the part about the corporate spy in the proposal I’d sent to the publisher).

The timing of the sale worked out great because there was a big writing conference the next week, so I got to celebrate with my writer friends and meet my agent in person.

I can’t believe it’s been twenty years. Surprisingly, that book is still in print, when a lot of other books that came out around that time (and got more of a publicity push) have gone out of print. It’s been optioned for film/TV twice, though both times the option was allowed to lapse without anything getting done. It’s been published around the world in a number of languages. I have copies on my shelf in Japanese, Dutch, German, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Korean, and Chinese, to name a few. The series ended up being nine books and a short story collection, which is more than I originally planned. I’d planned it as a five-book series.

I think a celebration is in order for Monday. I won’t buy more shoes, but maybe I’ll get some ice cream when I go to the community band concert in the park that night.

My Books, Life

Life Imitating Art

When I announced my move to a small town nestled in a valley, I got teased a bit about having actually moved to Rydding Village. But this wouldn’t be the first time my life has ended up reflecting something I’ve written about.

In my very first published novel, the heroine is the daughter of a successful romance author and is trying unsuccessfully to write her own romance novel, but she has a big breakthrough when she realizes what she really should be writing is fantasy. It took me five published romance novels and a lot of rejected romance novels before I had that realization for myself. The very first thing I tried to write was actually sort of a Star Wars mental fanfic with the serial numbers filed off, but when I got serious about writing, it was fantasy. I got sidetracked into romance because the best organization for learning the business of publishing and the craft of writing a novel at the time was the Romance Writers of America, and since there were so many more romances published and there were romance publishers who didn’t require authors to have agents, that seemed “easier.” It took me many years of banging my head against the wall of romance writing and publishing before I had the grand epiphany that I didn’t actually like romance novels all that much and that what I really liked reading and writing was fantasy. I do like to have a love story in my fantasy, but I’m not crazy about the way love stories are told in the romance genre.

I ended up getting the job the heroine has in my third published book. I’d just made up a job based on things I knew enough about to write about, then put it in a particular setting. It wasn’t until I was working in the new job a few years later that I realized I was doing the exact job in the exact circumstances I’d written about.

One of the reasons I ended up deciding to make this move was that I realized I’d been writing a bunch of books that all involved characters living in or finding a hidden enclave nestled among mountains. Most of them haven’t been published (yet?), but it was such a strong theme that I finally realized that maybe this was something I wanted.

In a book I’ve been working on off and on for years, one of the issues the female main character is dealing with early in the book is that she feels stuck where she is and wants to find somewhere else to go. I wrote that part before I even started seriously contemplating the idea of moving, so I guess it was a subconscious thing I was wrestling with.

I think I was imagining this town more than twenty years ago because while I was trying to write romance, one of my “banging my head against the wall” books was set in a small town. I described the town’s July 4 celebration in detail (it was a major part of the book). It turns out that this town’s July 4 celebration is pretty much exactly what I described in that book (which will never see the light of day. It’s so far from what I want to write that there’s no point in publishing it, and the plot is now so outdated it wouldn’t work). Fortunately, the whole celebration takes place at the park at the end of my street, so I can walk over there to check it out and see how close to it I got with my descriptions. I guess it’s not too different from the things a lot of towns do for July 4, but it wasn’t the way the small town I was from did things, and the city where I was living at the time didn’t do things that way. I made it up entirely based on what I thought should happen in a town like that, decades before I knew this town existed.

I don’t know if I have subconscious longings that come out in my books or if there’s something else going on. With the job I wrote about before I knew it was a real job, it wasn’t actually a job I wanted to do, and it turned out to be kind of a nightmare. I do think the fantasy vs. romance was something I knew deep down inside and wasn’t ready to let myself believe. As for the move to “Rydding,” I’m pretty sure that was a longing. I’d been considering making a change for years, and when I was trying to come up with some paranormal or fantasy women’s fiction, I kept coming back to the same kind of place. I knew I wanted something like that for myself. It just took me a lot of research to find it.

Most of my books don’t come true, though. I haven’t found a job at a magical company and I haven’t connected with a hot wizard, alas.

My Books

Rydding Village Update

Today is Tales of Rydding Village Status Update day, it seems.

I’m just about done with editing book 2, so I’ll soon start getting the publication part lined up. One thing I need to settle on is a title, so I can get a cover made. I thought I had one that I came up with when I was outlining it, but I’m wavering on it.

So, I’m looking for feedback from readers. This isn’t a vote, and I retain the right to decide for myself, but I am looking for opinions that might help me make the decision.

This book focuses on Lucina, the baker, and Nico, the new apprentice smith who came to town at the end of the first book. He’s from the same land as Lucina, which brings back some bad memories for her, since she didn’t leave her homeland in the best of circumstances. Things get more complicated when there’s a wave of burglaries in town, and since Nico is new in town, he’s the most obvious suspect. Lucina worries that if he’s accused, she’ll be tarred with the same brush, as the only other person the villagers know from that land, and she’ll be a refugee all over again. She and Elwyn set out to solve the mystery.

So, my working title has been Bread and Burglary. That follows the pattern of the X and Y title established in the first book (which also seems to be a trope in the cozy fantasy genre). I imagine some of the little symbols on the cover might include something like a loaf of bread and a smith’s hammer.

But a pivotal part of the story takes place at the village’s midsummer revels. There’s a lot of talk about “midsummer madness,” which leads people to take leaps they might not otherwise take. That’s made me wonder if I have to stick with that same title pattern and if Midsummer Madness might make a good title. Though, to be honest, there isn’t much actual madness, just some temptation and a few magical things happening.

Which do you think would be more interesting/appealing? Or do you have other ideas? I generally hate coming up with titles. If I don’t have one that pops into my head at the very beginning, I usually struggle with titles until the last second, then just stick whatever comes to mind then on the book so that I can get it published.

In other Rydding Village news, Tea and Empathy is now available on the hoopla library system. If your library offers this service, that means you can check the e-book out as a library book. It doesn’t cost you anything, and I get paid if people check it out, so win-win. It’s a good way to try out new authors or series at low risk. It’s also on the Overdrive library system, but in that one each library has to purchase a book to add to their e-book collection, so you’d have to request it from your library, and then they can decide to add it, either as a one-time thing (so you can check it out, but it doesn’t become part of the collection) or just as a permanent part of the collection so everyone can check it out.

TV, My Books

Time-Traveling Historians

My latest TV obsession is the series of historical farming documentaries from the BBC. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was watching one set in the 1600s (Tales from the Green Valley). I’d already watched the Tudor Monastery Farm series. Then the YouTube algorithm started serving me more. Last week, I watched the Wartime Farm series about World War II. I’m currently watching Victorian Farm.

The basic format of these is that a group of historians and archaeologists spend a year living as though they’re farmers in a particular era, using technology of the time, to see how it all works and whether they could have survived. They go from planting a crop to harvesting the crop and everything in between, eating the food, wearing the clothes, and living the life, in general. They’ll bring in subject matter experts to learn about a particular task or craft of the time. The cast sometimes varies, but there are some regulars who pop up, and that means my brain starts creating narratives about all this.

It started when I watched the Wartime Farm series right after the one set in the 1620s. The historians were talking about how their experience couldn’t replicate exactly what people of the time experienced, since they knew when and how it would end, and that was uncertain for the people of the time. They were going through all this with high expectations, trying to increase food production since most of their imports had been cut off, and they didn’t know when or if they might be invaded. Although the scholars were spending one year, they kept adjusting conditions based on different years of the war to show how things changed, like the availability of some things. They were talking about having to go back to some of the older ways that had been more or less lost because they were having to make do, and since I’d just watched some of these same people living in the 1620s, I thought they had an unfair advantage over actual 1940s farmers because they’d done things like make medicinal preparations out of foraged herbs, had made their own cheese, had thatched a roof, had worked a field using horses instead of a tractor.

And that’s when it struck me: They’re time travelers! These people are bringing knowledge from the past and from the future. I would say it’s a fun story idea, but Connie Willis has already written the books about the time-traveling historians. I guess this is the next best thing to getting a movie or TV series made from those books. One thing I’m enjoying is that while there is a bit of a story line — will they have a successful harvest? — there’s not a lot of drama. There are no villains or antagonists. It’s just people trying to learn things and make things work. That makes for engaging but relaxing viewing.

I’m also getting really curious about the behind-the-scenes stuff, wondering whether they really are living like this or just when the cameras are on. They tend to do a couple of months in a single episode, so it’s just a day or two that gets shown. Are they wearing these clothes and living in these places all the time with the cameras only on them for a day or two every month, on camera all the time but it gets edited down, or just showing up when they’re doing something the camera will record? They did mention for the 1600s one that they wouldn’t actually be living in the farmhouse for health and safety reasons but would be living nearby, which implies they’re living on-site, even if they are living in trailers or something like that. They also mentioned during the Victorian one that they’re not actually sleeping in the cottage but rather elsewhere on the estate. I’ve read the books by one of the historians, and she mentioned trying the Tudor-era hygiene protocol when they were doing that series and that even the camera crew that wasn’t around all the time didn’t notice any body odor, which also implies that they’re living this way all the time. Do these people have families? Do they get weekend visits?

We had a small farm when I was a teenager, but we mostly just raised a few cows, so I didn’t get the full farm experience, and I don’t romanticize it at all, but these are still fun to watch. I started watching these as research for the Rydding Village books, when I was looking up info on how people were cooking and baking, and this was what the search results brought up. Then I connected them to some books I’d read for research when I realized it was the same historian. The shows are great for being able to visualize what she discussed in the books.

Just staying alive before all the modern conveniences was a lot of work, which was why I came up with the house spirit to help the local healer. I’m not sure how a single woman who needed to keep house would have any time left in the day to earn a living. Laundry would take about as long for a single as for a family, and most people wouldn’t have owned enough clothes to go longer between loads of laundry. That may be why so many people made extra money by taking in laundry. It would free a lot of time to hire someone else to do the wash, and adding a few items to the load of a single person or small family wouldn’t require a lot of extra effort, so it would be monetizing something they had to do anyway. A healer-type person who had to maintain a garden for herbs, prepare medicines, and see patients wouldn’t have much time to also cook, keep the house reasonably clean, and do laundry. And so we have Gladys in my books.