The Story Behind the Story

Tea and Empathy was a book I wrote because it was what I needed to read.

Long before cozy fantasy became a publishing trend because of the success of Legends & Lattes, I first heard the term when one of my readers referred to my Enchanted, Inc. books that way. They often got compared to cozy paranormal mysteries, and a lot of the “people who bought this also bought” suggestions for those books were cozy paranormal mysteries. These books did follow a lot of the patterns of cozy mysteries, though often without an actual mystery-type case. The “cases” in these books were more fantasy related, and therefore they got called cozy fantasy, as opposed to cozy mystery.

Meanwhile, as life has been pretty stressful, I’ve found myself looking for less tension in my reading material. I remember when the TV series Westworld was on, showing a sort of theme park in which people could live out their Old West fantasies, I found myself pondering what theme park like that I’d want to visit. I’d want to visit a fantasy world, but not necessarily play out a fantasy story because I wouldn’t want all that tension and violence. I’d just like to spend some time hanging out in that world, maybe going on a mild quest to obtain something, so it was essentially a hiking trip with a purpose that allowed me to see fantasy creatures and interesting places. But because I’m not into hardship, they could make nice beds look like moss on the forest floor, and they could hide real bathrooms inside the tree trunks. And that made me think that this was the sort of thing I wouldn’t mind reading. My favorite parts of The Lord of the Rings were mostly the big celebration in the Shire at the beginning, the dinner party with the elves in the forest, and the time hanging out at Rivendell. I’d love to find fantasy books that focused on stuff like that, without the need to save the world or stop the Dark Lord from sucking the world into hell.

But there didn’t seem to be a market for that sort of thing because editors want tension and conflict. Then Legends & Lattes, a book about a retired adventurer orc opening a coffee shop, became a huge hit, and suddenly it seemed that a lot of other people felt the same way in wanting stories set in fantasy worlds but with lower stakes and less action.

I had been writing cozy paranormal mysteries — which seemed like a logical move, given all the “also bought” books — but then there was the day I was writing the scene in which they found the body when I heard gunfire outside my house and spent the next few hours watching the crime scene team after it turned out that a young man had been shot and killed on the street behind my house. A couple of weeks after that, the daughter of some friends was murdered. Suddenly, writing about murder was no longer fun, and I couldn’t see murder as a form of entertainment (I haven’t even been able to read mysteries since then). With everything going on in the world, I didn’t much want to write or read contemporary fiction. I wanted to escape to a fantasy world.

I remember the title Tea and Empathy popping into my head one day as I was making my bed, and soon I had characters and a plot. I think that was the quickest I’ve gone from initial idea to finished book. In a way, it was like the way the idea for Enchanted, Inc. came from adding magic to chick lit, but in this case I was moving those women’s fiction books about the woman leaving the big city after her life fell apart and finding herself in a quaint village to a magical world.

The funny thing was, writing this book made me realize what I wanted for my own life, and less than a year after I came up with the idea for the book, I left the big city to move to a smaller city tucked into the mountains. I even ended up buying a formerly abandoned cottage with a garden run amok. I do not, alas, have a resident spirit who keeps house for me.

These books are so much fun for me to write because I get to escape to a simpler place that may still have problems, but they can be solved by the community coming together and by everyone facing and learning to embrace who they really are.