It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? I haven’t done the free book thing since I went wide with my books. Something like a year ago, I think. And yes, I should have known it wouldn’t work for me. You guys might have told me. You should know me well enough by now. Whenever I spread myself too thin, across too many platforms, I get lost and forget how to work any of them. Also, despite people telling me that I shouldn’t, that I should value my work more than that, I do love giving books away for free. After all these years, I’m still not really in it for the money. I write the stories to get them out of my head – I don’t have enough brain space to keep them all in, okay? – and for people to have fun with them. Long story short, I’m back to Amazon exclusively. Which means, yes, you can get my books on KU again, and I can hand out regular freebies and not have to worry about how the various platforms agree or disagree with each other.
This took me longer than expected. Blame life, circumstances, and probably a hefty dose of perfectionism. By which I mean kids and their needs and wants, spontaneous adventures, and the gruesome fact that editing never ends. If I were to read the book again now that I’ve gone and published it, I’d no doubt still find a million things I’d rather change. It’s a writer sickness. I once read, in a blog bost or interview, I don’t remember, about a writer who went to her publisher’s office to check out the proof copy of her paperback, and promptly picked up a pencil and started scribbling editing notes into the margins. They had to, gently but firmly, loosen her fingers around book and pencil to make her stop and understand that you have to accept at one point that it’s done.
Either way, it’s out now. The seventh installment of my Resident Witch series, and my fifteenth book in total. Those numbers will never cease to amaze me. At the risk of repeating myself, I never thought I’d have more than one story to tell, more than one book inside me, and I especially never thought something that started out as a 4k short story would grow this much.
What can you expect from this book? Where are Alice and the gang going, what did I torture them with this time? We-hell… sorry, no spoilers. It’s safe to assume, though, that there will be challenges, more or less epic battles, and under-pressure bantering. There’ll also be a soundtrack, as usual, and seeing how Alice moved in with a metalhead two books ago, and the gang’s LARPer moved in shortly after, a lot of said soundtrack features folk metal. One of these days I’ll start assembling playlists for each individual book. Now, to give you just the tiniest hint of what you might encounter upon entering this latest addition to the series… is this copper I smell?
I know, it’s technically still winter. But we haven’t had much of the weather typically associated with the season, the spring flowers are already out, the hazel in bloom, the birds going crazy outside and I think even the hedgehog is waking up, so what the hell. We might as well pretend it’s over. Usually, I would have started the spring cleaning last week, but we need a bit of renovating done, and it’s kinda pointless to clean first and then make a horrible mess only to have to clean it all again. Right… only the husband said we’d better postpone the renovating until it’s a bit warmer, so we can actually air the rooms properly after painting them, so now we’re doing neither. Which makes sense.
Now. SFINCS. I totally failed to report on how that contest turned out for me… I guess I had to get over it first. Because it didn’t. Remember when I entered SPFBO and my 100% hope story was allocated to a blog fond of grimdark and dystopia? With SFINCS, it was the other way round. My luck is having a string of field days, it seems. I entered the darkest story I have on offer, the one readers have described as bizarre, macabre, psychedelic, trippy and disturbing… and ended up with a judging team not fond of stuff requiring a trigger warning. And let’s face it, if there were a comprehensive list of trigger warnings, The Girl on the Red Pillow would pretty much tick them all. When I entered the story, the questionnaire asked for possible triggers. It took me five minutes to jot them all down, and I’m pretty sure I forgot one or two. So… I get it. I get how this might be the wrong book for a great many people. What I don’t get is that I got absolutely no feedback. It was stated from the start that there would be no guarantee every entered book would get a review, but I would have hoped for at least a short message. I got nothing, which means anything is possible, from the judges absolutely hating it to no one has even bothered to read it. And that leaves a bit of a weird, empty feeling. Ah, well. Onwards to new adventures, I guess.
Speaking of which…
I’m waiting for two more beta readers to get back to me, and once they have, and I’ve made the best possible use of their comments and edited the hell out of everything, there will be a seventh installment in my Resident Witch series. Here’s a look at the cover.
Today’s the first real day of the new year. By which I mean that the holidays are over, the kids are back in school, and I’m struggling to keep my eyes open after two and a half weeks of staying up way too late, sleeping in way too long, and all of a sudden having to get up at quarter past six again this morning. Forgive any errant typos or whatever other faults this posting might contain. Like, no real point, for instance. Or deeper meaning. Or sense.
I’m a bit tired, and two cups of coffee didn’t make it any better but, as stated above, here we are. 2024. Let’s make the best of it.
Plans for this year include trips to Vienna and maybe Edinburgh, a handful of LARPs, a folk metal concert, maybe a punk rock concert, and at least one new book. The seventh in my Resident Witch series. A draft is already finished, and waiting for me to go through it one final time before sending it out to my beloved beta readers. That aside, I have a few ideas…
I also sorta decided to try and be more social again this year. As a start, I rejoined Mastodon today. We’ll see what comes of that. You can find me here.
That’s all for now, or more precisely, all I can think of, considering the useless state I’m in. I might need a third cup of coffee…
“I don’t read fantasy. I find it hard to suspend disbelief.”
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard those sentences, or something similar. Very often. Too often.
Let me tell you something about fantasy literature. It’s not real. You don’t have to suspend disbelief, because no one expects you to believe it, not even the authors. Especially not the authors. They know they’re feeding escapism needs. They experience those themselves, which is why they embark on their odd journeys into made-up worlds, and invite you to accompany them. You can come along fully aware that you might enter places composed of the wishful and wistful, where clichés come true and murky shades of gray dissolve into clear, distinct colors. Where heroes save the day, and villains get their just reward, and none of it is true, can never be true, because this kind of stuff doesn’t happen in real life.
And that’s the core of the problem right there. Is it really the magic which makes the realists struggle with fantasy? The flying dragons, or the voices only the chosen one can hear? Maybe it isn’t. Maybe the truth is somewhere else entirely, in our real world, where heroes get forgotten the instant the media move on to the next topic, where villains get away with a good lawyer, where our rulers are, more often than not, conniving and corrupt instead of noble and wise.
And maybe it’s simply the other way round with people who do read fantasy. Maybe they have a hard time suspending disbelief where reality is concerned. Our everyday reality, where a mythical beast called inflation in an almost magical way causes prices to rise all by themselves, where we reflexively condemn wars while simultaneously sell weapons to every fantastic realm with enough gold to pay for them, where we discuss speed limits as a possible method of preventing our planet becoming less inhabitable with every passing day, yet start honking the instant the horseless carriage in front of us goes even 1km/h slower than allowed, where we throw away tons of food knowing full well that millions are starving, long story short, where no one gives a fuck about anyone or anything.
I don’t want to believe any of that. Give me a good book to live in. Give me something I want to believe. Give me a world composed of the wishful and wistful. Or better yet, give it to everybody. Let everybody read fantasy until the switch in their brain clicks from “Come on, this isn’t real” to “Wouldn’t it be nice”.
The dream is over… A Tree’s Heart got cut from the contest. But!
I’ll be frightfully honest right now. When I saw, back in May, which blog I had been assigned to, my instant reaction was, fuck my life. I’m dead. I don’t stand a chance. A blog which was mainly into darker fantasy, and I submitted a book which basically oozes hope and positivity from every page. The contest asks the judges to read at least 30% of each book before giving up on it. I fully expected this to happen to me. Surely they wouldn’t put more effort in something so obviously not up their alley…
I feel like I owe them a giant apology now. Two of their team members read the book in full, and provided thoughtful and, to my eternal surprise, positive reviews. They… they liked it. Not enough to move it forward to round two, but still. They called it a good read, an interesting read, with a lot of great elements, plenty of mystery and intrigue, as well as a lot of heart, and one of the reviewers pulled out their entire arboreal vocabulary to do the tree theme justice. So I went and thanked them, because what else could I have done? I was super chuffed and happy, despite the cut. Their reply was…
“Thank you very much for writing this book and sharing it with the world.”
I’m not crying, you’re crying.
Anyway, here’s the link to the review. And now, onward to the next contest. I may be cut from SPFBO 9, but there’s still SFINCS. And maybe there’ll be SPFBO 10, who knows. I have a few more eligible books lying around…
High time I taught you another word, right? And this one is quite possibly the most important word in the world…
If the idea behind this cartoon feels vaguely sexist to you, rest assured, it could be worse. We could be using the exact same word for these motherfu…
Which we are. I would still strongly recommend not to refer to your mother as a screw nut. She’ll probably send you to bed without dinner. And you would fully deserve it.
I know, I know, there’s still a day left, but I’m kinda done with this month. It had pretty much everything from old friends of the family dying, to everybody and their dog down with Covid (not us, we only caught some less fancy flu thing and a stomach bug on top), to water coming through the walls in the basement. Don’t you just love it when the fun piles up like that? I promptly reached the point where I saw no other choice but to take it all out on my h…
….
….
….
… hair.
You thought I was going to say husband, right? Tsk. When life gives you sharp edges, use them to cut your hair. So this is me now. And yes, I did that. With my little hatchet.
I felt quite a bit better afterwards, which was what I needed. I need all the positive energy I can get right now, because I’m still running in the SPFBO9 contest. For the simple reason that none of the judges have yet read my entry. I thought the worst that could hit me was a scathing review and a DNF (did not finish), but the way my luck is going, I’ll end up with either a GLITPAFA (got lost in the pile and forgotten about) or a GCOHOFBOAD (got cut on her own freaking birthday of all days). If it’s not option B by the end of next week, it’ll be option A, there’s no doubt about it.
Yes, my impostor syndrom is running rampant, how did you guess?
Which isn’t about me at all. Remember the guy from the SPFBO cartoon series who I said looks like Nikola Tesla? Well, his entry has already been pronounced a finalist in the contest. Which makes me ridiculously happy, because I loved his drawing style. I still haven’t read the book, Daughter of the Beast, but I’ll be spending a few days at the sea soon, and I’ll totally take the book with me.
I’ll finish this post off with a little episode which happened a few days ago. I had some sharp edges left after cutting my hair, so I took them out into the garden for a little autumn polishing. Well… I have a dog, right? So at some point, I found myself exclaiming, rather loudly, “FOR FUCK’S SAKE DON’T TELL ME YOU’VE DUG ANOTHER HOLE.” Which was met with a bout of laughter from somewhere above me. No, not some higher entity. Only my neighbor, who’s currently in the process of fixing the roof of his terrace. “Dude, that’s not funny,” I told him. He just grinned at me from the top step of his ladder and replied, “From where I’m standing, it is.”
It’s the last of August. Tomorrow, we’ll have September. When I was a kid, this meant the end of two months of summer holidays, and the beginning of another dreary school year (I read a book once where the author compared the time from September to Christmas to bread soup – gray, bland, and preferably not consumed). The nights were growing colder, to the point where you could almost see your breath on the way to school, but you went out in shorts and t-shirt anyway, because you knew summer’s warmth would return by 10 a.m. the latest.
I’m not a kid anymore, so instead of going to school at 7:30, I take the dog to the park. In shorts and t-shirt. At 15°C. Because I know summer’s warmth will return by 10 a.m. the latest. Yesterday, a woman asked me if I had realized that autumn was almost here. I told her it’s August, technically still summer, and I refuse to acknowledge anything beyond that. Her answering expression was… unique.
However, summer started out weird, with the revelation that our car wouldn’t get another TÜV or MOT or whatever it is called in your country. The sticker thingy that says your vehicle passed the official inspection and is declared fit for traffic. The mechanic said the car was basically still good, but the one major thing in need of fixing would amount to A LOT, and that wasn’t even calculating all the minor things on the horizon, like new tires soon, a new windshield, at least one new electric window, none of which really qualified as minor… Long story short, we had a month to figure out whether we really wanted to invest more money into the old scrap heap than it was worth, or sell it for spare parts and get a new one. So we took Scrappy on its final trip to Vienna, drove the poor thing for every mile it still had in it, and then, with heavy hearts, said our goodbyes. The new one isn’t exactly new either. We’re slowly getting used to the panic beeping it issues every time it feels threatened by a white line, the curb, or the fact that it’s expected to reverse. The former owner was an old people’s home, they used it to drive the residents to appoinments and whatnot. Or, to quote my daughter, “Our new car used to be a social worker? That’s cool!”
That aside, summer was as golden as summer can be. Okay, the two weeks in Vienna were. The rest was rather wet, which meant little swimming and loads of crafting (like the LARP-compliant football below, yes, I may be crazy), little gardening and loads of beta reading for buddies (I’ll tell you all about those books when they’re published), little writing, what with the kids keeping me busy all the time, and loads of simply reading for my own enjoyment. My new favorite series is MT Zimny’s Apex Cycle (remember all the SPFBO cartoons? Hers was the first. You can check it, and my thoughts on book one of the series, out here). If you like YA, or superheroes, or both, you should definitely read the entire trilogy.
What else is there to say? Not too much. This post here is an attempt to get from summer back into work mode. It’s the first time I logged into my blog since July 31. I was greeted by 65 messages in my spam folder, which were dying to tell me that my life would never coincide again after this (coincide with what? I need to know!), that it was high time I had my own (my own what?!?), and that amazingness would help me achieve my every desire and even help me sleep. Yeah, right. Instead of following any of that sage advice, I’ll do a little more crafting, take the kids on the last LARP of the year, and then, yes, then, I’ll decide which of the three books in my head I’ll write first.
Oh, my biggest achievement this summer? I learned to play Diggy Diggy Hole on my tin whistle.
Aaaand it’s a dozen, and thus complete. This is the final submission I got. Let’s see…
“This was a blast!” Meredith wrote in her message to me, and it’s pretty obvious from the cartoon that she had fun drawing it and poking a little fun at herself. It’s also pretty obvious that what we’re seeing here can only be the beginning of a complicated love story. Two hearts, lost in the void…
Incidentally, that’s also the title of the book. Hearts Lost. I love the shadow creature on the cover.
The book is actually the second in a series, but Meredith says it’s a complete standalone. I’d believe her, but she also claims to have been raised by wolves in the mountains of Colorado, so I don’t know how trustworthy she really is…
Whatever, I’m sure she won’t mind if you read the first book first. Here’s the link to Hearts Lost, and to book #1 of the series, Heart’s Rescue. Also, here’s Meredith’s Amazon author page, where you can also sign up for her newsletter.
Angelika Rust 