Months ago I said I’d get some more books listed on Etsy. I finally did this week, mostly because I’m saving up for some dental work for Shawn not to mention I want some senior wellness checks on my two cats who turned ten this year; September cleaned me out, because while I had Shawn’s wellness check planned and budgeted, I had to get a new laptop at the start of the month and then lost my nineteen-year-old cat at the end of the month.

Of course I looked at the boxes Shawn was sitting on and thought hey! I have a stack of unsold stock here!

It does cost money to keep a lot of listings at Etsy, which is why I wasn’t in a rush to do it. But the holidays are approaching and I was informed at the post office today that parcel delivery will be slooooow (and for some countries nonexistent), so now’s a good time for gifts buying!

I’ve got Elis, Livi, and The Silent Places up, plus two gift boxes are left for Blood Ties and The Silent Places. The gift boxes are just that: packaged in an attractive gift box (which is shipped wrapped in kraft paper) with the signed book and other often handmade goodies, so all you have to do is stick a gift tag on it and put it under the tree (or whatever your tradition is).

I have a few extra beaded bracelets I’ve made that I’ve been waiting to put together in a gift box, but I might list a couple separately to see if they sell. (I’ll poke at that this weekend.)

Etsy link is here: https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/AlchemyRed

I do refund shipping overcharges if I get to the post office and it’s cheaper than expected, and if you buy a couple of things, I’ll ship them together and that usually cuts down on shipping fees as well.

If you’re local and want a book, hit me up rather than use Etsy–I can take payment via e-transfer and make arrangements for pickup.

That’s about all that’s new here–I’m just super drained after the usual not-great birthday, especially losing Reuben when I did. I didn’t think he’d make it to the end of the year but he slid downhill that last week fast. Shawn’s been a little lost–he kept looking for Reuben in his usual spots, and I wish I could’ve taken him with me to the vet so he could’ve seen the euthanasia and hopefully understood on some level. He’s doing better now, though (when he’s not nagging me to clean the bathtub, disrespectful little fucker).

I need to do a quarterly book state of the union here, but I’m pretty exhausted with my shitty health and all the other stressors, so look for that hopefully next week. At least I’ll have news, which I did not anticipate having during the July one!

I feel like the Count by this point. But yes, two down! One to go.

I did not expect with that post late July when I said I hoped to have a second zero draft done by fall that a) I would immediately start a new unplanned book, finish it, and find it solid enough to schedule for publication, or b) I would, in fact, finish another zero draft on the literal first day of fall. But I did, last night.

I’m particularly surprised because I’ve had this book in progress for over three and a half years and I’d resigned myself to the fact that I’d never finish it.

I rewrote the first 20K about four times.

It’s taken me that long to really figure out what the book is and what story I wanted to write. I started off thinking it would be a fun, semi-cozy sort of mystery. But while I like to read those…I cannot write them. It’s not sustainable for me to do for a book let alone a whole series. I like writing darker. I like writing weirder. So I rewrote the book in different POVs, different tenses, and felt like I finally got the voice down. Then I had a crisis of faith and abandoned it for another couple of months, but I needed a break before I tackled more Dweller revisions, and I thought I’d start poking it again.

Then, after writing over 12K words (that is not a typo) yesterday, I finished the very rough zero draft at last.

Working on a mystery is a very different kind of experience, even though that’s what I wrote many, many years before I did anything fantasy related, and I needed to learn–and relearn–different skills. So this one is going to require heavy revision and I think next time I’ll just write really lean and worry about layering in other elements later. Even having the full picture in my head is not the same as having the full picture in draft format.

There’s a lot in it I’m really happy with and excited to eventually share, however. At this point, I expect it’ll launch spring 2023, giving me a bit of time to work on sequels as well as other WIPs. Amazon won’t let me set up a preorder more than a year in advance but I might get it up on other stores soon.

The last thing I want is to be juggling another series but a different genre lets me stretch different muscles and, as always, there remains a chance that maybe this’ll be the thing that takes off. (I mean, realistically, probably not; there’s a venn diagram between what sells and what I write and they do not overlap. But! We can hope.)

I absolute credit my recent productivity with Patreon.

My sincerest thanks to everyone who has joined in at the weekly write-ins on Saturday nights. I set those up while I was a little manic on steroids, not really thinking it through and unsure whether anyone would even join. Of course Dina was quick to support me so it wasn’t just me showing up alone, and a few others have consistently been writing as well. That commitment was a push to get raw words in, which in turn helped shut off the inner editor and a lot of the pressure I feel to just write and reconnect with writing. Unlike other creative endeavors I’ve done over the years (painting, drawing, guitar, piano), I’ve always loved every aspect of writing. Even when it’s hard. I love drafting, I love revising, I love picking at a book and reading it past the point when I should be hating it.

Writing for publication means one often stops enjoying it, however, because everything becomes about other people’s needs and wants instead of one’s own. Shutting out those other voices and just focusing again on me and the stories I want to tell has made a huge difference in productivity.

Now with two zero drafts down (and an accidental new haunted house novel), I’ve got two other books on the schedule I haven’t started yet (Hell Fire, Elis #3; A Wild Kind of Darkness, Waverly #2) and another WIP I’m 50% through to hopefully finish…maybe by winter? I’m keeping pressure-free right now and my expectations low, but still trying to steal as much time as I can whenever I feel well enough to work to get as much writing done as I can. It would be nice to stay on a roll here.

Fingers crossed.

For now? I better nap lol.

Remember when I said I wasn’t going to start any new zero drafts?

Yeah, about that…

Less than a week later, I accidentally started a new book.

Three and a half weeks later, I finished the zero draft.

I know. I know! I didn’t mean to, I swear. Sometimes books just…fall out of my head. It’s been a very long time since that’s happened. I honestly didn’t think I could do it anymore.

Sometimes we surprise ourselves.

It’s scheduled to release April 5, 2022 and is currently up for preorder in ebook.

Amidst the 2020 pandemic, Norah Sloane has been sheltering in place with her ex-boyfriend—the equivalent of three toddlers in a trench coat pretending to be an adult—who abruptly informs her he thinks she needs to move out. Coincidentally, her estranged father has just died and left his family’s home to her, and in a fit of defiant frustration, she packs her bags—and her cats—and drives five hours north to the tiny village of Hope Falls to claim her inheritance.

Selling the big, partially renovated old house during a global pandemic is out of the question, but the bills are paid for a few months to give her time to get on her feet. It’s the best solution, all things considered.

So what if it’s haunted?

Wanna see the cover?

Preorder links: Kindle – Kobo – iBooks – Nook (print will be available in the spring)

It was a very different experience writing it compared to how I write now–with the books I’ve been working on the last several years, I usually know the endings and the arcs well in advance. Dweller on the Threshold was much more like how I used to write: diving in, no idea of where I was going, and trusting the process. The zero draft came in at 80K words and I’ve continued revising and picking at it, fleshing it out some and adding another 23K. So it’s a hefty book.

It’s also entirely standalone.

Anticipating some worries–and answering questions that have already come up–here’s a brief FAQ (no major spoilers).

Oh no, I’m not ready for more pandemic trauma!

So first of all, this is not A Pandemic Book.

The pandemic is a backdrop. Having been in a lot of situations as a poor person where my options of where to live are limited, I’m very interested in ideas around isolation and feeling trapped and exploring all that. It’s bad enough when you can’t afford to start renting somewhere new–what happens when you’re stuck in a haunted house you can’t even sell because there’s a global pandemic?

No one in the book catches/dies of covid. People mask and sanitize a lot, but Norah is largely isolated and interacts with other folks who are isolated. There’s a maskhole neighbour who has a total of like two small scenes. There’s some background noise about idiots running the province but Norah, unlike the rest of us, wisely avoids Twitter news.

All this means is that it’s not my intention to trigger any pandemic trauma in folks; I tried to be really careful about keeping the focus on the haunted house and keeping the pandemic a reason why Norah is trapped (and also stretching the limits of “I’d totally live in a haunted house rent free” and how far one would go with that).

WHAT ABOUT THE CATS???

The cats in the book are totally fine. Nothing bad happens to them. Norah, of course, worries about them a lot, but I promise they don’t even get the slightest injury. They don’t even get fleas.

They’re also named Spencer and Burton, played by these dudes.

So really, I swear, the cats will be fine.

Why did you write a whole new book and not Charon’s Gold when we’re waiting for more Livi?

Yeah, I’m already getting this. Despite my author’s note in Yampellec’s Idol.

Folks, I am not a machine. Publishing is a business but writing is a creative endeavour. It has to be something I do for me rather than other people, and I have to get back to a place of enjoying it. I could have spent the past month and a half beating my head against one of the other two books I have in progress–that have been in progress for one and three years respectively–and accomplished absolutely nothing, but instead I gave myself a break and wrote a whole new standalone book that I feel really good about.

I feel like if you’ve made it to the fifth book in the Livi Talbot series, you know by now that I’m working really hard to put out quality stories that I am proud of and that I am excited to offer readers. That process doesn’t happen if I rush it, if I write solely out of obligation, or if I’m feeling constant pressure (also…few things require as much research as her books do–I cannot rush the research process, there are only so many hours in a day). I assume you don’t want a book I’m phoning in to meet some arbitrary release date; you want the quality you have come to expect by this point in the series. This is how that happens.

I’ve written fifty-something books over the past twenty years. I know my process. I know how my brain works. I know what I’m doing. And I need breaks between series books and time to refill my creative well. So please, my doves, just chill, because I will have ZERO news about the series that I can offer publicly for probably another year.

If you’re disappointed Dweller on the Threshold is not a Livi Talbot book, that’s cool and I understand. Those feelings are valid, but so is my desire to not be told you’re disappointed. I don’t want to know! I just want to be excited about something new, please and thank you.

Other stuff and things.

• Horror fans and newbies alike: I find horror very subjective and I have a high threshold myself, so it’s really hard for me to label something as “horror”. The book’s not gory, it’s more creepy. YMMV though it’s my hope to creep you out with it at times.
• This is not a kissing book. One very brief off page sexy times but in no ways is there romance in this book. If you are looking for something romance-free, look no further.
• It does deal with childhood trauma, because trauma is my brand at this point, but there is zero rape/molestation/sexual threats.
• There’s a very liberal dose of humour throughout it.
• Chronic Illness Representation (TM)

I hope y’all check it out!

[Side note: for some reason, I can no longer comment on my own blog. So if you leave comments and I don’t respond, I’m not being rude–I just literally cannot reply while I’m signed in.]