Thanks so much to all of you who’ve already snagged Mr. & Mrs. Witch from your bookstore or library, and remember that reviews at the usual sites like Amazon or Goodreads or yelling enthusiastically on Insta or TikTok (or telling a human IRL!) are rad and a great way to support the book and your humble narrator.
I still have some fun things planned for promo, but have also been busy busy (running a nonprofit is time-consuming, who knew??? but the Lexington Writer’s Room just this morning hit 100 members and it’s so rewarding). And I’m working on the next witch book, which is the first book in the Wayward Sisters series, so my brain is deep in Regency England fantastical apothecary mode.
There’s also always this weird and ever-unpredictable emotional trajectory with any book release. The excitement and the absolute delight at readers who seem to 1000 percent have read the book you wanted to write, and the worry it won’t find enough of them! With about a tridozen more anxieties. The only thing to do is hope it finds its way and word of mouth, and…write the next book.
ANNNND I’m also thrilled to report that Not Your Average Hot Guy is on sale for the first time since it came out! You can go snag it at your etailer of choice for an devilishly low price of $2.99 for a short time.
“To all of us who ever tried to twitch our noses and make things happen”
That’s from the dedication to Mr. & Mrs. Witch, my new novel out today. And, if you’ve ever seen Bewitched, or even a clip of Bewitched, I bet you know exactly what I mean. I thought instead of telling you — again — just about the book, I’d instead write about why I love witches and why I think they’re having a moment (besides that we all love them, duh)…and a little about the book.
Say the word witch and the quickest associations that leap to mind for me are: women, power, and… burning. Maybe also…fun? Which is weird to throw in with burning. But it’s true, whether the witches in question are Samantha smoking hot or Macbeth’s ominous hags or historical women who claimed to be witches or who got classed that way, they are often women, perceived as powerful, and so people — usually men or other reps of the patriarchy — fear them and thus the burning. But there’s also the place witches bring for playful imaginative longing, for them to conjure what they want, what we want; there’s the possibility they might be in league with not the devil but each other. Friends! Women being friends! The horror. What might they get up to together?
Witches don’t fit in, even if they try to. Mostly, they don’t need to. They are outside the social order, another thing that makes them scary to some. Maybe witches in a given story are wicked and evil, maybe they are kind and generous, maybe they are both or something in between. That’s already a much wider variety than many types of characters that tend to be women (and the few female archetypes) get to encompass. How glorious! Witches are agents of possibility.
Witches and witchcraft have had a swell of popularity over the past few years, not just in books, but in pop culture and, well, real life. We have two thriving shops that sell witchy goods here in town — Creatures of Whim and White Willow Emporium (both of which I visit way too often, and plan to take Instagram live field trips to later this week!) — and it’s not that big a city. It makes perfect sense. Women and our bodies and, yes, our power are under attack. We all know this. And the pandemic reminded us of how thin the mortal veil really is. And with climate change, we’re reminded daily how little control we have over nature, and how maybe being more in tune with it might be a good idea.
So it’s not surprising at all to me that traditions that empower folk wisdom and intuition and so many other things we tend to align with the feminine end of the spectrum are having a renaissance. And it’s also joyfully wonderful to see so many books exploring this and giving us all an escape valve from a society that is literally attacking not just women but also those who don’t perform gender a specific way’s right to exist. Daily. A reminder that we do all have power in being who we are meant to be and that is what those villains — real villains — on the attack fear most. Their inability to understand us makes them want to control us.
I named the secret agent society of witches in Mr. & Mrs. Witch — which includes both men and women and non-binary people, though it’s mainly run by women — C.R.O.N.E. for a reason. Christopher helped me reverse engineer the acronym; we landed on Covert Responses to Occult Nightmares by Enchantresses. But part of the reason why C.R.O.N.E. had to be it? I’ve been saying hashtag crone life for years. Much the same way grrls helped reclaimed the word girl and so many others when I was a teen (chick, lady, babe), I am all for us claiming these words generally meant to imply women are past their prime. Crone. Hag. Because fuck that. We need a new, everlasting prime. To me, the word crone can just as easily symbolize freedom, power, flying (literally in this case) under the radar. What better name for a covert society of witches? What better way to live than saying women can be rad at all ages? (And other people too!)
The hero’s counterpart organization, H.U.N.T.E.R., was similarly reverse-engineered — Humans Undertaking Nocturnal Terror and Evil Reduction) and it’s no accident that its patriarchal leanings are part of what’s wrong with it, ultimately.
There are many ways to write about witches. Many kinds of witches to write about. Many kinds of magic to write about. And while Mr. & Mrs. Witch is on one level intended as pure, sexy, escapist fun — there are familiars that are really ostriches who glamour up as chickens for outsiders, a horse that masquerades as a toad, and yes, magic secret agents on opposite sides who fall in love — it is also about how we can come together to throw off limiting restrictions and use love to make each other better by creating new ways to be. By not being so scared of what outsiders are capable of that you try to stop them from living their lives, but instead see what beautiful new possibilities exist because they are here. Because we are here.
Also? Who doesn’t want to be able to poof a glass of champagne that doesn’t make you too soused into existence? So settle in for sexy spies and witches, hijinks, hemlock, combat brooms, and blowing up the patriarchy (with the help of a few good hunters and a lot of powerful witches).
Snag the book wherever you like to get your books and remember leaving reviews, recommending it to others, and sharing is SO APPRECIATED and basically the witchcraft of word of mouth. If audio is your pleasure, voila:
I hope to see some of you at Joseph-Beth tonight at 7 p.m. for a conversation with the fabulous Tif Marcelo. Hit the bistro for themed drinks beforehand! I’ll be having a C.R.O.N.E. Potion or two.
Please forgive any strange and bewildering formatting or typos — or the lack of same after this disclaimer. My precious, my own, my Mac Air, has been ripped from my arms after it stopped charging or seeing any of my external things last week. I have enough devices to work around it, but I’m still suspicious of “apps.” I’m a browser girl. I like browsing. I like big screens, and clicky external keyboards, and would you believe it? I keep putting my hand on my mouse. So I must even like that. Touchscreen, smudgescreen. (But literally.)
Anyway, I’m writing this on my iPad, which turns out to have been a very timely gift. I wasn’t sure what I’d use it for, but it turns out, it’s a solid “my laptop hath been ripped from mine fingertips” back-up. And I am using an external keyboard, and I have it propped on my monitor on top of two thick books that were nearby: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, which just hasn’t made its way onto a shelf since…uh, summer…and a shiny new edition of my first real introduction to classic Greek mythology, Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. It’s interesting, because I can still understand why I found/find her approach so appealing, and yet, I also argue with some bits much more. I’ll save the arguments for when I need to talk more publicly about the book I’m writing that it is one of my research texts for. I first read this book in a mass market edition that I revisited again and again in the giant tub in my parents’ house in high school. I associate myths with relaxation in part for this reason, with a luxuriant sensory experience, a bubble bath where you linger long enough to not only get pruny but need to turn on the water a few times so it stays hot.
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But I digress.
Last week was so busy! And I say this not in a braggy way, but in a way relieved that I had finally started to feel better and so managed it. We had a film crew over at the Lexington Writer’s Room for a story that will air on KET (our PBS affiliate), so more on that TK. Make-up artist and everything. She gave me a great line I will one day use in a book, so you can’t use it, I call dibs, but you can nod when it shows up. She asked about whether an interviewee she was doing elsewhere was bald or not. “It matters if it’s complete baldness. Completely bald is like doing three faces.” I mean, fair, and nonjudgmental. She was just looking for a work estimate.
I finally got out some tiny cards and presents that were meant to be for the holiday (and I whiffed the holidays this year, sorry!). Puppy had his first training class. A plus. I started writing more, and so of course my computer had to throw its fit. And we went to an art exhibit (two, actually!).
Visiting art museums and galleries has always been one of my favorite ways to get inspired. They force you to look at things differently, to see and absorb and pay attention to what’s outside you, but also what’s inside you, your reactions and the why and what of them, in a way nothing else quite does. I always recommend taking in visual art to young writers, because I’m a firm believer that it not only makes your imagination more robust (in a way that spitting words into an AI and getting immediate gratification results never will — SORRY), more able to think of how other people see the world, and how that’s different than the way you do, and how it’s the same (which reading also does, obviously). But I also believe it gives you a more robust visual vocabulary.
And it’s fun. And can be exhilarating. Which is part of why the hush, the gentle politics of negotiating a gallery, are a little bit a counterpoint to the actual experience at times.
Anyway, all of this a long way of saying Christopher and I drove over the Speed Museum in Louisville to take in the Alphonse Mucha Art Nouveau Visionary exhibit before it closed (it’s a touring show, so keep an eye out). Some of the smallest parts were right in tune with both the art heist book I just wrote and the one I’m writing now, if in different ways. Currently, I’m writing the witchy apothecary historical and seeing the perfume bottles, even slightly past my period, and their labels, the printing on tins, because Mucha did so much advertising work, was so helpful. This is what I mean when I say visual vocabulary; I will do a better job describing now. It also can be larger things like light and color and composition.)
Various Mucha images
Those are some of my favorites.
But we also meandered the rest of the gallery, because we hadn’t visited since a huge revamp some years back. There’s so much I could talk about here, but I love this little mystery they’ve chosen to highlight, a possible fake that is traditionally one of the museum’s most identifiable holdings.
And the explaining captions:
Fake or real or real fake? You decide. I want to crack him open — gently! — and see if there’s a map in there.
The second exhibit we went to was to showcase my brilliant friend Alex Narramore’s art, which usually only gets to last in its full splendor for a wedding day. (You might recall our paranormal adventure.) She is one of the few remaining people who knows how to do extravagant sugar flower sculpture, and has built a wedding cake business on it. But when I say that, you aren’t getting it. So here’s Alex with a creation on display for “One Night, One Cake.”
Despite appearances, this was the opposite of the quiet gallery experience. It was Alex’s first gallery show, and so stuffed with friends there to support her and gab gab gab. Two nice counterpoints, equally beautiful. I met a stained glass artist and a sculptor and they were forced to agree they are bad asses, just like Alex. You’re out here making things that could just blow up or melt or disintegrate, and then instead, they mostly turn out beautiful. It feels a lot braver than showing up at the page, even if it’s kinda the same.
So go out and find some inspiration, or take some from here, my friends! And…if you haven’t preordered MR & MRS WITCH, what are you waiting for? It’s out in a little over a month!
Sharing and preordering or planning to buy or adding to your Goodreads is caring!
The beginning of the year here has been good, stressful, good, and also, I’ve been sick since it started. Nothing serious, but something that’s requiring a round robin of antibiotics to kick, none quite working yet—this is what happens when you push yourself and don’t take a break over the holidays, kids. Consider it a cautionary tale. So I’m extra glad not to be traveling this month.
I am digging in on Wayward Sisters #1, which I had to get an extension on, see above. But which is now going really well. And I’m also trying to — well, being forced to — take it easier and not try to do all the things just now. What I have also been doing is watching and reading a lot of things. Some research, but some kismet fun.
I’ve been forced to discover some time to relax.
And Christopher rediscovered his love of sword & sorcery this year, and while I was skeptical about FANuary—a monthlong watchfest of classic sword & sorcery films, one each day in January, when he first mentioned he was considering doing it: It has been great! See, I love to watch stuff, but Christopher is very picky. (He claims not to watch much TV, but he watches plenty of bicycle races. 😉 Typically, I can get him to watch GHOSTS and WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS, our favorite sitcoms, and that’s about it, other than GARDENER’S WORLD.
BUT!
We’ve kept at this so far; skipped a few, but also had some real winners.
Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter; Dragonslayer; Hawk the Slayer; Jason & the Argonauts (or Medea should sue)
A few notes in the order of the photos above, not the order we watched them….
Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter: Starts off with a girl admiring the terrible trauma bangs her friend has just cut for her in the woods—the friend goes off to gather mushrooms and think about what she’s done or something and VAMPIRE ATTACK! Only this vampire leaves behind an aged corpse! At least the girl never has to know about the tragedy of the bangs. This movie’s lore is fantastic, the camp is high, and it is way better and stranger than it has any right to be.
Dragonslayer: I must have seen this before, right? But I didn’t remember it, if so. Some absolutely stunning shots—which is only to be expected, given the director and co-writer Matthew Robbins has been a frequent collaborator of Guillermo del Toro (including on the story for this year’s Pinocchio) and the cinematographer Derek Vanlint did Alien too (and also a lot of commercials). A baby-faced Peter MacNicol as the atypical wizard hero is fantastic, and there’s some interesting gender dynamics throughout, plus a scene that might’ve inspired Katniss involving a lottery. GREAT DRAGON. Actually, my takeaway from most of these is that you can see the DNA of GAME OF THRONES and Peter Jackson’s LORD OF THE RINGS films (not least because lots of these were borrowing from Tolkien) in a lot of them. And also that practical effects are a million times better. And movies 2 hours or less are ALSO BETTER.
I said what I said.
Hawk the Slayer: I’d never seen this, and it’s another way better than it has any right to be movie. As the villain, Jack Palance manages to over-act and scenery chew with half his face covered. His most subdued take is the one scene where he should feel emotion. Incredible! Hawk’s team and the witch who help him are the best parts, and also, this is the first movie we watched where the women had a real sense of roundedness and agency. The abbess should’ve gotten to kick some more ass, though.
Jason and the Argonauts: This should be about Medea, who has the most athletic sequence in the movie (don’t get me started). Talus was just doing his job. The pretending to push really hard with your facial expression acting of Hercules is something I could do! As is most of the swordplay in this one. I approve of that.
See also, the first day, and the best short film of Woofie and Sally I have ever taken, sound on:
Anyway, we’ve been enjoying this so much that I put together a Romancing the February list, of movies across a bunch of different genres from the 1920s to the now, that feature a love story as a central plot element. This is NOT a HEA list, necessarily, because I wanted some variety. There are some things I haven’t seen in ages on there, and a few things that I wanted C to watch that he hasn’t (IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, for example). Feel free to join in for some or all of it.
For something completely different, the lost part of this entry title, last week I learned about the great Anna May Wong’s The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong, the first American television show starring an Asian-American lead. The part of the detective was written for her, and reviews were good (and it sounds AMAZING). But the network it aired on, DuMont went under, and then eventually dumped most of their remaining library, presumably including this show, INTO THE HUDSON. I mourn. And I have time machine priorities.
At least we have two books I’m assured are fabulous about Wong to look forward to this year: Gail Tsukiyama’s The Brightest Star, which is fiction (I support the HarperCollins Union, by the way, and mention this book in the hope HC comes to the table and concedes by the time it’s out), and Yunte Huang’s Daughter of the Dragon, a biography. I look forward to reading both.
I leave with you a photo of the first full moon of the year I took, and a reminder that you can preorder MR & MRS WITCH! Out in LESS than two months!
MR & MRS WITCH preorder campaign goodness! Hit the link below to preorder your copy of MR & MRS WITCH from my local indie Joseph-Beth Booksellers — choose whether you want them to ship it to you or pick up in store, add any personalization details in the comments, and voila! You will get a signed, personalized book AND an exclusive bonus sticker for your laptop or fridge or your enemy’s back — aka wherever you like! C.R.O.N.E. is the organization heroine Savvy is part of and it’s a whole mood for 2023. Go preorder here!
And if you’re local, I hope to see you at Joseph-Beth on March 7.
It’s been one week since Not Your Average Hot Guy hit shelves — thanks to everyone who has bought or checked out or posted or shared about it so far! If you enjoy, please leave reviews and also badger everyone you know until they buy it (kidding, I kid! or do I?).
You can find signed books at both Joseph-Beth Lexington and Cincinnati or hit up Brookline Booksmith or Fountain Bookstore for copies with signed bookplates; thanks to these fabulous indies for hosting events this past week and all my convo partners. There’s a second round of stuff coming later this month/early next, but, for now, I’m on deadline.
Leaving reviews for books you enjoy helps other readers find them, which is so so important in these times of releasing a book into this vast ocean of *gestures*. If you can find a minute or two for a brief one, even that helps! While I have you…
So after Creators 4 Comics finished, my beloved ride-or-dies Kami Garcia and Sam Humphries and I decided we should come up with a way to keep scheming and working together. We finally got to announce it last week! Get ready for THE YOUNGBLOODS, an Audible original series coming next year!
Also! You can enter to snag a print ARC of THE DATE FROM HELL over at Goodreads? Go do the thing!
Hello! I recently gabbed a little with Publishers Weekly for an interview previewing Not Your Average Hot Guy (they also recently reviewed it, pronouncing it “fun, light, and funny” yay!). The interview is out now online and in this week’s print issue (which I’d love to see a snap of, if anyone gets it). Preordering is caring!
ANNNND that’s not all, advance reader copies of The Date from Hell arrived. Have you signed up for the newsletter? As soon as finished copies of Not Your Average Hot Guy arrive, I’ll be giving away a set or three exclusively to newsletter subscribers. The sign-up is findable beneath this post.
I hope the summer has been good to you, and that the stresses we’re all seeing in the news and real life every day have still left some time for R&R. I’ve mostly been working (gasp! shock! amaze!), because I have a book due in October and, like most books, it’s being a tricksy beast. But a fun one (most days). The Lexington Writer’s Room is doing fabulously (we’re at 39 fully vaxxed members, I believe!), and we just got our very first grant from the Kentucky Humanities Council.
And, hahaha, obviously my upcoming book release nerves for NOT YOUR AVERAGE HOT GUY have kicked in. We’re less than two months out! October 5!
You may have heard me say that my superhero identity is Anxiety Lass. It is TRUE. Last year (thank god) I didn’t have a new book out. My last book release was the Stranger Things book all the way back in that time of yore, 2019, and early 2019 at that. Add to, I’m moving to a new genre — though if you enjoyed my YA books, yes, this is still for you, it’s definitely cross-over-y — and yes, I’m big nervous.
It seems pretty clear that the Delta Variant (get vaccinated if you can!) is going to make the possibility of doing in-person events scarce. I’m working on some bookplates and things like that, so please preorder, keep your receipt, and more details to come. I’m hoping to do some virtual events, and actually have one coming up this month as part of Bookstore Romance Day (which has an AMAZING schedule) — it’s free, but requires registration.
I’ll be attending as much of this day as I can, because it just has an incredible line-up and I know for a fact having been on panels with Sarah and seen panels with Gail that we will have a blast. So y’all stay at home but come!
I also had my website overhauled. Please go check it out, particularly the pet page and the book recommendation of other people’s books page, which I’m particularly excited about. If you’re an author who needs a site, I can’t recommend Clockpunk Studios highly enough. You’ll see this newsletter posted there on the blog, but also Other Posts. That’s right! I’m updating my blog again. Though you’ll continue to get the most crucial stuff at the newsletter, so sign up if you haven’t!
I also went on a teeny tiny two night getaway with some of my absolute favorite people, who I haven’t seen since before the late unpleasantness began. What a recharge this was. Here are some pretty photos of the mountain, which, before you get too jealous…let me start with the photo just after I backed the car into a ditch after a five-hour drive scant miles from our destination cabin.
Luckily, this view is just tiny letter’s photo insert being a weirdo, or this would not have had a happy ending. The car was fine, but I couldn’t get it out on its own steam. I pulled out my Triple AAA card and tried to figure out how to communicate where in the wide world I was, but! People are good sometimes! This nice guy with a big truck who’d been mowing nearby stopped and pulled me out with a chain. At one point, we had this exchange:
“Looks like you dropped a card in the ditch there.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s, uh, haha, my Triple AAA card.”
And this is why I say I escaped from a screwball comedy.
But! We all made it to the lovely place on the mountain. Here are some photos to prove it — I took the Nikon with me, which I’ve been neglecting of late, and got some truly nice shots.
(the gang: me, Wendi and Alan Gratz, Megan Shepherd, Carrie Ryan, and Megan Miranda <3s for days)
I’m super proud of that hummingbird shot, which I drove everyone absolutely nuts constantly attempting. So many shots of the side of Carrie’s head on my digital roll.
