galadhir

Well, this is getting real now! The boat of Small Mysteries has both a cover and a blurb:

When a new disability ruins Emily’s life and family turn her out, she finds herself forced into a nomadic life on a narrowboat. With very little money and even less physical stamina, she doesn’t know if she has it in her to forge a whole new future on her own.

In the idyllic surroundings of the British waterways, as she moves from place to place she encounters a series of small mysteries. Can she solve them and find a new purpose for herself in the process? Or must a missing person remain lost and the case of the body in the lock remain unsolved?

Half cozy mystery and half fond ode to the narrowboat life, ‘The Boat of Small Mysteries,’ is a charming tale of resilience and intuition, sure to appeal to anyone who enjoys BBC Four’s Canal Boat Diaries, or the gentle adventures of Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books.

~

It's just going through a final editing pass and then it will be ready to be released. Possibly even as soon as next week.

I genuinely can't remember how I used to do this. But I am very excited and a little nervous at the same time.

It's been so long!

So, I've started brainstorming a cozy fantasy and am discovering that I have many questions about the genre. Chiefly worldbuilding. So far all the cozy fantasies I've read (a grand total of two of them) seem to be set in generic Dungeons and Dragons world.

I wonder if a lot of the appeal is in the safety and familiarity of that setting. Do you think it matters if I try to do something vaguely inspired by Ancient Babylon?

Knowing myself, I know that I am going to want to know where they get their water from, how they cook, who makes the laws and how they're enforced, what the basic theology is, why exactly the 'evil' forces are evil etc. And I will want that to be something other than standard D&D, because that's half the fun of fantasy.

Do you think a slightly more intricate focus on worldbuilding will turn the end product into something that isn't cozy enough?

I will want a little bit of peril, but I think I can keep that down to the level set in Legends and Lattes, the touchstone of cozy.

But I'm also not planning on including a romance. I had enough romance writing in the ten years of writing m/m, and that part of my writing soul is still recoiling in dread when I think about going back. (I hope to go back eventually but I'm so not there yet.)

Is it possible to be 'cozy' while just concentrating on one woman's failing out of wizard school and finding a new career in a fantasy hot country very loosely based on ancient Babylon?

My narrowboat novel has a similar issue of being one woman's rediscovery of herself while on a river journey and resolutely refusing to be in a romance (even though one is offered.)

These are, I think, the fruits of romance burnout, but they certainly don't make either book more typical of their kind.

It's very odd how it always seems to go this way: You write what you think is one of your best fics ever, and it gets absolute silence from readers. You write a throwaway thing that you don't think is much good, and it gets more comments than you could have imagined.

I'm currently doing the first thing of those. I think 'Visitation' is really good. And more than that, I'm actually enjoying writing it to the extent that I am excited about it and rotating it in my head like I used to do with stories back when I was a proper writer. But I post it and... crickets.

Meanwhile I've just come off what I thought was a rather pointless piece of kid-fic, and that was getting twenty comments per chapter.

And it wouldn't matter so much if I had any idea what made one more popular than the other. Is it just that this one is in Xichen's pov instead of Jin Guangyao's? Is it that JGY is dead in this one, and it might take him a few years to come back? IDK. I cannot have become a worse writer in the space of the two weeks between one fic and the next, so it must be the subject matter and not me, but it is a bit baffling and discouraging.

Never mind. Visitation is for me, so I'm going to continue to write it for me. Whether I continue to post it or not is another matter.

I can't remember who I was talking to about how nice it would be to have a community in which to share original fiction. Because the journey to writing a novel is a long, lonely one and sometimes it's nice to have a bit of company and support along the way.

I was going to make a new community for the purpose, but first I thought I should check to see if there was already anything of the sort. And it turns out that there is!

That community is originalfiction

It was last updated 26 weeks ago, and for at least a year or so has only had one visibly active member, duskpeterson but there are a lot of people signed up with it who might be persuaded out of seclusion if there was activity. So perhaps rather than reinvent the wheel, the thing to do is to sign up to that one?