Writing News

[osprey_archer]

Friends! Romans! Countrymen! There is now a paperback edition of Briarley available for sale on Amazon if that is a thing that you want in your life.

***

Current projects in the works: I’m cracking away on rewrites for Ashlin & Olivia, hopefully for a May release, although we’ll see, of course. Hopefully this time I’ll be able to release the ebook & the paperback at the same time - not least because it would be nice to have paper copies to take the Pride, although who knows if they’ll sell. If I take paper copies of Briarley, I might print out Courtney Milan’s rec to display with it… that ought to bring the romance readers to the yard, don’t you think?

I’ve begun contemplating future projects. The Little Red Riding Hood retelling with the occult Russian revolutionaries is still on the table. I also have the beginning of an idea, which came about as the confluence of three influences:

1. Those Tumblr posts about how all queer people (or possibly all Millennials) want to platonically live in a house and/or a communal farm with all their friends. This is totally true. I cannot tell you how many conversations I have had with my friends on this theme.

2. I threw a Galentine’s Day party in late February and fifteen minutes before the party was scheduled the electricity went out, and I stood there at my electric stove gazing at my half-cooked bacon and contemplating whether there was any way to save things if the electricity didn’t come back on. (Fortunately, it returned before the bacon stopped sizzling.)

Now, we of the electric stove would have been screwed if the power stayed off, but a fictional character with a gas stove and perhaps a gas fireplace could have totally had that party, by candlelight, and it would have been a totally amazing party and all of their friends would have talked about it for years.

3. I love writing about friendship.

So I’m imagining a book or a series of books about a bunch of friends, I’m thinking four or five, who share a house (possibly by a lake?) and they throw silly but delightful parties, and also they have some friends who live elsewhere and swoop in and out of the story at intervals.

Basically it would be like the The Babysitters Club except less baby-sitting and also the heroines are dealing with life problems appropriate to their age bracket (I’m thinking mainly 25-35, although I’m all in favor of intergenerational friendship so there should def. be older and younger people in the extended friend group) rather than the early-teenage focus of BSC. Some romances as sideplots, but not the main focus. Possibly recipes? Someone obviously knits.

Comments

[ancientreader]

Oh. My. God. You wrote Briarley. I adored Briarley. My five-star review is the one identified as by "Kindle Customer," and don't ask me why Amazon doesn't attach my Amazon username to my Kindle reviews, but there you are.

[osprey_archer]

Yep, that was me!

[maplemood]

Oh, I would definitely read that! Friendship and found-family-focused stories are some of the best.

[osprey_archer]

I'm thinking it would make a great series; there's way more opportunity to develop the whole social network that way, because different books can focus on different people. Very BSC. (And, like the Babysitters Club books, they would probably be novella length - 30,000-40,000 words.)

[evelyn_b]

Your book series sounds like The Golden Girls. People love The Golden Girls. I have never seen a single episode of The Golden Girls, but I feel as if I have because my best friend from high school is a huge fan. Anyway, you should go for it!

[osprey_archer]

I've never seen the Golden Girls either, which I know I should correct because I'm sure I would love it, but it's one of those things that always gets stuck a few slots from the top of the list - you know, "I'll read/watch/do this when I have time," but somehow something else always swoops in that you want to read/watch/do more and the things lower on the list languish.

[asakiyume]

I love the sound of your friendship series!

And YES Briarley paperback!

(And we had the power go out when I was cooking meatballs for a woman who had just undergone surgery and I shook my fist! "Blackout!! You are interrupting my **altruistic** cooking!! NOT ON." At which point the power smiled smugly and said, "Hmyes, 'not on' is correct." ... We got power back two hours later and I was able to finish the meatballs.)

[osprey_archer]

It was the best of puns! And also the worst of puns!

I'm now contemplating possible series names and also slowly building up the friend group in my mind. You know that at least one of them has to be a librarian. I'm thinking one of them is going to make a living selling stationary on Etsy, just because that sounds like fun. Maybe she runs out of design ideas and they have a big design brainstorming session and probably it ends with a piece of stationary that features a dragon playing golf.

[asakiyume]

I would so buy all the tie-in merchandising.

[raveninthewind]

Hello! I think I found the author of a story on AO3 that I rec'd here:
https://raveninthewind.dreamwidth.org/1291226.html

Apologies if this is not you.

[osprey_archer]

Oh, yes. That is me! Thank you for the rec!

[carmarthen]

I dunno, the idea of communal living is appealing in theory, but I have had enough awful experiences with both roommates and the commune-inclined that I'm not so sure...

[evelyn_b]

My experiences weren't even bad, but I no longer find it appealing even in theory. I'll read the books, though!

[osprey_archer]

I have noticed an extremely low correlation between "things people actually enjoy when they experience them" and "things people want to read about," so this doesn't worry me unduly.

Although it might provide some good subplots: they get a roommate who just doesn't get along with the others, or they realize that no matter how much they want to have five people living in the house, four is really the maximum before the whole thing starts to disintegrate.

Or they have the experience one of my college friends had, where one of the roommates was stealing from the others. But that might detract too much from the general light-heartedness.

[carmarthen]

Oh, I'd definitely read the books, I just very much have NOT had the kind of conversation in #1 with my friends. Most people I know are like LIVING ALONE IS THE DREAM and only have roommates for financial and/or mental health reasons. I guess I have missed out on this particular Millennial trend!

(When I was looking for an apartment in Sweden there was one "communal living" ad that set off my cult/otherwise creepy situation alarm bells really hard though.)

[ladyherenya]

"things people actually enjoy when they experience them" and "things people want to read about,"

That is so, so true.

But also, fiction can offer a way to explore an idea with certain guarantees in place -- one can often assume, based on the genre, whether or not it is all going to go horribly wrong, and whether or not it's going to go horribly wrong in a particular way. Those are guarantees that one doesn't have in real life.

So stories about a group of friends living together -- knowing that it mightn't be smooth sailing but wouldn't descend into murder and mayhem -- sound delightful.

[osprey_archer]

The closest it will get to murder and mayhem is a locked-room murder mystery dinner party which will definitely not end with an actual murder, but might end with some stubbed toes and bruised feelings after someone (everyone glares significantly at the culprit) turned off the lights at a dramatically appropriate but otherwise most inconvenient moment.

[anelith]

I have the Briarley ebook! Loved it!

I don't know about Millenials, as I am much older, but I do know that when I was in college I too desperately wanted to live in a house/commune with my friends. We were in the thick of the Cold War, it was 1982, and we had intense discussions about moving to Australia or other places that might have a chance to survive nuclear war. And yes, we'd all seen On the Beach so knew that Australia was iffy at best. We set our sights a bit lower and attempted to rent a house together, but one of us came from a religious family that objected to unmarried men and women living together, so that put an end to it. Ha! I just remembered that we all wrote letters to parents, introducing ourselves, and then sent the packet around to all the households. My parents were charmed. But alas the charm did not work on our friend's very conservative parents. I wonder what happened to that packet... I would love to read it again. That was so long ago. Thanks for bringing back those memories.

[osprey_archer]

Aw, it's too bad it didn't work out. I had some friends who shared a house for their final year of college (I went to a different school, so I didn't live with them) and they called it Camelot and talk about it with a nostalgia as intense as if it were Camelot of the Round Table itself.