Newsletter

The Golden Weather

Deadlines, Dead Time and Honouring the Dead

Book News:

With Hera Takes Charge, I have concluded the Olympian Arc of the Olympus Inc. series. Does that mean I’m done with the world of Olympus Publishing? HECK NO. I love this myth-inspired world of contemporary glamour, and I’m not leaving it just yet.

In fact, you can now pre-order Ask Cassandra, the first book in the Trojan Women arc!

A peach background with pink dahlia's and Ask Cassandra in white handwriting as a title. Head and shoulders portrait of the protagonists: a fat white woman with a curly bob, wearing a cardigan and retro round beads, with big glasses, looks up into the eyes of a smiling blond, bearded man wearing a V-neck sweater over a button-up, like the ex-frat boy he is.
Alison Cooley’s covers just keep getting better.

If you’ve read Hera, you’ve already met advice columnist Cassie Troiades. If you’ve read Penelope Pops the Question (and if not, why not? It’s a free gift for you!) you’ve already met Manny Pelopson. It is safe to say that he is not in a good place by the end of that book. I aim to get him to a better one.

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The Golden Weather

My living room gets a lot of light.

It’s one of the reasons I bought this house, the first home I’ve ever owned. I love daylight, especially in the middle of winter, when Ōtautahi can be grim and gloomy for days on end. I’m not, as such, a massive fan of being in sunlight (it’s easier to read inside and I don’t have to wear sunscreen) but I like seeing it.

However, right now, in the middle of a hot, dry summer, there are days I just don’t go into that room, even with all the curtains closed. It soaks up so much heat that stepping inside causes an instant sweat2. I hide in my bedroom and office instead, with the heat pump on cool mode.

The Canterbury nor’wester is notorious, a gusting hot wind that feels like a dragon huffing. It fans fires, strips topsoil, topples powerlines and sucks every drop out of the garden. The nor’wester is also bad for your brain; it’s been blamed for migraines, increased suicide and domestic violence rates. My friend Erin says that it “feels like static in your head” which I think is right on. When I was teaching full time, we all grimaced at nor’wester forecasts, knowing it meant hot classrooms, banging windows, students and teachers either listless with the heat or scratchy and ill-tempered from the incessant buffeting.

The wind does also create the Nor’West Arch, a very pretty cloud formation. It’s not that much consolation.

Deadlines

In the middle of these hot and golden days, I finished the first draft of Savory & Supernatural, the sequel to Bespoke & Bespelled.

Bespoke & Bespelled is a really special book to me; the first longform work I’d finished in five years, it convinced me my writing brain wasn’t exhausted, that writing was still there for me, if I could make the time for it. (And it was right! Last year, I wrote 282 000 words of completed fiction.) Because I was writing the book while I was teaching full time, it technically took two years to write, even though I was only actually writing for about four weeks of that time3.

Making writing my focus in 2023 made a huge difference. I started thinking about Savory & Supernatural while I was editing B&B last year, made a start on it in June, and then picked it up again in December. However, I wrote the majority of the draft in the first two weeks of this year, staring the deadline in the eye and daring it to mess me up.

I do not recommend this as a strategy, because in my experience the times when you have left yourself no buffer are exactly the times that you’re most likely to need it, but I’m happy to report the deadline blinked before I did.

It probably helped that even though this is a book that’s very interested in food and cooking, it was too hot to spend much time in the kitchen. Who knows, if we’d had a cold spell, I might have discovered the urgent necessity of making a series of increasingly elaborate cakes4. Instead, I ate out of my freezer, and channeled all that creative energy into making my words for the day.

Dead Time

I sent the draft to Allison, my lovely editor at 8th Note Press, and basically turned my brain off for four days. Oh, a dish or two might have been washed, some bedsheets changed, some long delayed sewing finished at last, but my major “tasks” were “schedule times for gaming group to meet up”, “have coffee and discuss an editing project with a friend”, and “road trip to Ashburton to admire looms”5.

No, I haven't picked up weaving. Yet.

Once upon a time, I might have tried to push through to the next thing on the to-do list. After all, I have newsletters to write, promo to prepare, and a business plan to make! And yup, I sure did (and do) but I needed to stop, and trust that I could do those things after some rest.

Instead, I napped. I played Frostpunk. I re-read most of astolat’s Game of Thrones fanfic collection6. Total dead time, with no internal pressure to produce.

Honouring the Dead

The one task I did make myself do during this period was attend a rally calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, where the IDF have killed over 25 000 people (and nearly 10 000 children) since the militant wings of Hamas brutally attacked civilian and military targets on October 7th7. This rally was specifically in honour of the 370+ Palestinian healthcare workers who have been killed.

In Hagley Park, the nor’wester pulled the flags into snapping horizontal lines during three minutes of silence for the doctors and nurses who have been treating the injured and dying without painkillers or antiseptics. We listened to a recording of the droning barrage they hear throughout their workday while the cricket players behind us called urgently for a referee decision. Gaza felt far away and very close.

I sat on the grass under a waving tree and wrote an email to Dr Shane Reti, the Minister of Health, requesting that he condemn IDF targeting of hospitals, ambulances, and his healthcare worker colleagues. I asked him to demand a ceasefire and immediate humanitarian aid in Gaza.

I came home to the open oven of my living room, and took my laptop to my bedroom to start drafting this newsletter. If all I can do is bear witness, that is what I can do.

My brain is coming back online. Here is the work I can do and the stories I can make.

Hello, 2024. What’s next?

  1. Yes, I read all the reviews, and have throughout my fifteen year writing career. No, I will never call out a reviewer, although I reserve the right to ALLCAPS message my friends in the group chat. Honestly, there’s no better way to drill into your head that reading is a subjective experience than reading all the reviews. ↩

  2. If you’re from a place where houses are habitually built with inbuilt air conditioning or heating systems, this may seem bizarre. Just know that not only do the vast majority of New Zealand homes not have central air or heat, but until very recently, they weren’t really built for any kind of temperature extreme. Compulsory insulation for new builds was only introduced in 1978; in 2023 the standards were updated to more accurately reflect actual need. Now ask about our horrible mold issues! ↩

  3. Novellas go faster than novels, even accounting for the reduced word count - because I also have a smaller cast and fewer narrative and structural balls to juggle, and that means they require less time spent on thinking. ↩

  4. I watched Masterchef: Dessert Masters, and now all I want to do is make an entremet. ↩

  5. We also stopped at the Chertsey Book Barn on the way home. Gotta go to the Book Barn. ↩

  6. Do recommend. ↩

  7. Please note that I am not open to discussing the various arguments justifying either of these actions. I don’t have the political knowledge, historical background, or personal experience to rationally engage in debate, and there are much better people than me to listen to, but also, I just fundamentally don’t care about anyone’s justification for killing kids. ↩