Lacuna Coil, “Enjoy the Silence” (Depeche Mode cover)
Good morning!
Bitchcraft Fair is this Sunday! A delightful selection of magical artists and craftspeople will be gathering at the Wisconsin Center in Milwaukee from noon until six. Here’s a link for advance tickets and more information. Brooke and I will be in Booth 204. Brooke has new cards (including a Dungeons and Dragons alignment set), and I’ll be opening preorders for The Book of the New Moon Door. Hope to see you there!
In the meantime, there will be a new chapter on Patreon tomorrow, and last week’s chapter will be up here on Wednesday.
Brooke and I are attending two markets next month!
The first is Bitchcraft Fair, which will take place Sunday, October 8 at the Wisconsin Center. Tickets are $12 in advance ($15 for the VIP skip-the-line experience) and $15 the day of–morehere. In addition to shopping, this market offers trick-or-treating, a photobooth for your Halloween costumes (one picture is included!), and magical workshops! Doors open at noon and close at six.
The second is What the Hex Witches’ Market (Autumn Edition) on Sunday, October 22 at Dresden Castle on Underwood. Admission is free, and the workshops are magical and very affordable. There will also be live music and drag performers! Similarly, doors open at noon and close at six.
Brooke has a ton of new cards, and I’ll be opening preorders for The Book of the New Moon Door (more info on that here). We hope to see you at one or both markets!
P.S. I forgot to mention that the newsletter is going out tomorrow, so if you’d like to get in on that, put your email in the box at this link.
The sun is a curious blood-orange as it sinks over the university hospital, staining the towering forest a deep brownish black and the river running through it a dull red. Berend makes his way toward the forest’s shadowed underside, where the Orchard District, he hopes, still lies. It should be a short walk, but something’s wrong with the formerly orderly row houses in which the students and a good number of their teachers live several to a room. The neat grid of north-south avenues and east-west streets is all askew, with one line of houses intersecting another in a way that just barely avoids two buildings ending up on top of one another—the occupants of both houses stand outside, hands on hips or scratching at their heads in confusion. The dark wood frame of the farther house touches the red-brick corner of the nearer, and a fringe of splinters coated in reddish dust mark the point where they collided.
Berend crosses a street twice as wide as it should be, and then another that’s about a third too narrow. They intersect at a point far to the south, farther than he estimates the southern wall should be, shrouded in a strange, brown haze that looks like smoke but smells like nothing.
He’s a few blocks east of where the district boundary should lie when the earthquake hits.
“What am I supposed to do?” the erstwhile assassin asks the empty street and the unhearing gods. He looks, suddenly, even younger than Berend had guessed.
The Book of the New Moon Door
Remember when a corrupt noble family tried to have Berend killed? Well, they’re still at it. You can read this chapter right now on Patreon, or wait until next week for the free release.
If you’ve met me, you probably assumed I had seen The Mothman Prophecies a number of times, but I must confess that I had never watched it until two weeks ago. I was sick with a stomach bug and had a cat on my lap–the perfect time to catch up on cultural landmarks I missed.
After that, Covid followed my husband home from work, so I haven’t left the house more than three times in the past three weeks or so. This is probably fine. I did have a negative test yesterday, so I am on my way to passable health.
I’m making good progress on The Book of the New Moon Door! I’ve recruited a couple of beta readers to look over my draft as I complete it. In the meantime, expect a new chapter on Patreon tomorrow, and last week’s chapter here on Wednesday.
I hope you are staying well! Have an excellent week.
The air hums like a taut string. Through the fog, Isabel can see the wall of bone buckle outward, femurs knocking against ribcages in a rhythmless clatter as the mass tries to shift and absorb the force pushing behind it. Mist burns away in curls, and scarlet light scorches through to the floor of Pereth’s office.
Beneath her feet, the ground is shaking. Dust rains from the ceiling. Somewhere nearby, there is the terrible crack of breaking stone, louder than the shattering bones. Is it the temple dome, or is the other wall holding back the many-eyed thing also breaking?
Isabel doesn’t have time to answer these questions. She takes two fast steps toward Father Pereth and grabs him by the arm. He doesn’t resist as she drags him across the room to his heavy oaken desk, still beside the office door, and shoves him underneath. She follows, drawing her knees up to her chest and putting her arms over her head. The desk’s wooden legs scrape against the marble floor as the temple shakes as if with a terrible fever.
“The world is ending, mate,” Berend says. “Aren’t there better things you could be doing right now?”
The Book of the New Moon Door
Everyone’s priorities are well-ordered, as demonstrated by how many obstacles Berend is facing on his way back to the Temple District to find Isabel. You can read this chapter right now on Patreon!
This past weekend, my husband and I went to Halloween Express–but it wasn’t just a Halloween Express, it was “Halloween by Scary Jim.” I was a little disappointed in Scary Jim’s selection of candy bowls, but his music taste was excellent. “Werewolves of London” has been stuck in my head since then, so enjoy.
In case you missed it, The Book of the New Moon Door has a release date, and you have some opportunities to receive your copy as a mysterious package before the release! Click here for more information.
I’ll have new chapters this week on the usual schedule: a brand-new chapter on Patreon tomorrow, and last week’s chapter here to read for free on Wednesday.
Journey to the Water will return soon! Possibly as early as mid-November this year, but no later than January of next year. Thanks for being patient.
I am excited (and a little chagrined) to announce that The Book of the New Moon Door will release, come hell or high water, on December 15, 2023.
I very much wanted to manage an October release, but life circumstances and my inability to estimate how long a task will take got the better of me. I’m just about finished with the rewrites of Part One, which is the longest portion of the book. Parts Two and Three should proceed quickly and comparatively smoothly. I plan to have my files ready to submit by mid-November, giving me a whole month for approval and ordering proofs. (For comparison, I submitted my files two weeks in advance of Beyond the Frost-Cold Sea‘s release date, a window of time I do not recommend in the slightest.)
So, what does that mean for the two markets I’ll be attending next month? The first will be Bitchcraft Fair on Saturday, October 8, and the second is What the Hex on Sunday, October 22. (Links will take you to the Facebook events. I’ll have more information on both as we get closer!) I will have a form for preorders of The Book of the New Moon Door, which will be signed, wrapped, tied up with string, and sealed with my Space Whales Press seal, pictured above. Listen, everyone loves book mail, but book mail in an antiquated package is even better. I’ll have a mockup for you soon, so stay tuned! If you preorder at either of these events, you should receive this package via USPS Media Mail in early December, before the book goes live to online retailers.
If you can’t make it to either market, and you’d like to receive Fantasy Bookmail that must be unsealed like a secret missive, I should have extra copies toward the end of November or beginning of December that I will make available here on the website. I’ll have more information on that once my files are formatted and approved.
I hope that these special preorders will delight you. I truly appreciate your patience with me, and I am working hard to make The Book of the New Moon Door worth the wait. Thanks for being here, and stay tuned for more updates.
She’s not alone here, on what was once the most holy of streets. People have gathered from all around the city, some carrying their belongings stuffed into sacks or tied in rolls of blankets, others empty-handed. A few of the watch’s broken barricades have been cleared away, but the street is still littered with them, and no one has touched the bodies. An old man sits beside a fire on the side of the road, and sharpened points emerge from the embers. Whatever drove him to build the fire has since departed, and he stares with burning light in his eyes, his lips moving without a sound.
Isra’s temple has acquired a huge gathering, pressing up against the main doors, surging around both sides, and smothering the kitchen door as well. They’re common folk, mostly, dressed in plain clothes. If there are any green-clad nuns among them, Isabel can’t see them. Two men support a third between them at the bottom of the stairs; the injured one’s head hangs down to his chest, and a festering wound on his shoulder leaks blood and pus into what’s left of his shirt. The wound still has the shape of the rotting, dead teeth that made it.
Across the street, a priest in a red robe stands on a box in the doorway of the temple of Alcos. He stretches his arms wide, as if he can quell the clamor around him by pressing it down. “Good people,” he calls out, “let us pray. We will seek the Father’s guidance.”
The crowd ripples. A few have taken to their knees, following his instructions. Others wander, restless, as much as the press of people allows. “Have the gods abandoned us?” someone shouts, but even the priest cannot answer.
Space Whales Press 