Hello, friends!
As promised, I want to post more regular updates, and here I am doing just that. I have a few life updates, and I want to share where I am with republishing The Alchemy of Letting Go independently. I also want to let you know about my next project, which is a little different from other things I’ve written.
First, the Life Stuff
Some of you probably already know this, but I’m getting married in June! My fiancee, Paige, is also a huge bookworm, so of course we’ll be having a book themed wedding. We’ll be getting married on June 27th, which is not-so-coincidentally also our five year anniversary.
Planning a wedding is A Ridiculous Amount of Work, and as the date approaches it will definitely slow down my writing. My goal is to have the draft of my current WIP done before the wedding. Paige wants to read it on our honeymoon, so I better hold to that. I’ll talk more about my WIP below.
The Alchemy of Letting Go
I’ve been working hard on getting the book formatted and ready to publish. I’m aiming to have the print version available on Amazon around the third week of May, and the ebook available perhaps a bit sooner.
I won’t be doing a preorder and I don’t have an exact publication date. The reason for this is that I’m not sure if Amazon will be weird about me publishing a new edition of an existing text. I have heard that they may delay sales if there is a question about the rights. My former publisher says they requested a take down of existing ebooks, but as of writing, it’s still available to purchase for Kindle. I may need to submit a takedown request myself. Once it’s squared away and available, I will of course be posting the relevant ordering information.
My Next Project: The Bramblespell Branch Library
For the past six months, I’ve been working on a cozy fantasy novel, and it finally has a title! (Thank you to Paige for helping me brainstorm.)
The Bramblespell Branch Library is about a career librarian from a big city who takes a post opening a rural branch library on the far side of the kingdom after going through a bad breakup. I decided to write this book because I’ve read so many books that feature librarians, but none of them really get the reality of library work quite right. Librarians are often romanticized as quiet, mousy introverts, and while I’m sure there are some like that out there, public librarians primarily work with people first and materials second. I wanted to bring this aspect of library work to my favorite fiction genre.
This book is my love letter to librarianship and the way that it made me grow as a person. I added a lot of niche, library-specific details. I let myself nerd out and created a magical cataloging system. The main character, Kasya, needs to figure out the information seeking behaviors of goblins in order to best serve her community (if you went to library school, I’m sorry if this caused war flashbacks). She’s an extremely competent career professional with the confidence to tackle any situation… but Bramblespell surprises her in ways she doesn’t expect.
I was also inspired by the real history of libraries in California. I’m sure I’ll write more at length about this in future posts, but in the early 1900s, the California State Library sent librarians to open rural branches in every single California county. Most of these librarians were women, and most of them were running library operations single-handedly or with the help of a single assistant. The libraries didn’t have a dedicated building, so they often shared with other services like post offices, town halls, churches, or even hotel basements. The rural library of Bramblespell is based on a library like that–one built from nothing but a competent librarian and the support of a community.
Also, it’s queer! The love interest, Rima, is a former paladin who broke her oath in order to give her daughter a better life. Another little bit of representation we don’t see often in fantasy heroines: moms! Especially queer moms.
I’m having a lot of fun writing this book. The draft is currently about 70,000 words, and I expect it to land at about 80,000 once it’s finished. My personal deadline for this is “before the wedding,” as I said above, but the sooner the better, because I know the wedding is going to absorb all of my time soon. I’m aiming for a fall release. I can’t wait for you all to meet Kasya and Rima!
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading.
Your friend,
Amber
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