When the Fäe go to war with a Nazi cult, one woman will protect humanity’s future.

As World War II rages, accidental immortal Pepper Elizabeth Jones is on the run from government agents on both sides of the Atlantic. Hidden in neutral Ireland, she is summoned to meet with a mysterious general, The Righ, who tasks her to save magic itself from the Nazis. Now, she must race against the clock to stop an evil ritual and prevent the Nazis from gaining a world-shattering supernatural power.

This book is part of the Strowlers Shared Cinematic Universe, a collaborative global story that anyone can join.

Tell your story. Change the world.

PREPCRASTINATION IS POWERFUL

My first book was a contemporary fantasy set in an imaginary city. If I needed a point of fact, I probably knew it off the top of my head. And if I didn’t just know? I was free to make it up. Making things up is, as it turns out, one of the chief skills involved in being a writer. And, I came to learn, I am actually quite good at making things up. Need a fancy bar? Make it up! Need a traffic light so the character has to stop driving and see something? Make it up!

Making things up is so satisfying. And easy! And awesome!

And did I mention easy?

Writing historical urban fantasy that [partially] takes place in real locations is an entirely different animal. It is not easy. It is, quite honestly, the opposite of easy. Unless you don’t care about accuracy (but, then, why are you writing historical urban fantasy when you could instead be writing just-regular-fantasy and saving yourself a lot of difficulty: see above re: making things up)

I am a history nerd, and I wanted an accurate book! I wanted all google-able real-world things to be as real as real can be. This was both for my own edification and also to keep the vultures of popular review platforms from screaming ugly things in my general direction.

The desire to make the historical reality as accurate as possible led me down such research rabbit holes as maps of the pre-WWII Berlin subway (which I found!) & the price of bus fare from Donegal to Dublin in 1943 (which I did not find). There were days I spent so much time trying to figure out what car to put on a road, how far X was from Y, or whether or not there would have been streetlights someplace that I barely got any words on the page at all.

These deep dives into time and place are some of the best procrastination techniques I have ever stumbled upon. I mean: copious researching is a super-easy way to keep from having to do any actual writing while still feeling all, “Whee! Look at me! I am Very Much on task!”. Y’all: IT’S A TRAP.

Yes, I had to do the research, but I also had to do the writing. Because even the best-researched books patently refuse to write themselves.

Dangit.

WHERE IT’S BETTER NOT TO BE ACCURATE

So, there’s research, and then there’s reality, and then there’s perspective. And when writing about history, especially the ugly parts, balancing those things can be um…well…challenging.

There are parts of the past most of us find nostalgic and delightful. Just look around at the Rockabilly movement and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Fedoras. Victory rolls. Benny Goodman. Yes. Yes. Yes. Give me the music and the dancing and the clothes and slang words like “Murgatroyd,” and Casablanca on the marquee at the Bijou. All of it.

Ok. Not all of it. Because things were happening in the world of my book that are much better left in the past.

Jim Crow, Eugenics, that time Hitler was Look Magazine’s Man of the year.

Yeah, no.

There is at least as much NOPE in the 1940’s as there is wonderful- and figuring out which parts of 1943 to keep and which to toss was an adventure I wasn’t aware I was signing up for. I wanted to evoke the era with enough delight to keep the reader happy to be there, but also with enough dread to remind y’all that the stakes are serious.

And as though that wasn’t a fine enough line to be walking, I discovered pretty early on in my writing process that I had bought myself a ticket on the evolution-of-language-train.

Figuring out how to be period-immersive while leaving behind harmful language was a lesson I’m glad I learned, but it didn’t come easy.

Just because the book is set in 1943 doesn’t mean I have to bring all of 1943’s problems into it. So much easier said than done….

When it came time to introduce a character with Romani heritage, I was a big mumbling mess of yikes. The only word Pepper would have known to describe this character is considered a slur these days; y’all know the “G” word. I’m not gonna write it here any more than I did in the book.

There we stood: a character who, without malice, wouldn’t have known better and an author who does know better but isn’t sure how to go about making this work in a way that neither pulls the reader out of the world of the story nor puts a slur in my book.

Writing around your protagonist’s prejudices, especially those borne of the time in which they live, double especially when they’re your sole POV character is a whole ball of wax. But with the help of my editors and the support of awesome friends with Romani heritage, we made it work.

Because, in the end, it’s about the reader’s experience, and since we don’t live in 1943, I’m not confined to the vocabulary of the era.

AND WHERE HISTORY IS HELPFUL

This book is about some imaginary magic in a real place. Real people rub shoulders with fictional ones, and my adventuring protagonist goes back and forth between actual historical locations and the world of the fantastic.

In order to make this work, I had to ground the adventure in actual historical time and place.

Starting with time.

When this book could possibly happen was the first problem I had to solve. I had constraints on all sides, both in-universe and real-world. Can’t be before THIS can’t be after THAT, and I need to get this guy out of the way.

You know how, when you’re writing a fanfic and you need to shoehorn this very intense conversation between your favorite pair into the cut between scenes in the movie? It was like that, only with Nazis.

And this, my friends, was 100% a job for history-nerdery. Putting those old fanfic muscles to good use, I dove deep into Things I Learned in College and found just the right historical moment to exploit for my purposes (insert evil laugh here). I got rid of Himmler and I did it with a real-world reason. Go me.

Sometimes history gives you just what you need—you just have to bother to go and look for it.

If you’re the type of reader who likes to Google what else was happening on the very specific dates given for the events of a piece of historical fiction, I see you, and you won’t be mad about this one.

Or maybe you will, but at least you’ll know I did my homework.

HOW TO USE “STET” WHEN I MEAN “STFU”

One of the things that happens when you write a book is that you’re not actually done writing it when you think you’re done writing it. Other people get to tell you things about what you wrote and how you wrote it and then you have to write more things in your book (or take some things out of your book—ugh.) based on what those other people say.

Those people are called Editors and in my case they do the very heroic thing of turning my long rambles of storytelling into something people are willing to buy and read. It’s neat!

One of the things I learned from my first book was how working with an editor happens—the processes and power balance and all that jazz. For me, a big part of learning to work with an editor was learning when to accept their suggestion and when to shake my head and say STET. For those of y’all unfamiliar with the term (as I was just one book ago), that’s a word writers use when we choose not to accept the editor’s version of something and instead want to leave the words the way we had them in the first place.

With THE DRAGON STONE CONSPIRACY, there were far more fingers in the pie than there were with RITES & DESIRES (a thing to be expected with a larger IP, no worries) and some of those fingers were really long and over-stretchy. And one of them just…didn’t like the way I write. Like… not at all.

Reading through and responding to those notes kind of sucked. Ok, no—it didn’t kind of suck, it sucked bigtime.

I wanted to get *so* defensive. I wanted to yell and scream and stomp my foot and explain in the greatest of detail not only that the person was wrong but also how much and how come. However, authors throwing temper tantrums in the general direction of their editors (especially when those editors weren’t the source of the offending comments) is generally frowned upon.

Luckily, the industry has gifted me the beautiful tool which is STET. And boy did I make use of it.

It’s now fighting “snollygoster” for the title of my Very Favorite English word (although it’s technically Latin, so I suppose it’s actually fighting “Post hoc ergo Propter hoc” to be my favorite Latin).

STET is good. As an early-career author, it was kind of empowering to stand up for my writing, my voice, and my choices. Self esteem not really being the biggest thing for most of us writer-types (especially those of us who are new to the business), it was uncomfortable, but rewarding, to use all caps and demand my words be respected.

It was also way more professional than some of the other words I might have chosen.

Good times!

WORD RATIONING

I write books, and sometimes other things (like guest blog posts) as my job. All of these things, books and otherwise, are made up of words. Words are the tools of my trade the same as wrenches and hammers are the tools of a mechanic’s trade. And I love words—I always have.

When I was in second grade, we were doing a phonics exercise wherein we were each assigned a letter of the alphabet and tasked with going to the blackboard (yes, I’m showing my age here, but whatever) and writing down a word beginning with our letter. I got the letter “T”. I then proceeded to that chalk board and proudly wrote “totalitarianism” for my whole class to read.

My teacher called my parents.

Words are my stock and trade, and they’re also my hobby. And there are some I apparently like way more than a person really ought to. I have a particular affinity for oddball words (see above re: snollygoster) and I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t use my favorite words in my writing. Words are good, and we should use them!

In getting RITES & DESIRES revised and ready for primetime I learned all about my addiction to “that”— which is a thing I continue to work on. But while working through revisions on THE DRAGON STONE CONSPIRACY I learned that isn’t my only word problem.

Too much of a commonplace word is one thing. But multiple instances of a beloved-but-uncommon word is enough to be disruptive. So I’m told.

I have now learned to read my own work with a critical eye for overuse of words that aren’t part of everyday speech for people who are not me.

I am now allowed only one “hodgepodge” per manuscript. One “slapdash”. One “ramshackle”. And I only get a “snollygoster” every other book. It’s a hard-knock life, y’all. But it is what it is.

Learning to parcel out the more peculiar words in my vocabulary has been a useful tool as far as making my work more approachable, but I still love my weird darlings and won’t be giving them up entirely any time soon.

***

Amanda Cherry is an author/actor who still can’t believe people will pay her to write books. She enjoys documentary films, fried food, and spending time on her boat. In her spare time, Amanda volunteers as an announcer and referee for Flat Track Roller Derby. Amanda lives in the Seattle area with her husband, son, and the world’s cutest puggle. She is represented by Claire Draper of the Bent Agency.

Amanda Cherry: Website

The Dragon Stone Conspiracy: Amazon | Bookshop

If you follow me on Twitter (you fool), you may have seen that I have been doing a thread over there of so-called GENTLE WRITING ADVICE. (That thread is here.)

And I just wanted to talk about, for a moment, why I’m doing that.

So, an indeterminate amount of time ago — my Pandemic Brain tells me it was either a few weeks or seven-and-a-half years — some anonymous individual popped onto Twitter and pooped out some manner of self-identified HARSH WRITING ADVICE. And it was framed as much of this kind of advice often is, which is like, BOOM, FACT CHECK, IF YOU CAN’T WRITE 5000 WORDS A DAY WHILE HARBORING A VENGEFUL INTESTINAL PARASITE, YOU’LL NEVER SUCCEED. Or something. I honestly don’t remember what the advice was. (Correction: I found it. It was worse than I remembered.)

And I did a funny thread of how this advice often sounds, which is, blah blah blah, kill and eat your fellow creatives, if you use adverbs you’ll get butt cankers, whatever. But then I also started doing the opposite of that, a series of gentler, softer pieces of advice — not as a goof, but as a real thing. I thought it useful to talk about why I’m doing that, and am continuing to do it still.

A lot of writing advice is frequently prescriptive. Meaning, it is there to impose law and order onto the chaotic act of writing and art making. Creativity is a lawless land, and art/writing is the act of refining that chaos into order, and so it makes sense in a way that advice is frequently about the imposition of that structure. And artists and authors are viewed as these wifty, wispy spirits who can’t keep it together and who would starve if you didn’t press a taco into their searching hands once in a goddamn while. Certainly my own career is one made out learning that, indeed, if you wanna do this thing, then that requires work and effort, and it isn’t always pleasant, it isn’t always fun, and so it behooves writers to learn that lesson. So, writing advice tends to drift away from the chaotic, unpredictable tangle of writing and storytelling and into the “reality check” style of harsh writing advice — it is often presented as if one is doing a favor by delivering it. “Here,” says the author, “is a hard truth someone may not have told you, you’re welcome.”

I don’t think this is malicious. I even think that some part of it is designed to counter advice from charlatans and abusers who want to sell you fake empowerment or some kind of self-help advice in that direction. I think it often comes from a good place: “I learned these hard lessons, and most people won’t tell them to you.”

Here’s the current problem du jour —

These days, most people will tell them to you.

They will, in fact, mostly give advice in exactly this fashion.

I mean, how often do we endure lists from big authors where it’s TEN WRITING RULES and it’s a deeply prohibitive listicle of Dos and Don’ts, and if you violate them, you’ll never be published and your stories will suck open ass and you will die in a lightless, artless abyss as the God of Story will have turned His Sacred Gaze from you. How many times must we be told that adverbs are BAD BAD BAD (even though adverbs are a necessary part of language that includes words like “often” and “everywhere” and “after”). Or how if you use dialogue tags other than ‘said,’ you’ll get a chafing thigh rash? I mean, sure, yes, okay, if you write —

“I went to the mall!” Derek yammered hydroponically

— then you deserve the side-eye from an editor, but that’s not because of adverbs or dialogue tags, it’s because you wrote a… ennhyeah, a not-great sentence. You eschewed clarity in favor of stunt writing. Stunt writing is okay sometimes. But sacrificing clarity, probably not. But again, the problem there isn’t adverbs or dialogue tags, and assigning writing advice to tackle those specific things is not necessarily helpful. It demonizes the wrong stuff.

Think about it. How often have we been told to kill our darlings without also being told we have to learn what hills we need to die on? How often have we been told you have to sit and write 2000 words a day and not been told that some days you’ll be unable to do that, and you need to not write those words because some days are genuinely for sitting there and staring at the wall and then saying “oh fuck it” before going to look at some birds? And then, in looking at birds, you find an answer you didn’t expect to find because you were able to clear your damn head for five minutes. Some advice says we must write in short, declarative sentences — but sometimes, only a long sentence will do, and it is in some long sentences that we can both contain a world of information and metaphor while also creating rhythm and beauty in the flow of that very sentence.

My point here is that harsh writing advice is in ample supply these days.

And, frequently, it’s a very masculine style of advice, very Western, very pedagogical with a lot of stern grumpy faces and lectern-pounding.

It lends the very act of talking about writing this feeling that there are answers to how we do this thing that we do — that writing and storytelling is an equation, and as long as we adhere to the formula and plug in the proper variables, we will Properly Compose Content. And we will win awards and become bestsellers, huzzah and hooray.

Writing is a craft, and storytelling is an art, and together they form this nebulous interstice where it’s just clowns juggling medium-sized cats and those cats are juggling little cat-sized chainsaws and the whole place is on fire and did I mention the “place” is actually a blimp and it’s drifting swiftly toward a flickering lighthouse operated by orphans? All the harsh writing advice is all about how to steer out of disaster and how to not get cut by cats wielding chainsaws but it all too often fails to acknowledge the glorious chaos of the act, the strangeness of it, the unpredictability. It fails to give you advice on how to go with that chaos instead of against it — how to appease the clowns, how to become a cat, how to turn the light in the lighthouse on once more. It also fails to teach you how to crash. So much of writing and storytelling is in the crashing. So much good comes out of that part.

Too much of our advice presents for us a map, a magic incantation, an instruction manual, but those inevitably fail under rigorous testing. The map is to a forgotten world, the incantation was unique to the wizard who first spoke it, and the instruction manual is in Swedish.

Further, we are currently mired in a fucking pandemic. (In case you haven’t noticed. And going out in the world, it definitely seems like some people haven’t noticed.) Everything is harsh. Shit sucks. It’s very hard to write anything in this situation, I’ve found — the last four years in general have been pretty corrosive to creativity. So I just don’t feel like this is the best time to say, HEY HERE ARE THE HARD TRUTH RULES, YOU PIECE OF SHIT, YOU BETTER DO ‘EM OR YOU’RE GONNA DIE. Like, when our 9-year-old is having A Day, you can’t just pound your fist and growl at him and tell him to JUST GET IT DONE, whatever “it” happens to be. Sometimes you need to sit down and talk him through it, and appeal to him on a human level, a compassionate level, and allow some days to be hard. And on those days where he commits to just doing a little of whatever it is that needs doing, he often goes ahead and gets it all done anyway, because you didn’t try to force it. Some things you can’t force. Emotions are one of them. And emotions are all bound up in the creation of art and the telling of stories.

Now, I’ve also learned that this thing that we do must walk the line between self-care and ass-busting-work. It is work. It is good to acknowledge that it takes work. But we also need time to decompress, and to be kind to ourselves. While also at the same time recognizing that an overage of kindness can start to drift into the making of excuses, and if your self-care stands in the way of getting anything done ever, then it has become the opposite of self-care — it has ceased to be a way out and instead, become just another trap. Just in the same way that hard-grr-bust-your-assery can lock you up, burn you out, and do the opposite of what you needed done.

I’ve certainly been the guy who has pounded that lectern, and told you what to do and what not to do. I don’t even want to look back at old writing advice for fear of what hell I unleashed upon you. I’m sure some of it was helpful, and some of it wasn’t. And some of it may have been helpful then, and not helpful now, because context matters, and times change, and who we are as writers change, too. I mean, Christ, once upon a time I was like, DON’T BE A SNOWFLAKE, WRITERS CAN’T BE SNOWFLAKES, but…

… maybe writers are snowflakes? We’re all pretty unique. Sometimes we melt. And when we all get together, we can form an avalanche of awesome stories. I dunno. Maybe it’s okay to be a snowflake, a fingerprint, a singular being — as long as we don’t become too fragile or narcissistic about it?

All of this is a very long way of saying, I think harsh writing advice is too plentiful, and the pandemic is hard, so maybe it’s time to try the gentle stuff for a while. With the asterisk footnote that says, all writing advice is bullshit anyway, but bullshit can sometimes fertilize.

Be good to yourself.

Progress is progress.

Write on.

Fifteen-year-old equestrian prodigy Roan Montgomery has only ever known two worlds: inside the riding arena, and outside of it. Both, for as long as she can remember, have been ruled by her father, who demands strict obedience in all areas of her life. The warped power dynamic of coach and rider extends far beyond the stables, and Roan’s relationship with her father has long been inappropriate. She has been able to compartmentalize that dark aspect of her life, ruthlessly focusing on her ambitions as a rider heading for the Olympics, just as her father had done. However, her developing relationship with Will Howard, a boy her own age, broadens the scope of her vision. 

At the intersection of a commercial page-turner and urgent survivor story, Dark Horses combines the searing themes of abuse and resilience with the compelling exploration of female strength.

I will never be in a “30 under 30” roundup of impressive young writers.

Although I showed early promise, I’m a late bloomer. I’m making my debut at age 59. It is the new 39, but even that isn’t under 30. While I’m all for nurturing young talent, I object to the suggestion that talent has an expiration date. Don’t write yourself off—and don’t let anyone else write you off, either—simply because of your age.

We write in an imperfect world.

One midwinter day in 2007, I received a rejection letter from Yaddo, where I’d applied for an extended residency. I would have rejected me, too. I’d written only three short chapters—later combined into a single first chapter—of my WIP. Ostensibly, the “P” in “WIP” stands for progress, but I’d made little of that. I began writing Dark Horses in the early 2000s, but for years at a time I didn’t touch the manuscript.

The Yaddo rejection was a dash of ice water on any dreamy notion I’d had of one day finishing my book. If I waited for all those perfect conditions I thought I needed—a stretch of uninterrupted time, a book-lined study (you know the one), no day job, no financial stressors—I would never finish this book or write any other. I would have to write in an imperfect world.

I made a deal with myself that day. Each evening when I got home from the day job, I would eat a quick dinner of cereal (perfect writer kibble) and then write. At the end of five days, I’d made more progress on the manuscript than I’d made in years. It felt good—so I decided to do it the following week, and at the end of two weeks, a habit was formed. That’s how I finished the book, writing for two or three hours every evening and indulging in write-a-thons on the weekends. I turned down invitations for drinks after work, dinner, coffee, and other social activities. No one else will make your writing a priority. Only you can do this.

In which I find an agent.

I finished the manuscript in August 2009 and spent the next year self-editing, a process during which I wasn’t nearly as hard on myself as I should have been, because all of us think, “This will be the cleanest, most perfect manuscript ever submitted to an agent.” HAAAAhahahahahaha. Clearly I hadn’t left all my delusions behind me. Have you seen the dragon in the kitchen?

I contacted an old publishing acquaintance who was now an agent. Of course I could send the manuscript to her. She read it and told me to cut 100 pages and send it back to her. I did. And—oooooooooo, children—she was never heard from again. There was only a hook dangling from my car door. A year passed, during which there were a couple of life-giving, hope-raising messages in which she promised my revised manuscript was next in her TBR pile, but in fact I’d been given the hook.

Slightly daunted, I regrouped and sent it to a friend’s agent, and exactly the same thing happened. After another solid year, another hook dangled from my car door.

Now deeply daunted and in possession of two useless hooks, I put the manuscript away for a year. At the end of that year, four years had passed since I’d completed the first draft. What was I doing with my life? Did I or didn’t I want to be published?

Welcome to the sim-sub (simultaneous-submission) route. I took a week off from my day job and created a spreadsheet with nearly 100 agents on it, most of them gleaned from the pages of Poets & Writers. I visited the website of each agency, where agents specified what they wanted in the way of a query, and contacted the ones I thought were the best fit for my manuscript.

By the end of the week, I’d found my agent. When we spoke on the phone, she asked if I were willing to revise. My reply: “Absolutely, but if I do . . . will I ever hear from you again?”

Her reply: “Yes, because I’ve already invested more time and energy in this than I would if I didn’t intend to represent you.”

Don’t be discouraged to discover you aren’t even close to being finished.

I love revising and editing, which is good, because my agent and I went through round after round of revisions. I was trying my best, but something wasn’t clicking. To my everlasting gratitude, she hung in there with me. Finally, when I thought I’d produced the best possible manuscript, she said, “Cut it by a third, and then I’ll read it.”

Part of me thought I couldn’t do it. The rest of me made a sign that read ENDURANCE, tacked it above my desk, and got to work. I brought Dark Horses in at a sleek 98,000 words and delivered a manuscript my agent could sell—and sell it she did, approaching exactly the right editor at exactly the right publisher. My editor requested further edits, which added slightly to the word count (I got to put back some material I’d deleted), but my agent had been so rigorous that at this point, editing felt like play.

Your path is yours, not ANYONE else’s.

In the critique group I’ve run for 20 years, I advocate heeding feedback that resonates and disregarding feedback that doesn’t—but this works only if you’re honest with yourself. My agent had a keen editorial sense, and I’d have been foolish not to listen to her.

“With your next book, you won’t have to listen to your agent and your editor,” one person said.

“Do you even feel like it’s your book anymore?” said another.

First, why wouldn’t I listen to an agent and an editor I trust? They want a book that will sell, and so do I. Second, it’s more my book than ever, forged by criticism and revision that burned away everything that wasn’t the story.

Only you can write your story, but regardless of whether you take the traditional route to publication, you’ll need to discern between advice that rings true and advice that’s off the mark. Know what to let go of, even if you’re attached to it. My words aren’t gold. Neither are yours. Be professional, listen to your team, and honestly assess their feedback.

Also, know what to hold on to. Tip: It won’t be as much as you think. Good editors, agents, and critique partners don’t want to make your story theirs. They want to help you make your story the best it can be.

***

Susan has worked as a book editor, curriculum writer, writing instructor, and freelance writer and editor. She has also taught therapeutic horseback riding. Dark Horses will be released by Simon & Schuster’s Scout Press on February 16. It has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Book List, and Library Journal. Susan lives in Taos, New Mexico, where she loves riding her dream horse, Goldmark, on the mountain trails. She is working on another novel.

Susan Mihalic: Twitter

Dark Horses: Indiebound | Bookshop | B&N | Amazon

WELL, HEY THERE. What’s this? Why, it’s just the cover to my new book, Dust & Grim, out October 5th. In it, a girl inherits a funeral home for monsters from her parents, but must share that inheritance with a brother she’s never met. There are: mysterious doors! Talking wolves! A rogue devourer! Something in the wallpaper! A secret cemetery! And also, a Florg. (You’ll see.) The cover and interior art is by the inimitable Jensine Eckwall.

The biggest excitement for me is to have a book coming out that my own kiddo can read. He’s already seen the arcs and is, for the first time, actually excited that I’m a writer? Amazing! Anyway, hope you’ll check it out. If you need some pre-order links, the publisher has ’em lined up right here.

For those not yet caught up, that means I’ve got three (!) books out this year, which means the number of books I had out last year, which was, uhhh, zero.

Release dates:

April 6th: YOU CAN DO ANYTHING, MAGIC SKELETON

July 20th: THE BOOK OF ACCIDENTS

October 5th: DUST & GRIM

Each book, I think, is a book of monsters.

Some wonderful. Some not so much.

Okay, bye!

*disappears in a cloud of moths*