If you have been waiting to subscribe to the StarDance Press newsletter, now is a good time! Coming Thursday is the EXCLUSIVE release of Part 2 of Julia’s story (and no worries if you were not able to download the first part–there’s a link to that in the email as well). Part 1 left off with Julia determined to uncover a secret, and Part 2 shows us how that’s going. Part 3, hopefully coming this fall, will wrap up the story!
These story snippets have been so much fun to write. They have a very different feel from either the novels or the short stories I’ve written in this world previously, being much more character focused, with the plot mostly existing to move along the character development. They are also giving me a chance to go a bit more in depth with some of the world-building that is only ever alluded to in my other works.
Plus, they are a fun perk for newsletter subscribers! It’s always lovely to be able to offer people a “thank-you” for subscribing to my thoughts on writing, reading, and life each month.
So again, if you haven’t already done so, now is the time to subscribe! Aside from occasional sale and new release information (and gifts, like this one), I send the newsletter out once a month, and my goal is to always make it a pleasant oasis in the midst of your busy life. And if you subscribe now and decide after a month or so that it’s not for you, you can always unsubscribe with no hard feelings.
So if Julia’s story sounds like something you’d enjoy reading, and the newsletter itself sounds like fun, subscribe today in order to get the new story on Thursday!
Ten years ago this September, I published my first novel. It was a pretty good debut novel! But … it suffered from quite a lot of the issues that can plague first-time novelists. Such as trying to cram way too much story into one book. And not really being sure what genre it was and so veering wildly between a novel of manners, a cozy mystery, a thriller, a fantasy, and a coming-of-age novel. And trying to force the characters to conform to what the author thought should happen rather than letting them be themselves. And being about 30,000 words too long.
I’m still proud of that novel, my Magic Most Deadly. Even all of the above problems came from aiming too high rather than too low. I’m proud of the world I created, the characters and the way they came to life (despite the occasional attempt to force them into boxes they refused to fit inside), and the way that novel set the stage for the rest of the series.
But because I learned so much from that first novel and then applied it to the next one, and then learned from that and applied it to the next one, not to mention the short stories, novella, and the other books I wrote over the last ten years that also developed my abilities, I am faced with the reality that Book 1 of the Whitney and Davies series is not really a good match for Books 2 & 3 (and eventually 4), or even the supplemental stories.
So this summer I started tackling the job of rewriting Magic Most Deadly in order to tighten the story and bring it more in line with the rest of the series. The overall story will be the same, but the way in which it is written will be vastly different. It will also be getting a new cover, which will also fit better with the rest of the series (I’ll be honest, it was getting a new cover that pushed me from only thinking that one of these days I ought to rewrite MMD, to actually doing it). I’ll be sorry to say goodbye to the original cover, because I do love it, but I am also excited to see MMD look like it belongs with Glamours & Gunshots and Death by Disguise rather than being their awkward stepsister.
I am a couple thousand words into the rewrite and already pretty excited over the way subtle shadings in Maia and Len’s characters are starting to show through, and the way the story is being set up. There are a lot of challenges involved in being a self-published author, but having the ability to say, “that book I published ten years ago? Yeah, I can make that better,” and then DOING it without having to regain rights or persuade anyone that it’s worth doing is AMAZING.
I am so excited for when I can share the new-and-improved Magic Most Deadly with you all!
I am honored and delighted to be able to share that Death by Disguise won the 2023 Maine Literary Award for Speculative Fiction. I was not expecting that at all! I was honored enough to be named as a finalist; actually winning the award was not on my radar at all.
The ceremony was held at Bates College (a very nice touch–I think I managed to work a joke about that into my acceptance speech, though I was so dazed I can’t really remember much that I said), and was absolutely lovely. I was pleased to be able to meet and cheer for so many wonderful Maine writers in every category. Our family settled in Maine just as the pandemic was starting to shut everything down in the state–not a good time to try to build or join a preexisting writing community! I joined the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance anyway, and spent a lot of time hoping that eventually they’d move back to doing in-person events rather than Zoom (which gives me a migraine if I use it for long). Now that they have, I am looking forward to participating in more events and workshops, and hope to get better acquainted with my fellow Maine writers. This award has certainly helped me feel more like I belong here!
This award has also helped push me into a project I’d been contemplating for some time but hadn’t gotten around to yet: rebranding Magic Most Deadly so that its cover matches the style and feel of the others in the series. When I wrote and published MMD (ten years ago this September!) I didn’t really know much about branding or how to choose a cover design. While I loved, and still love, the cover that my designer and I eventually came up with, it doesn’t really give off quite the right vibe for the “cozy fantasy-mystery” genre this series has, nor does it carry the Whitney & Davies logo that we developed by the time Glamours and Gunshots was published, and which has been on every subsequent book in the series.
My goal is to have the new edition available by the end of September, to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of MMD’s publication. We’ll see if I make it! I am also making some substantial edits to the story, as that was my first published book and honestly, it shows. I won’t be changing anything about the heart of the story or the characters, but I will be tightening it up, eliminating some unnecessary bits, bringing the characters into better focus, all that sort of thing. Using the skills I’ve learned through writing 3 more novels, many short stories, and four novellas in the ten years since publishing MMD to make it the story it was always meant to be!
I’m also going to be switching over print distribution for the Whitney & Davies novels from Amazon to IngramSpark over the course of the summer, so if you are a bookseller and have been wanting to carry these books but have been unable to due to the difficulties of buying wholesale through Amazon–good news! It will soon be much easier for you.
And hey, if you haven’t read the award-winning Death by Disguise yet, you can click here to buy. (You can buy the other books, too, but I might recommend waiting for Magic Most Deadly until the new edition comes out–unless you’d like to own both and compare them, in which case, have at it!)
The Maine Literary Awards are sponsored by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. They are open to all writers who call Maine home and who have published a book in the most recent calendar year. For Death by Disguise to have made it to the final three in the Speculative Fiction category is a tremendous honor! The winners in each category will be announced May 18 at an awards ceremony. I am looking forward to attending that and getting a chance to meet some of my fellow Maine authors! (And yes, one of my first thoughts after sending in my RSVP was, “Ooh, what am I going to wear?”)
For newcomers to this blog, or in case you have forgotten about Whitney and Davies in the excitement of the recent Pauline Gray omnibus, a brief synopsis:
Whitney and Davies: the series
Death by Disguise is the third novel in the WHITNEY AND DAVIES fantasy-detective series set in 1920s England, a world where magic lies beneath the surface of everyday life and mysteries and intrigue lurk around every corner. In an England still recovering from the trauma of WWI, hidden magicians work to rebuild their world and make it a better place. Enter Maia Whitney and Len Davies, two magicians who team up to use their magic and their wits to bring justice to those who cannot find it for themselves. If you have a mystery that no one else can or will solve, you can call on Whitney & Davies to come to your aid, and they will bring all their formidable abilities to bring you justice, peace, and hope.
Death by Disguise: the book
In DEATH BY DISGUISE, Maia and Len travel to Cambridge to search for a missing secretary at the magical college of Saint Dorothea’s hidden inside Cambridge University. What begins as a simple missing person investigation soon turns grimmer when murder strikes at the college. Maia and Len are in a race against time to catch the murderer and find the missing secretary before she too is killed. In the midst of all this, their friendship faces new challenges as differences in values and perspectives come to light and cause strain between them. Will they be able to solve the mystery and maintain their partnership, or will this mark the end of Whitney & Davies … for good?
Pick up your copy of DEATH BY DISGUISE today and find out the answer for yourself!
(We here at StarDance Press highly recommend drinking a fine cup of tea along with reading the book. Daffodils are optional.)
Welcome to Canton, NY, a small farming town nestled in the northern foothills of the Adirondack mountains. It’s the 1930s, and to an outsider’s eye, this looks like an idyllic village mostly untouched by the Great Depression that is ravaging so much of the nation. But even the most idyllic towns and villages have their dark sides. When trouble comes to Canton, the folk there rely on each other to help out. And that includes one young woman in particular …
Meet Pauline Gray. A graduate of the prestigious St. Lawrence University in Canton, she fell in love with the town while in college and has never left. A journalist by day and a secret novelist by night, Pauline’s compassion and drive for justice pull her into mysteries that are too small or too peculiar for the police. She would really prefer a quieter life, but when people need her help, she can’t turn them away, no matter what the danger to herself might be.
This book is available to purchase in ebook or paperback here, but even better than buying it online would be asking your local bookstore to order it for you. The heart and soul of the Pauline Gray stories is the importance of communities, and in that spirit I would love to see this book in as many local bookstores as possible, celebrating the importance of place.
If you do purchase this at your local bookstore, send me an email at stardancepress@gmail.com and include a photo so that I can see just how many bookstores Pauline has made it into! I’d love to feature your photos and your local bookstores in my next newsletter. (Which, by the way, you can sign up for here):
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Enjoy this beautiful omnibus, my friends! I certainly am.
This blog has been pretty silent for a while, but that’s mostly been because there hasn’t been much to say. (Admittedly, it’s also been because the little there has been to say has gone in the newsletter rather than on here. Have you signed up for the newsletter yet? It goes out once a month generally, more frequently if there’s exciting book news or sales to announce.)
(Also, would you mind letting me know if the signup form is showing up properly for you? It’s either not showing up at all on one browser or telling me the link has expired on the other browser, and I’m not sure if that’s just me of if it’s misbehaving for all you readers as well. Sigh … technology is great, until it isn’t.)
Anyway, the news. It’s exciting! But I can’t tell you what it is yet. Argh. I know, I know! Suffice to say, I thought I was finished with Pauline Gray, but something new may—just may—be in the works after all.
If you are new here, Pauline Gray is my non-fantasy mystery series consisting of three novellas (I suppose that’s more of a trilogy than a series, but each book stands alone, so it feels more like a series to me … sigh. Classifying things is hard. Thus says the librarian-in-training.)
The series description on my book page goes thus:
Welcome to Canton, NY, a small farming town nestled in the northern foothills of the Adirondack mountains. It’s the 1930s, and to an outsider’s eye, this looks like an idyllic village mostly untouched by the Great Depression that is ravaging so much of the nation. But even the most idyllic towns and villages have their dark sides. When trouble comes to Canton, the folk there rely on each other to help out. And that includes one young woman in particular …
Meet Pauline Gray. A graduate of the prestigious St. Lawrence University, she fell in love with the town while in college and has never left. A journalist by day and a secret novelist by night, Pauline’s compassion and drive for justice pull her into mysteries that are too small or too peculiar for the police. She would really prefer a quieter life, but when people need her help, she can’t turn them away.
I grew to be very fond of Pauline, and the community of friends and neighbors that grew around her as her stories progressed, but by the time I came to the third novella, the strain of trying to keep up three series (Whitney & Davies, Pauline Gray, and From the Shadows—yes, that book is getting a sequel if I ever manage to finish writing the first draft), got to be too much for me. The third novella was a good stopping place, and so I bid farewell to Pauline and her friends.
Or did I?
Well, as I said, I can’t share anything specific yet, but stay tuned—news should be coming very soon!
I know many of us prefer not to shop for books on Amazon, so I wanted to offer an online option that some readers might not be aware of. Bookshop.org not only distributes all the StarDance Press paperbacks (the Whitney & Davies series, From the Shadows, the Pauline Gray novellas), they also give a portion of the price to the independent bookstore of your choosing.
Nothing quite beats going into a physical bookstore and browsing through their physical books, but that can be more and more challenging these days–there are fewer local indie bookstores in general, and most of them can’t afford to give shelf space to all the authors they might wish they could. It’s especially challenging for independent authors like myself, who are not supported by a marketing team from one of the “Big Five” traditional publishers (e.g. Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hatchette Livre, and Macmillan).
So I am thankful for options such as bookshop.org, who are able to support local independent bookstores, small independent authors, and the reading community, all at the same time!
I suspect many people by now have heard of “Jolabokaflod,” or “Christmas Book Flood.” It’s the Icelandic tradition of giving books on Christmas Eve and spending the evening reading. Whether you have an Icelandic heritage or not, this is a lovely tradition, and one I suspect many families would enjoy implementing as part of their own holiday practices! In our family, we’ve always given books as part of the main Christmas event (we do Christmas Eve gifts, but those are always either special Christmassy pajamas or a new ornament for the tree), and I’m not sure my crew would welcome a change now, but there is something so cozy about the idea of spending the night before Christmas curled up with a good book.
And luckily for fans of StarDance Press, we have two separate series to choose from for books to give–or keep!–for reading on Christmas Eve, or any time during the holidays.
In Whitney and Davies, we have magic, mystery, the Roaring Twenties, Britain, friendship and witty banter, and a slow-burn romance that has been building through three books and one novella (and a couple of short stories!). Maia Whitney and Len Davies use their wits and their magical abilities to solve mysteries as they gradually learn to rely on each other and build a relationship on a foundation of trust and friendship. Fans have likened this series to “Agatha Christie with magic,” “Downton Abbey, The Dresden Files, and Right Ho, Jeeves,” and a blend of Dorothy L Sayers and Patricia C Wrede.
Not a fan of magic? Prefer a shorter read or a completed series? Try Pauline Gray, a collection of three mystery novellas set in the 1930s in the small town of Canton, NY, in the foothills of the Adirondacks. Pauline is a young career woman whose sense of justice keeps drawing her reluctantly into solving mysteries and becoming more tightly interwoven into the small town community as she does so. Fans say, “Recommended for fans of Patricia Wentworth novels, Jimmy Stewart movies, and fans of 1930s Americana.”
Rather not commit to any series at all, preferring a stand-alone work? A fan of Star Wars, Star Trek, or other sci-fi that focuses on the human condition? From the Shadows is perfect for you! This gentle sci-fi story follows Riss Waldron on a journey through space and time, yes, but also through the struggles of her own heart and sense of self-worth. Fans have related it to Jane Austen, LM Montgomery, or the Mitford series (in space!).
So whatever your taste in books, StarDance Press has something to offer. All our books are available in ebook and paperback format, and you can access them through any of the links in this post.
So what are you waiting for? The only trouble now might be waiting to give them (and read them!) until Christmas Eve!
Part of the Whitney and Davies series, but able to be read and enjoyed all on its own without any knowledge of the rest of the books, While Shepherds Watch is a delightfully lighthearted Christmas mystery. A crumbling Yorkshire manor, rumors of a ghost wandering the halls, a young girl with a deep secret, and a cad who needs to be taught a lesson. Only Maia and Len can smooth out these tangles to make a Happy Christmas for all! If you like your Christmas books to be, well, Christmassy, than this is definitely the book for you!
With Death by Disguise releasing in less than a week (November 8! Pre-order your copy here!), I thought it would be fun to do a bit of a retrospect on the previous books in the series. I’m starting today with Magic Most Deadly, my debut novel and the story that kicked off the Whitney and Davies series.
This book came about after a period of intense research and drafting of a high-concept fantasy story that never ended up being written because I had burned myself out on all the prep. I wanted to write something fun after all that, but couldn’t decide what. I had recently read Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer’s “Sorcery and Cecilia,” and loved the idea of picking a genre and adding magic to it. Not Jane Austen/Georgette Heyer for me, though … I looked at my bookshelves, saw Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence books, and thought, “Hm, Agatha Christie with magic?” Then I thought, “Maybe if I swapped the personalities, so the guy was the one who was intuitive and impulsive, and the girl was steady and logical.”
I decided early on in the writing process that I wanted to self-publish it. Aside from “Sorcery & Cecilia,” there weren’t a lot of stories being published at that time that blended an existing genre with magic, and the popular trend in mysteries was toward dark and bleak, so I didn’t think there would be much of a market for this type of story in traditional publishing. Plus, I was intrigued by the possibilities with self-publishing and thought it would be fun to try. Whether or not that was a wise choice is a post for another day!
Next September will mark ten years since I published Magic Most Deadly. Since then, I’ve published two more novels (Death by Disguise will make three), four novellas, and a collection of four short stories. It’s safe to say I’ve learned a lot, both about writing and about publishing, since then! Despite how much my writing has developed from that time, though, I am still very proud of my first novel. It was a labor of love, born from a desire to find joy and fun in writing again, an homage to one of the greatest authors in the English language while still being very much my own story, and an act of bravery, to say, “here is the story of my heart: I hope you read it and love it.”
Nearly ten years later, I still say that with every story I write and publish.
I was nervous about this cover, friends. My cover designer has, in the last nine years since producing the gorgeous cover for Magic Most Deadly, mostly moved on from such work (in fact, she’s busy writing her own books these days–check them out here: Amanda McCrina), and I thought I might have to do this one myself. I did the covers for Magic & Mayhem and While Shepherds Watch, as well as the entire Pauline Gray series, so it isn’t as though I have no experience with cover design, but for this, the long-awaited third novel in the Whitney & Davies series, I wanted it to be extra-special. Luckily for me, Amanda agreed to do another for me, and the result is spectacular.
Are you ready to see it? Because I am more than ready to show it!
Here we go!
The walls of Saint Dorothea’s College in Cambridge hide more secrets than simply the existence of magic …
Lennox Davies couldn’t be happier when the detective agency of Whitney and Davies receives a summons to investigate a missing secretary at the magical college of Saint Dorothea’s in Cambridge. He envisions a charming locked room puzzle, to be followed by strolling the streets of the ancient and beautiful university city with his friend and partner in detection Maia Whitney. What could be better?
But delight soon turns to dismay when a man is murdered. Not only that the missing secretary seems to have vanished into the morning mists off the River Cam. Will Maia and Len be able to catch the killer before the secretary’s dead body turns up as well? Or is it already too late? Before long even the bond between partners is strained as Len and Maia find themselves at odds over their values.
What began as a clever exercise in deduction turns into their most challenging mystery yet, and one that could result in the end of Whitney and Davies … forever.
Isn’t it stunning? I’m so thrilled to be able to finally share it with you all. And you know what else I am able to share with you today?
The release date!
Death by Disguise, the third novel in the Whitney & Davies series, will be released on November 8, 2022. Yes, that is only four weeks away! Just in time for your Christmas shopping–or buying for yourself to read while you relax on Thanksgiving weekend.
I started writing this book while living in Cambridge, and finished it after moving back to the States. It is in many ways my love letter to that beautiful and ancient university city, and to the friends I made there. I am so pleased to be able to share it with the rest of you soon.
