Here it is, friends! Free on Kindle for this weekend only, here is Magic & Mayhem, four short stories set in the magical England of this Whitney & Davies series!
4 exciting new short stories set in the magical England of the Whitney & Davies series!
The Third Thief: Maia Whitney has returned home for her sister’s wedding determined to stay aloof from family dramas. Alas, the disappearance of a valuable and possibly cursed bracelet alters her plans. Can this magician’s apprentice solve the crime and save her sister’s wedding from doom and disaster?
Many Magical Returns: On Susannah’s seventeenth birthday, she learns why her mother has always insisted she never use magic in front of Uncle Ernie. Escaping her uncle’s greed and learning magic on the run are tall orders, but one thing is certain: this is a birthday Susannah will never forget.
Passion & Practicality: Steady, sensible Evelyn has always looked after and protected her flighty, feather-brained older sister Violet. So when Violet accidentally kills a man, of course Evelyn is going to take the blame. But her former fiancé Henry, now working for the magicians’ Domestic Protection Agency, has other plans.
Masks & the Magician: Who is the mysterious woman? Is she the Grand Duchess Anastasia, as she claims, or a fraud? The English magician calling himself Merlin has his own ideas, but untangling truth from lie is a difficult task in this mission. When everyone wears a mask, who can be trusted?
I’m so pleased to finally be able to return to Maia and Len’s world, to revisit old friends in some of the stories and meet new ones in others, and to give glimpses into the wider world of England’s magicians. I hope you enjoy them as well!
Magic & Mayhem, the Whitney & Davies short story collection, will be available on April 7! That’s less than two weeks away!
4 exciting new short stories set in the magical England of the Whitney & Davies series!
The Third Thief: Maia Whitney has returned home for her sister’s wedding determined to stay aloof from family dramas. Alas, the disappearance of a valuable and possibly cursed bracelet alters her plans. Can this magician’s apprentice solve the crime and save her sister’s wedding from doom and disaster?
Many Magical Returns: On Susannah’s seventeenth birthday, she learns why her mother has always insisted she never use magic in front of Uncle Ernie. Escaping her uncle’s greed and learning magic on the run are tall orders, but one thing is certain: this is a birthday Susannah will never forget.
Passion & Practicality: Steady, sensible Evelyn has always looked after and protected her flighty, feather-brained older sister Violet. So when Violet accidentally kills a man, of course Evelyn is going to take the blame. But her former fiancé Henry, now working for the magicians’ Domestic Protection Agency, has other plans.
Masks & the Magician: Who is the mysterious woman? Is she the Grand Duchess Anastasia, as she claims, or a fraud? The English magician calling himself Merlin has his own ideas, but untangling truth from lie is a difficult task in this mission. When everyone wears a mask, who can be trusted?
I had so much fun writing these stories–two featuring our intrepid detectives from Magic Most Deadly, two with brand-new characters. I am also thrilled to be able to include a sneak peek at Glamours & Gunshots, the next novel in the W&D series.
Mark your calendars for April 7th to receive this next installment of the Whitney & Davies series!
(And might I suggest, if you haven’t read the first book in the series yet, now is a good time to start? It’s only $2.99 on Kindle–an astonishingly good deal for an 80,000 word book. You certainly can read and enjoy Magic & Mayhem without having read Magic Most Deadly, but it will be twice as delightful if you have already been introduced to Maia, Len, and their cohorts.)
A long time ago–in 2013, which is about 200 years in book publishing reckoning–I published Magic Most Deadly, a fantasy-mystery set in England in the 1920s, described by one reader as “Dorothy L Sayers with magic” and another as “Agatha Christie meets Diana Wynne Jones.” It featured a reverse Tommy and Tuppence pair, where the woman was reliable and practical, ruthlessly logical and devastatingly honest, and the man was impulsive and intuitive, a dreamer and an incurable romantic. Together, they used magic and their own wits to solve the mystery, defeat more than one enemy, and forge a firm friendship.
It didn’t exactly set the world on fire, but it did garner a small fandom, and I immediately set about writing the sequel.
And learned the truth of all the statements about second books being so much harder than first books.
It was so hard, in fact, that I finally abandoned it to work on a project-from-my-heart, the recently re-released From the Shadows. With that one finished, I went back to the next Whitney & Davies book.
And promptly hit a wall again. And again.
With the release of yet another non-W&D book this December, the mystery novella Candles in the Dark, my readers might be justified in thinking I had left behind this world, and these characters, for good.
I am here today to tell you that is not the case.
No, this isn’t an announcement of the sequel, although I am in the line-editing stage of that and hope to have it out to the copy-editor soon. What I am announcing is an in-between project, something to both remind readers of this world (and possibly introduce new readers to it), and tide them over until the sequel does come out.
It is …
Magic & Mayhem, a collection of four short stories set in the Whitney & Davies world (one each featuring our intrepid protagonists, two featuring brand-new characters).
And that’s not all! Magic & Mayhemalso includes the first chapter of the sequel to Magic Most Deadly, titled Glamours & Gunshots!
So, my faithful friends who have stuck with this blog and this writing journey of mine for the last five years, your patience will have its reward at last. Four short stories and the sure promise of the next novel in the series.
I don’t have an exact release date for Magic & Mayhem yet, but it will be out soon, and I will update here as soon as I have more solid information.
I follow Susan Cooper’s fan page on FB, and when I saw a couple weeks back that she was going to be doing a book signing/reading/talk in Cambridge, MA, I gasped in delight and immediately told my husband we needed to go. After a bit of comic misunderstanding of him thinking I meant “our” Cambridge, Cambridge, England, and trying gently to remind me we didn’t have money or time for unexpected trips across the channel, and me trying to figure out why he thought we needed to plan so far in advance for a town less than an hour’s drive from us, we got it straightened out and scheduled it in our calendars.
It was rich. It honestly would have been worth flying to Cambridge, England to experience it (plus, you know, Cambridge. You wouldn’t have to twist my arm to get me back there; I’ve missed it every day since we returned from our visit last year). She was so full of warmth and wisdom, joy and humor. I couldn’t even think of any questions to ask during the Q&A session; I just wanted to sit and soak in whatever she had to say, from children’s instinctive aligning with the land and nature versus the adult idea of progress, to her anecdote of CS Lewis and Tolkien teaching them at Oxford to believe in dragons, to her advice for helping reluctant writers.
One thing she said that really struck me was when she spoke of how much her writing is all rooted in a sense of place. The best writing, it’s always seemed to me, does have a rootedness in something beyond the immediate story or theme. For Tolkien, it was language (and myth, and Story, and … look, he had a lot going for him). For Lewis, it was the notion of Truth beyond religious packaging. For someone like Lloyd Alexander, I believe it was joy. Madeleine L’Engle’s work was rooted in the idea of names and naming.
What, I mused on the way home, and that night, and the next day, and on into the next week, is my writing rooted in?
Oh, there’s lots of themes that wind their way through my writing. Joy is a big one (there’s a reason LA is my favorite author of all time). The notion of Story is another, most especially Truth as Story. Finding one’s own place is something else that comes in to most of my stories, whether overtly (as in From the Shadows, where it’s pretty much the whole plot), or more subtly (Magic Most Deadly isn’t quite as blatant, nor is Candles in the Dark, but the idea is there with both of them). Still none of those felt quite like the answer.
The answer in fact came to me just a couple days ago, as we were walking through the nearby bird sanctuary. The setting sun shone a golden, warm light on the fields and trees as we made our way back out of the woods, and I found myself stopping to take pictures, just like I always do, despite the fact that I have dozens if not hundreds of photographs of different qualities of light already.
And that’s when it hit me. Light. That’s what my stories are all rooted in. The idea of light. That’s why I write, to be a light. That’s what I most deeply resonate with. This is what my self is rooted in, so of course it is what my writing springs up out of.
Sometimes it’s a warm light. Sometimes it might be a harsher one, even blinding. Sometimes it’s the sun on the water, sometimes a candle in a window. Whatever the type, that’s where my stories are born.
It seems rather fitting that this revelation should be inspired by the woman who wrote an entire series based around the struggle between the Dark and the Light. Even more fitting that one of the books she signed for me was The Dark is Rising, the first book in that series I ever read.
I am grateful.
(Also on that same day we went to hear Susan Cooper speak I got in the mail the edition of FrostFire Worlds containing my short story “A Spot of Orange”! It is available to purchase at the Alban Lake Shop, if anyone is interested in a copy of their own. It was a really good day.)
Today is the last day to get Candles in the Dark for free! It’s had a fantastic opening weekend, THANK YOU to everyone who has bought a copy and/or spread the word. It means so much to me.
The seed for this story was planted last September–I had finished a reread of Elizabeth Gaskell’s “North & South” and was thinking how rare characters like Margaret Hale are in fiction: quiet, strong-willed, filled with integrity, passionate about justice, willing to acknowledge when she’s made a mistake, fiercely loyal, yet still, and I repeat myself here because this is the rarest bit, quiet.
That mixed in with thinking about how fun it would be to read a mystery set in the Adirondacks with a scholarly protagonist along the lines of Harriet Vane. I grew up “in the foothills of the Adirondacks,” as we always described ourselves in Canton and Potsdam, two towns about ten miles apart with four colleges between them. So many mysteries–or indeed, stories in general–set in small towns focus only on the quirkiness of them, a la Gilmore Girls; or else portray the people in them as small as the towns themselves, narrow-minded and blindly prejudiced.
I wanted my story to show my small town as I knew it–warm, welcoming, open, accepting, full of hard-working, real people. I wanted my protagonist to have that same integrity and passion for justice that Margaret Hale had, with the scholarly mind and desire for honesty Harriet Vane shows. I wanted my story to show the real struggles of a rural, northern farming community during the Depression, which were very different from rural farming communities in the south and midwest. Above all, I wanted it to be a story where justice and truth prevailed and light shone in the darkness.
As to how well I succeeded in all those goals, only you, the reader, can tell. Pick up your copy of Candles in the Dark today, for free, and let me know what you think in a review!
The old Grist Mill I based Wharton’s Mill on, situated on the beautiful Grasse River.
This photo essay shows a little bit more of the Canton I know and love as it is today. It is indeed a beautiful little village!
Pauline Gray, journalist by day and novelist by night, discovers anonymous letters are being sent to a young widow, insinuating that her husband did not die by accident. Pauline’s compassion and journalistic instincts combine to help her to seek an answer to who is sending these letters, and why. Was Bob Ferris really murdered, and if so, by whom? Before long, Pauline is uncovering evidence of a local smuggling ring and stirring up secrets some people would rather remain buried along with the dead. Despite the danger, Pauline won’t stop until she has shone a light into the hidden places of the past and seen justice done for the grieving widow and her son. No matter what the cost …
Candles in the Dark is set in my hometown of Canton, NY, during the 1930s. It does not feature any of my family members, or friends-and-acquaintances, not even borrowing any last names. Nevertheless, it is as true a representation of that town as I could write. For the first time in any of my stories, I understood how the setting could become another character. Even the parts of the town that have changed since then—the Town Hall burned down long before I was born; the Hotel Harrington has been replaced by a Dollar General; the train station is now a bar—came alive in my imagination as I wrote the story. My dad was always available for all my “Canton in the old days” questions, and I pored over the old photos and memories shared on the Historian Town and Village Canton NY page.
Yet this story was not just a tribute to my home and roots. As it developed, a fine sense of justice for the oppressed, and light shining in the darkness came through. Which is why, as I said in my last post, it is so fitting that this story comes out during the Advent season, the season of coming hope, of promised justice, of peace triumphant, the season of knowing light is returning to the world even if it is not here yet.
So here, as a gift from me to you this Advent, is my mystery novella. I hope it brings as much light to your hearts as it did to mine in the writing of it.
The 99¢ sale for Magic Most Deadly and From the Shadows is ending today … but don’t despair! A BRAND NEW work is coming in the next couple days!
Remember me talking about that mystery novella set in my hometown of Canton, NY in the 1930s? The one that was going to get published in June?
Well, it hit setback after setback, but at last it is ready, and it will be available on Kindle tomorrow, and in paperback soon after!
The timing has turned out beautifully appropriate after all, as the idea of shining a light in the darkness and justice interceding for the broken is so fitting for Advent.
Candles in the Dark, by Louise Bates
Pauline Gray, journalist by day and novelist by night, discovers anonymous letters are being sent to a young widow, insinuating that her husband did not die by accident. Pauline’s compassion and journalistic instincts combine to help her to seek an answer to who is sending these letters, and why. Was Bob Ferris really murdered, and if so, by whom? Before long, Pauline is uncovering evidence of a local smuggling ring and stirring up secrets some people would rather remain buried along with the dead. Despite the danger, Pauline won’t stop until she has shone a light into the hidden places of the past and seen justice done for the grieving widow and her son. No matter what the cost …
In a near-future post I’ll talk a little more about the inspiration for this story and some of my reasons for writing it. For now, I’ll simply tell you to stay tuned! It’s coming soon.
In honor of the second edition of From the Shadows, I’m sharing a short story I wrote about Tyler and Sapphira’s first meeting. I love the friendship between these two, and I wanted to explore how that friendship began–was it always so easy and comfortable? Has Tyler always had that protective streak? What was Sapphira like as an ensign? How did an enlisted man and an officer get to be such good friends, anyway? And just what is Tyler’s full name?
This story, First Contact, answers all those questions and a few more. Check it out, and if you haven’t read From the Shadows yet, I hope this whets your appetite! You can follow the links on the “Books” page to purchase a copy of From the Shadows, free everywhere except Amazon, where it’s 99¢. (Or $9.99 if you want it in paperback)
Need a break after the holiday (and possibly the shopping following the holiday)? Escape with Magic Most Deadly; an Agatha Christie-esque mystery (with a dash of magic); or From the Shadows, a light-hearted space opera. Both on sale at Amazon for .99¢ right now!
From the Shadows is still in the midst of the “being released” process, BUT you can get the new edition on Smashwords for FREE right now! It’s also free at Barnes & Noble. It’s $0.99 at Amazon and the more people who share links to Smashwords and B&N on the Amazon page to report a lower price, the better chance there is of them letting me drop it to free there, as well. (And that is, alas, the only way it will get to free on Amazon, so please please please, report those lower prices!). My goal is to have it free in ebook form everywhere by the end of the month, but I do need your help with that.
Also, reviews are desperately needed in order for the book to show up in search algorithms and the like, so after you pick up your free (or less-than-a-dollar) copy, please leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads or both. This Indie author thanks you!
Once all the sites are aligned and everything is officially in order, I’ll update here again. Consider this your special pre-sale deal, offered to faithful blog friends before going out to the general public!
UPDATE: It is the old edition, but it is now free on Kobo as well, as my dear friend A.M. Offenwanger pointed out in the comments! Which made me check iBooks, and sure enough, it’s old but free there as well. So while you might want to hold off getting it from either of those places, you can at least use them to request a lower price from Amazon!
It was a really good day.)
