Greetings, fellow humans. I’m Caroline and I write fantasy and horror—my debut epic fantasy novel, The Obsidian Druid was released in April 2024. This is my newsletter.
Gilmore Girl Autumn
It’s starting to feel a lot like Autumn and because I’m nothing if not a cliche, I’ve been rewatching Gilmore Girls. There’s a lot to love about this show. It’s often funny, the early 2000s references make me feel like less of an ancient millennial, and Lorelai's hair provides endless fascination.
It’s always perfect, and that parting is always in the exact same place, slightly right of centre. I actually posted this same comment to Twitter/X, and not one single person cared. But that’s okay, because now you get to enjoy my intellectually charged thoughts about Lorelai's hair instead.
So, what don’t I love about Gilmore Girls? Lorelai and Rory’s sneaky pick-me-girl behaviour is often hard to watch, but what keeps jumping out at me during this rewatch is the fat shaming. It doesn’t happen constantly, but when it does, oy with the poodles already! (That probably makes no sense if you’ve never watched an episode of Gilmore Girls). I’d like to think that if Rory wrote a ballet show review today that called one of the dancers a “hippo” the way she did in 2003, she’d be kicked out of college. The early 2000s were a wild time to be young and impressionable though. The low-rise jeans were super skinny, and everyone was obsessed with celebrities' weight. It’s easy, if disappointing, to see how a few fatphobic comments might have slipped into a cult dramedy unnoticed.
Grr. Argh.
I was thinking about Gilmore Girls while revising a novella I first wrote in 2008. It’s about an intelligent zombie in charge of a harvesting plant where humans are imprisoned and used for spare parts (undead bodies just don’t endure the way they used to). It’s grosser than I remembered. Some of it borders on extreme horror and it definitely shouldn’t have brought a cosy dramedy about coffee addicts to mind, but when I realised how much of it I needed to change, similarities were inevitably drawn. Just as Gilmore Girls wasn’t quite as wholesome as I remembered, my youthful writing isn’t quite as good as I thought it was. I made some weird grammar choices, and several plot elements didn’t make any sense. Why would one zombie be dressed as a Napoleonic soldier, and his wife as an Antebellum-era debutante? Why was the human character so unphased by her captivity and looming death? And what was with all the screaming? Everybody screamed, constantly. I’m ashamed of youngling-me for failing to crack a thesaurus.
This was not the story I remembered writing fifteen years ago. I’d been proud of that story; it had been published in a fiction magazine and later, I’d sold it on Kindle. When I re-read it in 2024, all I felt was embarrassed.
Undead and Thriving
I almost gave up on the revision. I was close to trashing and forgetting it, grateful the novella was no longer available for public consumption. Here’s the magical thing about indie publishing, though: you can edit out all your youthful 2008-era mistakes and re-publish (which is what someone should have told the Gilmore Girls writers to do before they came up with the infamous pool scene in the 2016 revival).
I’ve spent the past week removing everything from the novella that made me want to hurl it into the sun, and it’s morphed into a far stronger story. The characters’ motivations are clearer, and the plot feels less rushed. I’m finally ready to let it re-enter the world. If you’d like to see how I did, you’ll be the first to know where it’s available.
Micro-SPFNO - Week Nine
Shining a light on some excellent indie fantasy novels that weren’t chosen to compete in the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off by reviewing their first chapters.
Book of Secrets by Claudia Blood
Book of Secrets is a post-apocalyptic paranormal fantasy and the first book in the Merged series. Here’s the blurb:
I'm a human, and I hate Others. But after being betrayed by humans, I have no choice but to trust those I used to hunt if I have any hope of preventing the end of the world.
For three hundred years, the human world and the world of Myth have lived as one. The cataclysmic Merge forced survivors—both human and Others—to form factions.
As the leader of the Human Protection Agency, Joshua is charged with maintaining the safety of humans in his city. But he secretly protects an artifact more powerful than he knows—the Book of Secrets.
With the anniversary of the Merge approaching, the Book of Secrets is stolen. Joshua finds himself at the center of a plot to unmerge the worlds. Stripped of his position, betrayed, and with a bounty on his head, Joshua must outrun the organization he once served and legions of Others. He races against time to locate the book and prevent an inter-species war that will end the world as he knows it.
Can he find his way to salvation when everything he believed is a lie, or will his distrust lead to another epic cataclysm he can’t stop?
The way Book of Secrets starts is refreshing. Not only are we presented with the main character as a child, but this child is about to live through the Merge—an apocalyptic nightmare that rips houses away from the human world while crushing others. There’s zero tedious build-up. One moment, Joshua is watching the Perseid meteor shower from the roof of his house, and the next he’s holding onto the chimney, trying to escape being crushed to death by a flying pyramid.
The first chapter is short but packed with details that give you a decent flavour of what you can expect from the rest of the book. A “woman with a green-feathered body and long black feathers cresting from her head” appears on a neighbour’s porch, and a castle falls through the air, complete with an armoured man holding on to the buttress. These, then, are our first glimpses of the world of Myth. I was left wondering if Myth was a world not unlike Fantasia in The NeverEnding Story, full of characters that humans would recognise from childhood fairy tales. It’s intriguing, and you don’t often see a pyramid and a castle discussed within the same few paragraphs, so that was fun. Joshua is also interesting. Being fascinated by the meteor shower and possessing the ability to build robots paints him as a clever and resourceful child. Chapter two introduces the adult Joshua, and you just know those attributes are going to be invaluable in the world of Myth.
Book of Secrets flows well with tightly packed action and a compelling premise. If a novel set in the aftermath of a paranormal apocalypse appeals to you, you should check it out.
Favourite line: “His eyes were drawn back to downtown, the stars behind the buildings disappeared. Not blocked by clouds, but gone, as if they had been drawn on an etch-a-sketch that a kid had shaken.”
Book of Secrets is available in paperback and ebook.
Midnight Metropolis is a sci-fi/fantasy novel about daemons, hallucinogenic mushrooms, and the neon megacity sprawled on the blackened backside of a sunless planet. New chapters are posted every Friday and you can read all available chapters for free.
That’s it for now.
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