Blog Tour Guest Post: Sarah Avery

Here is a second guest post in the Drollerie Press blog tour.  Please share this with your friends.




  
 

The first beginning was like any writer's first beginning: the word collection when other kids collected bugs and rocks, the secret notebook confiscated by the fifth grade teacher, the nervous parents with their exhortations about day jobs, all that stuff. Lots of people have first writerly beginnings, but most people who keep writing long enough to see their stuff in print need to have second beginnings, too, because somewhere in between, there was an end.

The second beginning was a list of all the goofy things--I called them goofy things because I'd been in a Ph.D. program, the kind where one spends years learning to be embarrassed by whatever one loves--that I would be free to do when I finished my degree. Write a fantasy novel! Run a role-playing game! Learn to play an extinct musical instrument! Every fun but unproductive thing that had crossed my mind in nine years in academia, that I'd had to put off in favor of studying or teaching, made it onto the list. I never did get around to the extinct musical instrument, but I did write a gloriously, absurdly long first novel.

I was, I thought, between teaching jobs, but in writing that novel, I had stumbled into the biggest happiness my work life had ever brought me, and the idea of teaching full time again made me twitch. Literally twitch, with visible facial tics. I'd given up writing for a respectable career once, but I could not make myself do it again. My husband and I agreed that, whatever it took, we would figure out a way to live that allowed me to write fiction. Since then, I've become a freelance tutor, a full-time mom, a terrible housekeeper, and a published writer.

My Rugosa Coven series of novellas follows a circle of Wiccans on their adventures in a slightly supernatural New Jersey. In Closing Arguments, Bob Baines has to rescue his pesky dead parents when they get stuck in the wrong afterlife. It's a warm tale of old-school occult mystery, postmodern Wicca, family devotion, and courtroom procedure, with a side of slapstick and greasy diner cheese fries. (If your characters lived in Jersey, your book would have greasy diner cheese fries, too.) With the help of his covenmates and his very Methodist wife, Bob unravels the mystery of his parents' peculiar deaths and bizarre posthumous demands, and does what it takes to protect his family.

Atlantis Cranks Need Not Apply follows Jane through a rough hurricane season on the shore. She's nursing her wounds from a messy divorce, renting a room in her coven sister Sophie's beach cottage, when the coven discovers a guy with gills washed up on the sand. The second-to-last thing skeptical Jane wants is to admit the guy might be from Atlantis. The absolute last thing Jane wants is to have a front row seat while Sophie and the not-Atlantean fall in epic love. And the thing Jane never imagined she'd have to do was save their love for them, when she suspects love might be as nonexistent and New Agey as Atlantis.

So far, the Rugosa Coven stories are available in e-books just about everywhere e-books are sold. Once the next novella's finished, there will also be a print collection, tentatively scheduled for this fall. The most New Agey member of Rugosa Coven, Ria, is a real fortuneteller who tells the real future, and now she's dealing with a real mental illness that's giving her fake visions, clouding her aura, and making her a royal pain in the ass to her covenmates. As she struggles to get back to sanity on her terms--which are very different from everyone else's terms--she has to deal with the local New Age shop's attempt to hire a saner fortuneteller to replace her, astral journeys gone horribly wrong, and a marauding creature out of New Jersey folklore. I'm having a lot of fun writing it.

Meanwhile, you can find a related story in which a few Rugosa characters make cameo appearances at the online magazine Jim Baen's Universe. New Jersey's Top Ghost Tours Reviewed and Rated follows a ghost tour operator's troubles when his ghosts unionize right before the October rush.

Like my host Brandon Bell, I'm also knee-deep in anthology slush. I'm co-editing a double anthology, Trafficking in Magic/Magicking in Traffic, with David Sklar, author of Shadow of the Antlered Bird. We're getting a lot of marvelous stories, and we're really proud of the book that's starting to take shape. Our deadline is February 28th, so if you have a story that fits our guidelines, there's still time for you to be in it.

Please check out more of the blog tour HERE!  Thanks, Sarah.  :)