Dear Side Questers,
It’s the most colourful time of the year! I hope you’ve had a chance to kick around some autumn leaves, enjoy the colours, and attempt strange leaf crafts that never quite work out. Oh, oops, is that last one just me?
I may have attempted maple leaf faeries.
When I first made them, they looked like this:
The girls thought they were weird. Then a few days passed and they got weirder. Me too, faeries, me too.
But this month’s biggest side quest has been A Binding of Spellwork and Story, the book I received an artsnb grant to write this year. I’m writing the chapters in tandem with a writing class/workshop’s assignments, which is working very well to keep me motivated.
I took a similar course with the same teacher (writer Matthew Ledrew) to get my Care and Feeding of Your Little Banned Bookshop novella drafted as well. In fact, I’m quietly debating taking this course again already. Its helping me get out of my head and I don’t feel so overwhelmed by the larger projects. It’s also giving me the autumn novel writing community that I used to get from NaNoWriMo.
Anyway, back to Binding. It’s a story in which I’m exploring the role of a writer’s manipulation of story from within the story, where it looks more like a sorceress wielding magic. Part of me keeps expecting people to laugh at this entire premise, but it turns out that it’s just as much fun to write as I hoped it would be when I first proposed it. With any luck, it’ll be fun to read as well!
Gratuitous mushrooms!
Between sick kids and a brother in hospital, I took to walking my local Ducks Unlimited marsh in an attempt to save my sanity (and avoid hunters in the woods). There are few birds left at this point, though the dragonflies are plentiful. The dying vegetation has taken to revealing secrets. Following a game trail, I happened upon an almost shockingly intact cormorant skull.
There’s a whole spiritual aspect to finding bones like this in nature that I’m never entirely certain if I should unpack. I did touch on the subject in my short story The Second Form of Ginny Elder. There’s something very sacred to the discovery that sits a sense of quiet in my chest. Other people feel a sense of disgust. With that in mind, I’m sharing a photo of the kind of skull I found from the internet, since skulls in nature can be a bit yuck:
Source: https://skullsite.com/wp-content/uploads/dbimages/large/phalacrocoraxauritus_s.jpg
Cormorants are common along the Bay of Fundy and they always tug at the memory of reading Island of the Blue Dolphins when I was young. I don’t remember much else about the book these days, but somehow the skirt she made from the cormorant feathers-and especially the way they took it away at the end of the book to put it in a museum-always stayed with me.
Speaking of books – this week marks the publication of my friend Nancy SM Waldman’s debut novel, Every Rule Undone. I had the pleasure of reading an ARC, so I thought I’d share my review:
This story follows the lead character of Aza Gen, that last name indicating which magical clan she belongs to and thus, her loyalties and abilities. The Gen in this world act as a submissive partner to the Puraples, the leading magical clan. In contrast, their enemies, the Cruiks, have their own submissive clan, the Besin healers. The Puraples and the Cruiks spend their time tossing magical curses at each other, and their submissives scramble to clean them up. If this sounds like an endless cycle, it is, and revolution is brewing when a full-on magical curse plague breaks out.
Added to these four clans is another set of people, folks whose parents broke the law by cross-breeding between magical clans and abilities. If they manage to escape execution, these Undones have no place in society.
Aza leads the reader through this world as unrest grows and builds, becoming the sort of delicious revolution story where unexpected heroes emerge simply because of the situations they find themselves. It is a pleasure to read how Aza and her friends grow, change, and become different people across the events in the book.
I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll leave it at that. If you enjoy a character-driven story filled with difficult decisions that change their worlds forever, this needs to go on your TBR!
Every Rule Undone can be found everywhere, but if you’d like a link, here you are.
That’s it for this month, Enchanted friends! Wishing you a lovely Halloween, fuzzy socks on chilly mornings, and your favourite warm beverage in the perfect mug.
Until next month,
Jennifer Shelby 
