September is one of my favorite months. The weather here is gorgeous, we are getting back into the swing of school, my house stays (slightly more) clean, and I have time to write again. But before I begin….

An Homage to the Faithful

This September was difficult. I was shaken by the death of Charlie Kirk and then, just a few weeks later, the passing of Pastor Voddie Baucham. Both events served as a sobering reminder that our days are numbered by God alone. Our task is faithfulness with what we’ve been given, and both of those men did so much in a relatively short time. I’m thankful to be a writer, but more than that, I’m thankful to be a Christian, a wife, and a mother. All of it is grace; may I have the kind of faith that looks around at these gifts and figures out how best to turn a profit. Just like Charlie. Just like Voddie.

AND A BONUS SECTION

As promised, I’m coming to you all first with news about The Second Greatest Thief’s release. My marketing team is putting together a sales strategy, which means they’ve given me a whole lot of questions to answer about where I could travel, who I know, etc.

It’s all a bit overwhelming, to be honest. It’s sort of like when someone asks you what your favorite book is, and you forget the names of every book in existence. “Who do I know?” I wondered. And then I realized that who I know is you all, readers of the Harbinger, who open your windows once a month to welcome my cantankerous raven.

So, I’m hoping you’ll be willing to help me out. I’ve included a link below with some questions about who you might know, where I could visit, and how you could help get the word out about The Second Greatest Thief. If you wouldn’t mind filling this out, I would be eternally grateful. Book sales are what enable me to keep writing, after all.

Here is the link.

What I’m Working On

Over the summer, I fell woefully behind on some contract work, specifically a homeschool curriculum project. Why did I agree to do this, you ask? They won me over with tempting phrases like, “narrative-based learning” and “you get to write the story however you want (within reason), so long as the concepts are learned.” I spent a lot of my writing time this month cranking out those units while I wait for my editor to send the next round of edits. We’re in the fine-tuning stage of developmental edits and about to move into line edits, where I agonize over every verb and start to question my grasp of the English language. Should be grand.

I’ve also been prepping for the upcoming MFA residency week (next week!) by rereading through my lecture notes and updating them with content from the new books I assigned. One of my favorite things about the program is that I get to throw books at students and have them tell me what works and what doesn’t. Getting paid to read novels for work is a dream.

I’m trying to chip away at a few side projects every day, including The Winter King 2 (I haven’t forgotten about it!!) and coming up with a pitch/outline for a potential sequel to The Second Greatest Thief. These are both way down on my task list, so they really only happen when I have a spare moment (which is not often).

My editorial team also emailed me this month to start discussing cover art for The Second Greatest Thief. I was thrilled by the direction they want to take it and by the artist they’re looking to hire. They asked what pictures I referenced when I wrote the story, and I told them this was the very first image I had in mind.

What I’m Reading

A friend and fellow writer from Canada (hi Callie!) gifted me three books over the summer, and while my husband immediately claimed the two nonfiction books (I’m sure I’ll get them back at some point), I did get to read The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey. Wow can that woman write. The prose was so fantastically deft, and while I didn’t care for some of the movements of the plot, I was too impressed by the line-level work to really notice. A fascinating take on an old tale.

After that, I returned to the land of Discworld and reread The Wee Free Men (I assigned it to my second-year students). Pratchett is such a gifted wordsmith, I will happily return to this one yet again in years to come. My 15-year-old picked it up after me and is now working her way steadily through the Tiffany Aching series.

Next, I picked a novel with a completely opposite flavor, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Joe Rigney and I are hoping to do another Canon Conversation on it, and since it had been over a decade since I last picked it up, I thought it deserved a reread. I was probably the most pleased with the circuitous storytelling (tales within tales), partially because I also finished The Odyssey this month on audiobook. Ian McKellen does a fantastic job narrating that one, and what stuck out to me most was the way the story progressed: where it chose to start, when it chose to circle back, who was allowed to tell which tale. I searched briefly for a flowchart that tracked the progression of the narrative, but haven’t found one to my liking yet.

Finally, for book group, we read Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green. Yes, that John Green. Fault in our Stars John Green. I didn’t know he’d turned his hand to nonfiction, and maybe you didn’t either. If you’re longing for a book on TB (and who isn’t), I have it on good authority that Betty Macdonald’s memoir The Plague and I is a great (and surprisingly funny) place to start.

A Writing Tip:

This harbinger is running long, but I did promise a solid tip in my Instagram stories, so here is my very solid tip, delivered at breakneck speed.

If you haven’t checked out tvtropes.org, you should (unless you’re a teen, in which case check with your parents because there’s adult content on there). That website is a treasure trove of tropes and their usage in film, literature, music, mythology, and more.

I use tvtropes to see how tired or stale an idea might be, to make sure I’m not directly copying someone else’s idea, and for some fun brainstorming (particularly in the mythology section).

That’s all for September! See you in October.