First of all, let’s talk giveaways. Next month’s book will be three paperback copies of Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful. The description of this book might sound straightforward — a retelling of The Great Gatsby from the perspective of Jordan Baker, a friend of Daisy Buchanan, in an alternative history of the United States where magicians and demons stalk the streets, and Jay Gatsby has genuinely sold his soul to the devil for his success — but the execution is spectacular. The prose is so beautiful that even with the text dealt with some heavy and scary stuff, I was pulled along by my delight in the words, and the worldbuilding is entrancing, in spite of being very familiar. Jordan is bisexual, and her relationships are complicated and layered, if not always happy.

You can fill out the form to enter that giveaway here.

SECOND, today (and tomorrow!) you can partake of a sale! Shipwrecked: Being a Tale of True Love, Magic, and Goats is $0.99 today and tomorrow as part of the Sapphic Stuff Your Kindle event. Shipwrecked is the first book in my Sea Goblins series, in which the sea captain Heron finds herself unexpectedly crash-landed on the sandbar below a goblin village, whereupon she is thrown together with the catastrophically magical goatherd Tellop to rescue Heron’s wandering toddler niece from a herd of mischievous goats. It was a lot of fun to write and I will admit I crack myself up whenever I re-read it. It’s available on Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books, and Smashwords.

Another perk, for peeps who are in the Boston metro: you can now purchase paperbacks of my book A Bloomy Head in a real physical bookstore, Lovestruck Books in Harvard Square!

I meant to have more Parisian food history for y’all today, but this has been a pretty difficult week for me personally, and I’m tired. I really deeply felt Annika Barrenti Klein’s last newsletter, where she talks about how hard it is to get the momentum up to write after it’s been lost, even though daily writing absolutely helps her mental and emotional health (and mine! and mine!!)

All that can be done is to take a deep breath and try again, and again, and again.

Best of luck in picking up whatever you’ve dropped,

Sharon