Hi there, fellow wallowers,

Fall has always felt much more like the beginning of something exciting and new to me than New Year’s Day does. Probably, part of that feeling is due to the fact that October is my birth month. For me, each fall is the beginning of a new year.

Beginnings are exciting, and tricky. Rife with opportunities and risks, So much depends on the way you start.

And so, with every new project, I find myself lingering over the beginnings. Circling the outside of the story, looking for the right opening. Is the front door too obvious? What if I go in through the storm cellar? The ancient stone gate? The witch window on the third floor? The sun roof? There’s a lot of backtracking. Infinitesimal reorienting.

I choose the witch window, but then I need to think about timing. Do I climb in at the stroke of midnight, or on a sun-dappled morning? Do I wait until frost has rimed the pane, or battle my way through thick summer spiderwebs and stumble, sticky and itching, into the attic?

I wallow in doubt, wondering how in the world one starts a novel. It doesn’t matter that I’ve done it before. It doesn’t matter that others have, too. Clearly, beginnings are impossible things. Fairy tales and not realities. Then, inevitably, excitement takes over. I’ve entered the maze of story, and the only way out is through.

I’ve done this enough times, now, to recognize this as a pattern. I’ll find my way in. But right now, I’m at the earliest stage, circling and circling and circling and new story, determined to find the best way in. And at this stage, the whole endeavor feels baffling and unfamiliar and possibly unattainable.

Project Updates

Speaking of projects, I’m juggling quite a few things at the moment while I’m between editorial rounds with HIGHER MAGIC:

• I finished a revision outline and synopsis for my magic embroidery novel, which I’ll start work on in the next month or so

• I’m outlining and experimenting with the opening chapters of a new dark academia novel that took me by storm this summer

• I got my agent’s feedback on the horror novella I drafted earlier this year, and I’ll be circling back to that soon

• The final episode of my audio drama The Way We Haunt Now releases October 12th - I’m probably going to do a whole retrospective here

Monthly Microfiction

THE WIND

by Courtney Floyd

The wind swirls falling leaves into a humanoid shape. It isn’t quite right. Serrated around the edges with a stem running crotch to crown, as though the shape were decided in consultation with the trees, inhuman forces replicating baffling mammalian forms.

It moves toward you, a bipedal dust devil, arm outstretched in supplication. Or is it something else? Want, perhaps. The possessiveness of a demigod or a demanding toddler.

You notice the snowflakes beginning to fall as its crisp, crackling fingers brush your cheeks.

For a moment, your breath leaves your body, joins its terrible eddying air. Your beings intermingle. And then, between one heartbeat and the next, the being is gone. The wind has died down and silence is absolute as you fall to your knees, breathless still. 

September Recommendations

• I need you to go out, right now, and find a copy of Starling House by Alix Harrow. It is a breathtaking book, perfect fall reading, incorporates the Orpheus and Eurydice story in a really fucking compelling way, and made me cry. You’re welcome.

• I recently read an advance copy of H.G. Parry’s The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, which is a sweeping, beautiful, heartbreaking historical fantasy set just after WWI on a magic campus in England. This was one of the best books of my reading year, it comes out October 22 - don’t miss it!

Thanks for wallowing with me!

Until next time,

Courtney