Hey , is your TBR too long?

A little while ago, you downloaded my novella, “The Horned Women.” You’ve probably also claimed a bunch of other free stories, so you may or may not have had a chance to read mine yet. I understand — I have a bunch of “this looks good” books sitting on my Kobo at 1% read, too. 

I know every story is not for every reader, so I’ve compiled this handy-dandy list to help you decide if you want to read “The Horned Women,” save it for a particular mood, or delete it from your e-reader and go skipping off into the sunset, unencumbered from readerly obligation.

And hey — no shade. These are all perfectly good reasons to choose or not choose a certain book. (Except I’m not a fan of #8, but you do you.) And if #9 was your only issue, please stick around…they’re coming. 

You don’t need to read The Horned Women if…

1. You like your “strong heroine” to come in with guns blazing.
2. I tend to write characters (both women and men) who start out not believing in their own power. Maura is overwhelmed by a messy divorce from a husband who undermined her. In each novella, she realizes more of her strength and finds more of her sense of self — but if you want a heroine who is confident, sassy, and is packing some firepower in her tight-fitting bodysuit, you might get frustrated with this one.
3. When you hear “fairy tale retelling,” you want Beauty & the Beast.
4. …or at least something you recognize from Disney.
5. I’ve been pulling these fairy tales from collections from the 1800’s and the Fenian Cycle (aka Finn McCool; it is pre-Arthurian). If you’ve read a lot of fairy tales, especially in the Celtic/Anglo-Saxon tradition, you will recognize the tropes and imagery — but it’s possible that even if you have read a lot of fairy tales, you won’t recognize every single tale in this series. 
6. You want to sink into a giant tome, staying with the same characters for weeks and answering every single question about their world.
7. This is a novella. It is designed to be a novella, and so are the other books in the series. 
8. Therefore, it doesn’t have the depth of a 500-page novel, but if you keep reading through the series, the characters continue to grow and more questions about the world are answered.
9. You’re looking for a plot like so many you’ve read before.
10. Entire sub-genres are built on this philosophy. Sometimes you just want to zone out in a book when you know what’s going to happen next. Readers call my plot “engaging and unexpected” and mention they stayed up late and abandoned chores to finish, so I guess it’s not easy to zone out. 
11. You like dark twisted monsters and lots of blood.
12. Lots of readers are looking for dark fantasy that keeps them trembling. 
13. That’s not what I wrote. At all.
14. Every story starts with a normal family interaction, and every novella pairs an internal story arc along with the fairy tale adventure. If you don’t care much about character development (this might go along with #1) you might get bored with those parts of the story.
15. However, it is based on Irish mythology, which certainly involves some dark and creepy.
16. You expect your heroine to be suspicious and skeptical.
17. I don’t think Maura is “walk into the basement to check out the noise in a horror movie” level naive, but I also don’t think she could have gotten through her marriage and divorce with her confidence intact.
18. As a historian, she thinks it’s pretty amazing to time-slip back into the history she loves and see what it’s really like. Apparently, some readers think this reaction makes absolutely no sense. (But stick around, you might like Hannah better. She lands in a medieval castle and she is peeved.)
19. You’re looking for witty banter and laugh-out-loud humor.
20. Me too! But my written humor leans more towards gentle irony and dry wit. Half my readers don’t even know it’s there. (Are you part of the half, or not?)
21. You have a strict definition of historical novels, and it only counts if it is set during a politically important time (preferably war), with primary sources backing up every plot point.
22. Frankly, these aren’t strict in any historical sense. They’re a time slip into a fairy tale world. 
23. Also, this definition really bothers me, because if “history is written by the victors” then this means we can only write historical fiction about the victors, backed up by the opinions that they codified in writing. That leaves out an awful lot of the globe, an awful lot of time periods, and most everything that wasn’t about white men. 
24. However, I am a historian, and I work to include historical context about the place and time periods covered. 
25. You want a book with sex.
26. Fair enough. I like romance books sometimes too, but in this case, I didn’t write one.
27. You hear “brother-sister love” and you’re wanting dark romance.
28. If you stick around my newsletter, I will definitely send you romance books, but they’re never going to be dark ones. I believe that consent is sexy, and sex is emotional. 
29. I'm writing actual kids, in normal kid relationships.
30. You like super tidy endings, or super tragic endings.
31. I write uplifting stories with happy endings. That’s my promise. 
32. But usually, people can’t have everything we want. To me, a “happy” ending is usually about solving some problems and realizing that’s enough — at least for now.
33. Also, Irish fairy tales acknowledge (ahem, wallow) in the misery and danger of life. I can’t take this canon and make everything happy.
34. You don’t like tea.
35. Just kidding. You are welcome to read my stories whether or not you enjoy tea — I just consumed an awful lot of it while writing them.

So there you go — a muffin pan of reasons why you don’t need to read my books! 

I have five kids; I bake muffins en masse

If you went through this and realize these books aren’t going to be to your taste, that’s fine! You can unsubscribe, or hang around for the puppy pictures. 

But maybe you saw something that means that THE HORNED WOMEN catapults to the top of your TBR pile…or maybe you want to check out the other "Castle in Kilkenny: Fairy Tales." I wrote books that I love to read, and I love to find fellow readers who love the same thing. 

Castle in Kilkenny: Fairy Tales

If you do like this kind of book, stick around — I'm sending out more cookies of the literary variety. ❤️📚

Sláinte!

Christy & the Shelties

Me with tea, at the Japanese gardens in San Francisco. I love both gardens and tea.

Inish does not have any human muffins, but says he would be perfectly willing to sample some. (Sorry, there is an extra non-me person in this picture, because if he weren't in the picture, Inish would be in the plate.)