I meant it when I said it. I still mean most of it.

The objection was never to the math. It was to what the big models were built out of—millions of books taken without asking, including books by writers I know, including writers who are still waiting on a royalty check or a legal settlement. You don’t get to bypass intellectual property rights by calling it training. I said no, and I said it loudly, and I said it on my own social media pages.

What changed wasn’t my ethics. It was my skill set.

I started learning to code. Not well, not at first. Certainly not fast, and with great frustration. Two books did most of the teaching: Al Sweigart’s Automate the Boring Stuff with Python and Charles Severance’s Python for Everybody. Both are free to read online, written by people who wanted beginners to succeed, and neither one assumed I had a computer science degree. When I got stuck—and I got stuck constantly, and often on things that turned out to be a missing colon—I asked in public forums, where strangers who knew a lot more about coding than I ever will answered a beginner’s question out of the goodness of their hearts.

But I have a neurodivergent brain that misfires constantly, and I had reached the point where the thing standing between me and my next book launch wasn’t craft. It was the admin of being a writer—the tracking, the remembering, the knowing what came before and what comes next. AIs/LLMs are built by programmers. So I thought: fine. I’ll be a programmer.

First, a dashboard

The first thing I built was Compass, because I needed it and nobody was going to build it for me the way I wanted it.

It’s a metrics dashboard for the Novel Concepts Publishing catalog. The number of ebook pages read, the books sold, the email list, reviews. Every series in one place, grouped by where it actually is—live, scheduled, in production, drafted, sketched out in a raw synopsis. A release plan where you change one date and the whole runway reschedules underneath it. A launch tab that lays out the run-up backward from launch day. A two-minute check-in for the days when logging one number is all I have in me.

It runs in my own browser. There’s no account, no server, no subscription, and nothing I type goes anywhere. Clear my browser data and it’s gone, which is the trade I chose on purpose. FYI: I back up every hour of every day. It has saved my life more times than I can count.

What Compass taught me had nothing to do with metrics. It taught me that I could build the tool I needed instead of searching for something someone else had made.

Then, the idea apps

So I built three more apps, just for fun (and I needed to avoid doing the hard work of writing fiction: neurodivergent brain works when it wants): Loom for romance, Gantry for science fiction, Rune for fantasy.

They’re workbenches for the brainstorming part of writing that happens before the writing. Prompts, tropes, settings, dynamics, complications, beats, cast wounds, structures. Draw a prompt, spark a premise out of parts you can lock and reroll, build a couple with a real wound between them, drop it all onto a framework. Gantry alone holds over 2,100 parts. A thousand of those are prompts.

I wrote them. By hand. Well, by keyboard (I have rheumatoid arthritis, and the hands don’t work so great).

That’s the whole point, and it’s the part I want other writers to hear clearly. There is no AI in those three apps. When you press Spark again, the app picks items at random from lists a human being sat down and wrote, and drops them into fixed sentence patterns. Nothing is composed. Nothing is predicted. Nothing is fetched. Once the file is open, it makes no network requests at all—the fonts are baked into it rather than pulled down from somewhere.

They will not finish your sentence, suggest a better word, or rate your idea. Those absences are the design. A tool that offers to do the writing teaches you to let someone else do the hard work.

Then the harder thing

And then I started building a Large Language Model to run in my own house, nestled in a server beneath my rolltop desk.

It’s trained on my own writing. Not the internet, not a scrape, not a torrent of somebody else’s novels. Mine—my finished manuscripts, my raw first drafts, my style rules, the list of my own neurodivergent tics that I’ve been compiling for years and that no other writer alive would want anyway. I could have added public-domain work, and I thought about it, but prose has changed a great deal since 1930 (the copyright cut-off) and I don’t need my continuity checker talking like a 1928 shipboard mystery, or recording series details like Jane Austen or Emily Brontë or Shakespeare.

It runs on a used server ($800 bucks on eBay), in my home, on my own power. My electric bill runs about $80 a month on a local membership cooperative (cheap compared to Duke Power or whatever). Whatever a server in the kneehole of my desk adds to that, it will be a number I can see on a bill with my name on it, which is more than anyone can say about a query sent to a data center in a state they’ve never even visited, not to mention the huge amounts of water those use. It isn’t free, granted, and I’m not going to pretend it is. Maybe someday I’ll be able to afford solar panels on the roof to cut my electric bill.

Here is what I actually use it for.

Continuity, across a novel and across a series—what color were her eyes in chapter three, what did that character eat at the banquet, is the hero’s scar on the same side of his jaw. Series bibles and worldbuilding, held in one place instead of in eleven documents and a pile of notecards and my abysmal memory. Structural reads: where a beat is missing, where the middle sags, where my heroine picked up a sword and forgot it was still in her hand when she climbed into bed. Where was I, when I come back after two weeks away and I can’t remember where I was in the editing process.

All of it is executive function work. All of it is the stuff I cannot manage on my own and have never been able to manage on my own.

It does not write my sentences. It was never going to. I built it specifically so it wouldn’t; the drafting side is deliberately fenced off, and the parts that touch my prose only ever produce reports and new files. I may use it to clean up the punctuation (Too many commas? Not enough commas? I can’t tell), or remove repeated words (those damn tic phrases that I looove!), or remove a sentence that says something I’ve already put in three times in a single chapter.

The flag

Yes, my writing may get flagged as AI-assisted. I’ve made my peace with that.

But I’d like the conversation to get more precise than it currently is, because “AI-assisted” has stopped meaning anything. A model I built, trained on my own words, running on my own hardware, that never generates prose and never sends a syllable off my property unless I put it in a docx and hit “send,” is not the same object as a subscription to a service built on other people’s stolen books. Treating those two things as one thing serves the companies, not the writers.

Open source is how writers get to have this without funding the thing we objected to in the first place. The models are out there. The tooling is free. The community support from people who know how to do this is free in the forums. The body of work can be your own.

If you want to start

You don’t need to be a programmer. I wasn’t one when I started, and I’m still a beginner by any real measure. Read Automate the Boring Stuff with Python—the title is the whole promise, and the boring stuff is exactly what’s eating your writing time. Read Python for Everybody alongside it when you want the underlying ideas rather than the recipes. Both are free online. Then find a forum and ask your stupid question, because the answer is usually one line and somebody is willing to give it to you. I’ve asked a thousand stupid questions and no one has ever been unkind.

Start with the smallest annoying thing. Mine was not knowing which of my books were where in the pipeline. Build the tool that fixes that one thing. My Compass dashboard came before the idea apps, and the idea apps came before I had any business touching an LLM. Each one taught me enough to build the next.

And build the ones with no AI in them first. Loom, Gantry, and Rune ideas apps do real work for me and there isn’t a neural network anywhere in them—just lists, written by a person, shuffled into an order nobody planned. That moment when you look at an unlikely collection of parts and think no, but it’s almost there—that thought is yours. It was always going to be the only part that mattered.

***

FYI I am planning to package the ideas apps for you to purchase, if it sounds like something you’d appreciate. I’ll announce it here in the Teahouse, when the apps have been tested (thank you, Betas!) and are ready to share with the writing community.

I follow two Facebook groups about older women buying houses together. Senior Women Co-Housing and Golden Girls Gang Housing Community. Women in their sixties and seventies working out shared mortgages, who gets the bedroom with the good view out the windows, what the policy is on pets.

The reason took me a long time to say plainly, without softening it first: I am autistic, and I cannot live that close to other people. Not for just a season, not without enormous effort, not even if everyone involved is kind. A shared kitchen would rip me apart in a month. So I read those groups the way you’d read a travel magazine about a country you can’t imagine going to.

It isn’t only the living-with. Most days I cannot fathom leaving the house at all. That was always true to some degree, and it has gotten much worse since the pandemic—going out now feels like walking onto a battleground, and I am not a soldier. I don’t say that for sympathy. I say it because it is the fact that shapes every other fact in this post and because I suspect it is more common than the number of people willing to say it out loud.

Here is what it costs. I have one close friend, from college, which I went to less than ten years ago. I used to drive out and see her and her family regularly. I have not been able to make myself do it in a long while now. Nothing happened between us. There was no falling out. The road is the same road. I simply cannot get onto it, and every month I don’t, the not-doing gets a little more established.

That is the loss that isn’t abstract. The rest of what I’m about to tell you is arithmetic about a future. That first one is a person, right now, who I love and do not see.

*** I turned sixty-five this year. I have never married. I have no children. I live next door to my ninety-year-old mother, and I am the person who keeps her going, which is a job with no title and no end date and nothing to show anyone. It is just what I do. My closest family is my sister and her sons. That is the whole of it.

I never had a career either, and until very recently I would have stopped that sentence there and let it stand.

What I had instead was college.

I enrolled at forty-eight, carrying a terror I could not put down—that I would walk into a classroom full of people young enough to be my children and find out I couldn’t handle it. I was not there out of love of learning. I was frightened. I was looking at old age with no safety net under it, and I chose Medical Transcription because it was work I could do from home without having to be in a building with anyone. That was the plan. It was also, as I discovered shortly afterward, a plan for a field that was in the middle of moving overseas.

But I loved being in college. So I added a second two-year program in Library Information Technology, and took the community college’s two lonely Creative Writing courses on the side. Then a man came down from the state university to talk to us about transferring and finishing a four-year degree, and handed out catalogs, and I found Creative Writing in one of them, and the thing was decided before he finished speaking.

I transferred to the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. A semester in, I learned I could double major, and put English Literature on top of the Creative Writing. An anthropology course in Ancient Britain and Ireland came with a class trip to the sites, so I went to England and Ireland, my first (and possibly only) trip abroad. Then the English degree made me eligible to apply through the Honors Program for study abroad, and I was given a grant, and I spent five weeks traveling through Scotland.

I had never in my life imagined I could do a thing like that. It changed what I thought I was.

Five degrees, in the end. The last one a low-residency master’s in Writing for Children and Young Adults.

None of it turned into income. That is the reason I have spent years introducing myself as a woman who never had a career, and it is also the reason that sentence is wrong. I did the hardest thing I have ever attempted, starting at forty-eight, frightened the entire time, and I finished it five times over. College was my career.

And here is the part I need to put down, because it is the true measure of where I am now, and it is not flattering. In my fifties, I got on an airplane by myself and traveled around Scotland for five weeks.

This year I have not been able to drive to my friend’s house.

I have also, this year, been back in contact with people I went to high school with.

They have had lives. Marriages, some of them long. Children and now grandchildren. Careers with retirements attached. Trips to places I have only read about. They post photographs, and I look at the photographs and think two things at once, and the two things do not agree.

The first is that all of it passed me by.

The second is stranger. They look old to me. Genuinely old, the way our parents looked when we were just beginning our lives. And I do not feel anywhere near their age.

I sat with that contradiction a while before I understood it, and I am not sure I like the explanation. Interior age has less to do with years than with how much of your life you have already spent. They spent theirs. The decades that went into the marriages and the jobs and the children are decades that are gone now, used, converted into the photographs. Mine did not get spent that way. I have been reading that as emptiness. It is at least worth considering that some of it is unspent instead.

***

When I’m feeling lost or directionless, I use the I Ching. Not as fortune-telling—as a way of putting a question somewhere outside my own head so I have to look at it from an angle that isn’t mine. Some people journal. Some people talk to a therapist. I throw coins.

A few days ago I asked it, in as many words, whether I had wasted my life.

It declined to discuss my life entirely.

What came back was Hexagram 8, which is about belonging and where you fit and whether you choose to join, and it changed to Hexagram 3, which is about things that are only beginning. Not a word about the past. I asked for a verdict on forty years of failure and got handed back a question about connection and a picture of a seedling.

I asked again the next day, differently: is there a future of value here? That one came back as wind. The hexagram about influence that works by yielding to the shape of things and moving through them rather than against them, that never meets resistance because it never confronts anything, that changes whole landscapes and leaves no mark you could photograph. Small successes only. Nothing dramatic.

I am aware of how convenient that is for me. A woman who has produced no visible evidence of a life might be very glad to hear about a kind of influence that leaves no visible evidence. I have turned it over, and I still think there is something in it. Most of what holds a family together was never written down anywhere.

The same reading carried a warning, and the warning was the useful part. It said, more or less: searching under the bed is fine, and searching under the bed forever will cost you your tools.

I have been under the bed since March.

***

There is one more thing pressing on me and I want to put it down honestly, because it is the piece I am least able to reason my way out of.

My life is my writing. Not as a figure of speech. It is the work, the structure of my days, the one room where I am fully capable, and it is nearly the whole of my contact with the world.

I do not do it alone, which is worth saying in a post this preoccupied with being alone.

My sister founded Novel Concepts Publishing, and she founded it in large part for me—so that I would have somewhere to bring work without auditioning for it, without explaining myself first, without performing the role of a writer who is easy to be in a room with. She built it out from there for other neurodivergent and differently-abled women who write, because it turns out there are a great many of us and almost nowhere to go.

And there is the Teahouse, where you are reading this. I use the word home for it and I mean it plainly: a place where I already belong. I don’t have to arrive. I don’t have to be introduced to anyone. Nobody here needs me to make small talk first, and the people I am talking to are built more or less the way I am built.

I have spent this whole post describing what I lack, and the truth is that I have a publisher who is also my sister, and a room full of my own kind, and none of it requires me to get in a car and go worlding.

Which is why the panic over AI writing frightens me the way it does. Not because of what I do, but because of how my sentences come out—the rhythms of a neuroscrappy brain that has always written a little sideways. The detection tools are known to misfire on writing that departs from the expected pattern, which is a category that includes autistic writers, non-native speakers, and anyone whose prose was formed somewhere other than a workshop. There is no appeal process. There is no burden of proof. There is a screenshot, and a number, and a comment section.

I have spent my whole life being told my way of processing is wrong. It would be a particular joke for the accusation to arrive now, aimed at the only thing I have to call my own.

***

So. The plan, such as it is.

The Facebook groups made me believe I was disqualified from community altogether, because I looked at the only model on offer—one house, one kitchen, everybody in it—and knew I could not survive it. But that is not the request I need to make. I do not want housemates. What I want is for one person to be close enough to notice when my lights don’t come on.

Those are different things. Proximity without intimacy: adjacent lots, a duplex with a wall between, the village-network arrangements. Nobody expects me at dinner. Somebody drives me to the eye appointment. Once I separated those two ideas, the wall I had been staring at turned out to be a door in the wrong place.

What I am actually going to do next is worldbuild.

It is the tool I have. I have spent years constructing societies and working out what they run on, who gets left out of them, what happens to a person in that world when the supports fail. I am going to point that at my own next twenty years and build the thing properly—the dystopian version first, because you cannot design for a system until you have been honest about how it fails.

There is a risk in that, and I can see it clearly. Building a dystopia is not the same as moving into one, and I know which of those I am prone to. That is what the warning about the bed was for.

I am not okay. I want to be honest about that, because I read a lot of essays that arrive at peace three paragraphs before the writer had actually reached it, and I don’t believe those essays and neither do you.

But I have stopped treating not okay as a description of my whole life rather than of this year.

The seedling hexagram says the work at the beginning is not to choose a destination. It is to find your helpers—anything at all that widens the ground you’re standing on.

I have been reading those Facebook groups for two years looking for a house.

I think I was looking for the ground to build it on.

Postscript: I am going to buy a Powerball ticket this week, if I can pry myself out of my cave. The jackpot is $905 million.

I know it isn’t a plan. The plan is a notary, and a phone call, and the letter I owe my friend. I have just spent an entire post arguing that the small, dull, incremental thing is the one that actually works, and I stand behind every word of it.

I am going to hand over my two dollars anyway, for a ticket certifying that a completely different life is technically possible.

Life-changing, the ads call it. I would settle for a hundred acres and a solid-built house.

Hillora Lang is a fantasy and romantasy author with a deep love of folklore, lyrical language, and intricate magical systems. She holds associate degrees in General Studies (Cape Fear Community College) and Library Information Technology (Central Carolina Community College), a BFA in Creative Writing and a BA in English Literature (UNCW), and an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults (Vermont College of Fine Arts).

Her work blends wonder with the everyday, pairing atmospheric worldbuilding with grounded emotional stakes and romances built on equal agency. When she is not drafting new worlds or refining a spell’s logic, Hillora can usually be found papercrafting, collecting books and interesting stones, or being outnumbered by her pets. On Substack, she shares practical craft guidance, prompt-driven inspiration, and thoughtful looks at the themes that make speculative fiction linger.

Volume I: Declarations of Temporal Acceptance

Being Daily Affirmations for the Regency Gentleperson
Who Has Embraced Supernatural Chaos

For Those Who Have Accepted That Reality Is Merely a Suggestion

Dear Affirmer of the Absurd:

You have discovered these affirmations at precisely the moment when you need them most—which is to say, after your reflection has begun attending assemblies without permission, your left gloves have formed a political organization, and your Tuesday has permanently relocated to another timeline entirely.

This is normal. Or rather, it is your new normal, and the sooner you accept this through daily affirmation, the sooner you may achieve peace with the fact that your village has moved three miles north, your shadow arrives at appointments before you do, and your tea tastes of moonlight and promises.

These affirmations are designed to help you embrace the magnificent chaos of supernatural existence in Regency England. They will guide you toward accepting that time is optional, that bargains you do not recall making serve purposes beyond your comprehension, and that your houseplants are discussing you in photosynthesis language with entirely justified criticism.

Speak these affirmations aloud each morning, preferably whilst standing in a fairy ring or gazing into a mirror that may or may not contain your actual reflection. Repeat them until you believe them, or until your words begin emerging as rhyming couplets, whichever comes first.

The universe rewards acceptance. Begin here.

~ The Society for Embracing Supernatural Inconvenience

Temporal Inconsistencies Are Expected

I am worthy of losing entire days to fairy rings and emerging unbothered by the temporal inconsistencies this creates in my social calendar.

My Reflection’s Independence

I embrace my reflection’s independent activities and trust that whatever assemblies it attends without me serve my highest good.

Centuries Are Constructs

I release my attachment to knowing which century I currently inhabit and accept that time is a construct designed to limit my experience.

Read more

Come in. The kettle’s on, and I’ll be honest with you, this is not the cozy chat I had planned for this week.

Something new arrived here on Substack in late July. If you’ve been on the platform at all, you’ve probably seen it by now: a little scan you can run on anything over 100 words: a post, a note, somebody’s comment, which comes back and tells you how much of it a machine thinks was written by a machine. Substack CEO Chris Best announced it. He was decent about it. He said that not everything made with AI is slop and not all slop is made with AI, and that the tool is not perfect. He’s worried about feeds filling up with text nobody meant, which is a fair thing to be worried about.

I’m worried about it too. It’s easy when you know: you can just tell which Notes were written by AI, because there’s like two lines, and then a question. No human talks like that. Maybe not all of them are AI, maybe somewhere somebody put out a template, like “Write your Notes like this and you’ll get subscribers.” Maybe, maybe not. Same with articles/posts. There are tells, but it’s getting hard to sort out the AI from the human.

So the detector on Substack: I still think this is going to hurt people. I think I can tell you which people.

I came to all of this through Dale L. Roberts, whose Self-Publishing with Dale podcast covered it on the 30th in an episode called “How Substack’s AI Detector Puts Authors at Risk.” If you publish your own books and you’re not following his news roundups, you should. He pointed at what happened here on Substack, and I went and had a look.

Here is what I found, and I’ll spare you most of the studies.

The uncomfortable part first. The detector Substack chose is good. It is not the junk from three years ago that flagged the Declaration of Independence or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Independent researchers have tested it and it holds up well. One critic who wrote a savage piece about it went back, called up some computer scientists, and posted a correction on his own article saying he’d gotten some of it wrong. I’m telling you this because I’d rather you heard it from me than from someone in the comments, and because the accuracy—or the errors—is precisely the problem.

The company says it gets it wrong about once in every ten thousand times. Consider that: one in ten thousand sounds like nothing at all. Now think about how much writing goes up on Substack every day before you’ve had your first cup of coffee (or your third - I drink a lot of coffee! Sorry teahouse: that’s my dirty little secret). A computer scientist at Princeton did the same figuring for a university, and worked out that if you scanned every essay a student handed in over four years, somewhere between five and ten percent of them would be accused of cheating at least once. Not because the tool is broken. Because it is very close to right, and there are an awful lot of essays.

And honestly? Close isn’t close enough.

A very nearly right machine is worse than an obviously wrong one, because nobody checks a number that’s usually correct.

Then there’s the part that made me put my cup down.

A writer named Charlie Finch ran a test at the end of July and published the whole thing. He wrote 226 words himself, at his own desk, out of his own curly head (sorry, Charlie, if you’re bald. Or straight-haired. No judgment!) He ran his words through the detector. The machine said human, which was correct. Then he spent about an hour and a half deliberately editing it to sound like a robot. Swapped plain words for fancy ones. Turned verbs into nouns. Stretched the sentences. Took out every I (although I don’t see why an AI who writes in first-person POV would get a pass). Scanned it again and the machine said one hundred percent AI-generated, which it was not, because he’d written every word of it.

So far, it’s basically a party trick. But here’s where it stops being funny.

He started putting it back. One edit at a time, scanning after each one. He expected the number to slide back gradually the way you’d expect. It didn’t. It lurched. He put version back in place of iteration and the verdict moved. He put also back in place of likewise, which is the plainer and more 21st-century-reader-friendlier word of the two and the one on every list of robot tells, and the verdict moved the wrong way. Then he deleted the word revision, and the whole passage came back as one hundred percent human.

One word. And when he measured the two versions, the one the machine had just certified as human was, by every measurement he could take, closer to the robot version than to the thing he’d actually written.

There’s a man on a tech forum who found his own writing flagged, fiddled with it for ages, and eventually discovered that deleting three bullet points, just the little dots, not one word of text, made it pass as human.

I don’t think this makes the tool a fraud. Every machine like this has to draw a line somewhere, and a line has to fall in some particular place. What bothers me is that the reader never sees how close the call was. You see a verdict. Delivered with total confidence and supposed authority. With no hint that a synonym could have sent it the other way.

Now, then: who actually gets caught by this?

Not the slop merchants. They ran their output through a laundering tool before they posted it, and they’ll use a better one next month. The people who get caught are the ones who used a tool casually and didn’t think to hide it, and the ones who never touched anything and simply write oddly (neurodivergent authors, I see you!).

And I know exactly who writes oddly, because I publish them and my own sister is one of them.

The clearest evidence is about people writing in their second language, who got flagged in enormous numbers by the older tools for the crime of using shorter sentences and a smaller vocabulary. For the rest of us it’s mostly stories, and the stories are grim. A young autistic woman called Moira Olmsted, flagged by her university, given a zero grade and a warning that she wouldn’t get the benefit of the doubt a second time. A professor at Purdue, Rua Williams, accused of being a bot online, who answered: “It’s not an AI. I’m just autistic.”

Consistent structure. Coming back to the same phrasing because you like it. Keeping a formal register because that’s the way you think. Repeating a thing on purpose, because the repetition is doing work. None of that is a defect. For a great many of the writers I know, it is simply the shape of a mind arriving on a page. And it looks, to a machine trained to spot regularity, exactly like a machine.

Which brings me to the bit I actually mind the most.

Substack has added a lovely little feature where you can write a note explaining how you make your work. It’s optional. It will not stay optional, not really, because the moment a scanner exists, saying nothing starts to mean something. (We in the Teahouse will be taking care of this, as soon as we have a minute.) And for some writers, explaining their process means explaining their whole selves. It means telling a comment section about the voice capture they use when their hands won’t cooperate, or the second pass that turns their raw first draft into something a stranger can follow, or the tool that gets them from a head full of random thoughts to a page of comprehensible text, on the days when that road is closed to them.

Everyone keeps calling this a witch hunt. It’s the phrase in every article written about it, I’ve used it myself twice already, and I think it’s worth stopping to remember what those two words actually described.

A witch hunt was never a search for witches. It was a procedure in which the accusation did the work of the evidence. The cleverness of it, if you can stand to call it that, was that no answer counted as innocence. Protest and you’re a witch. Go quiet and you’re a witch. They put a woman in the water and if she floated she was guilty and if she sank she was dead, and either way the village had its answer and went home to its dinner.

Now look at what a writer faces on their Substack page. Scan clean and you’re fine, for now. Scan dirty and your denial sounds precisely like what a guilty person would say. Switch the scan off and you look like a woman with something to hide. Three doors, one room behind all of them.

And it isn’t only this. That’s the part wearing me thin.

I have watched a great many things turn into a test over the last few years, and the test is never really about the thing. There is always somebody human on the receiving end of it. Prove your work is yours. Prove your motives are what you said. Prove you belong in the room you are already standing in, and be quick about it, because everyone’s watching. The accusation gets around the world before dinner. The correction, if it ever comes at all, reaches eleven people, four of whom have forgotten what it was all about in the first place. And a human’s reputation is trashed, with no way back.

I’m tired. Not of the argument. I’ll have the argument all day and bring snacks. (Fresh-baked scones, anyone?) I’m tired of living in a world where everything you do and say can be fodder for another attack..

And I’ll say the honest part, because it’s the part nobody says. Suspicion feels wonderful. It feels like we’re having ethical standards. It feels like defending something you love from people who don’t love it as much as you do. I have felt it, and I’d guess you have too, and anyone who has ever cared seriously about anything has felt it, which is exactly why it spreads so easily and gets examined so rarely by the people doing the spreading. Nobody believes they are in a mob. Everybody believes they are paying attention.

So here is what we’ve decided at the Teahouse, and it’s two separate things.

The first is that we’ve turned the scan off on this publication. If you go looking for it you’ll see a little notice saying detection isn’t available here. I’m aware that switching it off looks a lot like refusing a breathalyzer, and that is exactly why it wants doing loudly, with the reasons attached, by enough of us that it stops looking like guilt and starts looking like an ethical position. Plenty of others are doing the same, or will be.

It is not a position on whether people should use these tools. Truly. That is not mine to rule on, and I have no interest whatsoever in the job. Every writer has to work out where their own line sits, what these things cost, what they give back, and how much of that they care to say out loud. Those are real decisions made by people who know their own circumstances, and they deserve better than a percentage in a stranger’s browser. What I’m declining is narrower: I won’t keep a judging machine on my own page, aimed at whoever wanders past, myself included.

This Teahouse is one room. I can’t do a thing about the weather outside it, and I’ve stopped pretending I can. But I can decide what happens in here. What happens in here is that we read things, and talk about them, and take each other at our word until given an actual reason not to. There will be no ducking stool by the door. There is a kettle, and a good chair by the window, and a back room I’m still not entirely sure about (gremlins? goblins? brownies?), and that is the full inventory.

The second thing is that we don’t run our authors’ books through a detector. Not before we take them on, not before release, not because a reader thought a paragraph sounded funny. A manuscript belongs to the person who wrote it, and sending an unpublished one off to a company whose terms might be rewritten next spring is a decision you can’t take back. And a number, once it exists, is an argument. It can be screenshotted and remembered. A private editorial judgment can be argued with. A red percentage next to somebody’s name cannot.

We’ve got older tools anyway, and there’s nothing mysterious about them.

We meet once a month, in person, around somebody’s kitchen table or in a room at the library or in a coffeehouse. We build worlds out loud and we argue about why a character does the ridiculous thing she does in chapter nine and whether anyone will follow her into the graveyard, or wears the red shirt when she knows it means she’s done for. Then everyone goes away and writes, and the pages come back to us, sometimes a chapter at a time, sometimes ten or fifteen thousand words in one go, along with all the side-writing that will never see print. The backstory. The scrap scenes. The letters between two characters that exist purely because the writer needed to know what they’d say to each other in private. Nobody generates that to fool a scanner. Nobody generates that at all. It exists because somebody couldn’t stop thinking about people who aren’t real (or are they?).

We recently had our first weekend retreat in western North Carolina, where we broke several plots, mended a couple more, and mapped out two years of releases.

By the time a book is finished, we have watched it being made. We know which subplot was rescued and which one died on a whiteboard. No percentage tells us more than that.

Now. One more thing, and it’s a confession of sorts, which I admit is an odd note to strike after several hundred words insisting that nobody owes anybody an account of their process.

That is exactly the point. Nobody owes it. I’m going to give you my sister’s anyway, freely, and the difference between those two things is the entire argument I’ve just made.

Hillora said no to AI, loudly, on her own pages, and she meant every word. Her objection was never to the mathematics. It was to the millions of books taken without asking, some of them written by people we know, some of those people still waiting on a settlement. That objection hasn’t shifted an inch.

What changed is that Hillora learned to code.

She built a dashboard for the Novel Concepts Publishing catalog, because nobody was going to build the one we wanted. Then she went on to build three brainstorming apps that contain no AI whatsoever—just very long lists a human being sat down and typed, shuffled into orders nobody planned. And then, more recently, a small large language model living on a secondhand server in the kneehole of her rolltop desk, trained on nothing but her own manuscripts, her own rough drafts, her own style rules, and a catalog of her own bad habits that no other writer alive would have any use for.

It tells her what color the heroine’s eyes were in chapter three. Whether the scar is on the same side of the hero’s jaw. Where on earth she was in the edit when she walked away two weeks ago. It is executive function, in a box, for a woman who has never had much of her own.

It does not write her sentences. She built it so that it couldn’t.

Will that get Hillora’s writing flagged one day? Almost certainly. But she’s made her peace with it. Just as many writers are forced to produce paper copies of scribbled notes in different colors of ink these days, to prove they wrote the stories that came out of those notes, my sister may one day have to produce the Python code she used to program her personal LLM.

Next week she’ll give you the whole thing—what she built, what it cost her (a lot of hours!), what she got wrong on the way, and why she thinks a model made of your own words is not the same thing as a subscription to an AI generator made from other people’s. For today I’ll only say this. She decided where her line was. Then she chose to tell you, because she wanted to, and I support her in this.

A writer named Monica Hebert said the thing best, in a comment under Substack’s own announcement. A scan might guess whether a tool was involved. It cannot tell you who had the original thought, who lived the thing, who threw out the first version, who put the humor back in, who moved the ending. It can’t tell you who supplied the life in the story.

That’s the actual question, isn’t it? Not was a machine’s footprint here? But what does this writing mean to my life?

I can’t promise you the rest of it will calm down. It shows no sign of calming down. But you are allowed a room where nobody is being weighed at the door, and if I can only manage one of those, this is the one I’ve got.

So write the way you write. If a machine finds your sentences suspiciously well organized, that is a fact about the machine, and I’d rather have your sentences.

The kettle’s still on. Pull your chair up to the table. And read us some of what you’ve written today.

Where I got all this: Dale L. Roberts, “How Substack’s AI Detector Puts Authors at Risk,” Self-Publishing News, July 30, 2026. Chris Best’s announcement, “Against Claudefishing”. Charlie Finch’s experiment, “Fooling Pangram: How One Word Made Me Human”. Matteo Wong in The Atlantic, “America Has a Pangram Problem.” Tim Requarth’s long piece and his correction to it, which is where the Princeton figures and the Moira Olmsted story come from. Liang et al. in Patterns (2023) on writers in a second language. Monica Hebert, quoted in Substack’s own round-up of reactions.

I run a small press, and most of the writers I publish will never tell you their names.

That is not an accident, and it is not shyness. They write under pen names because being findable would cost them something real: a job that would not survive the subject matter, a custody arrangement, an address one specific person must never connect to a book, a diagnosis that makes performing warmth at a camera cost more than writing the chapter did. Novel Concepts exists in large part to make that possible. Anonymity, for the women I publish, is not a handicap to be overcome. It is a design choice, and holding the door open for it is one of the reasons the press is here at all.

So they stay shadowed. I am the exception, by choice, so that they can be.

For a long time that arrangement was the whole of it, and it worked. A writer would arrive with a manuscript she had carried for years, usually a first book, usually written in hours stolen from a life that did not have many to spare. We would help her finish it and put it into the world under a name that kept her safe. And then the part nobody warns you about would begin, because the writing is not the part that breaks people.

The silence is.

A book goes live on a Tuesday. Two people buy it, and one of them is your mother. By the following Tuesday the number has stopped moving, and what lands is not disappointment exactly. It is a verdict. The quiet reads as the market’s considered judgment on the book, or on its inability to even be found among the masses, and on the year you spent writing and polishing, and somewhere underneath that, on you. I watched writer after writer arrive at that same Tuesday and read it the same wrong way.

The thing is, the silence is not a verdict. It is the ordinary weather of a crowded storefront, and it can be understood, and most of what an author needs to do about it can be done in four decent hours a week by a tired person who cannot predict which four hours those will be. I knew that, because I had watched it up close for years. What I had not done was write any of it down.

The writers are the ones who told me to. Not once, and not gently. The woman whose second book finally found its readers after we fixed nothing but the category it was sitting in. The one who spent a season building an audience before her launch instead of after, and arrived to a room with people already in it. They kept saying the same thing, in different words: someone should write this part down, the honest version, the one that does not assume you have a face to show or a week a month to give. And then, more quietly, they started saying the other thing. That it had helped. That I should say so, out loud, where they could not.

They cannot say it themselves. That is the whole point of how we are built. So they asked me to, and this line of guides is the answer, and this Substack is where I am keeping my end of it.

What the guides are

There are twenty-two of them. They are short, they are cheap, and each one takes a single question and finishes it.

None of them teaches anyone to write. Not one. They start at the moment a finished manuscript exists and its author cannot find a single reader, which is exactly where the writers I publish kept getting stranded, and exactly where the rest of the writing advice industry tends to leave off. Everything I learned watching them get unstranded is in here.

A guide runs eight to twelve chapters. Each chapter opens on a situation you will recognize, makes its argument, gives you the practical part, and closes on a page headed If you only do one thing, which exists for the weeks when one thing is all you have. Every platform claim carries a named source and the date I checked it, so you can tell how old the information is and go verify it yourself. Where a number was going to be stale within the year, I pointed at the live source instead of freezing a figure that would quietly become a lie.

You will not find a case study in any of them. No invented author, no composite client, no screenshot of a dashboard belonging to a person who does not exist. When I could not source a claim, I cut it and said in the back matter that I had cut it. That is a strange thing to advertise, and I am advertising it anyway, because the industry these books sit next to runs on numbers nobody can trace.

There are no income claims. There is no system. Nothing in here will tell you what you will earn, because I do not know what you will earn, and neither does anyone selling you the confident version.

Where to start, depending on what is wrong

Twenty-two titles is too many to browse cold, so here is how I would route you.

If you just published and nothing is happening. The First Fifty Copies is the one I would hand you first. It documents what the beginning actually looks like: the real timelines, the real ratio of effort to result, the point at which most people quit and what it looks like just past that point. It is not encouragement. It is weather reporting. The Minimum Viable Author is for the version of you with four good hours a week and no way to predict which four. It is built so that on a terrible week, one small task runs and the rest of the machine keeps working.

If your book is out and you think the problem might be the book. It usually is not. Black Box is about running ads on platforms that stopped explaining themselves. Ask the Machine is about what happens now that readers have quietly stopped searching and started asking a chatbot what to read next. Nobody has told indie authors how those four answers get chosen. This one goes and looks. Human, Verified is about the question readers did not have five years ago: did anybody actually write this? It takes the suspicion seriously instead of complaining about it. Faceless is the one closest to the bone here. Building a reader audience without showing your face. Every platform assumes an author who will point at herself, and the available guidance offers nothing to the writer who cannot.

If you already have books sitting there earning nothing. Dead Stock is the cheapest action on this list, because you already own the goods. Which titles are worth reopening, which are not, and how to tell a book nobody found from a book people found and declined. Book Two is for the decision that cannot be undone: sequel to a book nobody read, something else in the same category, or out of the category entirely. Every adviser says write the next book. This one says which one, and shows its work. When to Stop asks the question the rest of the shelf refuses. How would you know? It sits directly opposite The First Fifty Copies, on purpose.

If you need readers and do not have any yet. Two Hundred Readers is the arithmetic of the small committed audience, which is a findable quantity in a way that a hundred thousand indifferent followers is not. Serial Habit is about giving a story away so that book one arrives to a room with people in it. Borrowed Audiences covers swaps, group promos, and what a borrowed subscriber is actually worth against what the borrowing costs you. Free examines the oldest instruction in this business, and what has been quietly done to the mechanism that used to make it work. The Back of the Book is the short, unglamorous one about the last page of your novel, which is the most valuable advertising space you will ever own and is currently blank.

If you are trying to make a business decision and everyone is arguing instead of counting. Exclusive on the Kindle Unlimited question, with the arithmetic that takes an evening and settles it for your catalog specifically. Out Loud on what an audiobook costs now that the floor fell out, and whether it pays. Elsewhere on foreign-language editions and which markets are large enough to matter. The Other Shelf on libraries, which buy books, lend them repeatedly, pay for the privilege, and are invisible in indie advice because nobody makes money teaching authors to reach them. The Treadmill prices rapid release, including the part of the price the orthodoxy is least willing to name. Rented Land maps what you own, what you are leasing, and what would survive if a platform changed its terms overnight. Stolen separates piracy that costs you money from piracy that costs you a week of your life, and says which is which.

And one that is not about your book at all. Marks vs. Scammers is about the industry positioned exactly where I am positioned, addressing exactly this reader, and taking several thousand dollars from her for a press release nobody reads. Almost nobody qualified to write that book is willing to, because almost everyone qualified also has something to sell. I sell books and nothing else, which is the entire credential.

Where the Indie Author Guides are and what they cost

They live at novelconceptsteahouse.com.

Each one is $6.50, delivered as a PDF you download and keep. There is no subscription, no course, no upsell waiting on the other side of the purchase, and no funnel. You buy the guide, you get the guide, and I have no further claim on you.

I priced them where I did on purpose. These are meant to cost less than one bad decision, and considerably less than the marketing package somebody is currently trying to sell you.

If you would rather test one before trusting the rest, take The First Fifty Copies or Dead Stock. The first will tell you whether I am honest about the hard part. The second will pay for itself or it will not, and you will know inside a weekend.

I will spend the next while telling you how the line came to be, why it refuses to make you a single promise about outcomes, why so many good writers stay out of view, and how I ended up running a press at all. The short version is the one I owe the writers first: they built something real, in the shadows, and they told me to stand in the light and say so.

So here I am, saying it.

— Catherine McDowell

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The rooster started at 5:12. Which was fine, because we were already awake, coffee in hand, arguing about a character who does not technically exist yet.

That is roughly the whole retreat in one sentence, but we’ll give you the longer version, because the longer version has goats in it.

Here’s how it started. Back in the spring, the two of us floated an idea that had been sitting around for a while: what if everybody at Novel Concepts went to the mountains for a weekend? Bring whatever you’re in the middle of. We’ll cook, we’ll walk, and somewhere between the coffee and the second walk we’ll talk about what each of us is working on and what we want on shelves over the next couple of years. We were the ones who said it out loud first, and that is the entire extent of our authority in this matter. Kohana Vale found the farm. Wren Carlisle handled the food, which turned out to be the single most consequential decision anyone made all weekend (who knew vegetarian fare could be so yummy?!?). Laurel Montrose brought a whiteboard that nobody used. Lyra Swann drove in Friday evening with a manuscript riding in the passenger seat like a chaperone.

There were no panels. No agenda printed on nice paper. Nobody presenting to anybody. Six writers at a kitchen table, all of us stuck on our own book and unreasonably clear-eyed about everyone else’s.

The farm

We rented what has to be the most charming Airbnb in western North Carolina: a farmhouse on working land outside Hendersonville, with chickens who ran the place, ducks who had a strong committee-like energy about them, and goats who took a genuine and immediate interest in our luggage. One of them looked us over the way an editor looks over a first draft. We were found wanting. We were also, we suspect, forgiven.

You learn things about people on a farm that you don’t learn on a call. You learn who feeds the chickens without being asked. You learn who names the ducks by day two and then can’t stop using the names in conversation, and you learn who pretends not to be charmed by this and is, in fact, entirely charmed.

The porch had the good kind of morning fog. The kitchen table had the good kind of mess: notebooks, index cards, three laptops, a cooling teapot, and somebody’s abandoned toast.

The woods

We walked. That was half the point of coming.

There were long rambling walks in the woods where nobody had to talk, and there was hiking out to waterfalls, which is the Hendersonville area’s great party trick. You can stack several of them into a single afternoon here, each one a little different, each one loud enough that you stop trying to have a conversation and just stand there getting misted on.

Here’s the thing about a waterfall: you can’t take notes at one. Your hands are busy holding a trekking pole and your brain is busy being small. And when you get back to the car, the problem you’d been chewing on for four months has quietly rearranged itself while you weren’t looking.

We came back with three plot fixes we did not go looking for. Waterfalls: highly recommended, and cheaper than a story consultant.

The work

Underneath the goats and the fog there was real work to do, and somehow we did it.

We mapped the next two years. Which books land when, and how far apart, and what has to be finished before what. Which Improper Entanglements book comes next, and in what order the rest follow it out, so that a reader who falls into that world at any point has somewhere to fall next. Kohana Vale laid out where the Ink & Elsewhere books are headed, and got argued with, and won. Laurel Montrose read us a page she was not planning to read to anybody, and then had to sit there while five people told her it was the best thing on the table all weekend.

We talked about characters. The ones being developed now, the ones who have quietly grown out of their assigned roles and want more page time, and the one who was supposed to be a minor annoyance in a single chapter and has instead become a structural problem, in the best way. Wren Carlisle has one of those. Wren knows exactly which one we mean.

We talked about storylines. About the threads that connect across series, and whether a reader should be able to see them or only feel them. (Feel them. We agreed on that one before lunch, which for us is a land speed record.)

And there is a new series in development by one of our authors.

We’re not going to tell you which author. We’re not going to tell you the world, the register, the century, or whether it has a sky in it.

We will say that it got a full afternoon at that kitchen table, that it survived every objection we threw at it, and that one of us went quiet for a while afterward in the specific way that means oh, this is real.

That’s all you’re getting for now. It was a retreat. Retreats are allowed a mystery.

Twelve thousand books and a man who wouldn’t look ahead

We couldn’t be in Henderson County and not go see Connemara.

Carl Sandburg — poet, journalist, folk song collector, and the man who spent years turning Abraham Lincoln into six volumes — lived out the last stretch of his life on a farm just down the road in Flat Rock. The National Park Service keeps the house exactly as the Sandburgs left it, and walking through it is a peculiar experience for a working writer, because it isn’t a museum of a Great Man. It’s a house where somebody was clearly in the middle of something.

The books are the thing. Twelve thousand of them. Not arranged for display: arranged for use, jammed onto shelves in every room, stacked on chairs, waiting. There are more books in that house than most small-town libraries hold. Sandburg shipped over twenty tons of belongings down from Michigan when they moved, and the great majority of that tonnage was his library.

And here is the part that made us laugh out loud in the goat barn afterward.

Lilian Sandburg was the reason they bought the place. She raised championship dairy goats, and she needed a warmer climate and better pasture for the herd. The Park Service still keeps goats there, descendants of hers, designated a historic herd by the federal government. We had spent the entire week being supervised by goats at our own farmhouse. We drove to a National Historic Site and were supervised by more goats. There is possibly a lesson in this. We choose to take it as a blessing.

But the thing we actually brought home was a sentence.

When Edward R. Murrow asked Sandburg how you write, back in 1954, Sandburg didn’t give him craft or theory or a reading list. He said it should be simple and easy: “Put one word after another until you are through.” And then the part that stuck to our ribs — he said that if you look two or three words ahead, you’re sunk.

Sunk. Not slowed. Not distracted. Sunk.

We sat with that one for a while, because we know exactly what he means, and so, we suspect, do you. Looking two or three words ahead is where the whole trouble starts. Looking two or three words ahead is looking at the reviews. It’s looking at the launch, the algorithm, the category ranking, the person who might read this and think less of you. It’s looking at book four while book one is unfinished on the screen in front of you.

The man wrote a hundred and fifty-odd books, in a house with twelve thousand more, and his entire method was refusing to look up.

Coming home

We came back down the mountain with a calendar, a stack of index cards, a fully developed secret, and a piece of duct tape on the wall above one desk that says: ONE WORD. NOT TWO. NOT THREE.

That’s the retreat. That’s the year.

The kettle’s on. Turn on the computer. And don’t look up.

— Catherine & Hillora

Novel Concepts Publishing · Stories That See You

The Release Desk is the live, authoritative source for what’s coming and when — we’ll keep it current there rather than promising dates in a post that ages.

***

Catherine McDowell and Hillora Lang are sisters, co-authors, and the reason a particular pub in Devon no longer hosts “themed trivia nights, especially those involving the occult.” One is a former theater set designer who left the profession after building a door for a production that “opened onto a room that wasn’t in the set design and definitely wasn’t backstage”; the other is a herbalist who runs a small cottage practice and whose patients recover at rates that her GP describes as “statistically implausible but impossible to argue with.” Together, they write cozy fantasies where what’s behind the door is never what you expected and the garden always has what you need.

Catherine’s set design background means she understands constructed spaces, illusion, and the very particular terror of a space that constructs itself. Hillora’s herbalism contributes knowledge of plants, remedies, and the calm conviction that chamomile knows what it’s doing. The pub trivia incident involved a round of questions about local folklore during which three answers were provided by a voice that wasn’t attached to any of the teams. The publican asked them to leave. They maintain this was unrelated to their presence. The publican disagrees.

Their Improper Entanglements series features doorways, herb gardens, and the understanding that healing and magic are separated by about six inches of respectability. They write for readers who appreciate cottages with kitchen gardens, who’ve had chamomile tea that solved more than insomnia, and who believe that the best doors are the ones that open onto rooms that shouldn’t be there.

We asked our own Kohana Vale to make it. Kohana’s debut, the first novel in her Scandal & Sorcery series, arrives from Novel Concepts Publishing this September, and we’ve spent months now living inside the world she’s building, an invented kingdom where the magic is charming, sincere, and reliably mortifying. It felt only right to ask her to open a small window into that world early, ahead of the book, purely to whet your appetites. She said yes before we’d finished the sentence.

A word about where this all begins. Scandal & Sorcery, Book One: The Reluctant Thief follows Gwennie Kerrain, a young woman cursed with the least convenient magic imaginable: things in her presence tell the truth. Not metaphorically. A stolen brooch will cheerfully announce whose pocket it left, a love letter will read itself aloud to the wrong person, and a woman trying very hard to get away with something will find the whole world narrating her crimes in real time. It is a terrible gift for a thief and a wonderful one for a comedy, and underneath the mishaps is a question the whole series keeps asking: what happens when you stop being ashamed of the thing that makes you a failure, and start using it on purpose.

The Kerrains, you should know, are a family whose magic never goes quite right. It runs down the line like a nose or a temper, and no two of them are cursed the same way. Which brings us to your gift.

The Homesick Finery belongs to a Kerrain cousin you won’t meet in the novels, at least not yet: Winnie, the poor relation, who arrives at every ball dressed in other people’s borrowed splendor because she owns none of her own. An ordinary humiliation, that, except Winnie’s particular Kerrain magic has ideas about ownership. Borrowed things, it turns out, do not care to stay borrowed. They want to go home. Loudly. At the worst possible moment. In front of everyone who matters.

It’s a story about finally being given something, instead of always handing it back. That struck us as exactly the right note for a day like this one.

Thank you for reading, for subscribing, for being here. Kohana wrote this for you, and we’re honored to pass it along.

Go on. The gown’s already halfway to the door.

— Catherine & Hillora

The Homesick Finery

The gown had been perfectly content for the first quarter of an hour.

Winnie Kerrain knew the exact moment it changed its mind, because the left sleeve gave a small, decided tug toward the door, in the manner of a dog that has sighted a cart it fully intends to chase.

“Not yet,” she said under her breath, pressing her arm flat to her side. “We had an arrangement. One dance. Two, if the punch improves.”

The sleeve tugged again, harder, and the seed pearls along the cuff went taut and shivering.

This was the trouble with borrowed things, and Winnie had a great deal of experience with borrowed things. The gown belonged to her cousin Araminta, who had lent it with the exact generosity of a woman lending out a dress she has grown too grand to wear twice. Everything on Winnie tonight belonged to somebody else. The gloves were her aunt Bellamy’s. The fan had come from the twins across the square, who had thrust it at her with instructions to bring it back unbroken and smelling of triumph. The brooch at her throat had spent nineteen years pinned to the bodice of a great-aunt whose portrait now hung in the Assembly Rooms’ upper gallery, and who was, at this moment, watching the proceedings below with an expression Winnie preferred not to examine too closely.

She had nothing of her own on her body but her hair and her opinions, and the hair had been dressed by a maid she had also borrowed.

The gown lunged.

It was a small lunge, as lunges go, a lurch of about four inches toward the north doorway, but Winnie was standing at the edge of the floor holding a cup of punch, and four inches was enough to send the punch onto the sleeve of a passing gentleman she had never met.

“Oh,” said the gentleman, looking down at himself with the pleased surprise of a man who has been waiting all evening for an interesting thing to happen. “How splendid. It has quite missed my only clean cuff.”

“I am so sorry.” Winnie caught the cup before it could commit any further crimes. “The gown did that. Not me. The gown.”

“Of course it did.” He produced a handkerchief and dabbed at himself with no great urgency. He was perhaps five and twenty, with a face built almost entirely for cheerfulness and hair that had lost an argument with the wind on the way in. “Frey,” he added, as though this explained anything. “Amric Frey. Second son of nobody you would have heard of, here on my brother’s ticket and my own charm, which I confess is the weaker of the two.”

“Winnie Kerrain.”

“Ah.” His whole face rearranged itself into delight. “A Kerrain. Then the dress moving of its own accord is not the surprise I took it for.”

The Kerrains were known. That was the thing about being a Kerrain: the wild magic came down the line like a nose or a temper, and the polite world had long since decided the family was best admired from a safe distance and never seated near the good china. Gwennie’s things told the truth whether you wanted them to or not. Cousin Lizaig’s did worse. And Winnie, the poor relation, the one who came to balls in other people’s finery because she owned none worth the name, had drawn a gift so quiet and so mortifying that for three years she had told no one what it was.

Borrowed things wanted to go home.

Not stolen things. Not gifts. Borrowed things, specifically, the ones she had taken on the understanding they must one day go back, the ones lent with a small grudging string still attached. Wear them long enough, want them badly enough, feel keenly enough that they were not truly hers, and they woke up and remembered where they belonged. And they set off to get there. Through walls, if they had to. Across ballrooms, certainly.

“The gown,” Winnie said, with the calm of a woman managing a small fire she has decided not to mention to the household, “is going to try to leave shortly. I would take it as a kindness if you did not make a scene when it does.”

Amric Frey looked at her with frank interest. “Where is it going?”

“Home to my cousin Araminta, who is in the card room losing at whist and does not want it back in the least, but the dress does not know that. The dress only knows it was lent.”

The brooch at her throat gave a sudden, yearning wriggle.

Winnie clapped a hand over it. The brooch, unlike the gown, was not trying to leave. The brooch was trying to get closer to the portrait upstairs. It had spent nineteen years against a Kerrain heart and had developed, over that long, fond acquaintance, a devotion that no amount of reason could talk out of it. When Winnie had pinned it on this evening, it had positively hummed. Now, within sight of its old mistress hanging in oils on the gallery wall, it strained upward against the pin like a debutante catching sight of a hussar.

“Is your brooch,” Amric asked, “in love?”

“My brooch,” said Winnie, “is besotted, and has been since before I was born, and I would thank it to have some dignity.”

The brooch hummed louder.

Up in the gallery, the great-aunt’s portrait shifted its painted gaze from the dancers to Winnie, and one painted eyebrow rose a careful half-inch. The Kerrains kept their dead close and their dead kept their opinions closer. Winnie had been raised on the family portraits the way other children were raised on prayers, and she knew this particular eyebrow. It was the eyebrow that meant Well?

She looked away before it could develop into a full sentence.

The gloves went first.

There was no warning to speak of, only Aunt Bellamy’s grey kid gloves deciding, both at once and with militant coordination, that they had had quite enough of being worn by the wrong Kerrain and would now return to their rightful owner, who was three streets away and asleep. They came off Winnie’s hands the way a cat leaves a lap: entirely, at speed, and with no interest in her feelings on the matter. One glove made it as far as the refreshment table before a footman fielded it, staring at the limp grey thing in his palm as it flexed one finger at him, plaintive.

The second glove chose the more direct route, which was to fly.

“Grab it,” Winnie said. “Please?”

Amric grabbed it. The glove writhed in his fist, straining toward the door and the sleeping aunt beyond it, and he held on with the expression of a man who has caught a fish larger than expected and is now committed. “It is very determined,” he reported. “For a glove.”

“It has always been determined. It is Aunt Bellamy’s second-best pair, and it takes after her.” Winnie flexed her bare fingers, which felt suddenly, hideously visible. A lady did not go gloveless at a ball. A lady did not go anything at a ball. A lady was a smooth surface off which the eyes of the room slid without catching, and Winnie, bare-handed and in a gown that was even now gathering itself for a second run at the exit, was catching every eye in the place.

Amric, still gripping the writhing glove in one hand, stripped his own off the other and held it out. “Here. Take mine. I insist. A gentleman cannot dance with a lady who has lost her gloves to a scheduling dispute.”

Winnie took it because taking things was what she did, and pulled it on, and braced for it to bolt.

It did not bolt. It settled over her bare hand, warm from his, and lay there quietly, with no more inclination to leave than the wall had. She flexed her fingers inside it. Nothing pulled. Nothing yearned. It was the calmest article of clothing she had touched all evening, and she was far too busy to wonder why, because at that moment Aunt Bellamy’s escaped glove got a finger into Amric’s ribs and nearly won free of him altogether.

“Still determined,” he gasped, recapturing it.

Two matrons near the pillar had already put their heads together. She could see the words forming. One of the wild ones. In borrowed feathers, no less. Did you see the gloves...

The fan sang.

This was worse than the gloves, because the fan belonged to the twins, and the twins were incapable of owning a fan that did not have a voice. It was a small painted thing, silk over sandalwood, and when it was pleased it made a sound like a kettle deciding to be a flute, and it was not pleased now. It was homesick. It hung from Winnie’s wrist by its ribbon and it sang, high and reedy and heartbroken, a song that was recognisably the twins’ own front door being opened, if a door could be a note.

Heads turned. A cellist in the orchestra faltered and looked around for the source of the competition.

“Hush,” Winnie told the fan. “Hush, you ridiculous object, you will be home by midnight, I promise you, only please do not...”

The fan hit a high note that curdled the milk in three separate cups of syllabub and brought the dancing, by degrees, to a puzzled halt.

Into the silence, the gown made its move.

It did not tug this time. It went. It surged toward the north doorway with Winnie inside it, and Winnie, who had spent three years learning that the only thing to do with a bolting garment is to go where it drags you and try to look as though you meant to, went with as much grace as could be managed by a woman being towed across a ballroom by her own bodice. She passed the matrons. She passed the footman with the fielded glove. She passed a small deputation of borrowed items that had by now joined the general homeward exodus: Aunt Bellamy’s first glove, escaped from its footman and flapping along the floor like an ambitious leaf; the fan, still singing; a hairpin she had forgotten was her cousin’s, tunnelling out of her coiffure and making for the card room with a whole side of her hair coming down after it.

She fetched up against the doorframe with both hands, the gown hauling at her, the whole borrowed weight of her wardrobe pulling in four directions toward four different homes, and every person in the Assembly Rooms watching the poor Kerrain relation come spectacularly apart at the seams she had not paid for.

Up in the gallery, the great-aunt’s portrait leaned forward in its frame.

Well? said the eyebrow. And then, because the eyebrow had run out of patience, the painted mouth moved, and a voice like dried rose petals said, quite clearly across the whole hushed room:

“Child. Stop borrowing, and start being given.”

Winnie held on to the doorframe and felt the sense of it arrive.

She had been doing this wrong for three years. She had spent three years clutching, apologising, pressing her arm flat to her side, holding the borrowed things down by main force and shame, because shame was the only tool she had ever been handed for the job. And shame, it turned out, was the fuel. Every borrowed thing on her woke because she felt, in her marrow, that none of it was hers, that she was a girl made of other people’s castoffs, that nothing on earth belonged to her and never would. The magic only did what she already believed. It sent everything home because she had never once let herself be given a home to keep it in.

She stopped fighting the gown.

She let go of the doorframe. She turned around, in full view of the room, hair down one side and gloveless and gownless-in-progress, and instead of holding the borrowed things back she opened her hands and let the whole homesick host of them off the leash at once.

“Go on, then,” she said, not to any one object but to all of them, and she meant it with her entire self, meant it clean and glad and without a scrap of shame, and the meaning went out of her like a bell struck once. “Go home. All of you. Go on.”

The Assembly Rooms turned, for the length of a breath, into a wonder.

The gloves rose. The fan lifted, singing now in relief. The hairpin shot free. The brooch alone hung back (it had somewhere else to be), but every other borrowed thread and pin and pearl on Winnie’s body loosed its hold and streamed for the doorway in a bright obedient current, and Winnie stood in the middle of it directing traffic with both bare hands, sending the gloves left and the fan right and the gown, when at last it slid away from her in a soft grey rush, off toward the card room and its indifferent owner. It was not mortifying. It was the most purposeful thing she had ever done. For the first time the magic was not happening to her. She was doing it, on purpose, gladly on purpose, sorting a roomful of homesick finery to its proper doors like a woman conducting an orchestra.

The brooch alone she caught out of the air, because the brooch was not trying to go home. The brooch was trying to go up, to the gallery, to the portrait, to the great-aunt who had loved it first and best, and Winnie understood the difference now the way she understood her own name. She cupped it in both hands. It hummed against her palms, warm as a coal.

“You want to go to her,” Winnie said softly.

The brooch hummed yes.

“Then that is not a borrowing, is it. That is a giving.” She looked up. “Aunt. May I?”

The portrait’s painted eyes were suspiciously bright. “You may,” said the voice of dried roses. “And keep the pin. The pin was always yours; I only forgot to say so.”

Winnie set the brooch down on the nearest sill, pointed at the gallery, and let it go. It flew up singing and vanished into the oils, and the painted great-aunt lifted one painted hand to her painted throat and touched it there, at rest at last, home.

The room was very quiet.

Winnie stood at the centre of it in her shift and stockings and one falling curl, with not a single borrowed thing left on her, and discovered that she was not ashamed. She was cold, and under-dressed, and being stared at by everyone of consequence in Dunmyrn, and she was not ashamed at all, because for the first time in her life she was wearing nothing that wanted to leave.

Then a coat settled over her shoulders.

It was warm and slightly too large and smelled of ink and the outdoors, and it stayed put. It did not tug. It did not lunge for any door. It hung about her as though it had found the exact spot it meant to occupy for the rest of the evening, and possibly longer.

Winnie turned inside it. Amric Frey stood behind her in his shirtsleeves, having given away his own coat in front of the entire assembly with the ease of a man who has never in his life clutched at anything.

“It will not run off,” he said, watching the coat with satisfaction. “I checked. I gave it to you properly, you see. No strings. So it has nowhere to be but here.”

Winnie pulled the coat closer around herself. It settled deeper, glad.

“That,” she said, “is the first true thing anyone has told me all Season.”

Above them, the great-aunt’s portrait made a small approving noise and went back to being paint. Somewhere in the card room, a woman shrieked, gently, as a gown she did not want arrived to reclaim her whether she wanted it or not.

The Assembly Rooms’ cat, who had watched the entire performance from the top of the pianoforte with the settled boredom of a creature who has seen finer wonders and better cheeses, yawned, tucked its paws beneath itself, and closed its eyes on the lot of them.

Amric offered Winnie his arm, in his shirtsleeves, unbothered.

“Shall we find the punch,” he said, “and see whether it has improved?”

Winnie took the arm. The coat came with her, contented, staying.

“It has not improved,” she told him. “But we may improve it. I find I am in a mood to keep things.”

About Kohana Vale

Kohana Vale discovered her calling in the quiet corners of university libraries, where she spent countless hours steeped in folklore and mythology while researching a graduate thesis on portal narratives in world literature. Drawn to the liminal spaces between reality and possibility, she writes the kind of gentle wonder that lives in margins and between pages—stories of ordinary people who stumble through extraordinary doorways and discover the world is far more magical than they’d dared imagine.

She is the author of Ink & Elsewhere, a portal-fantasy series from Novel Concepts Publishing in which ten librarians are pulled into deeply personal magical realms by a book that appears without warning. This September, she brings her warmth and quiet magic to a new register with the first gaslamp fantasy-romance in the Scandal & Sorcery series—where the magic is charming, sincere, and reliably mortifying.

At the heart of all her work is one conviction: the most powerful magic happens the moment we stop trying to control our stories and let them transform us instead. When she isn’t writing slow-burn romance and gentle wonder, Kohana can be found haunting used bookstores, collecting vintage atlases, and stargazing from her balcony, wondering what tales the constellations might tell if we only knew how to listen.

Find Us

Website: novelconceptspublishing.com

Free Downloads: Browse the collection on StoryOrigin

Find us on Amazon: Amazon Author Central

We’ve got news. Rather a lot of it, actually, so we thought we’d tell you the way we tell each other: over tea, talking across the table, finishing each other’s sentences the way you do after this many years of running an Indie press side by side.

Catherine: So. Do we start with the exciting thing or the terrifying thing?

Hillora: The exciting thing is the terrifying thing. That’s rather the theme this week.

Catherine: Fair. All right, then let me start with all of you, because honestly the best news we have is the room itself.

When we opened the doors here at the Teahouse, I wasn’t sure who would come. It’s a strange little press we run. Every author is neurodivergent in some way and we are fierce about guarding their privacy, all of it built so our writers can just write their stories without ever having to show you their front door. Not everyone knows what to make of that. And yet here you all are.

Ninety-seven of you, at last count.

Hillora: Ninety-seven! Catherine has been the one at the door, kettle in hand, learning your names and your reading tastes and remembering which of you love a grumpy hero and which of you are only here for the talking furniture. That’s her doing, all of it.

Catherine: It’s been the loveliest part of my week, every week. And I’ll admit I have a small, greedy hope. Ninety-seven is three away from a hundred, and I would dearly love to watch that number tick over today, with you in the room when it happens.

So if you’ve been following and meaning to subscribe, or you know a friend who’d like it warm and quiet in here, this is me, holding the door.

Hillora: Right. My turn, because I’ve been up to things.

Catherine: You have been up to so many things.

Hillora: I’ve spent the last few weeks with Wren Carlisle, and I need you to sit down for this one. We set out to help her shape a new series. We came away with four.

Catherine: Four series.

Hillora: One world. Four series. She’s calling it the Four Feathers, and the moment she laid it all out on the table I knew we weren’t going to talk her down to something more sensible, and neither did we want to. It’s the kind of idea that’s bigger on the inside. That’s all I’ll say for now. I’m keeping the rest close for a little while yet, but it’s coming, and it’s going to be worth the wait.

Catherine: She has that look. She gets it when she’s holding a secret she’s very pleased about.

Hillora: I do not.

Catherine: You absolutely do.

Hillora: ...I might. Onward, because Wren isn’t the only one who’s been scheming.

You know Kohana Vale—she’s the one behind Ink & Elsewhere and the whole Scandal & Sorcery line we’ve been warming up for autumn. She took herself off to the beach over the Fourth. Family, sand, the full holiday. And she came back with a sunburn and a story.

Catherine: Tell them the pitch. Tell them exactly the way you told me, because I nearly fell off my chair.

Hillora: Pirates. The most spectacularly inept pirates ever to fail to sail a ship. And beneath them, down in the water, a whole species of Fae who’ve made the sea their own. It’s a fantasy rom-com, and it is silly in the very best way. The kind of silly that sneaks up and makes you cry a little when you least expect it.

Catherine: And here’s the part I love. She sent the idea over to Vesperine, our cover artist and our friend, the one who somehow always sees the book before the book exists, just to test the waters.

Hillora: Vesperine came back with a cover.

Catherine: A first illustration. A teaser. Kohana took one look and that was that. Vesperine is doing the whole series now, because Kohana couldn’t imagine anyone else touching it.

Here’s the very first glimpse. We’re keeping the title under wraps a while longer, so consider this a peek through the porthole

:

Hillora: Isn’t it something?

Catherine: It’s something.

Hillora: Which brings us, at last, to the two of us. And to the series that started all of this.

Catherine: Improper Entanglements. Our own. Our Regency paranormal, where the fae are perfectly unremarkable, the brownies have strong opinions about the quality of the cream, and nobody so much as blinks at a talking hedgehog.

Hillora: We’ll confess: it’s taken a bit of a back seat lately. When you’re helping this many authors bring this many worlds to life, your own manuscript learns to wait its turn.

Catherine: But it hasn’t stopped. It has never stopped. And we can tell you this much—a new Improper Entanglements novel is coming before the year is out.

Hillora: We’ll raise a cup to that.

Catherine: To that. And to all of you.

So that’s the news from the Teahouse. Four feathers, a fleet of hopeless pirates, and a fresh IE novel on the horizon.

But first things first: three chairs still empty, and a hundredth cup we’d love to pour today.

Pull up a chair. Bring a friend. The kettle’s always on.

With love, and rather too much tea, Catherine & Hillora

***

Catherine McDowell and Hillora Lang are sisters, scribes, and the inspiration for a warning label on a particular brand of candle that reads “Atmospherically Potent — Use With Intention.” One is a former forensic accountant who left the profession after discovering anomalies in the financial records of a 300-year-old estate trust that suggested “continued transactions by an original trustee who should not have been transacting”; the other is a chandler who makes candles from beeswax and herbs and whose customers report “vivid dreams, strong emotions, and in one case a conversation with a deceased grandmother.” Together, they write gaslamp fantasies where the accounts don’t balance, the candlelight reveals more than darkness hides, and the dead are not as uninvolved as probate suggests.

Catherine’s forensic accounting means she follows the money even when the money leads somewhere that auditing procedures don’t cover. Hillora’s chandlery contributes knowledge of wax, scent, and the understanding that fire illuminates more than surfaces. The candle warning label was added after the third customer reported “ancestral contact.” Hillora considers this a quality indicator. Her supplier considers it a liability.

Their books feature estate mysteries, candlelit revelations, and the understanding that a well-kept ledger is sometimes the most haunted thing in the house. They write for readers who appreciate financial detail, who light candles with purpose, and who believe that the most interesting conversations happen after dark.

***

From the Outrageously-Embellished Quill Pens of

Catherine McDowell & Hillora Lang:

Welcome to the Improper Entanglements Universe

Regency paranormal cozy fantasy where magic creates chaos instead of solving problems. Equal parts sincere swoon and gleeful disaster. Proper correspondence colliding with wildly improper magical complications.

Four series. One universe. Magic that creates problems instead of solving them, competent women who handle the fallout, and love stories where the happy ending is a promise, not a surprise. Clean romance throughout—sweet kisses, no explicit content, guaranteed happy endings earned through magic and connection.

Pick the entry point based on what kind of Gaslamp Fantasy story appeals to you.

~ Improper Entanglements — standalone Regency gaslamp fantasy novels
~ Improper Entanglements Letters — epistolary novels told through found documents
~ The Puck Papers — epistolary novellas spanning ten thousand years
~ Letters from the Clouds — a serial-in-progress

Find them all on the Improper Entanglements series page at NovelConceptsPublishing.com.

Gaslamp fantasy · Regency paranormal · cozy romance · guaranteed happy endings

Starting small? Find free short reads on StoryOrigin, or glimpses into the Improper Entanglements world on our Substack.

Volume I: Misplacements Most Unfortunate

Being the First Collection of Advertisements Concerning Items, Abilities,

and Temporal Certainties Gone Astray

For the Discerning Reader Who Has Misplaced the Improbable

To the Reader who has discovered these notices:

You hold in your hands the first volume of advertisements placed in The Morning Chronicle and other publications of dubious veracity by persons who have misplaced things that ought not to be misplaceable. Within these pages, you shall find notices concerning lost composure, found moments that belong to no one, vanished hours that refuse to account for themselves, and reflections that have taken up independent social lives.

These are not your ordinary lost handkerchiefs or found pocket watches. These are the items that slip between the cracks of reality when one is not paying sufficient attention—or, more alarmingly, when one is paying entirely too much attention to things that ought to be left well enough alone.

If you have lost your ability to refuse second helpings of trifle, your sense of which day it is, or your certainty about whether it is raining, you are in excellent company. The persons who have placed these advertisements are respectable members of society who have simply had the misfortune to attend the wrong assembly, accept tea from the wrong stranger, or walk through the wrong fairy ring at twilight.

We make no promises that reading these notices will help you locate your own missing items. Indeed, you may discover you have lost things you did not know could be lost. This is unfortunate but unavoidable.

Proceed with caution and a firm grip upon whatever certainties remain in your possession.

~ The Editors

Composure During Country Dance

LOST on the evening of the 23rd inst., somewhere between the entrance to the ballroom and the refreshment table, one’s composure during a country dance. The item was last observed intact during the first figure but vanished entirely by the third. Said composure answers to the name of “Dignity” and is prone to fleeing when addressed by handsome strangers. A reward of considerable relief shall be offered for its safe return.

Stray Moments from Next Thursday

FOUND in the morning room on Tuesday last, several moments that appear to belong to no one. The moments are well-dressed and seem to have escaped from sometime next Thursday. They are currently being held in the butler’s pantry until claimed. Unclaimed moments shall be redistributed to persons running late for appointments.

Read more

Every publishing house has an origin story. Ours starts with a pandemic, a Regency drawing room that refused to behave itself, and two sisters who had been circling this project for years without quite realizing it.

Hillora Lang has been writing since she could hold a pen. Her imagination is genuinely extraordinary — ideas arrive faster than she can get them down, worlds unspool themselves with the kind of density and internal consistency that most writers spend decades developing, and her characters have an unfortunate habit of becoming more real than anyone planned for. If you’ve read the Improper Entanglements universe, you’ve seen what Hillora’s mind does when it’s given room to run.

What Hillora’s mind does not do is file things. Or pay bills consistently. Or talk to people.

Social anxiety has been part of Hillora’s life since childhood — the kind that doesn’t announce itself as a diagnosis so much as a persistent, exhausting undertow that makes ordinary social navigation cost far more than it should. The neurotypical world runs on a set of assumptions about how people move through it: how they communicate, how they organize, how they respond to deadlines and contracts and the particular flavor of human interaction required to turn a manuscript into a published book. Those assumptions weren’t built with Hillora in mind. They weren’t built with a lot of people in mind.

Catherine McDowell, Hillora’s sister, is an Occupational Therapist. She has spent her career thinking about how environments and systems can be adapted to serve people rather than requiring people to adapt to serve systems. When the pandemic arrived and the world went quiet and the sisters suddenly found themselves with time and proximity and a shared Regency paranormal universe that had been accumulating in Hillora’s notebooks for years, Catherine did what she’s always done: she organized the mess.

That’s not a criticism. It’s the most loving thing one person can do for another.

Catherine built the structure that their writing needed to become a series. She handled the administrative architecture — the contracts, the scheduling, the publication logistics, the hundred small executive-functioning tasks that are genuinely difficult for Hillora and genuinely straightforward for Catherine. Hillora wrote. Catherine made sure the writing could reach readers. Improper Entanglements launched, and then kept going, and then kept going further, because it turns out there are a great many readers who have been waiting for Regency paranormal absurdism with genuine heart, and Hillora has been storing it up for years.

And then something else happened.

Catherine started noticing a pattern.

In the process of building Novel Concepts — the small press she founded in Eastern North Carolina to house and support the IE universe — she kept meeting writers. Writers who were deeply, seriously talented. Writers with vivid imaginations and original voices and stories that genuinely needed to exist in the world.

Writers who also couldn’t do the filing.

Or who found the social performance of querying and pitching and self-promotion so costly that they’d quietly shelved manuscripts rather than face it. Or who had twelve projects alive in their heads simultaneously and no framework to determine which one to finish first, or second, or at all. Or who’d been told by the traditional publishing ecosystem — implicitly or explicitly — that their way of working wasn’t professional enough, wasn’t predictable enough, wasn’t the right kind of productive.

Neurodivergent women writers are not rare. What’s rare is a publishing structure designed to actually work with them.

The traditional route to publication runs on a set of skills that have very little to do with the quality of the writing: the ability to craft a pitch, sustain a querying correspondence, navigate an agent relationship, meet the specific social expectations of editorial meetings, manage a release timeline across multiple stakeholders, maintain a promotional presence. These are real skills. They’re also skills that have nothing to do with whether someone can build a world, develop a character, write a sentence that makes you snort-laugh and spit your coffee across the room.

The industry tends to treat those two skill sets as a package deal. You get both, or you don’t make it through the door.

Novel Concepts disagrees.

What Catherine has built — quietly, in Eastern North Carolina, one author at a time — is a press where the administrative and relational infrastructure that publication requires doesn’t fall on the writer’s shoulders alone.

Different authors need different things. Some need someone to manage their scheduling so they can protect the hours they write best. Some need a buffer between themselves and the social demands of promotion. Some need their deadline structure to look different from the standard publishing calendar, because their executive functioning works differently and a standard calendar is a guaranteed recipe for shame spirals rather than completed manuscripts. Some simply need to know that there is a person on the other end of this process who understands that the writing is the point, and that everything else is in service of the writing, not the reverse.

None of this is charity. The authors Novel Concepts works with are serious writers doing serious work. Kohana Vale’s portal fantasy romance series is the kind of emotionally sophisticated, beautifully imagined fiction that deserves a much wider audience than the traditional gatekeeping system tends to let through. Laurel Montrose is building three YA series simultaneously, which is an act of creative ambition that would be difficult for anyone to manage alone. Clara Townes is writing about the Revolutionary War-era women history forgot, with the kind of genealogical rigor and narrative instinct that doesn’t come from anywhere but genuine immersion in the material. Marisol Rivera is bringing a tradition of Spanish and Basque storytelling into epic fantasy romance in ways that feel genuinely new.

These women are not being given a chance out of generosity. They are producing remarkable work, and Novel Concepts exists to make sure it reaches readers.

The difference is that Novel Concepts doesn’t ask them to be something other than what they are to do it.

Catherine puts it simply.

“Hillora taught me what was possible when you stop asking a person to fit the system and start asking the system to fit the person. That’s not a complicated principle. It’s just not what most industries run on.”

It’s what this one does.

If you’re a reader, what this means is that the books you find at Novel Concepts were written by people whose creative energy went into the work — not into performing a version of professionalism that had nothing to do with the writing. The imagination on the page is intact. It didn’t get worn down by the wrong kind of friction.

If you’re a neurodivergent writer who has wondered whether there’s a place for you in publishing: there are more of you than the industry would have you believe. You are in very good company here. And the teahouse has room. Come by for a cuppa and a fresh croissant. We’re just over here in the corner chatting about writing.

Novel Concepts Publishing is an independent press based in Eastern North Carolina, founded by Catherine McDowell. The full catalog is at novelconceptspublishing.com.

Where else to find us:

• The full book catalog: Novel Concepts Publishing

• The free hub (bonus content, reading guides, extras): StoryOrigin

• On Amazon: Novel Concepts Author Central

— Hillora & Catherine

Novel Concepts Teahouse | Novel Concepts Publishing

Here’s the thing about running Novel Concepts Publishing from the coast of North Carolina while managing a growing catalog of fantasy novels and one household brownie who has strong opinions about biscuit quality: eventually, the Substack you started to talk about one beloved Regency universe starts to feel a bit like a coat that doesn’t quite fit anymore.

Not because we love the Improper Entanglements universe any less. We love it absurdly much. Robin Goodfellow still turns up uninvited. The hedgehogs still have opinions. There are still approximately fourteen open continuity questions involving a newt whose name may or may not be Bartholomew.

But we’ve been doing more — a lot more — and we’ve been doing it quietly, and we think it’s time to stop being quiet about it.

What’s Changing

This Substack is becoming what it probably always wanted to be: the Novel Concepts Teahouse — a place where all of our authors come to sit down, pour something warm, and talk to you about what they’re making.

That means you’ll be hearing from:

Catherine McDowell & Hillora Lang, sisters and co-authors behind the Improper Entanglements universe — three interconnected series of cozy paranormal fantasy spanning epistolary correspondence, an immortal chaos spirit with no impulse control, and Regency-era drawing rooms where the supernatural is commonplace and the tea is always a little too hot, as if it’s been waiting. They write, they say, for readers “who believe old houses keep secrets on purpose, who’ve had a cup of tea that tasted like forgiveness.”

Kohana Vale, who discovered her calling in the quiet corners of university libraries and has spent the past year building Ink & Elsewhere — a ten-book portal fantasy romance series about librarians who open a strange book and step through it into worlds shaped from everything they’ve lost, hidden, or refused to tell. Warm, closed-door, deeply felt. Kohana writes for the moment when you’re deep in a library after hours and feel yourself standing at the center of infinite possibility.

Laurel Montrose, who grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina where the mist clings to ancient ridgelines and every holler holds stories older than memory. She’s developing three YA series — Wild Grimoires, Widdershins Found, and Whispers of the Hedgewitches — about teenagers whose magic refuses to behave the way anyone expects, and who discover that the thing that made them too strange for every room they’ve walked into is, in fact, the gift. Laurel writes for those who feel the old magic stirring in their blood and have been waiting for a story that finally has a place for them.

Marisol Rivera, who grew up in the rolling hills of Navarra, Spain, where ancient Basque legends whispered through mountain winds and every family story carried the weight of centuries. Her debut series, Sons of the Dragon Emperor, weaves her heritage of patient tending — whether flocks or hearts — with her deep understanding that true strength often looks like vulnerability. She writes fantasy romance for readers who know that the most epic adventures happen inside the human heart.

Clara Townes, who carries ancestral memory in every word. As a descendant of the Townes family of New England — whose family history runs directly through the Salem Witch Trials — Clara writes time-touched historical romances in her Echoes of Liberty series about contemporary women transported to the Revolutionary era, where survival required different kinds of strength but love demanded the same vulnerable courage. She writes, as she says, “for the women whose stories were lost to history, and for the women today who feel lost in their own time.”

There are more of us. More series in development, more worlds being built in the quiet hours. Over the next year you’ll meet all of them.

What’s Staying

Everything that brought you here.

The IE universe isn’t winding down — it’s expanding. There are still novels coming, still short reads and Puck Papers novellas and Letters from the Clouds serial episodes. If Dame Perenelle’s Academy for Benevolent Intervention is your home, the kettle is still on.

The teahouse register stays too: warm, a little deadpan, sincere where it counts, never grim. We publish cozy fantasy, absurdist romance, YA with genuine heart, time-travel historical romance, epic fantasy romance, upper middle grade magic and found family — the full range. But the common thread running through all of it is that our stories are always, in the end, about the person who thought they didn’t belong in the room discovering that the room was built wrong, not them.

That’s not a theme we’re retiring.

What’s Coming

Over the next twelve months, you can expect first looks at Ink & Elsewhere as Kohana’s portal librarians continue their journeys through worlds made from forgotten stories. Updates from Laurel as her three YA series take shape. New releases and behind-the-scenes pieces from Clara and Marisol. And, of course, continued chaos from the Improper Entanglements universe, where Catherine and Hillora are still writing about drawing rooms that are considerably more dangerous than they look.

You’ll hear from the authors themselves — what they’re writing, why they write it, and what it’s like to build worlds from the inside. The conversations we have with each other when we’re building these stories, the ones we’ve wanted to share with you.

And yes, the brownie’s biscuit standards are still in effect. He has not softened on this.

We’re glad you’re here. We’re glad you’ve been here. And we’re very glad to have more to offer you than we’ve let on.

The teahouse has more rooms than we’ve shown you. Come see what’s through the doors.

— The authors of Novel Concepts Teahouse

novelconceptspublishing.com

The full catalog is at novelconceptspublishing.com. Bonus content, reading guides, and extras are at our StoryOrigin hub. Find us on Amazon at Novel Concepts Author Central.

Something lovely is happening this month: the book that started everything is stepping back out into the world in a brand-new cover, and I couldn’t be more delighted to hold the door for you.

The Librarian and the Forgotten Kingdom is where the whole Ink & Elsewhere series begins. Eliza Marlowe is a small-town archivist who has built a quiet, orderly life out of other people’s pasts — and spent the last year not naming a grief of her own. Then a book with no barcode and shifting, warm-to-the-touch glyphs turns up in the return bin one grey November morning. She opens it. The next thing she touches is the soil of a fallen kingdom grown from every story the world forgot.

If you’re new here, this is the truest taste of what I write: gentle, wondrous, closed-door romance about an overlooked woman carried through a strange book into a world shaped from exactly what she’s lost. Slow-burn. Bittersweet. Safe to love without bracing.

And because a first chapter says more than any blurb I could write, I’m doing something I’ve wanted to do for ages — posting the entire opening chapter, right here, free. Read it below. If Eliza’s grey morning and that magical book snag you the way they snagged me, the rest of the door is waiting, and the whole re-release rolls out from here.

Pour the tea. Turn the page.

Yours from the margins, Kohana

Chapter 1

It was the sort of morning that whispered of forgotten things—of pages left to yellow in shadowed corners, of lives written in ink now faded to ghostly gray. Most mornings, the Willowbrook Historical Library whispered in the quiet language of dust and discipline. Today, it muttered mildew and mild disapproval, as if even the walls knew I was behind schedule. The local history archives—folders, binders, and brittle pamphlets—loomed behind my desk in a slump of civic neglect. I sighed, adjusted my brass nameplate—Eliza Marlowe, Ph.D., MLIS—and picked up the topmost file like it might complain.

“Okay, let’s find you a home.” I doubted the 1956 Garden Club minutes cared either way.

The silence was companionable. I’d always liked that about this place—its soft creaks, its old cedar scent, the way it let me work without interruption or apology. Willowbrook itself rarely gave me more than a raised eyebrow and a nod when I passed through town square. Being a librarian suited me. Everything filed, everyone left alone.

The building ticked like a resting clock. Then the return bin clattered.

I frowned. We didn’t open for another forty minutes. No one was likely to drop off books until well after the morning rush at Hazel’s Bakery. Setting the folder aside, I crossed the lobby, boots echoing on flagstone. The front vestibule glowed with the weak light of early November. Outside, the wind stirred brittle leaves across the pavement.

One book waited in the metal bin.

Just one.

I reached for it without thinking—and stopped.

It wasn’t from our shelves. The leather binding was too thick, too old. Scuffed at the edges, like it had ridden in the bottom of someone’s satchel for a century or two. Symbols—neither quite alphabet nor decoration—wound across the cover in looping, uncertain ink. They shimmered faintly, like oil on water, then dulled again.

I turned it over. No barcode. No library stamp. No Dewey Decimal number affixed to the spine for easy shelving. Besides, a book this old belonged in the reference section. It would never be checked out. And our reference librarian was too sharp-eyed to allow the theft of such a volume.

I bent over the bin. “Well. You’re either an elaborate prank or a spectacular misappropriation.”

I lifted it. It was warm. Not sun-warmed—living warm, like something with a pulse.

My fingers tightened instinctively. I hadn’t touched anything this strange since the time someone donated a box of automatic writing purported to be written by the two-thousand-year-old ghost of an Egyptian princess to the historical society. I set the book gently on the checkout desk and bent closer.

It didn’t glow, exactly, but the symbols pulsed when I moved. Not bright. Just aware.

Some books ask to be read. This one dared me.

I hesitated, then slid it under my arm and headed for the office. The sensible thing would be to log the incident, leave it untouched for the state archivist. But some part of me—the part still half-aching from what I’d lost last year, still scraping purpose from these quiet stacks—tightened around the mystery.

I locked the door behind me.

Just habit.

I placed the book on the blotter beside my chipped mug and turned on the desk lamp. The light revealed more texture—creases in the leather, scuff marks on the corners, and a faint smudge that might’ve been wax or blood or just very old ink.

I told myself it didn’t matter.

The symbols across the cover—those twisting, riverine glyphs—shifted slightly when I touched them. Not enough to call it movement. Just enough to suggest the book knew I was looking.

I opened it.

The pages sighed.

The inside smelled like parchment and roses. Not fresh roses, but the dry, perfumed sort pressed between pages by someone who meant to remember. The script wasn’t legible in any conventional sense. Each line curled into itself, a knot of brushstrokes and spidery marks that flirted with recognition before dancing away again.

Old English? No. Not quite. Gothic, maybe—but if a monk had transcribed it while drunk and dreaming. My fingers hovered over a passage, then tapped gently on the edge of a character that resembled both an ampersand and a falling leaf.

The line rearranged itself.

I blinked.

The shift wasn’t overt. The ink didn’t ripple like in the movies. It just...altered. Letters angled differently. A swirl flattened. Meaning adjusted like a painting tilted back into the light.

One phrase emerged, half-formed and eerie.

“What is forgotten remembers.”

I didn’t know what it meant. But I read it twice, and my hand had gone still on the cover.

Turning the page, I found a full spread of symbols surrounding a central illustration—an archway knotted with vines, set into a hillside. A forest loomed behind it, sketched in delicate black lines. Beneath the drawing were footnotes in yet another script, narrow and restless, like someone had tried to annotate a dream.

My fingertips tingled where they touched the margin.

The room dimmed.

I looked up. The lights flickered—not out, just less. Like dusk had arrived indoors.

“Nope.” My voice came out absurdly calm. “Not today, cursed book.”

But I didn’t stop.

A new passage formed as I turned the next page. The script thinned, lost shape—became a series of looping marks that hovered on the edge of something older than text. They shimmered faintly, like gold leaf beneath vellum.

I leaned closer.

“The path returns when the keeper is ready,” I read the line out loud.

The warmth beneath my hands deepened. Not heat—presence. The book was listening.

“You’re not supposed to be here.” My voice dropped without my meaning it to. “You’re not even supposed to exist.”

The book made no apology.

A quiet thrill curled down my spine. Not fear—curiosity. That deep, sharp edge that came whenever I stumbled on a forgotten story, the pull of a lost thing that might still be found, if I looked hard enough.

I reached for my pen, but the ink on the page bloomed suddenly wide—too fast, too dark. The symbols swelled like rising water. My office tilted.

Then the world dropped out from under me.

It was not the first time I’d lost myself in a book.

It was, however, the first time I landed in one.

The office dissolved so thoroughly it took my breath—not in fear, but because the air changed. Oak desk and old ink gave way to damp earth and a cold, green wildness. When I blinked, the desk was gone. So was the lamp, the mug, the shelves, the ceiling.

I stood in a forest.

Moss swallowed the ground in a lush, springy carpet. The trees were tall—taller than they had any right to be—and veiled in pale mist, their bark etched with marks that almost looked like words. Not English. Not anything.

Fog curled through the air like it had somewhere to be. I took one careful step, then another. My boots, thankfully, had made the trip with me. They sank a little into the moss but held steady.

I checked my pockets by instinct. Pen. Notebook. No phone.

Of course not.

This was real. Really real. I hadn’t accidentally eaten a psychedelic mushroom or dropped some acid. I wasn’t asleep and dreaming in the office.

“Right.” I rolled my shoulders back. “We’re doing this.”

The trees creaked in a slow, settling rhythm. Leaves whispered high above me, as if the wind here spoke a dialect of sighs. I turned slowly, taking stock of everything I could see: blue-laced ferns, stone outcroppings etched with shallow patterns, a fallen branch that glowed faintly along its broken edge.

Nothing made sense. And yet, I didn’t panic.

Not really.

I’d lived long enough in the quiet between things—the archive aisles, the unfinished chapters of other people’s lives, the fantasy novels I’d loved since I was fourteen—that this was of a piece with all of it. If stories could live in pages, why not in places?

Still, I needed to move.

There were no trails, but the trees leaned slightly west, as if nudging me on. A gap in the mist widened. I followed it, brushing aside branches with careful fingers, unwilling to leave marks I couldn’t take back.

After a while, the air changed again. Sharper. Charged.

I paused at the crest of a slope, breath catching—not from exertion, but from the sight ahead.

Below me, nestled in the hollow of the trees, was a broken stone archway.

It looked exactly like the sketch in the book.

Vines curled around it like cautious fingers. Symbols glinted faintly along its sides. Some were missing—chipped away—but the shape held. A doorway without a door.

I descended the slope.

The arch pulsed softly as I neared. Not visually, not physically. The air had pulled tight, expectant, the held breath before a storm. It wasn’t menacing. Just...waiting.

I placed a hand against the stone.

Cool.

Real.

The symbols closest to my fingers shimmered, then stilled.

Somewhere, a sound broke the silence. Not close. Not far. A step? A breath?

I stilled.

Then tucked my notebook under my arm and stepped through the archway.

The air shifted the moment I crossed the threshold.

Not just colder—thicker, quieter, like walking into a memory held too long. The light dimmed, filtered through fog that clung to the stones underfoot. My steps echoed now. The moss was thinner here, traded for cracked flagstone and fallen leaves that rustled too softly to be real.

The path led forward. I followed.

The archway behind me stayed visible, but it no longer seemed like an exit. More like a comma in a sentence I was already halfway inside.

Ahead, the trees grew sparse. Stone ruins emerged—half-walls, broken pillars, fragments of architecture swallowed by ivy and time. The remnants of a city, maybe. Or a dream of one. I couldn’t tell which unnerved me more.

Something moved beyond a fallen column. I froze, one hand at my coat pocket. Not because I thought a pen would help—but it was what I had.

A figure stepped into view.

Tall, cloaked, solid in a way nothing else in this world had been yet.

He looked human.

Mostly.

I stepped back instinctively. The moss muffled it, but his head turned sharply, gaze locking onto mine. His eyes were shadowed, unreadable. He didn’t reach for a weapon—just watched, like he was deciding what story I belonged to.

He raised a hand, palm out. “Stay where you are.” His voice was low, dry, not unkind—just tired of surprises.

The words were out before I could stop them. “I wasn’t planning a dance number.”

A beat of silence.

He studied me, slow. “You’re not one of them.”

“If ‘them’ is the tourist board, definitely not.”

He frowned, stepped closer. His cloak was patchworked with wear—stitched at the shoulder, frayed at the hem. Up close, I saw ink stains on his fingers. That detail startled me more than anything else.

His gaze moved over me, doubtful. “You’re solid.”

“I get that a lot.”

He frowned, more to himself than to me. “No shimmer.”

“I assume that’s good?”

“It’s unusual.”

I adjusted my grip on my notebook. “Listen, I’m not here on purpose. A book appeared in my library. It looked cursed, so naturally I opened it.” As if, what else would any librarian worth her salt do? “And now I’m here. Wherever here is.”

That got his attention. He took another step forward, slow and deliberate.

“A book brought you?”

“Yes.” I shifted the notebook under my arm. “Leather-bound, off the books, smelled like ghosts and roses.”

He stared.

Then, very quietly, “You shouldn’t be here.”

“That’s becoming a theme.”

He ran a hand through his dark hair. It was tied back, unevenly, like he’d done it in a hurry days ago. “This place is closed. Sealed.”

“Well.” I shrugged. “It didn’t get the memo.”

He looked at me like I was a puzzle he hadn’t been given permission to solve.

Then, reluctant, he turned half away. “Come with me. Before the phantoms notice.”

“Phantoms?”

He didn’t answer. Just turned and walked into the mist.

And because logic had long since stopped applying, I followed.

I followed because standing still was worse.

The path he led me down wound between skeletal columns and broken walls, all half-swallowed by creeping moss and long-lost meaning. Vines threaded through windows without glass. A rusted balcony hung sideways off a crumbled tower like it had forgotten how gravity worked. Somewhere distant, bells rang—not in melody, but like warning.

The man didn’t speak, and I didn’t fill the silence. Not yet.

His pace was brisk, but not unkind. Once, he glanced back to see if I was keeping up. I raised an eyebrow. He looked away, unreadable.

We passed an open plaza. At its center stood a shattered statue—someone regal, maybe, or once remembered as such. Its face was worn smooth, its plaque blank. I stopped to study it.

“Don’t linger.” His voice stayed soft, but it didn’t bend. “It stirs when noticed.”

That was a sentence I didn’t want to unpack. I moved on.

Finally, we reached what might have once been a reading hall—stone steps, massive doors, ivy-laced carvings of scrolls and quills along the lintel. He opened one door with more care than force, and I followed him into shadow.

Inside, the temperature dropped a few degrees. Not unpleasant.

He lit a lantern—glass-paned, etched with similar symbols to the ones in the book. The flame inside burned silver-blue, casting just enough light to paint the dust in delicate constellations.

We stood in what had once been a home for books. Shelves stretched upward, many broken, some still clinging to warped books. The volumes looked familiar in shape and binding—but the scripts were alien. One floated slightly above its shelf, pages fluttering in a nonexistent breeze.

I couldn’t help myself. “Is this a library?”

His mouth twitched. “It was.”

I stepped forward. One book glowed faintly. Another shifted its spine to face me. All of them unreadable.

Of course.

The ache in my own voice caught me off guard. “They don’t want to be understood.” I stepped back from the shelf. “Not by me, anyway.”

“They don’t trust easily.”

I looked at him. “And you do?”

His gaze held mine a moment longer than necessary. “No.”

He set the lantern on a nearby table. It flickered but didn’t fade.

I kept my voice level. “I need to know where I am. What this place is. Why it feels like—like everything I’ve ever studied, but filtered through a fever dream.”

He hesitated. Then, finally, “This city holds what other worlds forget. Stories, memories, truths no one remembers how to carry. It’s supposed to stay sealed.”

I took a breath. “And yet, here I am.”

He didn’t smile, but his expression softened—just a fraction.

He weighed me a moment. “You’re not the first who’s come through by accident. But you’re the first in a long time who stayed whole.”

He’d said whole, as if there were other ways to come through—in pieces, maybe. I filed the word away and didn’t ask which.

He offered no comfort, no explanation, not even his name. But he stayed where he was, between me and the dark, and let the lantern burn.

Kohana Vale writes portal fantasy where the quiet magic hits hardest. Her debut series, Ink & Elsewhere (Novel Concepts Publishing), follows librarians drawn by a mysterious book into deeply personal realms of wonder, healing, and connection. She is currently working on her upcoming series, Scandal & Sorcery.

There’s a particular kind of reader I write for, and I suspect you might be one of them. You’re the person who has, at least once, finished a book at two in the morning and sat very still afterward, reluctant to turn on the lamp and rejoin a world that suddenly seemed a size too small. You’ve pressed a paperback to your chest at the last page. You’ve grieved a fictional house, a fictional town, a fictional kitchen with good light, as though you’d actually lived there.

If that’s you — hello. You found the right corner of the internet.

I write portal fantasy romance, which is a tidy little phrase for something I find almost unbearably tender: stories where an ordinary, tired, overlooked woman discovers a book that shouldn’t exist, opens it, and falls clean through into a world that has been waiting for her. My ten-part series, Ink & Elsewhere, runs entirely on that premise. Ten librarians. One traveling book. A great living library that stitches every world to every other. And in each volume, a woman who thought her best chapters were behind her learns otherwise.

People ask me why I keep returning to the doorway. Why a book, specifically, and not a wardrobe or a rabbit hole or a tornado.

The honest answer is that I think books already do this. I think they have always done this. For me, at least, they are how I have explored this world and many others.

You know the feeling. You’re standing in a library or a secondhand shop, running a finger along the spines, not looking for anything in particular, and then one of them more or less reaches out and takes hold of your sleeve. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen by it. The timing is uncanny — it says the thing you needed said, in the season you needed saying it. My mother calls it “dowsing for books,” as if there is a divining rod in my hand and it’s found a waterhole in a drought. My whole series is built on taking that quiet, common magic and turning the dial until it becomes literal. The book that finds you doesn’t just change your afternoon. It opens a door in the air and asks you to walk through.

And here is what I most want you to know about those doors: they don’t lead to danger for danger’s sake. I’m not interested in worlds that exist to threaten my heroines. The worlds in Ink & Elsewhere are shaped, every one of them, out of the heroine’s own buried longing — the part of herself she shelved years ago and stopped expecting to use again. A history-loving librarian falls into a kingdom built from the stories everyone forgot. A woman who has spent her life caring for others and being thanked for it, gently, and then overlooked, falls into a place that finally, stubbornly, sees her.

That’s the part that feels like coming home. Not the spectacle. The recognition.

I’ll be candid about the romance, since some of you are already wondering. My books are closed-door — clean, swoony, fade-to-black at the threshold. The heat lives in the yearning, the almost, the hand that hovers and doesn’t quite touch. I’ll write a whole post on how I keep that charged rather than chaste, because it’s a craft I love and a question I get constantly. For now I’ll only say: the love stories are slow, they are devoted, and they are built for readers who want to feel their heart climb into their throat without ever needing to skim a page in front of company.

So what is this Substack, then?

It’s where I get to talk to you the way I can’t quite inside a novel. Behind the scenes of the Great Archive. The reasoning behind a heroine. The reason a particular world looks the way it does. I’ll share craft, I’ll share feelings, I’ll occasionally share a small confession about how a scene nearly broke me. And come September, I’ll be opening the first door into a brand-new series — Scandal & Sorcery — a world with rather more gossip and rather more glitter, where magic is a social weapon and being noticed is the most dangerous thing of all. More on that soon. Much more.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ve only just met.

If any of this landed somewhere true in you — if you recognized yourself in the woman standing at the shelf, not looking for anything, about to be found — then subscribe and stay a while. The doorway stories will keep coming. And if you want to start at the very first threshold, Ink & Elsewhere: The Librarian and the Forgotten Kingdom is waiting on the other side of Door One. The re-release is coming soon! (Isn’t anticipation a wonderful thing?)

Pour the tea. Leave the lamp off a little longer.

Yours from the margins, Kohana

Where else to find us:

• The full book catalog: Novel Concepts Publishing

• The free hub (bonus content, reading guides, extras): StoryOrigin

• On Amazon: Novel Concepts Author Central

— Hillora & Catherine

Novel Concepts Teahouse | Novel Concepts Publishing

A note from Catherine and Hillora

This spring has kept us both thoroughly occupied with the Improper Entanglements novels — the books, the revisions, the cover work, the general organized chaos that attends bringing a series out into the world. (The brownie has opinions about all of it. We have been leaving better biscuits.)

What we haven’t talked about as much: while we were doing that, the other Novel Concepts writers have been quietly working behind the scenes on their own projects. There is rather a lot in the queue for the coming year, and we are very pleased to say so.

First up is Kohana Vale, who is re-releasing her Ink & Elsewhere series with gorgeous new covers and, for the first time, in ebooks.

Ink & Elsewhere — re-releases with new covers

The first three books in Kohana’s Ink & Elsewhere series are getting fresh covers over the next couple of months, and they are turning out beautifully. Same stories, same living library, lovely new faces at the door.

The series promise, if you’re new here: a strange book finds a librarian. The next page becomes a door. The world on the other side remembers exactly what she forgot.

As each one lands, we’ll post the cover reveal, a release-day note, a short and spoiler-free word on what the book feels like, and now and then a bonus scene or found page to go alongside it.

Book 1 — The Librarian and the Forgotten Kingdom · Eliza’s story A grieving archivist falls into a kingdom grown from every story the world threw away.

• Status: re-release pending

• Cover: coming soon

• Links: coming soon

Book 2 — The Librarian and the Star-Forger · Mira’s story An astronomer who stopped looking up is carried to a city where the stars are mended by hand — and one of them has gone dark.

• Status: re-release pending

• Cover: coming soon

• Links: coming soon

Book 3 — The Librarian and the Trickster’s Wonderland · Tessa’s story A “too-much” children’s librarian lands in a wonderland sewn from the tales she never let herself write.

• Status: re-release pending

• Cover: coming soon

• Links: coming soon

Scandal & Sorcery — a new series begins in September 2026

A cozy, comedic gaslamp fantasy-romance series opens this autumn, and it is brimming with misbehaving magic, disreputable companions, and people being mistaken for one another at precisely the wrong moment.

The series promise: magic never comes from a tidy profession or a noble bloodline. It comes from a feeling — usually the exact one someone was told to hide.

Watch this space for the series introduction, spoiler-light character spotlights, launch-week updates, and the first round of reader gifts.

Book 1 — The Reluctant Thief · Gwennie’s story The wrong sister, the worst thieves in the kingdom, and a prince whose rain cloud turns pink when he’s smitten.

• Release: early September (exact date coming soon)

• Links: coming soon

Reader gifts and giveaways

The moment these go live, you’ll find them right here.

• Giveaway #1: coming soon

• Printable ephemera: coming soon

• Wallpapers: coming soon

How to use this post

• If you only want announcements, check here first.

• If you want story atmosphere, wander into the Teahouse Archive instead and order a cup of Earl Grey while you read.

• If you’re still deciding whether these books are for you, the pinned Start Here post will help you pick a door.

Last updated: June 24, 2026

Where else to find us:

• The full book catalog: Novel Concepts Publishing

• The free hub (bonus content, reading guides, extras): StoryOrigin

• On Amazon: Novel Concepts Author Central— Hillora & Catherine

Novel Concepts Teahouse | Novel Concepts Publishing

The Novel Concepts Teahouse is where the writers of Novel Concepts Publishing sit with readers. Not at a remove, not as a brand — as the people who actually wrote the books. That distinction matters to us.

Here’s how the room is laid out:

The table rotates. Different authors take the host chair at different times — depending on what’s releasing, what’s on our minds, what the season calls for. You won’t always hear from the same voice, and that’s by design. We think a room with one voice in it is just a lecture.

The menu changes. Seasonally, when it makes sense, and sometimes just because we felt like it. Expect new releases, behind-the-scenes dispatches, craft talk, reading recommendations, and free fiction.

You’re not a subscriber, you’re a guest. That means we try not to waste your time. If we’re showing up in your inbox, it’s because we have something to say, not because we hit a posting quota.

That’s the layout. Settle in.

— The writers of Novel Concepts Teahouse

P.S. If you’ve been meaning to tell a reader friend about us, now’s a good time. New name, fresh start, same table.

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Letter the First — 6th January, 1813

Dear Mum,

My position at Madame Séverin’s is not exactly what I hoped, but I am making the best of it, which is what you would tell me to do and so I am telling you before you have the chance.

The shop is on Half Moon Street, which is a good address, and the clientele is the Quality, which is a good clientele, and the wages are twelve shillings a week with a half-day on Sundays, which is better than the glove shop and considerably better than the laundry, so I am not complaining. I am observing. There is a difference, and I learned it from you.

The shop itself is small from the street — a single bow window with one gown displayed on a form and a door that is painted the colour of a bruise, which Madame Séverin calls “aubergine” and which I call purple, because I am from Spitalfields and we call things what they are. Inside, the shop is larger than the outside suggests. I do not mean it is cleverly arranged. I mean there are rooms that the building should not contain. The fitting room is the size of our parlour, our kitchen, and Mrs. Kehoe’s parlour next door combined, and it is on the second floor of a building that, from the street, appears to have one storey and an attic. I have not mentioned this to Madame Séverin. I have a feeling she knows.

My duties are: greeting customers, fetching fabric, pinning hems, sweeping the workroom, and not asking questions. Madame Séverin was specific about the last one. “You will see things, Nell,” she told me on my first morning, in the accent that is French when she is speaking to clients and something else when she is speaking to me. “You will see things and you will not ask about them. This is not because the answers are secret. It is because the answers will not help you, and I prefer my girls to be helpful rather than informed.”

I am being helpful. I am not asking questions. But I am writing them down, because you told me when I was small that the questions you do not ask out loud are the ones you should write in a letter, and that a letter to your mum is the safest place in the world for a question that has nowhere else to go.

Question the first: why does the fabric move?

Your daughter, who is employed and observant, Nell

Letter the Second — 20th January, 1813

Dear Mum,

Thank you for your letter. You are right that twelve shillings is twelve shillings and that I should not look gift horses in the mouth. You are wrong that I am “fussing over nothing.” The fabric moves, Mum. It moves.

I will be specific, because you taught me that a complaint without detail is a whinge and a complaint with detail is a report. The fabrics at Madame Séverin’s are kept in the back room, which is the room that should not exist and which is cold in a way that is not about temperature. The cold is — I do not know how to describe this. It is a cold that watches. You walk into the back room and the cold notices you. It does not care about you, but it knows you are there.

The fabrics are on bolts, stacked on shelves, same as any draper’s shop. Silk, satin, muslin, velvet, crepe. Some of them are colours I recognise. Some of them are colours I do not, and I do not mean foreign colours — I mean colours that do not exist outside this shop. There is a blue that is not blue. There is a grey that is the colour of the moment before it rains, except it is always that moment, always about to rain, and looking at the fabric too long makes your eyes water. There is a black that is not the absence of colour but the presence of all of them, pressed together until they gave up and became dark.

And they move. Not all of them and not all the time. But when I reach for a bolt — when my hand is six inches from the shelf — the fabric shifts. Toward me or away, depending on the fabric. The silks lean in. The velvets lean away. The black fabric — the one I just described — recoiled when I touched it last Thursday, pulling itself two inches deeper onto the shelf, and I pulled my hand back and stood there with my heart going and the cold watching me and the fabric settled, slowly, the way a cat settles when it has decided you are not a threat but has not decided you are welcome.

Madame Séverin found me standing there. She looked at the fabric. She looked at me. “That one is not for you, Nell,” she said. “That one is for a particular client, and you will know her when she comes, because the fabric will go to her the way it went from you.”

I did not ask who the client is. I am not asking questions. But I am writing it down: the fabric has preferences. The fabric chooses. I am a shopgirl at a dress shop where the merchandise has opinions.

Twelve shillings a week, Mum. I know.

Your observant and slightly unsettled daughter, Nell

Letter the Third — 3rd February, 1813

Dear Mum,

The seamstresses are not what I expected.

There are four of them. They work in the room above the fitting room — the room that is above the second floor in a building with one storey, which makes it the third floor of a building that does not have a third floor, but I have stopped counting because the building does not appear to be interested in arithmetic.

The seamstresses do not speak. Not to me, not to each other, not to Madame Séverin. They communicate through the work — a lifted needle, a turned wrist, a particular way of holding the shears that means “hand me the blue thread” or “this seam is wrong” or “leave us alone.” I have learned to read their gestures the way you learn to read weather: not through instruction but through standing in it long enough.

They sew fast. Faster than any seamstress I saw at the glove shop or the laundry. Their needles move in ways that I cannot follow, and the thread — Mum, the thread. The thread is not thread. It behaves like thread. It looks like thread. But it is warm, and it hums when the seamstresses pull it through the fabric, and the sound it makes is not the sound of thread through cloth but the sound of — I keep reaching for the right word and missing it. The sound of intent. As though the thread knows what the garment will become and is hurrying to get there.

The seamstresses arrive at dawn and leave at dusk. I do not know where they go. I do not know where they come from. They are tall, thin, pale, and their fingers are longer than fingers should be, and they are very beautiful in a way that makes you look away rather than closer, the way you look away from a fire that is too bright.

Madame Séverin calls them “my girls.” She calls me “my girl” too. But when she says it to me, it sounds like employment. When she says it to them, it sounds like something older.

I am fine, Mum. I eat my lunch in the fitting room, where the cold is less, and the fabrics on the display shelves are the ordinary ones — mortal silks, mortal satins — and I can sit with my bread and cheese and pretend for twenty minutes that I work in a normal shop. Then the thread starts humming upstairs and I go back to work.

Your employed and adequately nourished daughter, Nell

Letter the Fourth — 17th February, 1813

Dear Mum,

A customer came today for the black fabric.

She arrived at four o’clock. She did not come through the front door. She was in the fitting room when I went in to light the candles, standing in the centre of the room as though she had been there for some time, or as though “arriving” was not a thing she did — she was either here or not here, and the transition between the two did not involve a door.

She was tall. She was wearing grey — the about-to-rain grey, which I realised she must have purchased on a previous visit. The gown fit her the way water fits a glass: it did not sit on her so much as belong to her, as though the fabric had been part of her and had been temporarily separated into the shape of a dress for reasons of social convention.

She did not greet me. She looked at me for a moment — looked through me, really, the way you look through a window at something on the other side — and then said, “The black.”

I went to the back room. The cold watched me. I reached for the bolt. The fabric — the black that had recoiled from me in January — moved toward my hand. Not cautiously. Eagerly. It unrolled itself from the bolt, six feet of it, eight feet, more than I could carry, and it slid off the shelf and onto the floor and began moving — flowing, like water over flat stone — through the doorway, down the corridor, and into the fitting room, where it stopped at the woman’s feet and lay still.

The woman looked down at the fabric. The fabric looked up at the woman. I do not know how fabric looks, but this fabric was looking. The woman smiled. The smile was not warm. It was satisfied, the way a lock is satisfied when the right key turns it — mechanical, precise, complete.

Madame Séverin appeared — from where, I do not know; she does not always use the stairs — and the two of them spoke in a language I have not heard before. It was not French. It was older than French. It sounded like the cold in the back room would sound if the cold could speak, and I stood in the doorway holding nothing because the fabric had delivered itself, and I understood — without asking, without being told, without any of the questions I am not supposed to ask — that the woman in the grey dress was the client the fabric had been waiting for, and that whatever Madame Séverin’s shop is, it is not a shop the way I understand the word.

The woman left with the fabric. She did not pay. Or rather, she did not pay in any currency I saw. She and Madame Séverin exchanged a word, a look, a nod — and the transaction was complete. The cold in the back room eased. The seamstresses upstairs stopped sewing for the first time since I have been here. The silence lasted eight seconds. Then the humming resumed.

Madame Séverin found me in the corridor. “You did well, Nell,” she said. “The fabric went to her. You did not flinch.”

I did not tell her that I flinched inside, where she could not see it. Maybe she could see it. Maybe not flinching where it shows is what she meant.

Your daughter, who is beginning to understand the nature of her employment, Nell

Letter the Fifth — 3rd March, 1813

Dear Mum,

You ask whether the shop is safe. I will answer honestly because you will know if I do not.

I do not think it is safe. I think it is careful. There is a difference. Safe means nothing can hurt you. Careful means something could, but it is choosing not to, and the choosing is a decision that is made each day and could be made differently.

Madame Séverin is careful with me. She does not let me handle certain fabrics. She does not let me enter the workroom after dark. She does not let me speak to certain clients, and the clients she keeps me from are the ones who look most human and least like themselves — the ones whose smiles are perfect and whose eyes are not smiling along with their mouths.

The seamstresses are careful with me. They do not touch me, which I thought was coldness until I saw one of them repair a torn hem on my own dress while I was wearing it, her needle moving so fast I could not see it, and she did not touch me once — not my skin, not my hand, not the fabric where it lay against me. She repaired the hem through the cloth alone, and when she finished, the dress hung better than it had since I bought it. She turned back to her work. She did not look at me. But the repair was a kindness, and kindness from someone who is careful not to touch you is a particular kind of kindness that means more than you might think.

The shop is careful. The cold watches but does not follow me home. The fabrics have opinions but do not enforce them. The thread hums but does not speak. The building contains rooms that should not exist but the rooms are warm and well-lit and the chairs in the fitting room are comfortable and Madame Séverin keeps the fire going all winter, and I sit by it during my lunch and eat my bread and think about the black fabric flowing across the floor like water finding its level, and I am not afraid.

I am not safe. But I am being careful too. I am learning which fabrics lean toward me and which lean away, and I am learning to read the seamstresses’ gestures, and I am learning that Madame Séverin’s accent changes depending on who she is and that who she is changes depending on who is in the room, and I am writing it all down, because you told me that a girl who pays attention is a girl who survives, and I am paying attention, Mum.

I am paying very close attention.

Your careful daughter, Nell

P.S. — The wages have been raised to fourteen shillings. I did not ask for the raise. Madame Séverin told me I had earned it. I asked what I had earned it for. She said, “Not flinching.” I do not know if this is a job requirement or a compliment. It may be both.

Letter the Sixth — 17th March, 1813

Dear Mum,

Something happened today that I need to tell you about because if I do not write it down it will sit in my chest and grow heavier, and you always said that a thing shared is a thing halved, and I need this halved.

A girl came into the shop. My age — seventeen, maybe eighteen. She came for a fitting for a gown that Madame Séverin had been making for three weeks, a gown of the grey-that-is-about-to-rain, and the girl stood on the fitting platform in the centre of the room while Madame Séverin pinned and adjusted and the seamstresses watched from the doorway with their long fingers still.

The girl was happy. She was going to a ball — her first ball, she told me, while Madame Séverin pinned the bodice. Her first Season. She had been promised the gown by her godmother, who was paying for it, and the godmother’s name was a name the girl said with reverence and which I did not recognise but which Madame Séverin’s hands paused at, very briefly, before resuming their work.

The gown was beautiful. I have seen beautiful gowns since coming to this shop — gowns that move like living things, gowns that change colour with the wearer’s breath, gowns that make the woman inside them look like a version of herself that has not yet happened. But this gown was beautiful in a different way. It was beautiful the way a trap is beautiful — the way a perfectly laid table is beautiful when you do not know what the meal will cost.

I looked at Madame Séverin. Madame Séverin was not looking at me. She was looking at the girl. And her face — her face, Mum, which I have seen in its French arrangement and its other arrangement and its arrangement for the woman in the black fabric — her face was the face of a person who is doing a job she does not wish to do and who is doing it well because doing it poorly would be worse.

The girl left with the gown in a box. She was glowing. Not with fabric — with happiness. The ordinary, mortal, seventeen-year-old happiness of a girl with a new dress and a first ball and a godmother who loves her.

I do not know what the gown will do. I do not know what the godmother paid for it. I do not know what bargain was struck or what the terms are or what the grey-that-is-about-to-rain becomes when the rain finally falls.

But I know what Madame Séverin’s face looked like when the girl walked out, and it was the face of a woman who has been in this trade long enough to know the cost of a gown that costs nothing.

I went home early. Madame Séverin let me. She did not ask why. She already knew.

Your daughter, who is paying attention and wishes she were not, Nell

Letter the Seventh — 30th March, 1813

Dear Mum,

I am staying.

You told me to leave. I know. You told me to leave three letters ago and I did not answer because I was still deciding and because answering before I had decided would have been the whinge instead of the report, and you taught me the difference.

I am staying because of what happened after the girl with the grey gown.

I went in the next morning expecting — I do not know what I was expecting. Dread, maybe. Guilt. The cold in the back room taking on a new quality, the quality of a place where things are done that should not be done.

Instead I found Madame Séverin in the workroom. She was alone. The seamstresses were not there. The fabrics were still. She was sitting at the worktable with a cup of tea that had gone cold and a piece of paper that she had been writing on, and when I came in she looked up and her face was neither French nor the other thing. It was tired. Ordinary tired. The tired of a woman who has been up all night working through a problem that has no good answer.

She told me to sit down. I sat. She told me the following, and I am writing it as close to her words as I can remember.

“The godmother paid for the gown in the old way, Nell. A favour owed. The girl will wear the gown to the ball and she will be the most beautiful woman in the room, and every eye will find her, and the evening will be the evening she remembers for the rest of her life. This is what the godmother purchased. This is what I made.”

She stopped. She drank the cold tea. She continued.

“The favour is mine to discharge. Not the girl’s. The godmother’s bargain is with me, not with the child. The girl owes nothing. She will dance and she will shine and she will go home, and the gown will hang in her wardrobe and it will be a gown and nothing more. I made certain of this. I have been making certain of this for a very long time.”

I asked her — breaking my rule, asking the question, because some questions cannot stay in a letter — what the favour would cost her.

She looked at me. The tired was still there, underneath, but what was on top was something I recognised from my own face when I look in the mirror after a long day: pride. Not vanity. The pride of a person who has done hard work and done it well.

“Another gown, Nell. There is always another gown. And I will make it, and it will be beautiful, and the girl who wears it will owe nothing, because that is the bargain I struck when I opened this shop, and it is the bargain I keep.”

She poured me a cup of tea. It was warm. The cold in the back room was still there, watching, but it was watching the way a fire watches — from a distance, contained, aware of the person sitting in front of it and choosing, every moment, not to burn.

I am staying, Mum. The shop is not safe. Madame Séverin is not safe. But she is making gowns for girls who do not know what their godmothers are, and she is paying the price herself, and the least I can do is sweep the workroom and pin the hems and not flinch.

Fourteen shillings a week. The seamstresses repaired my other dress last Thursday. The thread hummed while they worked. It sounded, for the first time, like it was humming for me.

Your daughter, who is staying, Nell

From the Outrageously-Embellished Quill Pens of

Catherine McDowell & Hillora Lang:

Catherine McDowell and Hillora Lang are sisters, authors, and the only people to have been uninvited from a garden party by a hedge. One is a former glassblower who left the trade after creating a piece that reflected a room that wasn’t the one it was sitting in; the other is a professional beekeeper (her second hive, the first having “departed under circumstances that suggest coordination”) who speaks to her bees each morning and reports that they have “gotten chattier since the solstice.” Together, they write cozy fantasies where reflections aren’t always yours, bees know things, and a garden gate that won’t open for you is making a choice.

Catherine’s glassblowing background means she understands heat, transformation, and the specific eeriness of a transparent object that shows you something unexpected. Hillora’s beekeeping contributes knowledge of communication, community, and the deep conviction that her bees are organizing something. The garden party incident involved a privet hedge that grew six inches in the time it took them to walk to the gate, after which the gate would not open. The host apologized. The hedge did not.

Their books feature enchanted gardens, glass objects with more than reflective properties, and the understanding that nature has preferences. They write for readers who talk to their plants, who’ve ever caught a reflection doing something they weren’t, and who believe that the most interesting boundaries are the ones that enforce themselves.

Welcome to the Improper Entanglements Universe

Regency paranormal cozy fantasy where magic creates chaos instead of solving problems. Equal parts sincere swoon and gleeful disaster. Proper correspondence colliding with wildly improper magical complications.

Four series. One universe. Magic that creates problems instead of solving them, competent women who handle the fallout, and love stories where the happy ending is a promise, not a surprise. Clean romance throughout—sweet kisses, no explicit content, guaranteed happy endings earned through magic and connection.

Pick the entry point based on what kind of Gaslamp Fantasy story appeals to you.

~ Improper Entanglements — standalone Regency gaslamp fantasy novels
~ Improper Entanglements Letters — epistolary novels told through found documents
~ The Puck Papers — epistolary novellas spanning ten thousand years
~ Letters from the Clouds — a serial-in-progress

Find them all on the Improper Entanglements series page at NovelConceptsPublishing.com.

Gaslamp fantasy · Regency paranormal · cozy romance · guaranteed happy endings

Starting small? Find free short reads on StoryOrigin, or glimpses into the Improper Entanglements world on our Substack.

From Mrs. I. Greaves, Cook, for Her Own Reference and the Protection of Future Cooks Who Make the Same Mistakes

Prefatory Note

I have been cooking for thirty years. I have served in four households, managed kitchens ranging from a cottage scullery to the main kitchen of a house with fourteen at table, and I have never — not once — had a recipe go wrong in a way that could not be explained by temperature, timing, or the quality of the butter.

Until I started shopping at the Barrowfield Market.

I began attending the market in the autumn of 1809, on the recommendation of Mrs. Brennan, who cooks for the Hartfield household and who told me, over a glass of ale at the Harvest Fair, that “the honey alone is worth the walk.” She did not mention that the honey is not from bees. She did not mention that the flour moves. She did not mention any of what follows, because Mrs. Brennan is a woman who believes that a cook learns best through experience, and because Mrs. Brennan has a sense of humour that I have come to regard as professional negligence disguised as friendship.

These recipes are real. I have cooked every one. The ingredients are from the Barrowfield Market unless noted otherwise. The methods are my own — standard kitchen practice, adapted where necessary for ingredients that do not behave as mortal ingredients should. The annotations are warnings. Read them. I did not have them. You do.

— Mrs. I. Greaves, Cook

Recipe the First: Midsummer Honey Cake

Purchased from: Mab’s Honeycakes, South Row What the vendor said: “The honey does the work.” What the vendor did not say: everything else.

Read more

For Internal Records Only. Do Not Share with the Midnight Market Gazette, Which Has Already Published Two Unflattering Items About Us This Season and Which I Am Choosing to Handle with Professionalism Rather Than the Targeted Delivery of Stinging Nettles to Their Correspondent’s Doorstep, Though the Temptation Is Considerable.

A Note on the Nature of the Business

Briar & Bloom has been operating at the Barrowfield Crossing Market for ninety-seven years, first under my grandmother, then under my mother, and now under myself. We provide floral arrangements for all occasions — celebrations, commiserations, declarations, apologies, and the various unnamed situations that fall between these categories and which require flowers because nothing else will do.

Our flowers are sourced from both mortal and fae gardens. This is what distinguishes us from a mortal florist, and it is also what produces the incidents described in this log. Mortal flowers sit in a vase and look beautiful and eventually die. Our flowers sit in a vase and look beautiful and occasionally do other things. The other things are the subject of these notes.

I keep this log because my grandmother kept one, and her grandmother before her, and because a florist who does not track her incidents is a florist who repeats them. I have repeated several nonetheless. The flowers do not read the log.

— Miss T. Root, Proprietress

Order 1: Bridal Bouquet for the Ashworth–Lennox Wedding

Client: Lady Ashworth, on behalf of the bride Arrangement: White roses, stephanotis, trailing ivy, silver ribbon Delivery date: 8th February, 1812 Incident classification: Blessing interference. Severity: Moderate to catastrophic, depending on one’s view of marriage.

The bouquet was assembled to the client’s specifications and was, upon completion, exactly what was ordered: elegant, traditional, and free of any active properties. I inspected it myself. The roses were mortal. The stephanotis was mortal. The ivy was from the garden wall behind Stall 14 — Mrs. Hopkirk’s wall — which may have been a contributing factor, though Mrs. Hopkirk denies that her wall produces enchanted ivy and I have chosen to believe her because the alternative is inspecting every leaf and I do not have the time.

The bouquet was delivered to the church at nine o’clock on the morning of the wedding. At half past ten, the bride’s godmother arrived and blessed the bouquet. The godmother is, according to the family, “a woman of traditional habits.” The family did not specify what tradition. The tradition, I have since established, is fairy godmothering, and the blessing was not a prayer but an enchantment, applied with the casual confidence of a woman who has been blessing things since before the bride’s grandmother was born and who does not distinguish between a christening gift and a wedding bouquet.

The blessing was intended to ensure “a marriage of enduring passion.” The blessing delivered precisely that. The bouquet, upon being held by the bride during the ceremony, began to bloom. Not the gentle unfurling of buds — an aggressive, exuberant, unstoppable blooming that produced new roses at the rate of approximately one per minute. By the time the vows were exchanged, the bouquet had tripled in size. By the signing of the register, the bride could not see over it. By the time the couple processed down the aisle, the bouquet was producing roses faster than the bride could hold them, and petals were falling in a continuous cascade that the guests interpreted as romantic and the bride interpreted as an emergency.

The roses continued blooming for the duration of the wedding breakfast, the speeches, and the first dance. They stopped at midnight, at which point the bouquet contained approximately three hundred roses and weighed, by the groom’s estimate, as much as a small dog. The bride set it down for the first time in fourteen hours and her arms shook for ten minutes.

The marriage is, I am informed, passionate. The bouquet is in the bride’s parlour, where it has not wilted, has not dropped a single petal since the wedding, and produces one new rose each year on the anniversary. The godmother considers this a success. The bride considers it “a lot.”

I have added a line to our order form: “Will the bouquet be blessed by any family member? If so, by whom, and with what authority?” Customers find this question peculiar. I find it necessary.

Resolution: No refund issued. The product performed as blessed, not as ordered. Client advised to prune annually.

Order 2: Table Arrangements for Mrs. Alderton’s Dinner Party

Client: Mrs. Alderton, Hartfield Hall Arrangement: Six centrepieces of mixed wildflowers, meadow style Delivery date: 14th April, 1812 Incident classification: Pisky infestation. Severity: Social.

The centrepieces were assembled from wildflowers gathered at the meadow border between Barrowfield and the old wood. The flowers were inspected before arrangement. The piskies were not in the flowers at the time of inspection. The piskies were in the flowers at the time of delivery, which means they boarded between my stall and Hartfield Hall, a distance of two miles, during which the piskies — who are small, green, and equipped with a talent for concealment that borders on the professional — embedded themselves in the meadowsweet and waited.

The centrepieces were placed on the dinner table at six o’clock. The guests were seated at seven. The piskies emerged at half past seven, during the soup course, and spent the remainder of the evening conducting their own dinner party among the flowers, using acorn caps as dishes and producing a noise that Mrs. Alderton’s butler — Mr. Alderton, whose composure under pressure I have had described to me by several sources — classified as “a minor atmospheric disturbance.”

The piskies numbered fourteen. They ate pollen, drank dew that had collected in the flower petals, and danced on the tablecloth between the salt cellar and the fish forks. Three of them attempted to ride the butter dish. One fell into the gravy boat and had to be rescued by the footman, who — I am told — extracted the pisky with a dessert spoon and the steady hand of a man who has seen worse at Hartfield Hall, which I do not doubt.

The guests were divided. Lady Ashworth found the piskies charming. Colonel Vane found them “a damned nuisance” but conceded that the one riding the butter dish showed spirit. Mrs. Voss — who had seen the piskies coming, being a seer, and who had said nothing, being a polite guest — smiled throughout.

The piskies departed with the dessert course, taking with them three sugar crystals, a length of ribbon from one of the centrepieces, and — according to the footman’s inventory — one silver teaspoon, which has not been recovered. Pisky theft of cutlery is a known hazard and I accept responsibility for failing to inspect for passengers. The teaspoon has been replaced at my expense.

I now inspect all wildflower arrangements with a magnifying lens before delivery. The piskies find this insulting. I find it necessary.

Resolution: Replacement teaspoon provided. Formal apology to butler. Informal apology to the pisky who fell in the gravy, who did not deserve that and who was, I am told, very dignified about the whole thing.

Order 3: Funeral Wreath for the Late Mr. Josiah Enderby

Client: Mrs. Enderby Arrangement: Wreath of white lilies, laurel, and rosemary Delivery date: 9th June, 1812 Incident classification: Residual attachment. Severity: Persistent.

The wreath was standard — white lilies for mourning, laurel for honour, rosemary for remembrance. The lilies were from my fae supplier, which I note because mortal lilies do not produce residual attachments and fae lilies occasionally do, though the incidence is low — fewer than one arrangement in fifty — and the mechanism is not well understood.

Mr. Enderby was, by all accounts, a devoted gardener. He maintained the finest kitchen garden in the parish and was known to spend entire days among his vegetables, conversing with his runner beans in a manner that his wife described as “the only sustained conversation he was capable of.” Mr. Enderby died in March. The funeral was in June because Mrs. Enderby wished to wait until the garden was in full bloom, which she considered a more appropriate tribute than haste.

The wreath was placed on the coffin during the service. The service was conventional. The wreath was conventional. The difficulty began when the wreath was removed from the coffin after the burial and placed, as is customary, on the grave.

The wreath began to grow.

Not in the manner of the wedding bouquet — not a frantic blooming, but a slow, deliberate rooting. The laurel put down roots through the wreath frame and into the soil. The rosemary followed. The lilies anchored themselves. Within a week, the wreath was no longer a wreath but a garden — a small, circular garden on Mr. Enderby’s grave, producing not only the original lilies, laurel, and rosemary but also, as the weeks progressed, runner beans.

The runner beans are Mr. Enderby’s. Not in the sense of ownership — in the sense of variety. They are the specific variety of runner bean that Mr. Enderby cultivated in his kitchen garden, a variety he bred himself over twenty years and which he called “Enderby’s Pride.” No one planted them on the grave. No seed was introduced. The wreath, rooted in fae-sourced lilies and placed on the grave of a man whose life’s work was his garden, produced the thing he loved best.

Mrs. Enderby visits the grave daily. She waters the runner beans. She does not find this strange. She finds it “exactly like him — he could never leave a patch of soil alone, and apparently death has not changed this.”

The grave garden has been growing for four months. It has expanded to include tomatoes, which Mr. Enderby also grew, and a border of marigolds, which he used for companion planting. The churchyard groundskeeper has requested guidance. I have no guidance to offer. The flowers did what flowers do when they are given to someone who loved growing things: they grew. The rest is Mr. Enderby’s doing, and I am not in a position to tell a dead man to stop gardening.

Resolution: No action required. The grave is well-tended. Mrs. Enderby is content. The runner beans are producing. Mr. Enderby’s Pride endures.

Order 4: A Potted Fern, Delivered to the Wrong Address

Client: Miss Arabella Kirke Item: One potted fern, variety undisclosed (fae-sourced) Delivery date: 22nd July, 1812 Incident classification: Misdelivery with consequences. Severity: Architectural.

Miss Kirke ordered a fern for her study. The fern was from my fae supplier’s greenhouse — a source I use for clients who have requested “something lively,” which is how Miss Kirke described her requirements. Miss Kirke is a regular customer and is aware that “lively” in the context of Briar & Bloom means something different from “lively” at a mortal nursery. She was prepared for a fern with personality. She was prepared for movement, growth, and the possibility of the fern expressing preferences about light, water, and placement.

The fern was delivered to the wrong house.

My delivery boy — a boggart named Sprig, who is reliable but who cannot read house numbers because he is a boggart and boggarts navigate by smell rather than by signage — delivered the fern to Number 12 instead of Number 21. Number 12 belongs to Mr. and Mrs. Harbottle, who did not order a fern, who were not expecting a fern, and who were not prepared for a fern of any kind, let alone one sourced from a fae greenhouse and equipped with what I can only describe as ambition.

The Harbottles placed the fern on the parlour windowsill, assuming it was a gift from a neighbour. Within a week, the fern had outgrown the pot. Within a fortnight, the fern had outgrown the windowsill. By the end of the month, the fern occupied the entire parlour window, had extended fronds along the curtain rail, and was — Mrs. Harbottle reports with a composure I admire — “making its way toward the bookcase.”

By the time the misdelivery was discovered — six weeks after delivery, when Miss Kirke enquired about her order and I traced the error — the fern had colonised the parlour, extended into the hallway, and was working on the stairs. The Harbottles’ house was, in the assessment of Mrs. Harbottle, “becoming a greenhouse from the inside.”

I offered to remove the fern. Mrs. Harbottle declined. The fern, she explained, had settled. Her husband had grown accustomed to it. Their infant son — the boy who does not sleep, whom I have heard about from Mrs. Hopkirk — had developed a habit of sitting among the fronds in the early morning hours, watching them unfurl in the dark. The fern unfurls at night. The boy watches. Neither sleeps. Mrs. Harbottle considers this arrangement “the first sensible thing either of them has done.”

Miss Kirke received a replacement fern — a smaller one, mortal-sourced, with no ambitions beyond the pot. She was disappointed. She had wanted the ambitious one. I have noted her preference for future orders.

The Harbottle fern continues to grow. It has reached the landing. Mr. Harbottle has moved a chair to the landing so that he can sit in the fern and read the newspaper in the evenings, which he reports is “unexpectedly peaceful for a man sharing a staircase with a plant.” The boy sits beside him. The fern holds the newspaper’s edges flat, which may be helpfulness or may be the fronds’ natural resting position. Mr. Harbottle does not distinguish between the two. I suspect there is no distinction to make.

Resolution: No removal. No refund. Replacement fern provided to original client. Delivery boy reminded about house numbers. Sprig has responded by sniffing the door of Number 21 and committing its scent to memory, which is his version of an apology and which I accept.

Order 5: An Apology Bouquet, Sender Anonymous

Client: Anonymous (payment left in cream and a folded note at the stall) Arrangement: Red roses, forget-me-nots, a sprig of something I could not identify Delivery date: 30th September, 1812 Incident classification: Under observation. Severity: Unknown.

An order was placed at my stall overnight — between market close and dawn — by a client I did not see. The payment was a saucer of cream (fresh, excellent quality, Jersey by the colour) and a note written in a hand I do not recognise on paper that smelled of woodsmoke and was warm to the touch despite the September chill.

The note read: “For Mrs. Agnes Holt, Postmistress, Hartwell-on-Crossing. Red roses for admiration. Forget-me-nots for constancy. The third flower is mine. She will understand. Do not ask what it is. It will not hurt her. It is the opposite of hurting. Deliver before she opens the post office. She should find them waiting.”

The third flower — the sprig I could not identify — was tucked into the note. It was small, silver-green, and produced no scent I could name, though it produced a feeling I could: the feeling of a letter arriving that you have been waiting for, the moment before you open it, when the waiting turns to having.

I assembled the bouquet. I delivered it to the post office at half past six, before Mrs. Holt arrived. I placed it on the counter beside the F.P. redirect basket, which I know about because everyone in Hartwell knows about the basket, and because Mrs. Holt and Mrs. Brindlecross are not as discreet about their arrangement as they believe, and because the village has been watching the two of them become friends with the quiet satisfaction of a community that recognises a good thing and has the sense not to comment on it.

I do not know who sent the bouquet. The cream was fae — the quality confirms that. The note was written by someone who knows the language of flowers, which is a mortal convention, and who added a flower that has no mortal name, which is not. The sender knows Mrs. Holt. The sender admires Mrs. Holt. The sender chose to express this through my stall rather than through direct delivery, which suggests the sender is cautious, or formal, or operating within protocols that require an intermediary.

Mrs. Brindlecross is a retired fairy godmother who runs the Faerie Post office behind the hawthorn hedge.

I am not speculating. I am a florist. I arrange flowers. I deliver them. I do not ask who sends them or why, because a florist who asks those questions is a florist who loses clients, and because the answers — in this case — are not mine to know.

The bouquet was on the counter when Mrs. Holt opened the post office. I know this because Sprig watched from the hedge. Mrs. Holt looked at the roses. She looked at the forget-me-nots. She picked up the silver-green sprig and held it to her nose and stood very still for a long time.

Then she put the bouquet in water, opened the post office, and began her day.

The sprig has not wilted. It has been two months. Everything else in the bouquet has faded and been replaced, as cut flowers must be. The sprig remains, green and silver and producing that feeling — the letter arriving, the waiting turning to having — in a glass on Mrs. Holt’s counter, beside the F.P. basket, where it sits and does what it does and is, I believe, the opposite of hurting.

I am not speculating.

But I am keeping the order on file.

Resolution: Delivered as instructed. Payment accepted. Sender unknown. Sprig: ongoing.

From the Outrageously-Embellished Quill Pens of

Catherine McDowell & Hillora Lang:

Catherine McDowell and Hillora Lang are sisters, word-weavers, and the reason the county’s annual scarecrow competition now includes a “lifelikeness limit.” One is a former meteorologist who left the profession after accurately predicting a storm that wasn’t on any model and couldn’t explain how she knew; the other is a portrait miniaturist whose work is collected internationally and who once painted a likeness so accurate the sitter reported “feeling watched by it from the next room.” Together, they write cozy fantasies where weather responds to mood, small things hold enormous power, and a portrait on the mantelpiece is keeping an eye on things.

Catherine’s weather expertise means she understands systems, patterns, and the uncomfortable moment when the data says one thing and you know another. Hillora’s miniature painting contributes extraordinary attention to detail, the understanding that small doesn’t mean insignificant, and the experience of having a client return a painting because it was “too present.” The scarecrow incident involved a joint entry so convincing that it was spoken to by four separate visitors, nodded at by a fifth, and disqualified after “the crow situation,” which involved crows arriving from distances that don’t support the theory that they were attracted by seed.

Their books feature weather with opinions, tiny objects with enormous presence, and the understanding that scale is irrelevant when something has enough intention behind it. They write for readers who check the weather and then check their instincts, who appreciate small beautiful things, and who believe that the most powerful enchantments fit in your pocket.

Welcome to the Improper Entanglements Universe

Regency paranormal cozy fantasy where magic creates chaos instead of solving problems. Equal parts sincere swoon and gleeful disaster. Proper correspondence colliding with wildly improper magical complications.

Four series. One universe. Magic that creates problems instead of solving them, competent women who handle the fallout, and love stories where the happy ending is a promise, not a surprise. Clean romance throughout—sweet kisses, no explicit content, guaranteed happy endings earned through magic and connection.

Pick the entry point based on what kind of Gaslamp Fantasy story appeals to you.

~ Improper Entanglements — standalone Regency gaslamp fantasy novels
~ Improper Entanglements Letters — epistolary novels told through found documents
~ The Puck Papers — epistolary novellas spanning ten thousand years
~ Letters from the Clouds — a serial-in-progress

Find them all on the Improper Entanglements series page at NovelConceptsPublishing.com.

Gaslamp fantasy · Regency paranormal · cozy romance · guaranteed happy endings

Starting small? Find free short reads on StoryOrigin, or glimpses into the Improper Entanglements world on our Substack.

A Welcome to Those Who Have Misplaced Their Certainty

You have discovered these fortunes at precisely the moment you were meant to, which is to say: probably by accident, quite possibly while looking for something else entirely, and definitely not when you thought you would. This is as it should be. The universe operates on a schedule that exists somewhere between “eventually” and “maybe never,” and these particular predictions have been waiting for you in that exact temporal location.

Within these pages, you will find guidance derived from methods of divination that no reasonable person would attempt and calendars that have given up all pretense of measuring time in any linear fashion. We have consulted alarmed buttons, philosophically troubled sparrows, and the panic patterns of moths. We have read the droppings, interpreted the leanings, and observed the behaviors of objects that really ought to remain stationary.

If you are the sort of person whose shadow has developed opinions, whose socks are plotting, or whose Tuesday has been replaced with a spare Wednesday, then these fortunes are for you. If not, they soon will be. The universe is nothing if not democratically chaotic.

Read these predictions with an open mind and a firm grip on reality—though not too firm, as you may need to let go of it shortly.

— The Department of Improbable Prophecy

The 43rd Day of Slumbergust, Year of the Disappointed Turnip: Reading:
Three Acorns and a Moderately Concerned Vole

Your shadow will develop opinions about breakfast. Specifically, it favors porridge but only when served in vessels owned by someone else’s grandmother. Avoid all decisions made while wearing socks that match. The universe has noticed your tendency to count ceiling tiles and will respond by making them multiply when you’re not looking. A stranger will ask you for directions to somewhere that doesn’t exist yet—give them anyway. Your third-favorite spoon seeks independence.

Moonday of the Backwards March, in the 712th Wobble:
Cast by the Ancient Method of Alarmed Buttons

Seven small catastrophes approach wearing your face. They mean well but lack coordination. Something you said to a houseplant in 2019 will finally take effect next Tuesday, though which Tuesday remains negotiable. Beware the number eight—it’s been practicing. Your left knee knows something your right knee doesn’t, and neither will tell your brain. A document you need will camouflage itself as other documents until you stop looking for it. Then it will nest in your shoe.

Read more

Compiled by Mr. Josiah Soot, Master Sweep, London and the Home Counties

For the Use of Apprentices, Journeymen, and Any Sweep Who Has Encountered Something Up a Flue That Was Not Covered in His Training

Foreword

I have been sweeping chimneys for thirty-four years. In that time I have removed soot, creosote, bird nests, dead birds, live birds, a Sunday hat belonging to a woman in Clapham who could not explain how it got there, fourteen shillings in loose coin, a love letter addressed to no one, and — on one occasion in Hampstead — a small and very angry badger.

None of these prepared me for the other things.

The other things are the subject of this almanac. I write it for the apprentice who reaches his brush up a flue and feels it grabbed. I write it for the journeyman who lights a clearing fire and watches it rearrange itself into a face. I write it for the master sweep who has been in the trade long enough to know that some chimneys are not empty, even when they are clean, and that the occupants have rights that a reasonable tradesman ought to respect.

This is not a work of fancy. Every entry is drawn from my own experience or from the verified accounts of sweeps I trust, which is to say sweeps who do not drink before noon and who can distinguish between a draught and a voice. I have organised the entries by species, as a naturalist might, though I suspect no naturalist would claim these creatures for his catalogue.

A note on compensation: several of the situations described in this almanac require additional time, specialised methods, or the kind of composure that exceeds standard professional expectations. I have included billing guidance throughout. Your labour has value. The fact that a chimney contains a supernatural resident does not reduce that value. If anything, it increases it. Bill accordingly.

— J. Soot, Master Sweep London, 1812

FIRE SALAMANDERS

Identification. The fire salamander lives in the hottest part of the flue, typically at or above the first bend, where the heat from the fireplace below concentrates before dispersing up the stack. It is between six and ten inches long, bright orange when content, deep red when agitated, and white when asleep. It is warm to the touch in the way that a coal is warm to the touch, which is to say: do not touch it.

You will know a salamander is in residence before you see it. The chimney will draw better than any chimney of its dimensions ought to. The fire below will burn evenly, never smoke, and consume fuel at a rate that the household cannot explain but has learned not to question. A well-tended salamander chimney is the finest chimney in the parish, and the household that has one is fortunate, whether they know it or not. Most do not know it.

Protocol. Do not extinguish the salamander. I place this instruction first because the apprentice’s instinct, upon encountering a creature made of living fire inside a flue he has been hired to clean, is to douse it with water. This instinct is wrong. A doused salamander does not die — it is fire; you cannot kill fire with water, you can only inconvenience it — but it will leave, and it will not return, and the household will spend the next thirty years wondering why their chimney no longer draws properly and why their fires smoke and their fuel bills have doubled.

Clean around the salamander. Use your brush gently in its vicinity — it will shift out of your way if you work slowly and announce your presence by tapping the flue wall three times before reaching the bend. The tapping is not superstition. It is courtesy. You are entering its home. Knock first.

If the salamander is asleep (white, motionless, curled at the back of the bend), do not wake it. Clean what you can reach without disturbing it and inform the household that you will need to return to complete the upper portion of the flue. When asked why, tell them there is a blockage that requires a second visit. This is true. The blockage is alive and on fire, but it is a blockage nonetheless, and your professional obligation is to the chimney, not to the household’s understanding of what lives in it.

Billing. Standard sweep plus half rate for the return visit. Do not charge the household for the salamander’s presence. You did not put it there and you cannot remove it. You are being paid to clean the chimney, not to evict its oldest resident.

NESTING PIXIES

Identification. Pixies nest in chimneys between April and September, favouring wide flues in older houses where the brickwork has developed crevices suitable for roosting. A pixie nest resembles a bird’s nest constructed by someone who has seen a bird’s nest once, poorly, from a distance, and has attempted to improve upon the design using materials no bird would select. Expect moss, cobweb, scraps of silk or ribbon, small shiny objects (buttons, beads, a ha’penny if you are lucky), and a structural framework of twigs arranged in a geometry that should not hold together but does.

The pixies themselves are small — three to five inches — winged, and ill-tempered before noon. This is the essential fact. Pixies before noon are a different creature entirely from pixies after noon. An afternoon pixie is curious, sociable, and may attempt to help you with your work, which is inconvenient but manageable. A morning pixie is a concentrated hostility the size of a sparrow with the disposition of a hornet and the aim of a marksman.

Protocol. Do not sweep a chimney containing nesting pixies before noon. If you are engaged for a morning appointment and discover pixies upon inspection, inform the household that you will begin after luncheon and occupy yourself with other chimneys in the house until the clock strikes twelve. If the household has only one chimney, go outside and eat your sandwich until noon. The delay is non-negotiable.

After noon, work slowly and with audible warning. Whistle, hum, or talk to yourself as you approach the nesting area. The pixies will vacate the nest temporarily and hover at the top of the flue making sounds that convey disapproval but not aggression. Clean around the nest. Do not remove it. Do not touch it. Do not take any of the shiny objects, regardless of their apparent value. I lost a journeyman for three days after he pocketed a silver button from a pixie nest in Bloomsbury. He was found in Regent’s Park wearing an expression of profound confusion and missing his left boot. He could not account for the intervening time, the missing boot, or the small scratches covering both his hands.

If you must clean the section of flue where the nest is attached, use your softest brush and work around the structure. The pixies will tolerate proximity to their nest if your movements are slow and your manner is respectful. If you are rough, fast, or careless, they will return to the nest while you are still in the flue, and the confined space of a chimney is the last place you wish to have a disagreement with pixies.

Seasonal Note. Pixies vacate their nests in late September. The nest itself may be removed after Michaelmas without consequence. Before Michaelmas, leave it alone.

Billing. Standard sweep plus quarter rate for the delay. If the appointment was morning and you must wait until afternoon, charge a half-day rate. Your time has value even when you are spending it eating a sandwich in a garden because the chimney’s occupants have not yet woken up.

BROWNIE AUXILIARY STORAGE

Identification. Brownies do not live in chimneys. They live behind walls, beneath floors, and in the comfortable spaces between the bones of a house that humans do not use and frequently do not know exist. However, brownies do use chimneys for storage, particularly the wide, cool upper sections of the flue above the smoke shelf where soot accumulates but heat does not reach.

You will identify brownie storage by its neatness. Where bird nests are chaotic and pixie nests are eccentric, brownie storage is immaculate. Items will be wrapped in cloth, arranged by size, and tucked into purpose-made niches in the brickwork that appear to have been constructed by someone with masonry skills and very small hands. Common stored items include spare buttons (sorted by colour and material), lengths of thread wound around wooden pegs, small tools (thimbles, needles, a diminutive hammer), polishing cloths, and reserves of cream in sealed containers that should not be able to keep cream fresh but do.

Protocol. Do not disturb brownie storage. Do not move it, do not examine it more than is necessary for identification, and above all, do not take anything from it. Brownies are meticulous record-keepers. They know exactly what they have stored and where. A missing button will be noticed, investigated, and attributed to you with a certainty that brooks no argument.

If brownie storage prevents you from cleaning a section of the flue, clean around it. If the storage is extensive enough that cleaning around it is not feasible, you must negotiate. Negotiation with a brownie you cannot see and who will not speak to you while you are looking for them is conducted as follows: speak aloud into the chimney, explain that you need to clean the area, and propose a temporary relocation of the stored items to a section of the flue you have already cleaned. Leave the chimney for ten minutes. When you return, the items will have been moved. Clean the area. When you have finished, leave the chimney again for ten minutes. The items will be returned to their original positions, adjusted for the newly cleaned brickwork.

You will not see the brownie during this process. You will hear nothing. The items will move when you are not present, and they will be arranged, when you return, with a care that suggests the brownie is testing whether you have disturbed anything. You have not, because you have read this almanac and you know better.

Apologise before you leave. Aloud, into the chimney: “I’m sorry for the disruption. The chimney is clean. Your things are where you left them.” This is not grovelling. This is professional courtesy extended to a fellow worker whose space you have temporarily occupied. Brownies are household staff, same as you. Treat them as colleagues.

Billing. Standard sweep plus quarter rate for the negotiation time. Twenty additional minutes of standing in a kitchen talking to a chimney and then leaving and then returning is twenty minutes of your working day. Bill it.

THE CHIMNEY ORACLE

Identification. The chimney oracle is the rarest and most disconcerting resident you will encounter in the course of your career. I have met four in thirty-four years. Three of my colleagues have never met one. One of my colleagues has met seven and is no longer in the trade, not because the oracles harmed him but because the knowledge they imparted made chimney sweeping feel, in his words, “beside the point.” I considered this an overreaction, but I understood it.

The oracle does not inhabit the chimney in any physical sense. It is not a creature. It is not a fire, a nest, or a stored object. It is a presence — a quality of the air inside the flue that is different from ordinary air in the same way that the silence inside a church is different from the silence inside a barn. Both are silent. One of them is listening.

You will know you have encountered an oracle when your brush, upon reaching a certain point in the flue, stops. Not because it has hit a blockage. Because it has arrived. The brush will feel as though it is resting against something that has weight but no substance, resistance but no surface. Your arm will feel heavy. The soot around you will settle — not fall, settle, as though it has decided to be still.

And then the chimney will speak.

What the Oracle Says. The oracle does not tell you the future. This is a common misunderstanding. The oracle tells you a truth. The distinction matters. The future is speculation. Truth is architecture. The oracle tells you a thing that is already real but that you have not yet seen, heard, or allowed yourself to know.

It may be personal. One oracle told me that my brother, whom I had not spoken to in six years over a dispute about our father’s watch, was ill and wished to see me. This was true. I visited him that week. We did not discuss the watch. Another oracle told a colleague that his wife’s roses would win the Islington horticultural prize, which seemed trivial at the time but which my colleague says changed his understanding of what mattered. I leave you to make of that what you will.

It may be professional. An oracle in a chimney in Kensington told me that the house two doors down had a cracked flue liner that would cause a fire within the month. I inspected the neighbouring chimney the following day, found the crack, and repaired it. The household never knew how close they had come. They paid me for the repair. The oracle did not charge.

It may be unintelligible. An oracle in a chimney in Southwark told me the word “heron.” Nothing else. I have thought about this for nine years. I do not know what it means. I saw a heron last spring on the Thames and felt a recognition I could not account for. This may be related. It may not. Oracles do not explain themselves, and asking for clarification produces only a deeper quality of silence that makes you feel you have been rude.

Protocol. When the oracle speaks, stop working. Listen. Do not interrupt, do not ask questions, and do not express an opinion about what you are told. The oracle is not interested in your reaction. It is interested in delivering the truth to you in the same way that you are interested in delivering a clean chimney to the household: it is the job, and the job does not require applause.

When the oracle has finished — and you will know it has finished because the heaviness in your arm will lift and the soot will resume behaving like soot — withdraw your brush slowly. Sit for a moment if you need to. The first time you hear an oracle speak, you will need to sit. This is normal. Have some water. Eat something if you have food with you. The body requires grounding after an encounter with a chimney that has told you the truth about your life.

Take notes. Write down exactly what the oracle said, as precisely as you can recall. Do this before you leave the house, while the words are still clear. Oracle truths have a tendency to blur at the edges if you do not commit them to paper, not because the truth fades but because the mind, in self-defence, begins to reclassify it as a draught, a trick of the echo, or something you imagined. You did not imagine it. Write it down.

Billing. Standard sweep plus a separate line item for the oracle encounter. I list this under “specialist flue consultation” on my invoices. The household does not need to know what the consultation involved. They are paying for the additional time. The additional time is real. An oracle encounter adds between twenty minutes and an hour to a chimney appointment, depending on the length and complexity of what is said and how long you need to sit with your water afterwards.

Some sweeps do not charge for oracle encounters on the grounds that the knowledge received is its own compensation. I respect this view but disagree with it. You are a tradesman. You were in a chimney. You were working. The fact that the chimney spoke to you does not reduce the professional nature of the visit. If a client spoke to you at length while you worked, you would not discount the bill because the conversation was interesting. The oracle is the same. Bill separately.

OTHER RESIDENTS: BRIEF NOTES

The following are less common but worth mentioning for the apprentice who wishes to be prepared.

Jackdaws. Not supernatural. Remove nests in the standard manner. Included here because the apprentice who cannot tell the difference between a jackdaw nest and a pixie nest has not been paying attention. A jackdaw nest is made of sticks arranged without ambition. A pixie nest is made of sticks arranged with too much ambition. If the nest contains buttons sorted by colour, it is not a jackdaw.

Cats. Occasionally a household cat will enter a chimney and refuse to leave. This is not supernatural. This is a cat. Extract using standard methods (patience, a dish of cream at the base, and the understanding that the cat will emerge when it decides to emerge and not before). However, if the cat, upon extraction, has soot on its paws arranged in patterns, or if the cat looks at you with an expression that suggests it learned something up there, note the chimney’s address for future reference. Cats do not enter oracle chimneys by accident.

Echoes that do not match. If you call up a chimney and the echo returns a word you did not say, leave the chimney alone for the day and return tomorrow. This is not an oracle — oracles do not echo. This is something else. I do not know what it is. I have encountered it twice. Both times the chimney was clean when I returned the following day, as though something had tidied it overnight. I did not charge for the second visit. I did not investigate. There are limits to professional curiosity, and I have found mine.

Warmth in a cold chimney. If a chimney that has not had a fire lit in it for months is warm to the touch from the inside, check for a salamander. If no salamander is present and the warmth persists, the house may be built on a ley line or above a source of geothermal interest. This is outside a sweep’s remit. Inform the household that their chimney is “in good health” and leave it at that. They will not understand what you mean. They do not need to.

Closing Remarks

A chimney is a passage between the inside and the outside. It connects the warmth of the home to the openness of the sky. It is, in the most practical sense, a threshold — and thresholds, as anyone who has spent time around the edges of things will tell you, attract residents.

Your job is to clean the chimney. It is not to understand everything that lives in it. It is not to catalogue the supernatural, negotiate with the unseen, or interpret the utterances of oracles. But your job does require you to work in spaces where these things occur, and a tradesman who cannot adapt to the conditions of the workspace is a tradesman who will not last.

Knock before you enter. Clean around what you cannot move. Apologise when you have been in someone else’s space. Write down what the chimney tells you. Bill for your time.

And if a chimney gives you a word — just one word, with no explanation — write that down too. You may not understand it yet. That does not mean it was not meant for you.

— J. Soot, Master Sweep

From the Outrageously-Embellished Quill Pens of

Catherine McDowell & Hillora Lang:

Catherine McDowell and Hillora Lang are sisters, storytellers, and the only contributors to the parish newsletter who have been asked to “tone down the accuracy.” One is a former lighthouse keeper who served twelve years on a rock off the Welsh coast and left because “the light started doing things I hadn’t asked it to do”; the other is a professional papermaker who creates handmade sheets from foraged materials and whose most celebrated paper was made from a tree that had been struck by lightning and is warm to the touch regardless of room temperature. Together, they write cottagecore fantasies where isolated places are never truly empty and what you make with your hands keeps something of where it came from.

Catherine’s lighthouse experience means she understands isolation, the rhythm of tides, and the specific loneliness of being the only person awake in a place where the darkness behaves oddly. Hillora’s papermaking contributes knowledge of fiber, process, and the understanding that materials carry memory — sometimes literally. The parish newsletter incident involved their column about local history, which the editor felt was “too specific about events that the parish records don’t corroborate but that three elderly residents independently confirmed.”

Their books feature remote cottages, handmade things, and the understanding that the most enchanted places are the ones where someone has been paying attention for a very long time. They write for readers who appreciate solitude, who believe craft matters, and who understand that a house on a cliff is never just a house on a cliff.

Welcome to the Improper Entanglements Universe

Regency paranormal cozy fantasy where magic creates chaos instead of solving problems. Equal parts sincere swoon and gleeful disaster. Proper correspondence colliding with wildly improper magical complications.

Four series. One universe. Magic that creates problems instead of solving them, competent women who handle the fallout, and love stories where the happy ending is a promise, not a surprise. Clean romance throughout—sweet kisses, no explicit content, guaranteed happy endings earned through magic and connection.

Pick the entry point based on what kind of Gaslamp Fantasy story appeals to you.

~ Improper Entanglements — standalone Regency gaslamp fantasy novels
~ Improper Entanglements Letters — epistolary novels told through found documents
~ The Puck Papers — epistolary novellas spanning ten thousand years
~ Letters from the Clouds — a serial-in-progress

Find them all on the Improper Entanglements series page at NovelConceptsPublishing.com.

Gaslamp fantasy · Regency paranormal · cozy romance · guaranteed happy endings

Starting small? Find free short reads on StoryOrigin, or glimpses into the Improper Entanglements world on our Substack.