Welcome to Tales of the Pale! I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving. After a negative covid test result and spending time with my family, I’m back in Madison, Georgia, and taking a deep dive into one of the many books that I’ve started. Today’s podcast showcases two poems that will appear in my upcoming poetry collection, Love, Sex & Witchery. (Paperback will be released Jan 9th, Kindle version is available for pre-order)
This week’s news:
The holidays are here! For anyone beginning their Christmas shopping, I’d like to ask you to include books on your gift lists. This is a wonderful time to support an author of your choosing by purchasing their book.
The fourth book in the Legends of the Pale Series is live. The Souls of Witches is sold locally at The Madison Artist Guild and will be coming to The Art Box and The Southern Pen BookShop soon. Online you can find the series at all the online bookstores. Just follow this link.
I am looking for readers who will review The Souls of Witches. If you’ve checked out my author website’s resource page, you know that there are sites that provide Amazon-compliant review services for a fee. These services exist because organic reviews can be hard to come by. I think the statistic that’s thrown around is… for every 100 readers, an author will receive a single review. OUCH! But it never hurts to ask. So please… if you’ve read and enjoyed one of my Legends of the Pale books, consider taking a few moments of your time this holiday season to find a platform like Amazon or Goodreads.com and leave a short comment for other readers to find. It is appreciated and the best gift this indie author can receive.
I also shared a few new poems on my Substack page this week. Love Lessons and The Zen of Less. Check them out.
Now let’s move on to updates on the Pale Characters.
Let me first say that I am not crazy, but the characters I create live on in my imagination, as I hope they will do in a reader’s mind long after they’ve finished reading the book. The following is a glimpse of what is still happening inside the universe I created. (I will try to keep this as spoiler-free as I can for anyone who hasn’t read the books. I should also mention that not all the information I share here will find its way into a book.)
One of Zee’s cats had kittens and Lugh has informed the demigods that she must find homes for all the kittens. Thirteen cats inside her loft are far too many. Eight is the limit he will accept. And of course, Murmur thinks even one cat is too many.
Rowan’s best friend and hedgewitch, Tara, is running recipes by me for making a new line of magickal soaps and bath bombs. As readers are probably aware, Tara really doesn’t need my help. I think she just likes chatting with other witches. She is also the one to bring up the coven idea. Like Rowan, I’m not interested in being apart of an official coven.
A new character that readers will likely meet in 2021 has been the most vocal lately. Kayda is dragonkin and has been in a bit of trouble lately. She’s on Rhiannon’s shit list which is never a good place to find yourself, even for someone as uniquely magickal as Kayda.
The little bit extra in this week’s letter addresses my writing process.
Do you meditate? If you do, then you know it is all about the breath. The cycle of inhale and exhale. The taking in and the letting go. The first lesson meditation practitioners are taught is how to follow each breath as it enters, circulates through the body, and then exits. Fairly quickly one begins to listen to the pauses between the two sensations, that connective moment of stillness where your mind is quiet and your body waits suspended.
The longer I write, the more I realize I’m not one of those authors who can force myself to open my laptop and bang out a chapter or two a day. My work ethic more closely resembles cycles of intense creative output followed by periods of non-productivity. After a long exhale of active creativity, I’ve discovered that I naturally withdrawal to take a long slow inhale of the world around me. This can take a day, two days, a week, or even a month.
I used to beat myself up about my erratic work ethic. After all, the most common advice given to writers is that you must write every single day. Writers write! Or worse yet, is the idea that you must write a mountain of crap before you get to the good stuff. Perhaps for a newbie writer that advice applies. Maybe the act of daily digging into our internal landscapes is how we learn about ourselves. But at some point, I think we as writers need to allow ourselves to grow beyond that sort of one-size-fits-all sort of thinking. I no longer force myself to write a single creative word during my time of inhale and absorption.
After ten books, I’ve begun to give myself permission to wait for the pause. I wait for the stillness between the inhale and exhale. That moment when the story is clearest. When the words come without force. When the plot turns effortlessly down an unexpected path and I find myself as excited as any reader who’s discovered a new twist. I believe the withdrawal and inactivity I mentioned earlier allows my mind to work quietly on an idea. To shape it. Deepen it in ways that I could not have anticipated.
This is how I work.
—Tarrant
And as always, thank you for listening and spending time with Tales of the Pale. Please leave comments and share Tarrant.substack.com with your friends.
Tales of the Pale; Vol 6.