The write friendships matter.

How a fateful meeting on an indie set became a decade of co-storytelling ✨

Flash back to December 2010. I’m sick as a dog with mono, crawling like a half-sentient worm across my floor to my notebook. I start fever-journaling about my condition, my fears (paying rent, paying potential hospital bills, eating solid food ever again)… and what I’m going to do about it all when I recover. Primarily, I’m going to get a real job with real sick leave, and I’m going to shove myself out of my comfort zone.

I’m back on my feet by January, and that’s when I hit the job listings—and Facebook. Among the local groups, I find exactly what I’m looking for: the Seattle indie film community. Without hesitation, I sign myself up to be a PA (that’s production assistant) on a project called “Fearless Episode Hunters.”

I show up on set—somebody’s very nice house in West Seattle—awkward and feeling very out of place. Everyone else on the crew seems to know what they’re doing and, though I catch on quick, this is still my first time on a real production.

That’s when I meet Jill Corddry.

It’s Jill’s first time on set too. She signed up to be a PA on “Fearless” since she was friends with the screenwriter and had recently quit her job to pursue her dream of being an author. Unlike me, she’s a useful PA, because she has a car. So when the crew runs out of bottled water, it’s the inexperienced lackeys they send off to Costco for supplies.

That car ride is fate.

We spend the whole journey giddily exchanging notes on being writers (and Harry Potter, something we were both into at the time). It turns out we both like flavors of fantasy and speculative fiction, and that’s that. We are fast friends.

A few months later, I find a Buzzfeed article with “50 unexplainable black and white photos” floating around and share it to Facebook. “What the hell is going on with these?!” I ask in my caption.

Jill’s response is exactly what I like to hear: “I dunno… but let’s tell the stories!”

And so, the Accidental Magic Project is born (known, its first year, as 50 Unexplainable Stories). Starting the first week of January 2012, Jill and I write a weekly short all year, trading off who writes the story each week and basing them on the 50 photos. It is, dare I say, pure magic.

✨

As time has allowed, we’ve spent the subsequent 11 years finding other ways to write together. We continued AMP for several years until I had a demanding career and Jill had twins, and a weekly or even monthly story commitment became too much. We took a couple of runs at co-writing a novel—our “weird fairy Western” set in the fictional town of Saltbush. (Coming soon, fingers crossed!)

And recently, Jill took the plunge and followed me into the realm of indie publishing.

I’m really proud of her. So I wanted to share her work with you.

• Soulless Mates — A gently snarky read about magic risotto and supernatural creatures trying to fall in love—and the one server who’d really like it all to go away.

• Bad Company — Embark on the road trip from Hell with Stella and the Hill brothers! Almost Like Magic is a series Jill’s been working on almost as long as I’ve known her, so it was amazing for this to come into the world in 2021.

• Against the Wind — Wild magic bites back in the sequel to Bad Company, with Stella back home and fighting for her sanity and custody of the land she loves.

I read Bad Company last year, which is soooo delayed (sometimes you just need it to be the right mood for the book though, amirite?), but I really enjoyed it. Stella is one of those flawed heroes I talked about recently, so you know I love her. I’ve got my copy of Against the Wind loaded up on my Kindle and will dive in when the urban fantasy mood strikes me again.

Jill’s most recent work is Soulless Mates, which I got to read as it developed—the short works that she weaves together into one interconnected tale were some of the last Accidental Magic stories written.

I can’t wait to see where Jill takes her tales next, and I know I’ll be along for the ride.

Do you have writer friends? Hit reply and tell me all about them!

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I’ve been banking on my history lately.

BOILING POINT was a story that had been with me since I was in middle school. Though I’m not generally a traditional monsters girl, shifters are intriguing—they aren’t quite human, after all—and I’d always wanted to come up with some kind of pseudo-historical explanation for werewolves.

Enter the miiquils! My version of were-creatures conveniently appeared on Earth around the time that Atlantis was rumored to exist. Since the legend of the lost island has always included advanced technology, my 13-year-old brain figured that “well, they’re aliens!” made logical sense. Finding a way to combine werewolves, Atlantis, and ancient Egyptian divinities made me feel awfully clever.

(Shhhh, I found out about Stargate later…)

The 2023 versions of Charra, Belario, and Minnor differ greatly from who I thought would make good protagonists twenty years ago. But their names are the same, and the spirit of their adventures—and romantic entanglements—comes straight from my teenage heart.

Do my shifters look, love, and live like everyone else’s shifters? Not at all. And yet, I got to add BOILING POINT to the BRING THE MAGIC OF THE PARANORMAL TO YOUR COLLECTION promotion, alongside what I would consider traditional paranormal romances. It’s pretty cool to be included this way.

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The Free-zer

And now, for THE FREE-ZER—the section where you’ll find something that will cost you zero monies. (That’s no dollars, cents, pounds, pesos, Republic credits, Monopoly money, latinum, or dubloons.)

Do you dare to become immortal? If you do, seize your free copy of Kayelle Allen’s Lights Out! I love the playful way Allen writes her newsletter installments in the voices of her characters, so you’ll get the added bonus of entertaining emails from Immortals when you sign up for her mailing list.

If you’ve already gotten your dose of immortality, how about some found families? (My favorite theme!) Dive into one of these books from BookSiren’s FOUND FAMILY ARCs bundle, and forward it on to your reader friends so they can get their copy of KINFOLK.

Because I am predictable as hell, can you guess which cover I was immediately after…? 😉

I’ve got a three-fer for you this time. Get a bite of Kay Widow’s Bloody Billionaire… an enemies to lovers vampire romance!

That’s a zesty cover right there. 👀

Until next time,
August