The magic of childhood ✨

Innocence does not equal powerlessness in my latest short story collection.

In this newsletter…
👧 Relive childhood magic with my latest short story collection!
🐎 Another new collaborative project in the works!
🎭 Last chance to get AND, SCENE! for free!

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It’s been a while since I was a kid, but I’ve never forgotten what magic used to feel like.

Nearly everything seemed like magic when I was younger. My family used to take trips to the U.S. Southwest, often centering our trips in Utah’s Goblin Valley, and trust me when I say that every cactus, strangely-shaped rock, and scorpion sparkled with otherworldly power as it flashed past the window of our Suburban. My eyes would glitter with wonder as I ran through a field of blooming dandelions underneath the buzzing electric wires. And every time I got to meet a new dog, I would hear its voice in my mind.

That’s why I kept returning to childhood magic time and again when working on The Accidental Magic Project. There was something in the way I used to see the world that intrigued me as an adult, enough to try and recapture that magic in the form of short stories.

And now I’ve gathered seven of those tales into my newest collection, THE LIBRARY ATTIC COLLECTION PRESENTS: CHILDHOOD MAGIC, which releases today.

You’ll have to grab a copy (for just $1.99!) for yourself to read them all, but here’s a taste of three of the stories within.

“Summertime” came from a challenge I set myself to pick something boringly ordinary and make it the cause of magic. In this story, three sisters visiting their grandma take watermelon slices down to the river and sit together, spitting seeds—which turns out to be a magic spell. They then must set out on a classic quest to undo what they’ve unintentionally wrought.

This story is exactly what I love about the “accidental magic” theme that Jill and I returned to year after year: the source of the magic is so mundane that you can’t help but be suspicious about it in real life forever afterwards.

In this collection, I think “The Way” is my favorite, for a reason I won’t spoil for you (it’s much more interesting to me to see if anyone clocks what I was doing while they were reading it, though to this day, nobody has yet picked up on it until I told them afterwards).

But while the challenge I set for myself makes me proud of what I accomplished, I’m also proud of how I stared unflinchingly at generational trauma in this story. Denying yourself, denying who and what you are, compounds with each generation, reaching backwards and forwards in its pain. The only way through is for a generation to stop, face it, and end the cycle, and that’s the emotional core of “The Way.” I invite you to read it and then write me back with your guess as to what my challenge was!

“Law of the Unknown” is a later entry in The Accidental Magic Project, and I think that shows in how my style, my characters, and my choice of setting have sharpened. This one is also special to me for another reason: my friend Robyn Clements illustrated the protagonist Rex for me, looking innocent and happy.

Rex’s wonder and joy are what I wanted to address in “Unknown.” Magic has its dark sides and uses, because there are plenty of people in this world who have lost its joy entirely and are too deep in their denial to see it anymore. But Rex’s wholehearted, stubborn refusal to deny magic’s appeal is exactly what brings him victory, in the end.

So! In celebration of this collection’s release (the sixth in The Library Attic Collection Presents series!!!), I also wanted to take you back to a few specific magical moments from my childhood, times when the veil felt especially thin…

I grew up in a cul-de-sac, which meant lots of pavement for running around being a kid. Every now and then, a strange phenomenon would occur: with hardly a breeze, the dry, fallen leaves on the ground would start to swirl into a perfect circle, just big enough for a person to stand in the center. My siblings and I were absolutely certain that if we could catch it and step inside, we would be transported to another realm.

I think that’s one of those deep childhood fantasies, that magic can whisk you to somewhere better. And those leaf circles are still magical to me. Even now, if I see one when I’m walking through a city or someone else’s neighborhood (mine hardly has pavement to speak of), I find myself drawn to it. That little voice still tells me that if I stood at the center of the circle of leaves, I could go somewhere else.

Other times in my childhood, the magic was in pretending. My brother, who’s four years younger than me, always needed to one-up me, which I tolerated like a good big sister. We would often play characters that we had invented—or, rather, which my brother had invented and which I had repurposed from John R. Erickson’s series Hank the Cowdog. I chose Sinister the bobcat, the series villain, because I was sure he was misunderstood. He lived on the books’ periphery, seemingly malicious but more silent than anything, and I was determined to redeem him.

So when my brother’s character, Falcon the falcon, would come face to face with actually-kind-hearted Sinister, their magics would often clash. My brother had just learned the word “infinity” and thus Falcon had infinity infinity magic, because by doubling infinity, he was certain that he would best any power my imagination gave to Sinister. (We weren’t allowed to consume much in the way of stories that contained magic at all, so he was working with a limited framework. Still, hilariously funny to me, then and now.)

When I stepped into Sinister’s paws, I always felt like the barrier between myself and the magic of the world dropped a little. Even if he “only” had infinity magic.

Finally, there were the neighborhood cats. There were always between four and seven of them who lived in the cul-de-sac, depending on which humans currently resided there, but nearly all of them would follow me around. It wasn’t that I gave them treats or food. I just recall that whenever I went outside, a cat or three would show up and tail me.

I felt that we were all part of a club of some sort (the name of which is lost to the mists of time); they were my clan. I would go under the big fir tree in the neighbor’s yard and pretend to build a fire, and the cats would come lounge around it as if we were in ancient times. Those cats were some of the closest things I had to a group of friends, as a lonely, homeschooled kid, and they’re a huge part of why animal characters have always felt like magic to me.

What were some of the magic-touched moments in your childhood? Light, dark, anything goes. Reply and tell me all about them!

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What’s cookin’? 🛵

SO. Since, in a recent interview with Public Domain Super Heroes and previously in a “looking back and ahead” style blog post, Perry revealed our latest collaborative project…

Let me just piiiiile on top.

Y’all remember my collaborator Percival Constantine—we wrote the Chaos Caretakers series together (along with Paige Andrews), which we talked about in one of my past newsletters. We loved working together so much that even though our previous situation fell apart, we’ve decided to have another go at co-creating an urban fantasy series together.

This time, it’s about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Only… they aren’t the Horsemen anymore. They’re the Former Horsemen; their powers have been stripped and they’ve been banished to the human realm for good. They’re four brothers who ride modern-day vehicular steeds, and who don’t exactly get along swimmingly.

I’ve got lots more to tell you about Pest, Warren, Fam, and Dee later this summer, when we get closer to publication, but for now I can tell you that I’ve just gotten to read the manuscript in its entirety for Book 1, and now I’m diving into the outline for Book 2.

Where Book 1 featured a sinister cult disguising itself as a D&D club, Book 2 will bring a new, modern Horseman into focus: Fear. A frightening army rises and crawls the streets of Chicago, while the Former Horsemen push their newfound alliance to its limits as they face the terror of the city’s religious residents.

I’m just scratching the surface of what this outline will cover, but I know that we’ll have plenty of action, intrigue, supernatural powers, and brotherly afflictions affection. Oh, and I’m hoping to feature more of their stoic angelic father and over-the-top demonic mother… 🪽😈

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The Free-zer

Welcome back to THE FREE-ZER, the bottom of the newsletter where you can always find something that costs you zero monies. (Not a dollar, cent, pound, peso, Republic credit, sheet of Monopoly money, bar of latinum, or dubloon.)

👉 Luna Fox is back with Becca Princess of Sona! In this free short story, you’ll meet Becca, a normal eighteen-year-old… at least, that’s what she seems to be, until she’s trapped in her home by a red-eyed man with a strange blade. Find out what happens to Becca in your free copy!

👉 Stock up on sci-fi at no cost with the FREE SCIENCE FICTION BOOKS bundle! More on this one in the next newsletter… but for now, know that I am deeply intrigued by the covers for Toward the Veiled Grave, Prometheus: A New Dawn, and Hammer and Crucible… 🌌🐘🏰

👉 And don’t miss your chance to exchange an honest review for a free copy of my writing craft book, AND, SCENE! You’ll go behind the scenes of my process to find out how I break down each scene I write into four different passes which, when woven together in the final pass, keeps me from having to do heavy editing later on.

May your world be full of magic!
August