Actually, it’s a two-day sale! And the new Seventh Son is part of it! The ebook version is on for US$0.99 (or its equivalent in your currency) all weekend, Saturday and Sunday. The Cozy the Day Away Sale: Over 150 books, all Cozy Fantasy, all on sale!
It’s a great sale again, with so many different authors and books. To mention just a few of my favourites, of course there’s E.L. Bates with Whitney and Davies; there’s Shanna Swendson (through whose newsletter I found the sale in the first place); there’s Victoria Goddard whom I discovered at the first sale I participated in at the end of December and whose books I have since devoured like they’re going out of style (which, thankfully, they’re not – rather the opposite…) – so many good books, so many amazing deals.
So hie thee over to the Promisepress website and check out the Cozy the Day Away sale! But do so right away, because the sale really is only on for those two days; the listings go away after that.
Life, the Universe, and a Cozy Fantasy Sale! Which books will you pick up on sale?
You can get your very own copy from Amazon, for the equivalent of Cdn$20. Or, if you don’t want to deal with Amazon, and/or you want a signed copy, let me know; however, unfortunately it’ll cost extra because of shipping, and at the moment Canada Post is on strike (again). You could also get your copy from Amazon, and if you want a signature to go with it without paying for the extra shipping, give me a shout and I’ll send you a signed card that you can stick in the front of your book – again, Canada Post willing; it might be a while in getting to you.
So, here we are: It was the blue bowl that started it all…
You know how, almost a year ago, I announced that I was re-writing Seventh Son? It’s finally done.So here it is, in its new glory! It was meant to be a tenth anniversary edition, but now it’s more like a ten-and-eleven-twelfthth anniversary edition.
This is the foreword to the new edition:
I wrote Seventh Son in 2011, and published it in 2014. It was the first novel I ever wrote and published. I was quite proud of it at that time, and went on to write and publish several more books in the series. But after ten years of writing, and of editing for other writers, I re-read this book, and I realized that while I still really enjoyed the story, I could do a lot better on the writing front, and that this book deserved a makeover. So, if you read Seventh Son before, rest assured that this is still the same story, that nothing has changed about Cat and Guy and all the people you’ve met before (except that perhaps they’re a bit less diffident and wordy). I hope you enjoy this new version just as much. And if this is the first time you’re here, then Welcome! I hope you’ll find a home in the Septimus World.
Angelika M. Offenwanger June 2025
And this is the blurb (also new & improved):
Cat was ordinary—until the day a blue bowl whirled her off to a magical medieval world… Catriona thought a fresh start after a breakup would be simple. She didn’t count on a museum visit, a curious blue pottery bowl… and a sudden tumble into a world where nothing is the way she expects. Her welcome committee? One badly injured man sprawled across her path, one very muddy baby watching over him, and one very big mystery: the seventh son of the seventh son has gone missing. Armed with only her wits, her courage, and the bits and pieces she learned from library books, Cat must cope in this new world, unravel the mysteries before her, and find a way to get back home to the modern world. But when the chance finally comes—will she even want to?
The print copies aren’t quite ready yet – I’m still waiting for the proof copy so I can make sure everything is right before I put it out into the world – but hopefully within a week or two they’ll be available on Amazon. And meanwhile, you can get started by reading the ebook, from whatever your favourite ebook vendor is!
That’s Life, the Universe, and an Old Book in New Wrappings. Come on over and hang out with Cat and Guy again!
Cat was ordinary—until the day a blue bowl whirled her off to a magical medieval world…
Catriona, ex-librarian, dumped by her boyfriend, is just trying to restart her life when she gets sucked into and carried off by a blue pottery bowl. Suddenly thrown into a world where she can’t move for mysteries, how is this modern town girl going to cope alone in the woods with a comatose man and a muddy baby? And there’s that hint of something sinister…
That’s the book as it stands right now, and it’s still available as FREE EBOOK on Amazon and all your other favourite ebook sites! (At least it’d better be. On Amazon the book price sometimes snaps back to asking for money. If that’s the case, let me know and I’ll get them to fix it; but you can also go to Smashwords and download the free copy for your ereader – .mobi for Kindle, .epub for pretty much all other readers. Or contact me and I’ll send you a copy!)
And now for the big announcement:Seventh Son is getting a makeover! (The book, not the person – he’s fine as he is.) You see, in the ten years since I first published it – thirteen years since I wrote it – I’ve grown as a writer. And I’ve become an editor. So when I recently re-read the book with an editor’s eye, I realized that while I still really like the story, I could make it even better with a rewrite.
But don’t worry, the story itself won’t change! I’m just rewriting some of the language (giving it a stylistic edit, in editor’s terms). Sort of like those “digitally remastered” old movies – same movie, sharper image and brighter colours. And speaking of colours, I’m hoping to eventually put on a new cover, as well. While I love the covers that Steven Novak created for the series (he’s great, highly recommend), I want to change them to something that reflects the tone and genre of the books a little better. But when that happens I’ll let you know.
Meanwhile, I’m really enjoying hanging out with Cat and Guy and Bibby and all their friends again, right there at the beginning of their story. It was the blue bowl that started it all…
Life, the Universe, and Ten Years of Being an Author. Happy Birthday, Seventh Son!
I just saw that today is our ninth bloggiversary on WordPress. After four years of blogging on Blogger, Steve and I moved house and came over to WordPress, in anticipation of publishing Seventh Son, which happened on Oct. 18th, 2014.
Steve posing on my library books. Yes, he’s still around, even if he hasn’t said much lately (to me at least).
So, Happy Bloggiversary to us! If you feel like wasting, umm, I mean spending some time on browsing the Archives, there’s a handy button on the right entitled, fittingly, “Archives” (if you’re getting this per email, you’ll need to click on the title to go to the post in your browser to see it). Or you could type a keyword into the “Search” bar and see what there is to see on the topic – for example, “Steve”. You could find all about him; he’s a bear with history.
In other news, our main website just underwent a major overhaul; check it out at www.amoffenwanger.com (or www.clayandwords.com, that should get you to the same page).
And that, to keep it short and pithy, is Life, the Universe, and a Bloggiversary. More to come soon!
I finally, at long last, finished a book again. (I know, right?) Just to clarify, no, it’s not a Septimus Series book, it’s a standalone. And by “finished” I mean that last week I buckled down and implemented the changes my editor, the intrepid and amazing E. L. Bates, had suggested. So now, I think, the story is finished and is the best that I can make it.
So now what? Actually, one thing I’m considering doing with this book is to send it to publishers, to see if one of them might put it out under their label. And one of those publishers I’m looking at requests in their manuscript submission form that I supply links to my web presence, but only of sites that I use to promote my work. Umm, okay. Then I guess I better do some promoting. The publisher wouldn’t want to just see posts about my cat and my stuffed bear, would they? No matter how handsome Louis and Steve are.
So, yes, in case you were wondering, my books and short stories are still out there to purchase and/or read! There are quite a number of them now. I tend to forget just how many.
The Septimus series is what started it all. It began with a blue pottery bowl:
“Cat was ordinary—until the day a blue bowl whirled her off to a magical medieval world… Catriona, ex-librarian, dumped by her boyfriend, is just trying to restart her life when she gets sucked into and carried off by a blue pottery bowl. Suddenly thrown into a world where she can’t move for mysteries, how is this modern town girl going to cope alone in the woods with a comatose man and a muddy baby? And there’s that hint of something sinister…”
TheTwelve Days of Christmas is the story of a woman whose boyfriend mysteriously vanishes on Christmas Eve, just when some unearthly beautiful people show up in town. Can Mac get Tom back in time before the Twelve Days of Christmas are up?
The Forty-Dollar Christmas is what I call a “here-and-now” story, i.e. contemporary fiction: a tale of how Liz tries to show her neighbour and his little girl that for celebrating Christmas, it’s not the content of your wallet that counts.
Again, both those books are available on Amazon for Kindle and print, and at most other ebook vendors in other ebook formats.
As for short stories, there are quite a number of them out there right now, and most of them are available to read for free! Go overhere and follow the links.
So there you have it, that is Life, the Universe, and A. M. Offenwanger Stories to Enjoy. Get reading!
My very good friend E. L. Bates (aka Louise) advertised my books on Tumblr to someone who was looking for Domestic Fantasy (because she’s that kind of friend). And they went and bought them.
And then they MADE FAN ART ABOUT THEM.
I might have just burst into tears when I saw this… I love it so much.
So of course I had to join Tumblr in order to comment. I’m still kind of lost on that site, but I do think you can click on the image above to go straight to the artist’s page (I didn’t copy and paste, these are just the links to the Tumblr page).
Incidentally, one of the things I love about it is that they made Cat brown-skinned. I hadn’t thought of her that way, but she totally could be. In fact, I think she is.
This is a scene from the end of Cat and Mouse – if you haven’t read it, go check it out.
I was just re-arranging this website a little bit – posting the links to the recently published stories in one place, consolidating the books in the sidebar into one link – and it occurred to me that some of you folks who’ve come to reading my blog lately might not be all that familiar with this whole turquoise-coloured “Septimus Series” thing. For example, if you were to come from all those fairy tale stories I’ve posted recently to reading “Lavender’s Blue”, my Septimus short story, you might find yourself a little puzzled – it’s not a fairy tale; but what exactly is it?
So, for those of you new to the Septimus world, here’s a little intro. The nickel tour to Catriona’s life, as it were. For those of you who’ve followed Cat’s adventures all along, you might enjoy this little refresher.
It all started a number of years ago, when Catriona McMurphy, an ordinary 21st-century librarian, was in a museum in her hometown of Greenward Falls. She looked into a turquoise-coloured pottery bowl, and all of a sudden everything went swirly and blue around her. Next thing she knew, she found herself in a forest, in a whole other world.
This is a world that has no electricity, flush toilets, internet or cell phones – but it does have magic. Subtle, gentle magic; nothing that involves waving wands or throwing around sparkly curses, but that permeates the very existence of the people of this place.
Cat soon found out that she herself has some of that magic – in her case, an ability that is called “The Knowing”, a strong intuition bordering on clairvoyance particularly about the people she loves. One of those people turned out to be a tall, red-headed potter by the name of Guy, who is a member of the Septimus family, the most prominent group of people with special gifts in the town of Ruph, descended from the seventh son of a seventh son.
When Cat first met Guy, literally lying at her feet, he had a small red-headed daughter named Bibby, possessed of a double dose of “The Knowing” and a charm that wormed itself irresistibly into Cat’s heart. A few years down the line, Catriona’s life is, let’s just say, not short on red-heads of various sizes and descriptions, and she has her hands and her heart full keeping them all in order, and getting in some time to read the odd book at the town library of Ruph, too.
And of course there is always something that throws a wrench in the works – ordinary life in Cat’s world is never all that ordinary. A speechless young boy and a plague of mice – a girl bullied by her sister, and a new kind of clay that seems to have special properties – a teenager that has dropped in from Cat’s old world and desperately wants to get home… There is usually some knotty problem that Cat needs to solve in between stoking the hearth fire and keeping Ruph’s library books in order.
If you’re wondering just what Cat’s new world is like, there are descriptions in the books, of course, but roughly speaking, in technology and climate it’s very similar to pre-industrial Europe. Of course with there being some magic, they have options that your 17th-century Englishman didn’t have – for example, closed stoves with attached water heaters, so Cat can still have a nice hot bath without having to lug a cauldron to the fireplace first. They also don’t have antibiotics, but there are wise women who know their way around a herb patch and the odd person with healing power in their hands, which is just as good.
If, of course, you’re already a die-hard fan of Cat & All the Red-Heads, there’s only one thing left to tell you: STAR BRIGHT IS COMING SOON! Honestly, Book 4 in the series is written, and is being edited as we speak. No exact release date yet, but it’s coming! As soon as I know when, you’ll get to see the snazzy new cover so you can start drooling in anticipation.
Life, the Universe, Cat and the Red-Heads. Welcome, or Welcome Back, to the Septimus World.
“Don’t tell Angelika,” a friend of ours, an engineer, said to my husband, “but I tried to read her book, and didn’t make it past the first few pages. There are way too many feelings in it!” My husband did tell me, because he knew what my reaction would be: I laughed long and hard.
But also, quite contrary to our friend’s expectations, I took his statement as a compliment. For one, he only tried to read the book because it was mine, i.e. it was an expression of friendship, which I appreciate. But the other thing is that the average engineer is not exactly my target audience. So if I managed to turn one off by dint of having too many feelings in my book, I think I may have succeeded in writing for the other kind of person: the one who wants to hear about emotions, about the inner life of characters, about their relationships to one another.
The point was brought home to me again just the other day in my writers’ group. One of the critiques I got on a piece of mine, the beginning of another novel, was, “Do you really need three different points of view to tell the story?” I was a little taken aback (not to say hurt, which is, alas, the price of getting all-too-necessary critiques). But once I’d mulled it over for a while, I came to a conclusion: the answer is Yes. Yes, I do need three points of view, because what my stories are about is the characters and their interactions.
One of the Amazon reviews of Seventh Son says: “The character relationships are subtle and involved. In fact, all of the book’s true drama comes from how people relate to each other”. Precisely. I write character-driven stories.
And the reason I write character-driven stories is because that’s what I like to read. Now, I’m fully aware that I’m in somewhat of a minority with that preference. What’s popular, what sells best, are plot-driven stories, stories where things happen, where there is action and external drama. Battles! Kidnappings! Sword-fights! Car chases! Explosions! Murders! Wicked witches poisoning girls with apples and being chased by workaholic dwarves with pickaxes!
Personally, I find action scenes boring. Crash, bang, boom, bash – just tell me who wins already, and get on with the real story, about the people. (Plus, I don’t like the tension and extra adrenaline; I’ve got too much of it coursing through my system already – a side effect of being an HSP; but that’s a post for another day.)
To me, what is interesting in a story is not so much what happens, but what the people make of it, how it affects them. I want to get into their heads. It’s the character of the, well, characters that matters to me, that creates stories. Of course you always need a plot – a beginning, a middle, an end – but to me that plot can be as simple as “girl meets boy, girl has trouble getting together with boy, girl gets boy”.
In fact, the latter is the plot of all six Austen novels; the only thing that changes is the characters. And Austen is still in print after 200 years. It’s also the plot of every romance novel, which are, in fact, as a group the biggest sellers on the fiction market. Character-driven stories roll across the screen in every TV serial like Downton Abbey or Coronation Street which follows a group of people through the years, watching them live their lives and interact with one another; and they shocked movie critics when My Big Fat Greek Wedding and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel became sleeper hits.
Come to think of it, given the popularity of the aforementioned tales, maybe I’m not in such a minority with my preference for character-driven stories, after all. There are a lot of us who prefer people stories, which can be easy to forget when you hear writing gurus go on about “what sells” or castigate the fledgling writer for “not writing tightly enough” or – gasp! – using adverbs, those touchy-feely markers of emotion.
There are a lot of us – but even if there weren’t, I’d still stick with my preference. I like Austen, and L. M. Montgomery, and Georgette Heyer, and even Miss Read. No swords, no car chases, no bad guys and nary a dead body. Just wonderful, fascinating stories about people.
Okay, I’ll grant you that writers of these stories don’t often populate the weekly bestseller lists. But I have a hunch that they are disproportionately represented on the long-sellers list. Which is all to the good, because it means their books are going to be around for a long time for the likes of me to enjoy.
Life, the Universe, and Character-Driven Stories. It’s all about the people.
“What’s the point?” someone asked the other day, when the conversation came around to NaNoWriMo. (NaNo-whatmo? you say. NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month. You know, that Novemberly craziness where I, and several hundred thousand others across the globe, vanish into a deep rabbit hole of mad, bad and dangerous-to-know novelling, aiming to write a 50,000-word novel in the space of 30 days. I might have mentioned it a time or three [dozen] before.)
What’s the point, indeed. Why do this to yourself? Why engage in such a bout of insanity? And don’t get me wrong, it is insane. Every year, I get stressed to the hilt, moan and whine, say I’m not going to finish (my fellow local Wrimos can attest to that). And every year, I sign up again. This will be my seventh NaNo in a row. But why?
If it wasn’t for NaNoWriMo, I wouldn’t be a writer. Because writing, dontcha know, is for special people. People who have talent. People who have passion, who must write or go insane. People who have grand ideas, big stories to tell – stories of adventures in far-off places, of lives lived in danger and darkness, of deep and harrowing emotions or high and lofty ideals. People who create unforgettable characters and bring them to life on the page. In other words, people not like me.
I’ve always loved stories, and as a kid in school, I was good at writing them. I even took creative writing courses in my undergrad studies, and a night class on how to write books for children. But what I learned from those classes, among other very useful things, was that I don’t have what it takes to be a novelist. I don’t have the stick-to-it-iveness to finish a whole novel, and even if I did, my ideas are kind of basic, trite. Light-weight, as it were. Not the stuff that real novels, and therefore real novelists, are made of.
And that was okay – it’s not like I was crushed or heartbroken about it; it was just a realistic estimation of my skills and abilities. I’m not one of those people who “always wanted to write a novel” – it never occurred to me that I could, because novel writing, dontcha know, is for… (see above, rinse and repeat).
Enter NaNoWriMo 2011.
I wasn’t going to “write a novel” – nah, I had no such lofty goal. All I wanted was to see if I could do this thing, could write 50,000 words in one month. I was going to have fun, and tell myself a story that I liked, and that’s all.
And you know what? I did. I wrote 50,000 words, told myself a story, and “won” my first NaNo. But that wasn’t all. When I was finished, I had a novel. A full, completed novel. And just like that, I was a writer.
Because a writer … is a person who writes.
And that’s what NaNoWriMo is about – writing.
The goal that all us crazies sign up for is to write 50,000 words. Not everyone makes that goal; in fact, not very many Wrimos do – a rough estimate is that maybe 1 in 4 reaches the full word count. But for the rest of them? They still write. Even if someone falls 40,000 words short of the goal, that means they’ve still written 10,000 words they hadn’t written before. Ten thousand words! That’s a lot of words, people. It’s about forty pages, printed out, and there’s novellas out on the market of that length.
And the reason these Wrimos wrote those words is because they signed up for it, and got caught up in the sheer enthusiasm and excitement that’s NaNoWriMo and swept along in the current of writerly excitement. Caught up just like I get caught up again, every year, for the seventh time in a row now. Surrounded by other crazies, talking titles and plots and word count tricks, sharing ideas and cheering each other on.
It doesn’t matter that those stories we write aren’t deep, or lofty, or weighty or important. They might be, but then again, they might not. They might be terrible, riddled with spelling mistakes, more full of plot holes than a broken sieve. But they are still stories, and they have been written. Written by writers.
And that is the point of NaNoWriMo: it makes me a writer. That’s why I do it, year after year.
Like I said, you don’t have to join in – by no means do you have to join in. But if, perhaps, this is something you think you might want to try – do it! Come on in, join the fun! It’s the best thing ever. And who knows, at the end you might have a novel in your hand – that’s what happened to me. And it was a game changer.
Life, the Universe, and Being a Writer. Thank you, NaNoWriMo!
