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!
They’re fantasy – but not classic fantasy with orcs and swords and sorcery. They’re romance – but not classic romance with heart throbbings and he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not. They have a whole lot of cooking and hand-making things, and small children, and people being kind to each other and finding new friends and family and home. They are, in short, very cozy, but they’re fantasy. So I made up a name for them: I called them “Cozy Fantasy“.
I really did make up that name myself. You know, to go with the “Cozy Mystery” genre (e.g. Agatha Christie). Because at that time, there was no name for the genre I’m writing in, or at least none that I could find.
But then, a year or so ago Shanna Swendson started a new book series. She called it cozy fantasy, and, she said, “‘Cozy fantasy’ has become a huge trend.”
Whaaaaat? I thought I made that up myself! And now it’s out there, and other people are writing in that genre, and it’s trendy! How cool is that?
So of course I got on the bandwagon (that I’ve technically been on for the last ten years already) and joined forces with my fellow Cozy Fantasy writers. On Sunday, Dec. 29th, Martin Millerson is part of a big Cozy Fantasy sale, the “Cozy the Day Away” sale. For a whole day, a big list of Cozy Fantasy books is on sale, for anything from discounted to downright FREE!
Incidentally, E.L. Bates joined me on the bandwagon, and Magic Most Deadly is part of the sale too. There’ll be some cool books for sale: go check it out!
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’ve been having a bit of a hard time lately, for one reason or another. So I went on the internet to ARD Mediathek (Germany’s public broadcasters’ streaming service) and turned on some fairy tale movies. I needed them, needed that reassurance that the world is a place where things will work out and everything is okay in the end. German and Czech fairy tale films are fabulous in that regard—they come across as so real, the tales are so much part of that culture, you can sink into the story and come out happy at the end.
From Cinderella (1919) by Arthur Rackham
But I was left a little dissatisfied that day. I wasn’t sure why at first. The films I watched were lovely fairy tales, with princesses and magic and intrepid heroes and heroines, and bad guys that were defeated, and a happily ever after. One was called “Der Geist im Glas” (“The Spirit in the Bottle”), and “Die verkaufte Prinzessin” (“The Sold Princess”) was the other.
You’ve never heard of them? Neither had I. That’s because they’re not classic fairy tales. The one claims to be loosely adapted from “motifs of a Grimms’ tale”, the other to be “inspired by Bavarian legends”. Whatever—there’s nothing wrong with adapting tales, or even just taking loose inspiration from existing fairy tales and making something of your own with it.
No, that’s not what frustrated me about those films, as I came to realize the next day after I had some time to think about them. What got my goat about both those films is that they shoehorn “issues” into the story. They clobber you over the head with such matters as feminism and inclusivity and “thou shalt believe in magic”. The characters spout off, in a repeat loop, about how princesses can’t be rulers or girls can’t be miners and oh, it’s so unfair and an issue to be solved; or they heavy-handedly draw attention to the fact that there’s MAGIC in this story and oh, that’s so unusual and the science-minded heroine doesn’t believe in it and needs to learn her lesson (even though she accepts without so much as a blink the wicked spirit from the bottle that’s got them all into trouble).
Don’t get me wrong—it’s not the issues I take, well, issue with. Feminism and inclusivity are a no-brainer, as far as I’m concerned. I have no problem with turning the doctor’s apprentice in “The Spirit in the Bottle” from a boy into a girl, or with casting People of Colour in roles that were traditionally “golden-haired”. That’s all great. But what I object to is using a fairy tale as a vehicle for an agenda, instead of letting it speak for itself. That’s using a delicate instrument as a hammer to pound in a nail.
You see, that’s the whole thing about fairy tales: they don’t need to have anyone superimposing a “lesson” on them! Fairy tales teach and empower without anyone getting on a soap box for the purpose. Jack climbing the beanstalk and outwitting the giant makes us feel like giant slayers ourselves; Cinderella going from drudge to princess makes it possible for us to do the same—without someone preaching at us about having self-confidence, or about the evils of step-sibling exploitation. The stories make their point without spelling it out (“spelling”, haha. See what I did there?). They show what they’re saying, they don’t need to tell.
For several years now I had a quotation on the top of my list of notes: “Ich glaube mehr an Märchen als an Zeitungen.”—”I believe in fairy tales more than in newspapers.” The person who said that was Lotte Reiniger, the first creator of animated film. That’s right, years before Disney’s Snow White, Lotte Reiniger made stop-motion films from silhouette cutouts (Scherenschnitt, scissor cut, in German), including the 1926(!) feature-length “Adventures of Prince Achmed”. She created many amazing fairy tale films, and she knew what she was talking about when it comes to fairy tales.
From Adventures of Prince Achmend (1926), by Lotte Reiniger/Primrose Productions – Christel Strobel/Primrose Productions (copyright holder), CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=68075134
I believe in fairy tales more than in newspapers. What’s that supposed to mean? It means that what fairy tales* have to tell us has more validity, more truth to it than the ever-changing, deceptive clamour of the news industry.
Using a fairy tale as a vehicle to preach about whatever current “issue” you feel people (in this context, that invariably means “children”) need to be instructed onis to not take fairy tales seriously.
Part of what I love about European fairy tale films is that the tales seem normal there. The film makers find the most likely local castle, put the actors in historic-ish costumes, and start shooting. And because the settings aren’t artificial stage sets, but real places that have weeds growing between the cobbles and lichen on the old wall bricks, the stories themselves seem that much more real – magic and all. We believe the weeds in the cobbles, we believe the magic, and we believe the power of the characters to overcome their problems.
But having the un-real-ness of the story shoved in our faces, be it by one of the characters doubting the existence of magic like any modern product of the enlightenment or by having the actors monologuing about how women should have the same rights as men, breaks the illusion. It breaks the setting, almost like breaking the fourth wall. And the silly thing is that it’s totally unnecessary.
Anything is possible in a fairy tale. If you want to send the message in your fairy tale adaptation that women should have the same rights as men (as they should, of course), and that “a beautiful princess” can just as easily be brown-skinned and black-haired as blonde and blue-eyed (which goes without saying), then just show them having those rights or those looks, and your audience will accept it. You’ve made it normal.
But those issues are not the point of a fairy tale. The point is that the doctor’s apprentice (whether boy or girl) saves the day by outwitting the wicked genie in the bottle; or that the beautiful young ruler (whether fair- or dark-skinned) wins the struggle for the throne against their evil uncle with the help of the young miner who is in league with the spirit of the mountain. And we, the audience, save the day and win the throne right along with them—that is why we love fairy tales and keep coming back to them again and again. If we quietly absorb some new ideas in the process, get some new images planted in our imaginations, so much the better, but for the love of Grimms, keep your didactic bulls out of the china shop.
Take fairy tales seriously, believe in them for the time you’re hearing them, reading them, watching them, and you unlock their power. Relegate them to children’s stories that need to be made more “modern” and “relevant” by preaching on the issue du jour, and you’ve spoiled it.
I believe in fairy tales more than in newspapers: I do, I take my fairy tales seriously.
And they lived happily ever after.
From Cinderella (1919), by Arthur Rackham
*The term “fairy tales” could just as easily be replaced with a generic “stories” here. Fairy tales are a distillation of Story, are “Story Pure”, as it were; it’s not about magic and princes, but about the power of Story. However, that’s a topic we’ll have to save that for another day.
“No,” said the expert, looking up from his close scrutiny of the issue. He raised the magnifying glass and peered through it at the spot on her chin. “No, you are not, are you.”
“On the other hand,” she said, trying not to feel like a lepidopterist’s specimen, “I’m also not very good at about a dozen other things. That ought to count for something, shouldn’t it?”
“Heddle,” she muttered. “Warp. Weft. Raddle. Warping board. Bobbin. Shuttle. Harness. Shed, reed, ratchet. Sett, castle, breast beam, cloth beam. Heddle, warp and weft.”
“Stop!” he shrieked. “Stop throwing curses at me! And put down that, that, that spell book!”
She glanced up at him with a mild, enquiring look, then closed the book in her lap with a finger pinched between its pages and turned it over to look at the spine.
In gold-imprinted letters it said THE BEGINNING WEAVER.
The world has become a bad place in the last few years. So many things are going wrong, so much strife, so much floods and fires and earthquakes and wars and rumours of wars.
But Story can set a counterpoint. Story allows us to escape the trap of perceived reality.
And that’s the key, isn’t it—perceived reality.
Story allows us to perceive a different reality. It lets us experience a different world, one in which plots resolve, problems come to a conclusion. Unlike the so-called real world, where everything is just a muddle, Story brings order to the world. As renowned folklorist Max Lüthi says*, the story world shows us not what could be, but what is.
Why do I tell Story? In order to create worlds and places for people to enter into, worlds of truth. Worlds of justice and joy. Worlds not without problems, but worlds where those problems can and will be resolved.
Story is not escapist in the sense of letting us run away from our problems. But is is escapist in the sense of setting us free from the confines of our perceived reality. It allows us to see the bigger picture, opens our eyes to what is actually there. Even when it is Story about ostensibly “unreal” things, about elves and fairies and little dwarfs under the mountain. Maybe especially then.
We need Story—the World needs Story. The world needs Story to make sense of itself, to keep from sinking into a morass of muddle and chaos.
And that is why I tell Story. Unabashedly and unapologetically, I tell stories of joy and pleasure and home and warmth and family, where tiny people live in tiny homes and big ones get whirled away into other worlds where they find belonging.
Because in entering into these worlds, entering into Story, we can step out of the bondage of perceived reality, and we can find what is really real.
The world needs Story. That is why.
[*Lüthi, The European Folktale: Form and Nature (Philadelphia: ISHI, 1982), p.89. I quoted the full piece in a post on my research blog some ten years ago, here.]
“So You Want to Write a Book?” is now available, all six parts in one document, on the website to download as .pdf (here) – just in case you want to save it to your computer, or print it out or something, and peruse or re-peruse it at your leisure.
