Cozy Fantasy – amo vitam

It’s a Sale!

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?

It’s a New (Old) Book!

Introducing: Seventh Son, the 2nd Edition!

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!

And I Thought I Made That Up: a Cozy Fantasy Book Sale

The time: April of 2015. The issue: I’d published a couple of novels, and I didn’t know what genre to fit them into.

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!

That’s Life, the Universe, and COZY FANTASY! Check out the sale and find some new books to love.

Cosy Fantasy – Or Is It Cozy?

I have a problem with my books: Seventh Son and Cat and Mouse, I don’t know what genre to stick them in.

People ask me what kind of books they are, and I usually say “fantasy” – but then I always feel compelled to qualify: “Well, it’s light fantasy,” or “It’s kind of a romance,” or “It doesn’t have any orcs in it.” Because, you see, when someone classifies a book or movie as “fantasy”, what is the first thing that comes to mind? For me, and I suspect for most people, it’s Tolkien. Well, he did start the whole thing, really. Yes, yes, I know about George Macdonald’s Phantastes and that there were other fantasy writers before Tolkien. But he is the one who made the genre popular and who is unfailingly copied. Fantasy fiction, for the most part, means pointy-eared elves, vicious-looking orcs, and pseudo-medieval knights in more-or-less-shiny armour. There has to be at least one sorcerer and plenty of swords, and a dragon or other mythical creature is pretty much mandatory – that’s the essence of “fantasy”.

But my stories haven’t got any of that. Not a single pointy-eared person in sight. To date, in Ruph nobody even owns a sword, let alone has drawn it; and as for dragons, they’re mentioned once, in Chapter 6 of Cat and Mouse, but only in passing, when Cat is wondering if they’re real or just as mythical as in our own world (the jury is still out – Nikor, the librarian, thinks they might exist, but he doesn’t really care, as long as he has a good way of shelving the books about them).

So, the Septimus series is definitely not classic fantasy (nor epic, nor high, nor whatever other flattering epithet one might bestow on Tolkienesque fiction). So what is it? Well, there’s romance, in the first couple of books at least. But, then again, the books aren’t “romances”, either. No ripped bodices, heaving bosoms, or lust in the dust (nor anywhere else, for that matter); no perpetual belly-aching about “he loves me, he loves me not”; not even the high-class tension-filled relationship dance of an Elizabeth and a Mr Darcy – this is not “boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy has to overcome obstacles to get girl, boy gets girl”. Not that there’s anything wrong with that storyline (I lurv me a good romance) – but Seventh Son and Cat and Mouse don’t really run along those tracks.

They aren’t fantasy. They aren’t romance. I’ve also had readers comment that Seventh Son feels like a Young Adult novel – but Cat is twenty-eight, hardly your typical YA teen protagonist. So, really, not YA either (which is at best a somewhat controversial category, anyway – is a YA a book for teens, or about teens? Just like the Ruphian dragons, the jury is still out on that one). And then there’s mystery in those stories, but nobody dies (or at least not mysteriously), and Cat is not a Ruphian equivalent of a gum-shoed, pipe-smoking and/or mustachioed sleuth who has to figure out whodunnit. So not mystery, either.

But what to call them? Because really, the Septimus books are fantasy. And they are romance, and mystery. Just not your typical example of either of those genres. And when I thought about how to describe these stories, a term popped into my mind: Cosy Fantasy.

You see, one of my favourite genres to read is Cosy Mysteries. You know, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers (to name just three of the queens of the genre): mystery novels which usually deal with a limited cast of characters (often in the typical English country house setting), have very little violence (and what there is of it, usually happens off-stage), and above all, focus on people and their relationships.

And that’s exactly what the Septimus series is like – but in a fantasy setting. So I coined this phrase, Cosy Fantasy, to describe my books – and then I found out that I’m by no means the only one who has come up with that descriptor for this kind of stories. Goodreads, for one, has whole lists of books that fit into that category (which is exactly where I’m going to go next time I’m looking for a good new read).

But here’s another snag: how to spell it? Is is Cosy Fantasy, or Cozy Fantasy? Goodreads, again, has two lists, one under each spelling – and they’re different lists. I have a feeling the Cosy Fantasies are the British ones, and the Cozy ones the American-published. Yet another dilemma – I’m publishing my books in Canada, though US venues (Amazon, Createspace and Smashwords), with British spelling… Cosy, or Cozy?

I think for the time being, I’ll stick with Cosy, to go with the rest of my spelling. But if you would rather cosy up with Seventh Son and Cat and Mouse under the name of Cozy Fantasies, please do.

Life, the Universe, and Cosy Fantasies. All that matters is that you enjoy them.

What SEVENTH SON Is Not

The other day someone asked me, once again: “Did you write Seventh Son?” Well, yes, yes I did. However, that’s actually not what they’re asking. They don’t want to know if I wrote a fantasy novel called Seventh Son; it’s something else they have in mind. And so, to answer that question, let me enlighten you about what my SEVENTH SON is NOT.

My novel is not the source text for the movie Seventh Son that is coming out next week (well, in North America it is; the release date is February 6th). The film has been several years in the making, and stars Ben Barnes (heartthrob!) in the lead role. The source book (or, as they put it, “inspiration”) for that movie is actually not even called Seventh Son, but The Last Apprentice: Revenge of the Witch (original UK title: The Spook’s Apprentice), and it’s written by Joseph Delaney.

Another book my Seventh Son is not is the 1987 novel of that title by the great Orson Scott Card. His book is the first in his series The Tales of Alvin Maker (which he still hasn’t finished, as far as I know).

Hmm, now that I look it up, it appears there’s another work called Seventh Son I was unaware of – a 1926 silent film from Germany. I’ll have to check that out; maybe Youtube has it.

So, just for the record: none of these stories are mine. And I’m not ripping off any of their ideas, either. In fact, I had written the text and decided on the title of my book before the forthcoming movie was even filmed; and didn’t read the Card book until several years later. Really, what all these stories, mine included, have in common is the old folklore trope that the seventh son of a seventh son has special powers – magical ones, generally. And that’s about all that’s similar, other than the title.

My book is a light romantic fantasy (well, yes, they’re all fantasy stories) about a young woman named Catriona, who looks into a turquoise pottery bowl and suddenly finds herself whisked off to a magical medieval village called Ruph in which the – you guessed it – seventh son of the seventh son has just gone missing, and she has to figure out not only how she ended up where she is and how to get out of that predicament, but what’s been happening in this town. I call it a Cosy Fantasy – you know, like a Cosy Mystery, but in a fantasy environment.

Card’s and Delaney’s stories are much more classical fantasy. Delaney’s would probably classify as Sword and Sorcery – well, definitely the sorcery bit (there’s a very nasty witch); while Card’s is the alternative-history variety – a different 19th-century USA with magic. The stories are darker than anything I would ever write; actually, they get darker yet as the series progress – I gave up on Delaney with the second book, and on Card with about the third volume. They’re well-written books, but I don’t enjoy reading that sort of thing, let alone writing it.

However, “dark” is a matter of definition. Both Delaney’s and Card’s “Seventh Son” stories are also Young Adult novels, at least these first books in the series are, in that the protagonist, the seventh son of the seventh son, is a young boy – twelve years old in the case of Delaney’s Tom Ward, even younger in the case of Card’s Alvin Maker. So what I call “dark” here is really very mild, by fantasy standards – it probably wouldn’t even warrant the term for most readers (yeah, well, I’m super-sensitive. So sue me).

And that’s another thing my book is not: a YA novel. My Catriona is not a teenager, she’s twenty-eight; and the Seventh Son in question is not a twelve-year-old, but right around Cat’s age, too. But that’s not to say that YA readers wouldn’t enjoy the story; in fact, I have it on good authority (i.e. word of mouth/keyboard) that several of them already did.

Incidentally, the movie that’s coming out is not a YA, either. The screen version of Tom Ward is most emphatically not twelve years old – in fact, Ben Barnes is over thirty. I have a feeling the movie might not have a whole lot to do with Delaney’s book. But whether it’s dark or not, I’ll have to go see that film; gotta check out the competition, dontcha know. But more importantly, while I’m a big fan of BB’s, there’s another young actor in that movie I can’t wait to see on the big screen: Lilah Fitzgerald, who plays Tom’s little sister Cate – I’ve met her in real life, although she probably doesn’t remember it (she was quite small then). Her mother is a friend of mine.

When I first heard that a movie with the title Seventh Son was coming out, I seriously considered changing the title of my book (I was going to go back to Septimissimus, which was its working title). But then I thought, No. I picked it first. Actually, Orson Scott Card picked it first, and they didn’t ask his permission about the movie title, as far as I know. Titles aren’t copyrighted, you can use whatever you want. And the basic idea we’ve all named our stories for is something none of us can claim credit for – the originator of that trope is lost in the mists of folklore.

So there you have it: Life, the Universe, and What My Seventh Son Is Not.

Incidentally, speaking of BB – a little side-track-advertising here: there’s a Ben Bauer in Cat and Mouse, the sequel to Seventh Son. You know, just sayin’ – book release is in just five days! You can pre-order the ebook right now!