Zetta Elliott's Blog, page 4

Ta-dah!

It’s finally done! This cover caused quite a few headaches and spanned the globe, starting in Brazil, then going to Indonesia, and finishing in San Francisco. I’m so glad that I hired Matthew Smith-Gonzalez because having the IndiePubDoc on my side has given me the book of my dreams! My newsletter went out this morning; you can read it here. The giveaway on Goodreads starts today; enter here. And yesterday’s press release went out through IBPA; three responses so far. They just sent yet another marketing opportunity but I think I’ve reached my limit. Will I earn back the money I’ve spent so far? Time will tell. This really does feel like an experiment since I’ve never hired so many people to “self”-publish a book. IBPA refers to us as “author publishers” but that  doesn’t feel like the right fit. I’m only publishing my own work, no one else’s, and I can’t really compete even with a small press because a staff of three is still two more than I’ve got. But it definitely takes a village to get a book out in the world and I’m very grateful for the artists and designers and experts who’ve helped me along the way. I’ll be launching this title on September 14 at the New Children’s Museum in San Diego—can’t wait to see their new Octavia Butler exhibit!

See you in DC!

It’s official—I am now allowed to share that I will be in conversation with J.C. Cervantes at the National Book Festival in August! I don’t think I’ve been to D.C. since before the pandemic so it’ll be nice to catch up with friends and check out a few museums. Hopefully we won’t be in the grip of another heatwave. June has been broiling…summer definitely isn’t my favorite season and I tend to go out early in the day to avoid the heat. On Saturday I woke with a migraine but went for a quick run, took a pill, took a nap, and then spent the rest of the day reading and writing. I took my blood pressure that evening and it wasn’t optimal but it was close! I’ve started taking yet another supplement to help with my joint pain. My grandparents used to have countless prescriptions that took up half the kitchen table; I’m not there yet but the bottles are adding up! Can’t get an appointment to see a rheumatologist until next spring so for now I’m running every other day, taking my supplements, and painkillers as needed. Maybe it’s arthritis, #maybeitsmenopause…

In other news…if you’re hitting the road this summer or want to hear some empowering poems while you’re at the beach, check out the audiobook of SAY HER NAME, which is on sale until 7/21 for just $2.25 over at . Personally, I can’t see myself lying on the beach when it’s 97 degrees here in Chicago but I am playing bingo with Jed Dearybury and need a photo of myself next to a body of water…

Purple

I dread having kids ask me to name my favorite novel but I’m always happy to share my favorite color: purple. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’ve now collaborated on *nine* books with Purple Wong! Based in Hong Kong, Purple has a whimsical style that perfectly captures the magic of THE ORACLE’S DOOR. I’ve had quite a few issues with the cover but my designer Deasy is hard at work and I should have something ready to share soon.

We’re stuck in a heatwave here in Chicago and after being outside for most of yesterday, I’m camping out in front of the air conditioner today. Summer isn’t my favorite season but I’ve decided to try some new activities—canoeing along the African American Heritage Water Trail yesterday. My cousin will be coming to visit next month and I’m hoping we can stop at one of the Amish villages in IN on our way back to Toronto. In August I’ll be in DC and that leaves plenty of time to (hopefully) finish a couple of novels.

I’ve been stressing about the prequel—I’ve self-published plenty of books but this is my first time buying advertisements and paying to send out a press release. Every week IBPA sends a new offer or tip on how indie authors can promote their books. I signed up for yet another webinar this week, though I often find they don’t contain much useful information. I’m not that active on social media but hopefully someone who is will help spread the word because I don’t have $15K to hire a publicist. I got a stunning illustration from my artist in Scotland but can’t yet afford to proceed with that book. Purple’s art is making me want to do another color picture book with her—maybe one for Halloween. I have too many manuscripts! It’ll be a relief to finish editing and designing the prequel; in a few weeks, it’ll be on NetGalley and won’t take up so much space in my mind…

 

through

My friend lost her mother last week. They were very close and Mrs. King generously extended her support and enthusiasm for the arts to Rosa’s many creative friends, including me. I watched the funeral in Texas on Facebook last Sunday, and then the next day lost a dear friend here in Chicagoland who was one of my “other mothers.” I visited Satia just a few days before her death; I arranged the flowers I’d brought in a vase by her bed, told her I loved her, promised to come back and visit soon. I arrived at the care home knowing something was wrong and wasn’t entirely surprised when she told me she had cancer. I just held her hand and listened as she talked about how awful the chemo made her feel. Sometimes I think we’re just meant to be a witness. Our instinct is to fix and fuss but sometimes there’s nothing you can do.

Grief is mixed up with so many other emotions. This month marks twenty years since my father died of cancer, and in 2018 it was my friend Mary stolen too soon by pancreatic cancer. I wrote a strange poem for Mary while visiting her for the last time in the UK, and I wrote an angry poem yesterday that I’ll probably never share. Then I attended a virtual ritual on intuition where my tarot reader asked us what weighty feelings did we need to release? He took us through visualizations about bubbles and lilacs and I thought that might open the floodgates, but it didn’t. I don’t even feel sad, really. Just sort of untethered. I don’t have many close friends in Chicago and losing Satia somehow makes the city feel less real, less necessary. Not that I have another destination in mind. I hope to get back to Ireland this fall but that feels like a long ways away.

I had two doctor’s appointments this week and my vitals were good. Whatever caused my blood pressure to spike seems to be resolved, though I’ll continue to use my at-home monitor. I measure a lot of things these days. Today I requested health records so I’ll be ready for my upcoming mammogram. Then it’s time for another colonoscopy. We do all the right things to protect ourselves and prolong our lives but nothing’s guaranteed. When I’m in this kind of mood, I usually write but I haven’t yet found my momentum in May. I spent the past week working with a new cover artist for the prequel and trying to figure out which trim size to use. Folks will complain if I diverge aesthetically from the other books in the dragon series but this story IS different so why should I try to make it “fit in?” If I choose a custom trim size to match the Random House paperback, the book won’t be available to booksellers. And if I publish through Ingram to make it accessible to them, I’ll have to raise the price by several dollars. I’m not going to please everyone so I might as well just please myself.

The Amish novel is waiting to be finished but I started it four years ago and now wonder how to write in the pandemic, whether it’s really a novel for teens when the four main characters aren’t teenagers anymore…the dramatic monologues are done and I like them a lot. The files are open on my computer; the outline has been sitting on my desk for weeks. I think I just needed some time this week to not hustle, not push. There are still two weeks left in May—plenty of time to sort myself out and work through my grief or whatever it is I’m feeling right now. Rosa texted me yesterday to send her condolences and she reminded me that the only way is through. But wading through water requires us to slow down, so that’s what I’m going to do.

Summer Reads

Tomorrow afternoon we’ll be discussing books that are part of Brodart’s summer reading program. There’s still time to register here and a recording will be shared if you can’t attend in real time. Tomorrow’s panel will be my last kid lit event until the National Book Festival in August. That means the summer will be reserved for writing!

This past weekend I was in Baltimore for the Reginald Lewis Museum’s book festival; it was wonderful to see so many friends gathered together in one place and the exhibit Black Woman Genius is excellent—don’t miss it if you’re in or near Maryland. I’ve been dealing with a cluster migraine for about a week but I’ve still managed to keep up with NaPoWriMo. Writing a poem a day has also helped me complete the poetry section of my hybrid verse novel. It’s with one editor and I’m aiming to finish the prose section by the end of May. Then I can turn back to Ireland and my middle grade time-travel novel.

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about this article. Did Big 5 publishers lie on the stand to make themselves look like victims? Probably. Do 90% of books sell less than 12 copies? Probably not. Apparently I’m in elite company since only 10% of authors sell more than 500,000 copies but I’m certain my publisher didn’t spend the average of $36K on marketing and publicity. I’m giving editors a couple more weeks before proceeding with what publishers are now calling “disintermediation”—otherwise known as self-publishing. If you’ve got a big following, why not cut out the middle man and engage directly with your audience? Yesterday an author friend recommended a local publicist but when I visited her site, it clearly states that she doesn’t accept clients with self-published books. The main industry publications won’t review indie titles and many libraries won’t acquire a book that hasn’t been reviewed. I know the drill. I’m still a bit anxious but I’m also excited—it’s a new challenge but I’ve got over a decade of experience. I’ve sold over 30K self-published books and I have media contacts who loved the dragon series and might be open to the prequel. It might flop but there’s only one way to find out…wish me luck!

Samhain in St. Kitts

I finished my first Ireland story on Monday! I’m not happy with the title, “Samhain in St. Kitts,” but it’ll do for now. I’ve been working on the author’s note, which is stalled so I thought I’d post it in here to encourage me to finish it up. I’m writing it more for myself than for kids, I think, theorizing what I’m now calling my “Sankofa series” of stories that blend Black history and fantasy. That pretty much describes every novel I’ve written over the past twenty+ years, starting with A Wish After Midnight, but I think of these stories set in Ireland and Scotland as somehow different—they’re history, fantasy, and ancestry. I’ve written the Irish into a few of my books over the years, including my latest, The Oracle’s Door, but the intention now is different. It’s not exactly atonement but maybe an acknowledgement of…shame? rage? discomfort? There’s something I need to process personally and then there’s the silence I want to disrupt. Why don’t these books already exist? Why do Ireland and Scotland and England get to keep feeding their children fictions that bury facts? This is what I’ve got so far:

I visited Ireland for the first time in October 2023. I grew up in Canada believing my maternal grandfather, Frank Arthur Hobbs, had Irish heritage but genealogical research revealed his roots were actually English and Scottish. I learned that the ancestors I believed to be Irish were originally settlers who enabled English colonization of Ireland. Those same ancestors then left Ireland more than a century later to similarly displace the First Nations of Canada. It’s a complicated history that I don’t yet fully understand, but I wanted to make some sort of offering using my skills as a scholar and children’s book author.

With the Sankofa series I am generating narratives for young readers that reveal the links between the islands from which my ancestors originated. The genre of historical fantasy permits me to speculate when the “official” historical record fails to document the realities of marginalized and oppressed people. While in Dublin last fall, I visited the EPIC Museum and learned in a temporary exhibit (Entangled Islands: Ireland & the Caribbean) that the Irish were expelled from St. Kitts after the 1641 rebellion over fears they would align with the French against the English. Though my father was from the neighboring island of Nevis, I knew this historical event would form the basis of my first story about the Irish. It was about a week before Samhain when I left Dublin, and after reading an article in a local paper, I decided to imagine the Gaelic festival in a Caribbean context.

Irish indentured servants brought their cultural practices with them when they crossed the Atlantic to labor for a fixed term in the Americas. What if an Irish woman shared the rituals of Samhain with an enslaved African girl? Stripped of her true name and forced to speak English under threat of the lash, the girl nonetheless fights to retain her Yoruba identity and easily recognizes the trickster Orisha Esu when he appears at Samhain. Guardian of the Crossroads, Esu presents the girl with several options: return to the plantation from which she has fled, enter the realm of the Fae and enjoy eternal youth, or head into the mountains to join an interracial maroon community.

I guess I need to conclude with a paragraph about takeaways and what I hope to convey to kids, why this particular fiction should matter to anyone else but me…

In book news, Dragons in a Bag now has a lower price for a limited time; publishers claim middle grade sales are in a slump but I’m grateful for all the readers who are still supporting my series. The Sankofa series won’t enjoy that same kind of commercial success but these stories mean just as much to me.

I only had three gigs this month and one just canceled so I have plenty of time to work on my Amish novel and have started scouting farm stays in PA and IN. I’m heading to Terre Haute to celebrate a friend’s promotion so I might as well tack on a few nights in Amish country. At the end of the month I’ll be in Baltimore for a children’s book festival at the Reginald Lewis Museum—join us if you can!

KidLit4Ceasefire

Want to support children in conflict zones? Then head over to the auction site for #KidLit4Ceasefire! There are over 300 items you can bid on, including a one-hour virtual author visit with me. Normally that would cost over a thousand dollars but right now, bidding starts at $45…a great gift for a school that might not otherwise be able to afford a book talk. The money raised goes to charities in Gaza, Sudan, the Congo, and to support clean water in Flint, MI. You can bid on signed books, manuscript critiques, book swag—please take a minute to check it out! The news can make us feel powerless but there ARE ways we can help.

spring ahead

Yesterday’s tarot card urged me to rest but after sleeping for sixteen hours on Tuesday, I think I’m good. I returned from Dublin on Monday night and started sorting my many receipts. Then I emailed the National Library of Ireland and asked for a copy of The Dublin Mercury from August 1768 so I could see the original advertisement I learned about earlier this month. It’s unsettling to see a child listed for sale in between banal notices about “exotic” trees and shrubs and some jilted husband refusing to pay for his wife’s expenses. One trafficker was clearly based in Dublin but the other seems to be from the north (I think the town is Carrickmacross). My mind is a bit too open right now after making so many discoveries during my trip. But I’m trying to stay focused; tonight I found three potential Black Irish illustrators online and am ready to start revising my selkie story. I’m developing outlines for the Samhain picture book and now have a fairly complete cast for the novel about this girl trafficked from North or South Carolina.

You can find photos from my trip on Instagram; as usual, I packed in quite a bit over a few short days. What I need to do now is update my notes and set a writing agenda so I don’t lose momentum. It was pretty wet, windy, and cold in Ireland, but I managed to do a lot of dreaming as I wandered around various historic sites in Tipperary and Wicklow. My guide Maggie suggested Powerscourt as a quick day trip and I found a lot of inspiration there as I walked through the extensive gardens. The house looked quite a bit like Pollok House in Glasgow but this time-travel novel will be entirely different. I’ve named my girl Glory and she is enslaved by an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family who have a townhouse in Dublin and an estate in the country. Right now I’m patterning Glory after Phillis Wheatley…but we’ll see how far I get writing neoclassical verse, lol. I’ve given her allies and enemies…she gets to ride the giant stag I saw on display at Trinity College last fall…I thought of an ending yesterday but don’t know if it works. Will hammer out an outline and just try to make a start!

On my last day in Dublin I got to meet some bright, diverse students at a primary school not far from my hotel. There are 34 languages spoken by the students, and I was greeted and thanked in at least half of them. JetBlue is having a seat sale and it’s very tempting to go back for the summer festival of Bealtaine but I think I better watch my pennies, stay home and write, and return to Ireland for Samhain at the end of October. I should have my next genealogical report next month and that will help me plan a trip to Northern Ireland to see where my Scottish ancestors settled.

Time to prep for today’s virtual book talk on Mother of the Sea! That novelette is a good reminder that self-publishing is always worthwhile even if it’s not lucrative. I never imagined it would be selected for the ALA’s Great Stories Club, but nothing wonderful can happen if you don’t give your work a chance to live in the world…

The Fifth Province

My head is full of threads and I’m slowly weaving them into a new story…there’s space to dream because I finished The Oracle’s Door on Monday! It’s with two editors but I’m trying not to think about that and I’m still prepared to self-publish if necessary. When I finish a novel, I often fall into a slump so I preempted that by diving into my research on Blacks in Ireland. I leave for Glasgow next week; I’ll teach a writing workshop the night of the 7th and then leave the next day for Dublin. So far I’ve lined up a school visit and a tour of Tipperary; Cork seems to have a connection to the Caribbean so I might take the train down there on my last day. Then it’s back to Chicago to write! My guide actually emailed me today to say she was already in Terryglass, checking out the pub and churchyard to save us time next Saturday. Maggie’s an artist and I can’t wait to pick her brain about Irish folklore. I bought a book last fall that introduced me to the mystical Fifth Province. This week I’ve been reading scholarly articles and I’ve discovered so many things to help me with the next novel…the Stone of Divisions sits on the Hill of Uisneach (pron. ish-knock), spiritual center of Ireland, the place where disputes were once resolved…so where else would an enslaved girl from the Carolinas go when seeking justice? I am deep in dream mode and just started Part 2 of a 5-part documentary on the history of Ireland. On Tuesday I started things off by watching this informative presentation by Dr. Elizabeth Stack of the Irish American Heritage Museum in upstate New York: “The History of Black People in Ireland.” She shared her sources right at the beginning so I ordered one book by Dr. Nini Rodgers and then found that I had already saved an article of hers when I got back from Dublin last fall. Dr. Stack included the above newspaper advertisement and that immediately jumped out as a potential protagonist. The picture book I started last fall has a Caribbean girl as the main character so it doesn’t hurt to have the second girl be from the (soon to be) U.S. A student this morning asked how long it has taken me to write the dragon series but it’s so hard to measure because most of the time I’m dreaming and researching and walking my neighborhood listening for voices…it takes a while for a story to come together, though I almost feel ready to write about Uisneach and it’s only been three days! But this week’s research builds on everything that came before—including my many visits to Scotland, where I saw this painting by “Glasgow Boys” Henry and Hornel, The Druids Bringing in the Mistletoe. Hornel’s adjacent painting of a brownie at the Kelvingrove Museum partly inspired me to write Blue Boy and now another of his paintings is haunting me…maybe on my one unplanned day in Ireland I can figure out how to get to the Fifth Province (modern day County Westmeath)…

Happy Book Birthday, Jax!

Happy New Year and Happy Book Birthday to The War of the Witches! It has been a long journey but we have finally reached the end of Jaxon’s magical adventure! I’m having a low-key kind of launch. No parties or cake, but I did make a short video which you can watch here. With so many conflict zones around the world, I’m a little uneasy promoting a book that has the word “war” in the title. But I wrote resistance to war into the novel and I hope the book can serve as an opportunity for kids and adults to talk about what it means to be a peacemaker. My fellow Canadian kid lit author Uma Krishnaswami kindly interviewed me for her blog, Writing with a Broken Tusk. Part I on the dragon series went up today.

I hoped to have the prequel done before the start of 2024 but things didn’t quite go as planned. I’m easing my way into the New Year and giving myself a bit more time to get it done. In the meantime, I want to take a moment to thank all the folks who have supported this series. We’re creeping closer and closer to the half-million mark! I’m pretty sure I’ll never have another title that will sell as well as Dragons in a Bag, so I’m going to enjoy what’s left of the ride and plan (loosely) for what’s next. I keep drawing tarot cards that urge me to reflect on past achievements so I guess that’s what I’ll do.

I got an incredible report from the Irish Family Research Center last week, and yesterday I received an invitation to lead a writing workshop for an LGBTQ arts advocacy group in Glasgow. Edi and I have booked our January trip to Detroit (first time for me!) so after that I’ll start looking farther abroad. I reached out to a primary school in Terryglass, Tipperary, which is where my ancestors settled after leaving England. I’m interested in how Irish history is taught to children. My memoir is basically a consideration of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, our families, and our countries…

In other news, Ship of Souls is on sale in the Kindle Store; get your copy this month for just 99 cents!

Wishing you all the best for 2024…perhaps this is the year we can finally achieve peace on earth.