Francesca Astraea's Blog, page 5

Mail for the No. 1 Readers' Club!

I send letters and postcards to members of the No. 1 Readers' Club 3-4 times a year. You don't have to be a member of a particular tier to qualify - just add your mailing address when you sign up to your preferred tier! (Membership starts at £1 GBP.)

https://www.patreon.com/FrancescasWords

How to clock off for the holidays

Go through your messages. Reply to the big emails.Realise the big emails require planner cross-checks and WhatsApp messages. Send the messages.Send the emails.Clear your inbox of anything of medium importance.Realise that the low importance emails never mattered and delete them. Resolve to do this more after the holiday.Turn on your out-of-office automatic email replies on however many inboxes you monitor. Include useful links in the accounts to which people will have emaile...

Chapter One of Rotting Trees

Available now! Enjoy: https://www.patreon.com/collection/32...

(New chapters every Monday through December 2024.)

Rotting Trees links

Hi! With new chapters of ROTTING TREES dropping from Monday, I thought I'd share some links.

Chapters are here (and you can trial paid membership for 7 days!): https://www.patreon.com/collection/32...

Post with Q&A, blurb and content warnings: https://francescasthoughts.com/2023/1...

I've also added the book to GoodReads so you can join in with the readalong: Rotting Trees

Self Publishing? In This Economy? (chatting about why it’s fun)

Is going into a creative career an admirable pursuit of one’s passion or an act of epic financial self-sabotage? Don’t look at me for the answer, I once stuck my finger in a plug socket. Anyway, I’ve been chatting with arty friends and less arty friends alike about publishing Rotting Trees (from 11th December! Read about it here!) and thought I’d share why I’ve decided to self publish at a time when quite a lot of cosmic signals – like, I don’t know, the global economy – would suggest it’s silly...

Introducing ROTTING TREES, a ‘Bezzina’s Emporium of Magical Artefacts and Antiquities’ novel, with FAQ

Once upon a time, I nicknamed a manuscript ‘cursenovel.’ More recently I finished it, named it Rotting Trees and, when no one I’d approached wanted to sell it, decided to publish it myself.

Then I wrote this post. I do have some graphics planned to share to my social media as part of the never ending PR machine that is required of self publishing, but I thought it would be fun to have a master post type blog here, since most social media platforms are increasingly functionally unusable and/or...

Newsletter folk:

Check your email!

Blog folk: check francescasthoughts.com on Monday...

wasp rooms

Good evening,

I have one thing I can’t talk about yet and a room full of wasps. Let me fix the grammar of that sentence. There are Things afoot about which I cannot talk (yet), and one of them is a big-ish thing I’m looking forward to. Separately, my place of work now has a wasp room. A room full of wasps. It didn’t used to be full of wasps. Normally it contains two vending machines of dubious functionality and a fire exit. Today, which is a nine-hour shift, the room is populated by wasps. I ...

A Guide to What You Should Take to University (featuring some things that aren’t things)

Hark, what is that? The sound of a thousands of first year university students receiving their email login details and finding out their timetables? Lo, but it is. Fresher’s week is around the corner, and after folk on Patreon suggested it might be fun for me to write about uni life or studying, I thought I’d put a little guide together for those of you who are preparing to start your degree about what you might benefit from taking (or not). My credentials, if you are new: I went to university a...

New story 'A Devil of a Time'

Hello!

My latest short story, illustrated by the excellent Tatchiana Michaela, is live: https://francescaswords.wordpress.com...

Enjoy!