Amy Laurens's Blog, page 3

Mint Grows Even In The Dark Is Out Today!

It’s release day!

I’m over the moon to announce that Mint Grows Even In The Dark is officially out in the world. Claire’s story is one of bravery, belief, and doing what needs to be done—and I hope it resonates with you as much as it does with me.

Blurb:

Claire knows where to find the people reported as ‘missing under suspicious circumstances’. Unfortunately, telling the authorities means Claire risks taking the blame for the disappearances. Infuriating.
Instead, if Claire wants to see ...

Why Positive Affirmations Sound Really Stupid To You

“Overheard” this conversation on a Discord server I’m part of (whee, look at me learning new technology and finding communities without social media!*) this evening where the conversational participants were like eh, positive affirmations always sound so stupid to me, and I’m like OH HEY HI I CAN HELP WITH THIS I KNOW WHY.

* Dear brain, an excellent topic for a post next week is How & Why I Broke Up With Social Media, just flagging this FYI, m’kay?

It’s mind-changingly simple. Most positi...

All The Ideas But Not At The Computer

I’m going through a period of time wherein I have a constant drip of ideas for blogs ONLY when I’m not in a position to actually write them. Is this a sneaky form of perfectionism, with my critical voice conveniently erasing the idea harddrive whenever it suspects I might (outrageously) actually write something? Possibly, hmm, possibly.

Anyway, the only way to conquer that, I suspect, is to just show up here until my brain gets the message that I’m going to write, even if it’s about nothing,...

Flail, Basically.

So almost every part of me was shocked this morning when the psychologist’s response to ‘I’m functioning right at my capacity now due to these specific life rolls but the pinch point is just the next two months so I just need to put my Big Girl Panties on and survive for 8 weeks’ was ‘uh, no Amy, that’s called Pushing Through and we don’t do that anymore, ESPECIALLY because you’re sick’ and proceeded to have a conversation about ways we could trim down my plate and increase the amount of time I ...

Is Tolkien Making Me Rethink My Primary Story Universe?

I think I’ve mentioned here briefly before that I finally have a name for my cohesive, overarching storyverse, to which perhaps 75% of my stories, both published and planned, belong. It’s The Veiled Worlds, a reference to the fact that the fey live in The Realms, a world veiled from ours, and ours veiled from theirs, and yet both mutually accessible in the right sort of ways.

It’s a permutation, in many ways, of slightly step-sideways Christian mythology, because in seeking to avoid appropri...

Well If That’s Not Self-Sabotage, I Don’t Know What Is

I literally spent all morning (well, a couple of hours, anyway) Doing Other Things. I read for a while (finished The Two Towers, on to The Return Of The King). I looked up a bunch of LOTR-related terms, characters, trivia (‘kine’ is cows, y’all!). I read some of the appendices for lols and funsies. I got inspired, opened my computer, did a few organisational things in my story files and took a couple of notes of things that seem like they’ll inspire future stories. I reread an old story-start. I...

The Story Behind Mint Grows Even In The Dark

Well, it’s officially now the lead up to Mint Grows Even In The Dark: I’ve updated the image on the front page of the site to show this preorder. Farewell from front-page status, Christmas Miracle Is Just A Saying!

That being the case, I decided now was an opportune moment to give a little insight into the ‘making of’ this story

As I think I’ve said here before, Mint Grows (which my fingers INSIST on typing as ‘Mind Grows’ every. single. time.) was originally supposed to be a short stor...

Friday: Things That Are Keeping Me Going

(Apart from my meds, ah ha ha)

In no particular order:

Lord Of The Rings . I started rereading last year since I haven’t read in 20 years and picked away slowly at what I’d forgotten to be a story deeply permeated by grief, in a time in my life already saturated by grief, hence the slow picking. But then suddenly the boy child is 13? And then the family was away for a weekend without me and I was craving Cast Commentary, so my sister dropped off her extended edition dvds (I thought we had...

When You Can Do Anything, What Do You Do?

In a way, it’s freelancer’s privilege; in another, it’s an awful liminality between health and frailty, with the spectre of mortality looming large over all. Partly, also, it’s sleep deprivation at this point, as I’ve barely slept since Boxing Day due to what I shall euphemistically call ‘medication side effects’. Regardless of what’s causing it, I’m feeling adrift. As the title says, when you can do anything with your time, what do you do?

Obviously that ‘anything’ is constrained by my ener...

Impending Poetry :)

Good news! If you caught any of the poetry I shared last year (mostly on Instagram/FB) and enjoyed it, it’s all coming very soon in one convenient collection! Life Had Other Plans officially comes out on May 26, but if you order via www.AmyLaurens.com (literally right below, though if you’re reading this via email you’ll need to click through to the site to see) you’ll get your copy about a month early

Things are slowly stabilising here at home, and I’m hopeful of returning to blogging soon...