AuthorCelia

Celia Lake spends her days as a librarian in the Boston (MA) metro area, and her nights and weekends at home happily writing, reading, and researching for her books about magical Albion. Born and raised in Massachusetts to British parents, she naturally embraced British spelling, classic mysteries, and the Oxford comma before she learned there were any other options.

Perfect Accord is out!

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Perfect Accord is many things. It’s Charlotte Edgarton’s romance, as her brother prepares for his wedding. It’s about friendship. And it’s about alchemical perfume, making hard choices to take care of our families, doing something different that might work better. All with a dose of mangled Arthuriana for improper purposes, forced proximity, and inventive applications of magic.

In 1923, Charlotte’s family is busy preparing for her brother Gabe’s wedding, and she’s not entirely sure she likes all the changes. When her best friend – and the man she expects to marry – gets pulled into a mysterious and suspicious group, Charlotte won’t let him go off alone. What she finds at the remote manor house doesn’t help. She’s sure they’re up to no good, but she’s not sure how to prove it.

When she finds herself alone in a maze – and then in an alchemist’s cottage kitchen – there are even more challenges to solve and overcome. Curious? Get your copy of Perfect Accord and enjoy!

(This is a fine place to start with my books, but if you like the Edgartons, I have plenty more books featuring them.)

A copy of Perfect Accord by Celia Lake on a tablet. The cover has a man and woman in silhouette. He is offering her perfume, and she is sniffing it on her wrist.

Idea to Book : Nocturnal Quarry

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Today’s Idea to Book is all about Alexander Landry. That’s because Nocturnal Quarry is a character-focused novella about Alexander Landry. While most of my books can be read in any order, this one comes best after at least Best Foot Forward

It also has some pieces in it I deeply loved getting to share. A bit of Boston’s magic, a couple of loose ends of other plots, and a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for starters!

A copy of Nocturnal Quarry lying on a wooden table with a cupe of coffee and some deep purple lilacs. The cover of Nocturnal Quarry has Alexander silhouetted seated in a chair, leaning forward, one leg crossed over the other against a purple background with a map of Manhattan. An astrological chart to the left has the symbols for the Sun, Mercury, and Mars in close conjunction in Leo and Virgo, glowing against the pale grey of the chart.
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Three Books on Sale : FaRoFeb

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I’m excited to be part of FaRoFeb this year. That stands for Fantasy Romance February, and it’s a promotion with a number of moving pieces. There are tons of different events planned, including 250+ books available for $0.99 US on February 1st. (That’s tomorrow, when I’m posting this.) There are also author spotlights, a panel discussion, a giveaway of a book a day between February 1st and Valentines Day on February 14th, and more. 

Find out all the details at the FaRoFeb 2024 site including how to follow FaRoFeb on your social media of choice and how to sign up for the newsletter to get the book giveaways. 

And if you follow FaRoFeb on social media (please do!), you’ll see me spotlighted on February 8th.

Me and my books

Three of my books will be on sale for $0.99 USD (and the equivalent elsewhere) through February 15th as part of FaRoFeb.

They are Sailor’s Jewel, Pastiche, and Eclipse. All three are set in Albion, the magical community of Great Britain that is the setting for all my books. They’re a mix of history, fantasy, romance, and a puzzle or mystery to solve. (In FaRoFeb terms, they fall into the gaslamp category.) 

Read on to learn more about all three books!

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Age, characters, and time passing

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I got a great question on my Patreon post about what I was planning for 2024 over there, and I wanted to answer it somewhere more visible. (This post also contains the answer to “Will Claudio get his own romance?” and if so, when.)

wiedźma_florentyna asked in the comments whether magic extends life expectancy over what we would expect today (and mentions both Mistress of Birds and Richard still actively working at the age of 73.) And then what that means for some of my oldest characters who are bound to die eventually.

Short version: I don’t want to kill any of these characters I love due to old age, so I’m doing my best to avoid that.

The cover of Four Walls and a Heart has a bright red background with a blue door. Two men are silhouetted against the background, one of slighter build in a Victorian wheelchair, missing his lower left leg, the other standing and talking, one hand at his side. Both are wearing hats, and they are intently focused on each other. The cover is mounted in a frame, next to a globe and a cup of coffee.
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Idea to Book: Best Foot Forward

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Welcome to today’s Idea To Book post, this time about Best Foot Forward. This is the book that honestly has the best origin story. Kiya – my friend and editor – left a comment in Eclipse in February 2021 when we were editing it. It said: 

I now sort of want the buddy cop story in which Alexander and Carillon team up to utterly destroy a munitions smuggler.

I left it in the Google Doc when I sent it to my early readers, and every single one of them left comments thoroughly wanting this. My early readers are smart people and they have good ideas, so I started staring at it. I stared at it for over a year, honestly. 

At the time, I hadn’t intended to write past 1929 for a variety of reasons.

I wasn’t sure how to handle a number of the complicated pieces of history (some of which get very close to my own family’s history, as I’ll mention below). And yet, the idea was absolutely compelling. I’m so glad I did – and that I figured out a whole series arc for the Land Mysteries books. The final book, set in 1946-1947, comes out in May. That’s The Magic of Four. 

Best Foot Forward deals with the shifts that happen in Europe as the world heads toward war again, and it’s also about dealing with at least a little of the trauma and loss of the Great War, even if it’s been decades. Read on for more of the details.

Copy of Best Foot Forward lying on a desk with a dip pen, bottle of ink, and paper. The cover has a deep red background with map markings in a dull purple. Two men in silhouette stand, looking up at a point in the top left. An astrology chart with different symbols picked out takes up the left side of the image, with glowing stars curving up to the title.
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Extras in 2024

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Time for an update on extras – both how I think about them and where you can get them. 

Upon A Summer's Day displayed on a tablet in a sunset scene looking out across water to fields beyond, all of it glowing golden and sparkling with magic. The cover of Upon A Summer's Day shows a man in a suit silhouetted over a map of northern Wales in a muted green. He is gesturing, holding his cane in one hand, a cap on his head. Behind him is an astrological chart, with Jupiter and Saturn highlighted in the sign of Taurus.

Extras

Extras are one of the terms for, well, extra bits of writing. Different authors approach them in different ways. It can be bits cut out of the final work, or it can be a treat for readers. It can be things the author had to write to figure out how something in the main novel/novella/whatever went. Often it’s more than one of these at once. 

Some authors never share these. Some of us (hi, that’s me), share more. 

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Up for a 2024 reading challenge?

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It’s late December, which means it’s also the time when various sites post their reading challenges. If you’re doing one in 2024, here’s a guide to which of my books might fit particular categories. (If you’re doing a challenge not listed here, and other people can join in, send me a link and I’ll add it!) You might also want to check out my post about summer reading challenges from the summer of 2023.

The two challenges I’m pulling from for this post are the Book Riot’s Read Harder 2024 challenge and the 2024 PopSugar Reading Challenge. They have some overlapping categories, so I’m going to note which challenge applies, and the books I’ve written that might apply.

Copy of Best Foot Forward standing upright with leather bound books stacked behind it. The cover has a deep red background with map markings in a dull purple. Two men in silhouette stand, looking up at a point in the top left. An astrology chart with different symbols picked out takes up the left side of the image, with glowing stars curving up to the title.
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Three Graces is here!

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As the war in Europe comes to an end in April of 1945, there’s finally a bit of time and space for Lizzie Carillon to work on an old mystery – what exactly brought about the death of the brother and sister in law she never met. Three Graces is about friends using their skills, what happens as war ends, and what it means to find justice in a community.

In 1922, Delphina and Temple Carillon died within days of each other, leaving Temple’s younger brother Geoffrey as Lord. Over the years, he’s figured out the cause of death – direct action by Albion’s Council. In 1935, he got more information about what brought them to that point. But no one’s known what started the whole awful problem. 

Lizzie brings in her friends – Alysoun Edgarton and Thesan Wain – hoping that the three of them might make some progress and get some answers. 

I loved getting a chance to spend more time with all three, and there are a couple of other tidbits tucked in here about how various other people are coming to terms with the Second World War and its events.

We also have appearances by a number of other characters. Geoffrey Carillon, Alexander Landry, and Isembard Fortier spend much of the novella in Europe, untangling ritual magics in the wake of the war’s end. We get a glimpse of Lizzie and Geoffrey’s eldest, Edmund. There’s a turning point for Garin Fortier. And we get to see both Lapidoth Manse and Reggie Hollis again, if briefly. And, of course, there’s Margot Williams, swanning through the plot in high-fashion clothes and a swath of questionable choices.  

If you’d like to learn more about all these people and where they appear, my authorial wiki has all the links and details.

And if you just want to get your copy, here are all the places you can get Three Graces.

New and exciting!

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