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.
I’m delighted to share Forged in Combat, a prequel novella for the Mysterious Powers series. It’s the romance of Arthur and Melusina, parents of Roland in Carry On. It takes place mostly in 1882 in the Viceroy’s Palace in Calcutta.
Melusina is building her own career as mistress of warding and protection magics. Arthur is following the well-trod traditions of his family in the Army. When Melusina takes on an assignment to help with a tricky safe problem in the Viceroy’s office, they find themselves collaborating – and more than collaborating.
(This giveaway is over! It ended on Tuesday, December 13th, 2022. Thank you so much for everyone who joined us!)
Do you love jewellery? Do you know someone who does?
My dear friend Elise Matthesen is an amazing jewellery maker – and also a lover of my books. She’s offered a delightful giveaway, with a short timeframe. One lucky person will win an item from Elise’s shop (based on your answers to question 2).
[giveaway details removed]
More about Elise
Elise won the Hugo Award (a major award in the Science Fiction and Fantasy fandom community) as a Fan Artist in 2020. Her pieces are in the collections of quite a few authors, musicians, artists, and other creative folk. Many of us have a custom of picking up something from Elise for a major achievement in our creative lives.
Almost Monochrome pendantBlue lampwork earringsDragon with Green Roses pendantElise, holding the Hugo AwardHouse in the LabradoritePearl Dragon with Moon pendant
I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Elise for more than 20 years, so as you might imagine, I have quite a few of her pieces by now!
The necessary giveaway details
By entering, you understand that if you are the winner, I will be sharing your email address with Elise to make arrangements about getting the piece you have won.
Elise ships regularly, but depending on where you are in the world, the piece may not make it to you in time for holiday gift-giving.
No reading of books or purchasing of anything is required, but we certainly hope you enjoy thinking about wonderful things to read and look at!
To be more serious, the names of characters are something I spend a lot of time thinking about. I got a great reader question about it this week, and that makes it a wonderful time to share some of how I do this.
To be honest, there’s a lot of staring at my list of names and sighing a lot. But I also have established patterns that help me sort out what I’m doing with the names.
(As a note, links to character names in this post will go to their WorldAnvil pages so you can see where they appear most easily.)
Eclipse is a great example of several different naming patterns in my books.
Hello! Given the world (and especially the Internet at the moment), it seems a good time for me to look at where I’m spending my time online in the authorial sense.
I’ve put together a survey form to ask some questions about what spaces you’d be interested in, so I can think about some options. I expect to get whatever new options I add set up by the end of December 2022 at the latest. (ETA, December 20th: Survey form now closed. Watch this blog space for an update on what we’re going to be trying!)
It’s completely anonymous unless you give me your email address at the very end. You can also use the contact form or email me at celia@celialake.com if you’d rather do that.
I send out a newsletter on most Fridays. It has my latest news, a highlight of a book that’s been out for a bit, links to any blog posts I’ve made, and notes about the week’s writing. It also usually includes a couple of links I discovered while researching that week.
Twitter is the place where I’ve shared more flippant commentary on the writing process, often with some back and forth with Kiya, my friend and editor (and other half of my brain who makes my books so much better.) If you haven’t been following this bit of the news, I’m not sure how much longer that’s going to be viable. I’ve also shared links to new books there or other news.
I’ve really enjoyed some of the conversation with readers there, and seeing what they say, too, when they tag me in to the conversation.
Facebook is the place where I spend the least time, but it also gets announcements of new books and other related material.
Best Foot Forwardis the one Kiya (my friend and editor) described as “M/M aroace/bi-allo-(incidentally polyam) enemies-to-it’s-complicated there-was-only-one-bed espionage and WWI trauma-healing romp”.
Best Foot Forward also contains:
Vienna and Berlin in 1935
The power of spring
Healing and becoming who we were meant to be
Love of music
Egyptian theology
Land magic and the good it can do
Chosen family
Music turned out to be a big part of this book, so there’s an additional playlist and explanation of the music references. (It does contain spoilers for the book, but there’s a link in the author’s notes to remind you to go look and listen, or from the book page here on my website or on the authorial wiki.)
In a recent newsletter, I mentioned that working on Old As The Hills had let me test a research note model for more research-demanding fiction that’s working pretty well. (This is also in service to my contemplating a 1480s series set around the time of the Pact sometime down the road. I have a ton of background reading to do before I can even think about it, so no time soon.)
As I suspected, more than one reader was interested in how I set that up, so here’s a glimpse into my research notes. (Click through on the screenshots to see a full size version, but I’ve also described the contents in the text.)
Are you curious about the land magic? Carillon’s background? What it means to be a Lord in Albion?
Did you know there’s a new novella out? It’s my treat if you sign up for my newsletter.(Feel free to unsubscribe when you need to, of course. But I hope you’ll stick around, at least for an email or two that will let you get all the other treats I share with my newsletter subscribers.)
Ancient Trust is all about what happens when Geoffrey Carillon inherits the title on his brother’s death. It has quite a lot about the land magic customs at Ytene. It also led to some interesting questions from a reader.
(I love reader questions. Sometimes I haven’t settled on my final answer about something. But I’ll let you know if you ask something I can’t answer yet. Or if you ask something that’s too much of a spoiler for something that’s coming out in the future.)
The questions:
It got me thinking, how do the Lords of Albion engage with the House of Lords? Is attending Westminster an additional responsibility for Carillion? Do Albion peerages result in having the right to sit in the House? And what about the women? How does the Land Magic recognise women?
These are great questions – and also some that I haven’t quite found the right place to get into text. Let’s take this one by one in an order that should help.
I’m currently in the editing process for Best Foot Forward, and thought you might find a glimpse into the process interesting.
I do most of my writing on the desktop that lives in my bedroom. However, I do most of my editing on the laptop that lives in the living room, which has fewer distractions.
Here’s a shot of what that looks like. Read on for a description of both the image and the process.
Mistress of Birdsis the final book in the Mysterious Powers series, exploring the impact of the Great War on the people and institutions of Albion.
Thalia has had a certain small success with her literary writing. But her inspiration is gone, and no one is buying her stories. When her family volunteers her to stay at her great-aunt’s house on the edge of Dartmoor, she figures at least she’ll be fed.
Adam had a bad War. Ten years after he was invalided out of the Army with shell shock, he still hasn’t recovered. His family have lost patience, and when his uncle breaks his leg badly, they ship him off to lend a hand. Adam isn’t sure he’s able to do anything useful. When his uncle wants a report on the apple orchard, though, Adam realises something isn’t quite right.
The mysteries of the house and the apple orchard bring Adam and Thalia together, in search for answers. Together, they might just be able to figure out what’s going on, what’s making the eerie noises in the house, and why the apples ripen so late.
Mistress of Birds is my take on a Gothic romance (spooky house and all). All of my books can be read in any order, but this one stands alone particularly well.
One particular content note on this one (also on my content notes page). The book does deal with long-standing PTSD (what we’d now call CPTSD). If you’re sensitive to discussions of it, chapter 31 briefly references the barbaric treatment of it in 1917. (One paragraph, strong implications of what happened, few explicit details.)
