Milk Sister: A YA Novel of Fairies and Family

While I'm still not 100% sure this is the right cover, I do rather like it, and I wanted to get Milk Sister uploaded this week, so I decided to just use it. I can change it later if I get ambitious.

You can get the ebook version right now, in various formats for just about any ereader, from Smashwords for a mere $2.99. It'll be available on the Kindle store once it's done processing.

Maddy has always been able to see things that other people can't, but she didn't know it might have something to do with the mother who died giving birth to her. Now her father has decided to move back to Scotland, and for the first time in her life, Maddy has a chance to learn about her mother's family and the strange circumstances surrounding her own birth.

Maddy was born on a fairy hill--the same hill that the the 17th century writer Robert Kirk wrote about in his book The Secret Common-Wealth, and just like Kirk, Maddy's mother may not have died there. Like Kirk, she may still be alive, living in the Otherworld, and Maddy may even be able to see her.

If Maddy can rescue her mother from the fairy hill, maybe her father won't be so sad all the time. But what if her mother doesn't want to be rescued? And who is the mysterious dark-haired boy who calls Maddy "milk sister?"

This is the second novel I wrote (The Coming of the Fairies was the first, though it really only qualifies as a novel because it's "middle grade"--or maybe YA. It's a little over 30, 000 words), and (I think) much better than my first. It uses a lot of the research I did when writing my Master's thesis and originally I hadn't intended for there to be so many fairy folk in it. In fact, as originally conceived, I was going to leave some events rather vague so the answer of whether or not the fairies were actually real would be left up to the reader (which is more or less what I did with The Coming of the Fairies). But the bloody fairies took over, and I think it's actually a rather better book for it. If you go through my blog archive, you can read a blow-by-blow of the writing process (look in past Novembers--I wrote the first draft for NaNoWriMo).

Also, my serial novel Aeryn Daring and the Scientific Detective, written under the pen name Calliope Strange (chapters available on Kindle) is also appearing a chapter at a time in the very cool steampunk magazine Doctor Fantastique's Show of Wonders. I believe it will be online for free soon, but you can also purchase it right now in e-format and hardcopy, here.

It's worth it for the super-cute illustration of Aeryn and Madman alone.