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I wish more scientists/news agencies could learn the art of re-storying. Instead of giving us the doom-and-gloom story, riddled with jargon and painting a hopeless picture of the future, give us a picture of what things could look like if we start making changes! Sure, if we don’t change things are bad, but if society does x [fill in the blank] here’s what could happen instead. If we plant trees in the deserts and change our farming practices, here’s what could happen in three years instead. If we change our fishing practices here’s what the oceans might look like in three years, or five years, or ten years. If we switch to more sustainable energy by just this much, here are some concrete, specific improvements we could see.

Telling us how bad things are getting hasn’t really worked spectacularly well thus far. Most people shrug and move on, or give in to despair, because the problem is so big and there seems so little we can do about it. Tell us how good things could be under other circumstances instead.

Give us the redemption story, is basically what I’m saying here.

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The trouble with people who said what they thought was that they didn’t always think a lot.

-Slight Mourning, Catherine Aird

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Started watching Star Trek Voyager with Grace the other evening and now I need someone to stop me from rewriting the show with the same character dynamics and set-up but from a creator who actually, you know, cares about them all. Because VOY had such good characters, and such interesting concepts and ideas (the two crews who were enemies trying to merge into one! Cast into the distant corner of the galaxy with no friends and no support! Trying to hold to their principles because they are principles even when nobody is there to see or care! Exploring--as always in Star Trek--what it means to be human! Loyalty and fidelity and trust and friendship and love of all kinds, romantic and friendly and parental and self-sacrificial), and the show-runners just ... didn't care enough to do anything interesting with them. And I loved VOY as a teenager--it was a hugely important show to me because of everything mentioned in the parenthesis above and I needed all of that when I was a lonely weirdo teen trying to figure out life--and so it has always hurt, rewatching it as an adult, to see what it should have been--what I put into it in order to take out of it as a teen--compared to what it was. And it still hurts to see the actors giving it their all and the show never--or rarely--repaying their efforts.

And because I'm a writer and a fix-it person, my brain's immediate response to this sort of situation is, "I fix! I make it better by writing it myself!" and no, I do not have TIME to start a new ambitious story right now. I have to finish Whitney & Davies 4 as well as write a couple shorts for newsletter subscribers. I have my Project-I-can't-talk-about, which might actually become a Project-I-can-talk-about if I ever get this draft finished. Then there's the story inspired by the legend of Tristan & Isolde that's been simmering in the back of my brain for six years and is begging now to be written and feels like the story I've been waiting to write my entire life. Where can I fit a fun-and-earnest sci-fi story that is basically VOY with the serial numbers filed off and therefore would be pretty much unpublishable?

And yet ... we wants it, precious. We very much wants to writes it.

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American Girls in my style!

Just a fun little fan art series purely for the nostalgia! Do you have a favorite?

Molly and Kit

Addy and Samantha

Kirsten and Kaya

Still working on a few more!

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being an artist and revisiting media you liked when you were 11 is like. oh ok. this shaped my sense of humor and the way I write characters and the way I pace narratives and the tropes I'm drawn to. and I vastly underestimated how much of an impact it had on me because I literally have not thought about it for 15 years. but it was there inside me the whole time. ok. ok cool! c ool

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Chiltern Hills, England by Will Blakey Milner

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This delights me no end

Was pleasantly surprised to stumble across a mention of @e-louise-bates in an academic book (Children and Childhoods in L.M. Montgomery: Continuing Coversations, in the chapter "Continuing Stories: L.M. Montgomery and Fanfiction in the Digital Era" by Balaka Basu).

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Our IT guy at work today was talking about his various interests in history, and he said he was really fascinated as a young man by the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition.

Me: don’t say I wasn’t expecting that, don’t say I wasn’t expecting that, don’t say …

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“Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.”

-Terry Pratchett (Hogfather)

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As the end of Whitney & Davies draws ever-so-slowly nearer (31,500 words and counting in the skeleton draft!), I’ve started tentatively mulling over my future plans. Writing-wise, I have one story I’m actively working on (Maine-based cozy fantasy) and one that I will begin after the Maine fantasy is complete (inspired by Tristan & Isolde and the deepest and most ambitious story I’ve ever dreamed of; I’m so excited to dive into it when the time is right), so there’s not much to mull over there. Publishing-wise …

I’ll be honest: I’m tired of the self-publishing gig. I’ve seen it done really well, but I don’t have the marketing savvy to make it work for me, and I’m tired of being on my own when it comes to my books. I want a team behind and with me. However, traditional publishing has even more stringent gate-keeping currently than it used to, and it seems like you need just as much marketing savvy to get accepted into traditional publishing as you do to make it in self-publishing. Yes, I’m speaking of the dreaded “platform.”

I just deactivated all my social media account except this one. My author newsletter has about 25 subscribers. My readership for Whitney & Davies isn’t much bigger. In terms of platform, no agent or publisher is going to give me a second look—and as much as I’d like to think, “oh, my books will speak for themselves,” I’m not so naive as to actually believe that.

Which leads me to … Substack. Perhaps once a month posts along the lines of, “the intersection of faith, fantasy, and redemptive storytelling,” with brief essays akin to my “Tragedy of Susan” post that’s recently gained new traction here, or the difference between Faramir and Boromir (in the books) and the significance thereof, or the establishment of right kingship in Narnia, or other such musings, including some of the ways these themes have influenced my own writing. Not an author newsletter, which is more specifically focused on my books and writing updates, but not trying to fight the algorithms of social media either. Something to introduce people to the ideas and themes that are behind everything I write instead of trying to focus on the individual stories that I have or am currently writing.

So then, hypothetically speaking, if you, my friends, were to see a Substack like that, would it interest you enough to subscribe? And possibly even recommend to others that they subscribe? Not because, "hey, this is e-louise-bates from Tumblr," but for the actual content of it?

Because I am otherwise stumped at the idea of how to build a platform over the next 2-5 years for when I'm ready to start looking for an agent/publisher for my non-Whitney & Davies books.

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With Book 4 being the final book for the Whitney & Davies series, I knew going in that it had to resolve both Maia and Len’s overall character arcs in order to give a proper resolution to the series. Len was easy—he started out the series afraid that he was losing himself in his multiple facades, that he’d hidden behind a mask for so long that there was nothing left behind it. Throughout the series he’s been confronting who he is if he’s not the dashing gentleman magician-adventurer-spy, and that comes naturally to a culmination in this book.

Maia has been trickier. She had her glorious revelation of “you don’t have settle for a life of drudgery, you were made for more!” in the first book, and since then she ought to have been on a steady path. Except in each successive book she ends it with changing her goals and dreams once again, and frankly I’ve been baffled as to what’s up with her. At the end of Death by Disguise I was as clueless as anyone else as to what she was going to do next.

Well. Sunday I wrote a conversation between Maia and another character where that character declared that of course Maia is still ambitious, of course she wants everyone to see her and know how amazing she is and appreciate her for being the awesome magician she really is. Maia’s knee-jerk response is, “uh, no I don’t! I just want to use my magic to help people,” and the other character says, “sure, of course you have to say that, but we both know better,” and I suddenly realized that was it, that’s Maia’s journey. Underneath her newfound joy in magic and her meaningful life, she does still desperately want to be seen and valued for who she is, and everything she has done has been her way of trying to live a life that’s going to tell other people she’s worth knowing and loving. Only she hasn’t been able to admit that to herself, and now she has to face that.

So now we have Len who is having to confront the question of “who am I, really?” and Maia who is having to confront the question of “do I have value?” and both of them get to find the answer in this book. All while solving a murder, of course.

When people hear that I write mysteries they assume I’m very plot-based and must always write from an outline, and I always laugh and then try to explain that no, I am first and foremost a character writer and the plot is just there to move the characters along. This sort of thing is my favorite part of the journey—when something thats been a mystery for almost ten years finally comes together with my pen on paper, and I had no idea it was coming.

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Every word that starts with an N should have a silent G in front. Gnorway. Gnuclear. Gnervous system. Gnipples.

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The bad news is that the bronze-and-silver yarn for the Len-and-Maia shawl is actually more of a muted tan and silvery blue—lovely and earthy, but not at all an accurate representation of their magical signatures. So no Whitney & Davies shawl at this time.

The good news is that the yarn is perfect for a scarf for Carl, so I have a new project for a family member in my queue.

Current project queue: Maine fantasy shawl; leg warmers for Grace (actual stash-busting project!); hooded scarf for Mom; scarf for Carl. The baby sweater is almost done and the yarn for the Maine fantasy shawl will be here in less than a week. I can still have at least one of my book-adjacent-knitting-projects! (And the yarn for this is approximately 70% silk and 30% wool and is lightweight enough to be a good summer project, which is excellent given the time of year.)

I did set out this year to only do stash-busting knitting projects to clear out my yarn stash, and I have in fact completed one such project!

… I also bought yarn and a pattern for a baby sweater for a friend who is expecting, despite having yarn in my stash I could have used (but it wasn’t exactly right for what I wanted for this friend), as well as buying yarn to make a hooded scarf for Grace (but she loves it!), and then yarn to make a similar hooded scarf for my mom (but I never knit her anything, she always knits beautiful stuff for the girls and me and it will be lovely to be able to gift her something I have made for a change), and I just barely ordered four skeins of yarn to knit two shawls/scarves for myself (but they’re knitting projects to accompany my writing projects and they have to match my writing projects, I can’t just do any old knitting project along with these stories, what do you take me for, and besides, two of those skeins ARE to go with yarn I already have on hand so that’s practically a stash-busting project anyway).

I, uh, might have a little bit of a problem.

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I did set out this year to only do stash-busting knitting projects to clear out my yarn stash, and I have in fact completed one such project!

… I also bought yarn and a pattern for a baby sweater for a friend who is expecting, despite having yarn in my stash I could have used (but it wasn’t exactly right for what I wanted for this friend), as well as buying yarn to make a hooded scarf for Grace (but she loves it!), and then yarn to make a similar hooded scarf for my mom (but I never knit her anything, she always knits beautiful stuff for the girls and me and it will be lovely to be able to gift her something I have made for a change), and I just barely ordered four skeins of yarn to knit two shawls/scarves for myself (but they’re knitting projects to accompany my writing projects and they have to match my writing projects, I can’t just do any old knitting project along with these stories, what do you take me for, and besides, two of those skeins ARE to go with yarn I already have on hand so that’s practically a stash-busting project anyway).

I, uh, might have a little bit of a problem.

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I watched the preview. It’s appalling. I don’t care if her family approved it, it’s repulsive—I mean that quite literally, my visceral reaction was to throw my phone as far away from me as possible.

Not only that, it’s RUBBISH. It’s this garbled jumble of stuff from her books and her autobiography and her notebooks and the Detection Club and it’s not Agatha Christie at all (“the most important thing in my books is lots of bodies”—that is said tongue-in-cheek, not as an actual statement of fact you numpties).

If you really want to learn writing from Agatha Christie, read her books. Dissect them. Pick them apart and put them back together. Do not, for the love of Poirot, take this sick excuse for a “master class.”

If ever I become as successful as Agatha Christie, after I'm dead don't let BBC Maestro make a masterclass video series that we can all pretend was hosted by me, using an AI version of my face.

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If ever I become as successful as Agatha Christie, after I'm dead don't let BBC Maestro make a masterclass video series that we can all pretend was hosted by me, using an AI version of my face.

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Boy, reading this on Easter really makes you feel some kind of way