Allie Leigh

My province decided to be on fire all month. 😦 Hopefully August is better, but it’s not off to a good start. Anyways…

The biggest news this month is that I got the edits for A Damsel and a Demon back from my editor! Developmentally, there is very little that needs to change (a couple of really minor things that could be expanded on/clarified), so it’s mostly going to be going through the copy edits and importing those changes into Atticus! So, I’ll be trying to work on that this month and see if I can nail down a release schedule.

I’ve also started a series I’m calling “Melodrama Mondays”, in which I write overly melodramatic haikus every Monday. This is part of a long game because in like, over a year (after I finish the third Sorceress and Scones book), I want to write a story in which the main character expresses herself through excessively melodramatic poetry, and have the little in-between chapter bits be poems. So, I’m doing this as practice. Also, I discovered that writing excessively melodramatic haikus is a lot of fun. Here’s my favourite one from last month, about my friend’s cat that I’m cat-sitting, and his “biting face”.

You can follow along on either my instagram or bluesky.

• Instagram
• Bluesky

After last time when I learned NOT to start another novel length project in the middle of working on edits for a previous novel (because holy cow, was it hard to get back into writing it after a break), my writing life has become consumed with short stories. I wrote one last month which was SUPPOSED to be nice and cute about an old man and a dragon, but then it ended up making me cry. So, you know.

I ended up setting it in the same world as A Sorceress and Scones, because why not, so now there are some fun tie-ins between that and A Damsel and a Demon, and it fleshes out the world a little bit more. I had lots of fun. And then I threw it on the chapter header for fun just because I could. ❤

Anyway, I did submit it somewhere and I have no real hopes of it being accepted because it’s on like the very upper range of the wordcount they accept, but we shall see. If not I’ll just hang onto it and throw it at a bunch of places and see if I can’t find a home for it somewhere, because I am very pleased with how it turned out!

This month I’m also trying to write another short story for Indie Bites’s “Potions and Paramours” issue, due at the end of the month—which is going well but is leading to the most hilarious of google searches because I have chosen to write about two people vibing at a bar, and I do not drink. So I’m googling things like, “do people take straight shots of vodka???” just to double-check because I’m like, “idk, I think they do, but I certainly haven’t.”

Theeen, because I get emails and I saw it, there’s a magazine accepting slice-of-life fantasy short stories that are a max 2500 words so I want to seeee if I can pull something together for that. I have a kind of repurposed idea of something that I wrote years ago that I think I could take the base of and completely rewrite. I’m plotting it and also shoving it in to A Sorceress and Scones’s world (because apparently that seems to be my new favourite thing). We’ll see how it goes.

This is already going long so I will just say that during July I had to go on a work trip to Montreal and in the hotel room they gave you little sleeves for your coffee cups and THEY LET YOU DRESS UP YOUR CUPS and it was very cute.

My dog’s birthday was in July! She turned 5! My sweet angel went to the pet store and picked this monster out (by which I mean she low-key stole it from the toy bin and I was like, “well, I guess we’re buying that one!”)

See you next month!