Allie Leigh

The days are long, the weather is nice, and it’s before the bugs come out in full force! It’s just great!

Enjoy the summer vibes~

I have a new short story out in the latest issue of Indie Bites! You can read it for free here!

The Dove and the Wren

A ritual has long been observed by those living on the outskirts of the woods: when the forest’s heart selects a new host, the life that existed before must be put to rest. Once awakened, the host can bring miracles to life, provided they are willing to pay the price.

Selected by the woods, Wyndle has spent her youth in a glade, surrounded by the creatures she’s brought to life at the cost of her years. But when the tranquility of the forest is disturbed, she discovers the consequences of the ancient ritual being misunderstood.

Fun facts about this story!

• The idea for this story also spawned off of the same D&D campaign as A Sorceress and Scones (though the two have nothing to do with each other). At the end of the campaign, our DM asked us to write a little epilogue for our character. In so doing, I accidentally came up with the idea for a novella. This short story would be the prequel to said novella, though it is much darker than I expect the novella to be, should I ever end up writing it (it’s what I plan to do once I finish Book 3 of Of Mist and Magic, so hopefully in the cards!)
• Also very heavily inspired by the song Neath the Grove Is a Heart by Yaelokre (fantastic song, you should definitely give it a listen.)
• I read part of this story at an event for local authors in my city! It was the first time I’ve done anything like that, and despite being rather nervous, it was a lot of fun!

Book Club

In what is probably the COOLEST NEWS EVER, the indie bookstore that stocks my books in my city made a local author book club and picked A Sorceress and Scones as the first book! This was absolutely amazing to find out! I adore book clubs and I never expected one of my books to be included in one so it’s like a dream come true!

HAPPY PRIDE

June is also Pride month! All my books will be on sale for the entire month in celebration! If you’re wanting to pick any of them up, there are links to purchase on each of their pages. Happy Pride! 🙂

I am continuing to try and plot out Book 3 of Of Mist and Magic. It is…going. I switched to using sticky notes because I felt like that would help me move events around more and then I could just remove them/stick something over them if I needed to, but it has lead to it looking like a crazy person did it.

I was hoping to be done by the end of May, but I ended up redoing parts of it a few times, so that did not happen. The new goal is the end of June. This seems to be a moving goalpost, but fingers crossed!

This month I also finished up the short story that I started planning in November, in the wee hours of the morning, when I was awake like 3 hours before my husband and friend while we were on vacation in Banff. It’s called What’s Left Behind, and I don’t have a home for it yet, but it was fun to write! I tried something different with the structure where the scenes are sequenced in reverse-chronological order, with the end of each scene linking to the beginning of the next one (through repeated words/phrases/themes). So hopefully it lands somewhere, but I had fun with it, regardless!

My sister and I have calls every weekend, and a lot of the time, she, her husband, and I will play games together. They got me into Slay the Spire 2 (because of the multiplayer) and I…have been playing too much of this game. It’s fun! Although I would like to go back to Persona 3, as I am ever so slowly making my way through that.

One of the book clubs that I’m in has also had some great reads lately! The book for last month was The Paleontologist and this month’s is Of Monsters and Mainframes, both of which I greatly enjoyed!

The Paleontologist is ghost dinosaurs, but was extremely cathartic because it’s about this guy working at a non-profit museum during COVID, which was what I did, so every time he talked about the *delights* of working at a non-profit I was just sitting there cackling. Which probably was not what I was meant to take away from the ghost dinosaur book, but that’s fine.

Then I’ve been wanting to read Of Monsters and Mainframes for forever, and I’m so glad I did! This book is delightful. I would say that it’s like cozy horror/sci-fi with absolutely loveable sentient AIs. It’s a wild ride but everyone is so endearing and it’s absolutely worth it.

Millie was hard at work reading in the sun. It was very serious business.

Hope everyone has a great month!