November News
Hello!
First, a new home for this newsletter.
You may have noticed that this message arrived in your mailbox from a different email address, neve@substack.com, and with a new name. For a while now I’ve been meaning to move away from Mailchimp. Mainly because it took me forever to figure out how to make the smallest change but also because their product is geared toward corporate clients with all the accompanying complexity, not writers like me who just want a simple newsletter. Fingers crossed that the new sender address didn’t slot this message straight into everyone’s Spam folder. If it did, thanks for fishing it out!
After I moved the newsletter to Substack, it suggested I give it a name. Neve Maslakovic by Neve Maslakovic felt very navel-gazey, so… welcome to Cosmic Tea. Substack has an AI algorithm to play with for logo ideas and after a dozen rewordings of the prompt “weird tea mug in space,” this is one of the ideas that it came up with. I toned down the colors. I’m sticking with it for now!
Substack also nudges its writers (“It’s been a while since you’ve written a post, Neve” - I imagine it saying that in a stern voice) so I suspect that I’ll be better at keeping to a once-a-month schedule from now on.
Moving on, a couple of book recommendations.
The first is one I stumbled across randomly and quite enjoyed, a historical novel by Stephanie Storey called Raphael, Painter in Rome. The first person, modern voice narration makes the reader feel as if they’re there in the moment. It’s a historical novel that doesn’t read like one. I learned a lot about Raphael and Michelangelo and the politics and the difficulty of painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, all of which now makes me want to visit the Vatican some day.
The other book recommendation is a crackling mystery set in Australia called Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, by Benjamin Stevenson. This is one twisty whodunit and to say anything more would be to say too much.
Next, my Incident series prequel novelette is part of a big promotion of science fiction and fantasy titles. Support authors by signing up for their newsletter and get a short story or book for free!
I’ll end with the neighborhood news here in Minnesota, which is that the trees have lost most of their leaves. There’s still a bit of green here and there, as you can see in the photo at the top, taken at the lake a couple of blocks away from our house. Though it’s on the chilly side we’ve only had a sprinkling of snow so far. I imagine the next update will have a high probability of snow cover in it.
Thanks for reading!