I don't know if any of the rest of you remember this dream from @fictionadventurer from ... three years ago now (wow), but it stuck in my mind even after I laughingly shrugged off the encouragement from @rockinlibrarian to write it.
Fast-forward a year (I think?), to when I was bored with all my stories and my creativity was dried up, and I decided I needed to write something just for fun, just for me, without any set intention of having it published or even having anyone else read it, just something to refresh my spirit. It was June in coastal Maine, and I began a story, hand-written in a notebook with a fountain pen, about a young woman who is feeling lost in life, arriving at a coastal cottage in Maine because she had a letter from her lawyer telling her she'd inherited it from her great-aunt, only to discover after her arrival that her great-aunt was a sorceress and not only did she inherit the cottage, she inherited the role.
That story became my "PICTA" (project-I-can't-talk-about), and remained that way right up until I finished the handwritten draft and had decided this was worth pursuing further and started typing it out. Then I started casually mentioning to one or two people that I was working on a "Maine cozy fantasy," but I still wasn't talking about it. The working title at that point was Trillium Cottage, only changed late in the typed draft to The Sorceress by the Sea as fitting the genre vibe better. (But the house is still named Trillium Cottage in the story!)
I typed "The End" today. It's turned out not so much cozy fantasy as it is magical realism + healing fiction + DE Stevenson with magic if she were American and living now - any sort of romance. I don't have a clue what genre it best fits into or how to market it to agents and publishers, or even if that's the right path for this story. All I know is, I kind of love it. And I have a companion story in mind that hit me last summer while we were camping, so we'll see what happens there.
Anyway. Many, many thanks to @fictionadventurer for her dream that kicked this whole thing off, and to @rockinlibrarian who nudged me along the path toward writing it (come to think of it, From the Shadows being a novel instead of a novella is your fault, too, you writing enabler, you!).
Any of my mutuals interested in beta reading it? Just to see if it has any appeal to readers other than myself? I'd be happy to send it your way if you want to take a whack at it and see how it reads to you. (Should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway--no AI use in beta-ing, please. I need real human opinions, and I've already had enough of my work stolen for feeding the AI machine, I won't give it more.)
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