Emily Croy Barker's Blog

I answered some questions about the new book, How to Talk to a Goddess and Other Lessons in Real Magic, on my website. Click here for some very mild spoilers. Or just wait two days for the book!

How to Talk to a Goddess is coming as an audiobook original from Recorded Books on February 16. Print and eBook editions will follow later in 2021.

To celebrate the book birthday of How to Talk to a Goddess and Other Lessons in Real Magic on February 16—just four days away, wow!—I’m giving away some review copies! 20 entries will be chosen at random, and each entrant will receive one download code for the audiobook original.

Please fill out the form at this link to be entered in the giveaway. The deadline to enter is 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Sunday, February 14. Entry is restricted to residents of the United States age 18 and older. I'll inform the winners on Monday via email, and Recorded Books will send them the download code, also via email.

I had a lot of fun writing How to Talk to a Goddess, and I hope you have just as much fun listening to it. And when you’re done, I hope you'll write a review here on Goodreads. Other readers would love to hear what you think!

UPDATE February 15, 2021: The giveaway is now concluded, and the winners have been notified. Thanks so much to everyone who entered!

Some interesting stats from the survey question:

42 percent of entrants said that Aruendiel was the Thinking Woman's Guide character with whom they would most want to be marooned on a desert island. 20 percent said it would be Nora, and another 20 percent said Hirizjahkinis. 2 percent chose Ilissa. No one chose Raclin. 15 percent would like to be marooned with all of these characters.

And one person contacted me separately to say that he would have picked the ice demon.

I'm SO happy to present a small preview of Alyssa Bresnahan's fantastic narration of How to Talk to a Goddess and Other Lessons in Real Magic. I knew she was good—we all did, after her terrific reading of The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic—but WOW! It's amazing to hear her bring my characters Nora and Ramona to life in just a few quick sentences in this clip. Click here to listen, while I'll just be over here fangirling....

Want more? The full audiobook original is coming from Recorded Books on February 16. I can't wait to share this book with you!

Some of you have asked about the sequel to The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic....

As a journalist (and now a recovering journalist), I've always been reluctant to break news before I have the full story—not just the who and the what, but the when, where, and how.

Well, I finally have the whole scoop.

Here's the lede: How to Talk to a Goddess and Other Lessons in Real Magic is coming in 2021. Read all about it.

I'm really excited to roll out my redesigned website—which also has some details about the sequel to The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic.

I know it has been a long wait for Book 2, and I'm so looking forward to having you read it! More news to come soon.

I absolutely can’t wait for you to read the sequel to THE THINKING WOMAN’S GUIDE TO REAL MAGIC.

From the social media messages and emails I’ve received, I know a lot of you can’t wait, either. Here’s a quick update: Over the past year I’ve revised the sequel further, I’ve gotten great feedback on it, and now I'm working on bringing it to you.

Thanks so much to everyone who’s asked me about the progress of Book 2! It’s inspiring to know that you care about Nora, Aruendiel, and the rest of the characters as much I do. I’ll let you know as soon as I have some more news to share.

I have some reading to do this week.

In his excellent book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King advises leaving a newly finished draft to sit for at least six weeks before you start revising. That way, you come back to it with fresh eyes and a ruthless pencil.

In fact, it has been about seven weeks since I completed the latest draft of the sequel to The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic. Time to start in again. Five hundred double-spaced pages are waiting in a binder on my dining-room table, and I’m both excited and fiercely anxious to be at this moment of truth.

I didn’t think that the new draft would take a whole year to write. Six months, tops, I thought. But a couple of people who read the first draft prodded me to take a new look at a certain character. When I did, I discovered a lot of intriguing things about her, and then she started acting differently, and the other characters noticed and started reacting, and suddenly all kinds of changes were rippling through the entire book. All I could do was write and write and write to try to keep up.

No, I’m not talking about Nora—although she has ended up surprising me, too. It’s Cisoaneer, whom Nora meets when she’s having a very, very bad night. You haven’t met her yet. But you will.

I know what you’re thinking: And when will that be? No, alas, I still don’t have a publication date for you. I can tell you that I’ll likely be spending some months more revising this novel before trying to get it into print. Which, to be honest, makes me happy—I love figuring out ways to make the story sharper and more alive. You as readers deserve a novel that you can be passionate about. And that’s what I want for myself, too.

When I do have news about publication plans, I promise to spread the word as soon as possible. Not just here on Goodreads, but on emilycroybarker.com, on Facebook, on Twitter (@emilycroybarker), and anywhere else I can think of.

I’m getting notes back now from some early readers of the new draft. “Really enjoyed it,” my friend D. writes in an email. “But I do have a couple of comments.” She’s a retired magazine editor, and her comments will be smart and tough. We’re having lunch in a couple of days. I can’t wait to hear what she has to say.

I’ve gotten a couple of inquiries—well, more than a couple!—about what sort of progress I’m making with the sequel to The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic. It has been more than a year since I posted here to let you know that I was about three-quarters of the way through a first draft. Time for an update.

I spent most of the past year finishing the first draft of the sequel. As usual, it took longer than expected because characters often insist on having their own way, and magic is complicated. No major spoilers here—but it took me a while to understand exactly how timestones work, for example. The Kavareen turned out to have more interesting depths than I first thought. And Nora’s magical education took some unpredictable detours.

Now I’m at the stage where I’m getting feedback on Book 2 and revising. The first readers of the manuscript appear to have survived their ordeal intact; some even say they enjoyed it. They’ve also given me some really terrific suggestions—which in turn has sparked some new ideas on my part. “Wait, I never knew THAT about Aruendiel!”

You can tell where this is going, right? I wish I had a definite, set-in-stone publication date to give you. But I don’t, and it will be a while before I do. Writing takes time, and then editing takes more time. The first draft of The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic took three years, I spent a year revising it before I even tried to find a publisher, and then it was three more years of editing and rewriting—not to mention all the myriad things that publishers do to create an actual, physical book and get it into bookstores—before the novel saw print.

So. I’m working now, and it’s going well. That does mean that I'm sometimes too busy writing to respond to your wonderful messages and comments. I wish I could get back to everyone who has taken the time to write to me to ask me how the sequel is going, but then—well, you see my dilemma.

Still, I have to be honest. When I sit down to write, I have a couple of habits. First, I make a pot of tea. And then—usually without even thinking about it—I take off my watch. Because where I’m headed, I can’t think too much about time.

When The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic first came out, the question I got most often from readers was whether a sequel would be forthcoming. By now, I think, word has gotten out that yes, there will be a sequel. (I hope you didn’t really think I was going to abandon Nora in—all right, no spoiler!—the place I left her at the end of the novel.) Now there is another question: When is the sequel coming out?

The answer to this question is not as easy. “Some time after I finish writing it” is about the best I can do right now. I’m three-quarters of the way through a first draft, and the writing is going well. Still, the story evolves as I go along. I’m still learning about my characters, as they move into different situations and into new relationships with each other, and some things that originally I thought I could cover in a page end up taking up a whole chapter. I like to believe that’s a good sign. If I’m interested in what’s happening, my bet is that readers will be, too. But the whole process takes time. Then there’s the editing and publishing process, which as you know has its own schedule, not always predictable.

Such a vague answer may be small comfort to those of you who just want to know What. Happens. Next. I’ve been there. I vividly remember the sense of frustration—oh let’s not mince words, of betrayal—when I got to the end of The Golden Compass and (spoiler!) realized that I was not about to find out what lay in the new world that Lyra’s father had just blasted a portal into. I had known, going in, that the book was the first novel of a series, but even so, I hankered for more resolution. Even Pullman’s perfect final sentence didn’t make up for the tidy ending I was missing: “So Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky.”

And yet here I am, having written a novel that—while it doesn’t end with Nora dangling from her fingernails from a cliff, no levitation spell handy—does suggest that there needs to be more magic in her future. As it happens, the first version of The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic did tie everything up neatly with a regulation happy ending. That draft was also a thousand pages long. My agent had the brilliant suggestion of ending the novel at a scene that seemed like a good resting place, and saving the rest of the story for a sequel.

It took me about a day to wrap my head about this idea, and then I saw the best part of it: I wouldn’t have to say goodbye to Nora, Aruendiel, and the world of real magic. Because I hated to come to the end of the novel, too. And I knew that there was much, much more to tell, even beyond what I had originally envisioned.

So the end of the first draft has become the beginning of the second book. (And some things I’m saving for Book Three, too.) I’m having a lot of fun with the story, especially now, as I approach the climactic chapters. In fact, I’d love to tell you what’s happening now—but I’m going to stay mum, because that makes me write faster. I can’t promise daily or even monthly updates, but I’ll let you know, via Goodreads, Twitter, and Facebook, when the book reaches major milestones.

Huge thanks to everyone who has read my novel and let me know how you liked it. I’m hoping you’ll enjoy Book Two as much as I am now.

Reader Jenn W.B. asked me if I could post a couple of sentences from Book 2—because, she kindly said, she's missing Nora and Aruendiel so much. I'm not quite ready to post anything from the new book, because it could all change so much during writing and editing, but I can share some of the material that was cut during the process of editing down a 1300-page manuscript down to a 660-page one. (And you thought the final book was long!)

This section comes from the runup to the Null Days—just this time of year, in fact—after Aruendiel has asked Nora to look up some of his old spells, so that he can free the spirits trapped within. I cut this part because, although it's rather colorful, it didn't really advance the bigger story. In the hardcover, this scene would start around page 380.

“Have you found all of the spells I instructed you to look for?” he asked suddenly from the other side of the room.

Nora had found all of them except the spell for summer snow. “Well, perhaps it is just as well,” Aruendiel said, considering. “I have no wish to loose an ice demon into the countryside in winter.” She followed him up the stairs to the workroom at the top of the tower, where Aruendiel had drawn a large circle in charcoal on the floor. Standing inside the boundary, Nora was to read each spell, while Aruendiel repeated it and destroyed it, line by line.

“Of course, your own words will have no effect,” he noted as they began.

Because I’m a woman, Nora thought. “You don’t know these spells already?” she asked, an edge in her voice.

“I will be working two spells at once, so the fewer distractions, the better. And,” he said with a grimace, “it has been more years than I care to count since I composed them.”

The first spell began, “Kelp-bearded traitor, old fish-nibbled bones,” and Nora had to fight to keep Those are pearls that were his eyes out of her head. Aruendiel’s deep, cracked voice followed hers, producing a strong smell of brine and a disembodied voice that demanded to know what the foul wizard wanted now.

“Ah, Mernesr—it is Mernesr, is it not?” Aruendiel said easily. “I require nothing of you, nothing any more.”

“Nothing? You tricked me into doing your will as the salt water took my breath; you enslaved me for a dozen dozen years; and now you ask nothing of me?” The voice sounded affronted.

“I release you now,” Aruendiel said. “You may leave, you may do as you will.”

“As I will?” the voice repeated. “As I will?” The room grew gray and cold, filled with a freezing marine fog, as the voice howled insults at Aruendiel. There was a thump nearby. Glass shattered.

And then the room was clear and quiet again. The air remained icy. With a twitch of his shoulder, Aruendiel stepped out of the circle and bent over to pick up pieces of the bottle that had fallen from a shelf.

“That was a ghost,” Nora said, awed, accusatory. “A real ghost, not like that portrait in Semr.”

Aruendiel nodded. “Did I frighten you?” he said, with a trace of irony.

“No, but that was damned creepy.” Hesitantly she stepped out of the circle. “Who was he?”

Aruendiel set the restored bottle on the shelf. “Mernesr was a captain in the royal navy caught selling information to the Pernish. He was thrown overboard for treason, and we would have heard no more of Mernesr, except that I, a bright young wizard in the king’s employ, found some use for him, by binding his ghost into a new spell that I had written.”

“Where is he now?”

“Gone where ghosts go.” Aruendiel shrugged. “I knew he would not trouble us long,” he added, as if to reassure Nora. “Ghosts rarely have power to do real harm.”

Just as well, Nora thought at the end of the afternoon, because none of the spirits released had anything good to say to Aruendiel. Some raged, like Mernesr, or hissed baroque and poisonous insults before they disappeared. The ghost from the spell to make men grunt like pigs took the simple but eloquent route of flinging pigshit all over the room. Aruendiel, who seemed gloomier and more laconic after each supernatural encounter, grinned briefly as he made the mess disappear. “I remember that fellow—he was never subtle,” he said. “Being a ghost hasn’t changed him much.”

“Was it really a dozen dozen years ago, as Mernesr said, that you created the spell with him in it?” Nora asked as they finally left the workroom.

“Ghosts are notoriously bad judges of time,” Aruendiel snapped.


© Emily Croy Barker, 2013