The Chamomile Conspiracy: A Garden Lover Cozy Mystery (Seasons of the Witch)
Cozy Mystery
1st in Series
Setting – Maine
Witchy Mysteries (September 30, 2022)
Print length ‏ : ‎ 311 pages

Synopsis

Green witch Pax Thatcher leads a busy life. Between working two jobs, applying to grad school, and helping out at the old herb shop that belongs to her friend and mentor, Miss Millie, Pax doesn’t have much time for practicing spells. She’s lucky she can keep her enormous plant collection alive.

Fortunately, she can talk to her plants, and they talk back.

But when Pax arrives for a visit to her seaside hometown of Honesty Harbor, Maine, and discovers Miss Millie is missing, she drops everything to find her. When she does, it’s just in time to hear Miss Millie’s dying words:

Poison. Find them.

Unable to believe anyone would want to murder the kind old woman, Pax vows to fulfill Miss Millie’s last request. But how can a boring little witch who doesn’t even own a cauldron solve a murder? Ask the only witness—a potted plant—what happened.

But the more she listens to her leafy allies, the more questions she has. And when others begin to view her as the prime suspect, Pax must hurry to weed out the killer before someone else gets whacked.

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Guest Post

I’ll admit, it was hard to write this blog post. I sat here, staring at the screen for days, trying to come up with something compelling and maybe even a little funny. Not feeling too funny today, though. A lot on my mind, mostly missing my cat, Marvin. He died in July, after fifteen years together, and it still hurts even now, months later. You don’t just forget your best friend. It’s a wound that never really heals. You just learn to adapt, like you would to a missing limb.

But that brings me to what I’d like to talk about, I suppose: writer’s block. I’ve been a writer since I was a teenager, and Lord knows writer’s block has hit me off and on throughout the years. This happens to every writer. Real life encroaches on our creative spaces and shoves everything out the window, replacing it with the worries and crises that interfere with, you know, everything.

For me it is the death of my cat, my father’s failing health, and my own disabilities rearing their ugly head. It’s choked my creativity down to the vague trickle of a drought-stricken stream, and now I can’t seem to get my butt in gear when it comes to the things I want to be writing and should be writing—and the ADHD sure doesn’t help matters, either.

So how do you beat it? I’ll be honest, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes, you have to ride it out, go with the flow until you come to the ocean of words. Then you have to remember how to swim. It’s a struggle, and there’s no one way to break the cycle. Some people pick up a distracting hobby. Some go to therapy. Others try to power through it, forcing words onto the page just to make them exist. And for some people, those things may work.

I suppose my message to other writers struggling with writer’s block is that it is not your fault. It could be your circumstances, it could be neurodivergence interference, it could be any number of things, but you don’t control how your brain processes the words in your head. They may dry up and you have to wait for the rain, or it may be raining too much, and you need it to just stop for a while. Either way, you can’t blame yourself, so don’t.

A final piece of advice: don’t underestimate the power of fanfiction as a writing tool. I wouldn’t be here without it. I think the worst bout of writer’s block kept me from writing for several years, before I broke my streak with a short little fanfiction about hockey boys from a webcomic. Try taking someone else’s characters and playing in their sandbox for a while. Write little post-episode/film tidbits, or a short story in which the characters of a fantasy epic find themselves in a modern-day coffeeshop. Write a 100,000 word epic tale of angst, ending in the main characters riding off into the sunset.

Bottom line: Don’t give up and don’t be too hard on yourself.

And hey, if you really can’t make the words obey, try writing about that. It worked for me, because now this blog post is done, and I can go eat cookies now. J

About the Author

Louise Marvin’s mother wrote Star Trek fanfiction in the 1980s, so it was only natural that Louise follows in her footsteps. FanFiction played a big part in Louise’s development and coincidence as a writer, inspiring her to try her hand at original fiction. THE CHAMOMILE CONSPIRACY is her first book. Louise lives in New England with an elderly cat and an extensive LEGO Star Wars collection and works at a medical cannabis facility.

Website (Coming Soon) * Twitter * Tumblr * TikTok

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