Well, it’s officially now the lead up to Mint Grows Even In The Dark: I’ve updated the image on the front page of the site to show this preorder. Farewell from front-page status, Christmas Miracle Is Just A Saying!
That being the case, I decided now was an opportune moment to give a little insight into the ‘making of’ this story 🙂
As I think I’ve said here before, Mint Grows (which my fingers INSIST on typing as ‘Mind Grows’ every. single. time.) was originally supposed to be a short story. (Are we surprised? Of course we are not.) I started it back in… Hmm, it must have been 2021, judging by the year level of various students, in that time period where I was writing a lot of flash fiction to practice structure and twists and thus needed a lot of names easily accessible. I’ve written before about how I asked my then Year 10 class if they would mind donating their names, and they were unanimously happy with this, hurrah. Alas, I didn’t end up writing a story for each of them (though I may yet – it’s a handy pool of names to draw on, after all!), but here we are, another one down, another one bites the dust! 😀
So, I started writing Mint Grows back in 2021, and then took a break from it because I had the sense that it was going to go not only longer than flash (stories under 1000 words), it might also not be a short story.
I pulled it back out at the end of 2023 thinking it might be a nice addition to And Then I Shall Transform, only… of course… it didn’t stay short, and turned into a novella 😀 (Or, technically, a novelette, but the only places that use that term these days are some of the long-running magazines.)
It’s actually based on a dream, and I knew that long before I knew it would end up with Hades-and-Persephone references. The setting, if you can imagine it clearly, is based on the last house I lived in, the one where my children did their primary amount of Growing Up. Yes, the front door was indeed bright yellow, and yes, you did indeed have to slam it to get it to latch shut because the door was so breezy when we initially moved in that in cold Canberra winters a refreshing breeze would blow in, so my husband sealed the door, and lo, one was now required to slam it. (It effectively stopped the breeze though, hurrah!)
The dream part was me, standing in the kitchen making herbal tea (I usually prefer black because if I’m going to drink a hot drink, I want milk in it dagnabit), and then me in a long, wine-red broom skirt with mint all bundled up in said skirt, leaving the house and noting that I wasn’t taking my phone. And obviously, I knew the story would have something about missing people in it, because I wrote the story mostly sequentially – the opening of the story has been the opening from the start – or, well, this is the third (I think) version of the opening but I got that sorted before I proceeded any further with the story.
Claire, as you will see if you read the book, is a sensible young woman with a strong sense of responsibility and a level head. She deals in making the uncertain certain, the intangible concrete, and the unbelievable real, but she does so with great practicality. I admire her very much; she’s the kind of person I enjoy being friends with 🙂
And naturally, the story being what it is, there is a Very Good Dog, and so this story is full of things I love: a pragmatic, philosophical character I’d be friends with, an adorable canine, a plot that involves standing up for people who’ve lost the ability to stand up for themselves, tea, and making peace with the things I can’t control in life while accepting unshirking responsibility for what I can.
Which, that’s an apt lesson for me right now and I wonder that my subconscious put that into this story without me knowing that’s where it would be going (like all my novellas to date, I wrote this entirely by discovery, with no outline or plan whatsoever beyond ‘make the two dream snippets make sense’), and I wonder at the publication date which I put in 2025 Q1 purely because I already had releases for 2024 sorted when I finished this story… And here I am, at the start of 2025, almost entirely adrift due to my life having been imploded by what is still technically a terminal cancer diagnosis. Certainty? What’s that?
…And I guess there is a useful lesson here for Present!Me, gifted to me so thoughtfully by Past!Me: Life is always going to be uncertain, BUT ALSO belief DOES create reality to at least an extent, and so although I might not be able to stand with any certainty on things like ‘health’ or ‘career’ or even ‘a predictable routine month-to-month’, I CAN lean in to the parts that I can believe into existence: my value, the gentle rhythm of each individual day and week, the things in my life that I love.
Sigh.
I suppose if Claire can learn to live with the fact that she can’t control everything, I can too.
One day, we’ll collectively figure out how it’s possible to write characters that are smarter than we are 😀
Anyway, if you happen to want to preorder Mint Grows Even In The Dark, you can do that at all the usual online places for a March 31 release, OR you can be a complete darling and buy direct from me here, which means that instead of your money being split between me and the Tech Bro’s, I get to keep most of it, AND in this instance it means you can be reading Mint as soon as, like, sixty seconds from now, because if you buy through my site, you get your book right away, no waiting for a preorder 😉
With that, I hope you have a fabulous day/night/period of time, and that you too can find some measure of solace in the things you believe, rather than the things you can’t control. <3 <3
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