I’m excited to announce that I have officially signed a contract with Tree Shadow Press to publish my novel Breaking the Silence. In the coming weeks and months, look for a new page dedicated to Breaking the Silence, a cover reveal (I have seen the initial drawings, and I’m really excited!), and information about publication date and how to order. In this post, I’m going to write a little about the press and why I chose an indie publisher over traditional or self publishing.

Tree Shadow Press

Tree Shadow Press publishes a range of genres, including middle grade and young adult fiction and historical fiction. When I met the editor, Debra R. Sanchez, at the Pennwriters Road Trip conference, I immediately felt like the press would be a good fit for Stephen, the orphaned son of a deceased Carolingian monarch who can tap into the power of the celestial spheres by playing chords on his cythara. Debra thought so too when she heard my pitch.

As an independent publisher, Tree Shadow offers a far larger share of royalties than a traditional press in exchange for some minor cost-sharing. (And when I say minor, I mean minor. If I had gone the traditional publishing route, I still would have had to pay a professional editor a similar amount of money to get my manuscript to the point of submitting to editors or agents.) I also have a say in some marketing decisions, including cover art, jacket blurbs, and the title of my own book, which often are not granted to authors by traditional publishers. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to go indie.

I have also self published before (Quest for the Historical Arthur is self-published), and knew that I would end up with a much better book if I trusted my manuscript to an editor and publisher than if I did it all myself. Self publishing was my backup plan for if I did not get Breaking the Silence accepted by an independent publisher, but I’m really glad it was. This book will be much better for it.

One other awesome thing about Tree Shadow Press is that Debra also translates into Spanish all of their publications written for kids. I’m excited that Stephen’s story will be opened up to a Spanish language readership as well.

What I’m Reading

I just started A Conspiracy of Kings, which is the fourth book in Megan Whalen Turner’s The Queen’s Thief series, which I absolutely love. Even though the first book, The Thief, was published in 1996 and is a Newbery Honor book, for some reason I never heard of it growing up. I stumbled upon it by accident several years ago when my spouse rescued books 1-3 from the trash when a previous administration at our school was throwing out all their library books. Good news – the library has since been restored and I donated these books back to the library once I finished reading them. What’s more, the English-teacher-turned-librarian who saved the library also ordered the rest of the series, so now I’m on to Book 4!

The books are subtle fantasy, which I love. The magic isn’t in your face. It’s mysterious. Is it even really there? These books inspire huge goals for Breaking the Silence and its sequel(s).

The setting is also amazing. It is a fictional, fantasy setting, but it is based on the Byzantine empire of the medieval Middle East, which I find compelling as someone who has studied this period and geography, and I imagine would feel refreshing to fantasy readers who want a break from the typical vaguely western medieval settings.

The best thing about these books, though, are the twists. They’re a slow burn, full of political intrigue, with the mysterious Eugenides at their center, and all three that I’ve read so far turn so profoundly near the ending that I’m left awestruck. I’m excited for whatever twist in A Conspiracy of Kings has to throw at me.

I’ve also been rereading Augustine’s Confessions with my students. I’ve read this with students off and on for the past six years, and each time I read it with a new group of kids I learn something new myself. The translation I read with students is the old translation of Pine-Coffin, because although it’s not the most scholarly or accurate, it is much more readable for students than any of the “better” translations. It’s old, though, and I only wish the language were a little more modern. Sarah Ruden’s modern translation introduces far more problems than it solves, in my opinion, though, so Pine-Coffin it is!

On the academic side, I’ve just started reading some secondary literature on Avitus of Vienne, who was a poet and bishop from Burgundy in the early sixth century. Avitus has always been tangential to my research (my dissertation was on Caesarius of Arles, who was a contemporary bishop and theologian), but I never really sat down with Avitus himself until now.

What I’m Writing

The majority of my writing this past month has been academic: I’m back to drafting the final chapter of my monograph on how ordinary people understood the flesh of Christ in sixth-century Gaul, and I’ve also started developing my conference paper from last month into an essay for the conference volume. That’s where Avitus comes in. I presented a paper on “Motherhood and the Making of the Virgin Mary in the Sixth Century” at the sixteenth biennial Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity conference and got a ton of excellent feedback from colleagues. As I wrote the conference paper, I realized the virgin birth was only part of the story of Mary’s motherhood, and I ended up not writing about birth at all, but rather the rest of motherhood: breastfeeding the baby Jesus, raising him, and most significantly, outliving him. Anxiety over losing one’s child permeated motherhood on all social levels in the ancient world, especially given the high rate of infant mortality. Although Jesus did survive childhood, Mary still outlived him, and sixth-century poems hymns about Mary from different contexts reflect this anxiety by collapsing her grief and showing her mourn the crucifixion at the nativity.

On the fiction side, I’m back to focusing on publishing Breaking the Silence and put its sequel on the back burner. I tried to write it “in the background” for awhile but realized that wasn’t producing very good results. I’m better off just leaving it simmer and then returning to it when I can devote more time and build up momentum to draft the full story. And in the meantime, because I can’t make life easy for myself, a new idea hit me like a bus three days ago, and I’m starting to flesh that out as well. So much writing!