June Announcements (Patreon)

Happy June! We're getting into Summer and, to celebrate, I'm upping the advance chapter counts! Starting today, Bowler Hats will be receiving 7 Advance Chapters and Top Hats will be able to read 15 Advance Chapters ahead of Royal Road!

LTSV Book One is ending soon. The Book One Epilogue is posting today for the Top Hats. LTSV will be continuing with Book Two in July, but the updates will NOT be pausing! Between now and the beginning of Book Two, you'll be receiving ten short stories. If you're in the Discord, you might remember when I polled the group for interest in some side stories from Cecily's POV. Well, I have ten of them waiting for you!

We'll be starting off with a novella-length short story told in four parts about Cecily's first day at Breckenridge Academy and part of what the first 'game' looked like for her.

This month's WIP is a fun project that I think has a good chance of being my next Royal Road webnovel. I'm excited to hear your thoughts!

Miss Maple: Solving Murder Mysteries in the Countryside After My Banishment

Content warnings: Faux British Countryside

Summary:

Acacia 'Maple' Blackthorne’s life has just hit rock bottom. She has temporarily stumbled from being a duke’s daughter, a premier future magical researcher, a titan of high society, and the fiancee of the most eligible husband candidate of her generation. Her life should have been nothing but roses, but then a plucky young ingénue caught her fiance’s eye and Acacia might have overreacted. Just a bit.

After torpedoing her golden future through a catastrophically poor decision, Acacia’s parents have banished her to their pastoral countryside estate in a last-ditch effort to keep her from causing any further trouble before things blow over. She will now live in the old groundskeeper’s cottage under the pseudonym of ‘Maple Bramblett’ for a year while the heat dies down back home.

Her orders are simple; keep her head down and cause no more problems for the family or this temporary exile could become permanent.

Acacia—or rather, Maple intends to do just that. She’s actually kind of tired and humiliated, now that she’s no longer in the thick of her scandal, and part of her actually welcomed the opportunity to take a break from being herself.

Then her neighbor is found dead in his locked study.

Maple’s alibi is flimsy and she also has a false identity to hide. Worse still, if Maple’s mother finds out that she was anywhere near this new scandal then that empty threat to send her to a convent might become something more like a promise.

What to expect:

A Queen Bitch Bee in recovery, slowly having to learn how to behave like a normal human being

An idyllic countryside landscape with a surprising number of monster attacks

An increasingly implausible number of murders in a small geographic area

Cute romance with the local flower shop girl who is (probably) not a murderer

Comedy; please do not take the majority of this story seriously

Regular excerpts from Maple's terrible reading material

Excerpt:

01. Welcome to Bellflower Woods

The cottage was—quaint, Maple supposed, as all cottages surely were. Still, it was private and quiet; surrounded by the expansive grounds of the Foxglove Hollow Estate.

This was the Old Groundskeepers Cottage, which had been converted to a guest cottage back in Maple’s maternal grandfather’s youth. It was a one and a half room building with a small sleeping loft. In this case, the ‘half’ room was a late-addition water closet that had been added when the cottage was renovated. It was built of stout limestone, local to Bellflower Woods, with a thatched roof, a small portico surrounding the front entrance, and a stone bay window with vaulted casements. There was a bit of moss growing in the thatch, which suggested to her that the thatch would need attention soon.

“Your luggage was delivered this morning, Miss,” the woman who’d picked her up from the train station explained.

Her name was Adele Lockheed and she was the property manager here at Foxglove Hollow Estate, where Maple would spend the next year rusticating. She was of middle age with a soft, friendly face. She was dressed neatly in a mustard colored utility suit with a pleated skirt and a tidy jabot affixed with a cameo brooch. Her graying hair was put up into a smooth bouffant with the rest in a net snood. She was, perhaps, the only person in the entire county who knew Maple’s real identity.

“I had one of the girls come down from the big house to tidy up and put a few simple groceries in the kitchen for you. I’m given to understand that you will arrange your own meals, but I thought you might want a few things in place when you arrive. I’ll be sending someone around for your laundry at the beginning of every week and someone will come to tidy up at midweek,” Mrs. Lockheed continued as they entered the building.

Inside, the cottage was furnished secondhand from the Big House’s castoffs. The main floor consisted of a sitting area in front of a big hearth with a small kitchen and pantry tucked under the loft. Some of the cooking clearly happened in the hearth because the mantle had a swinging pothook that could be pushed into the fireplace and had a kettle dangling from it. There was a big wingback chair in front of the hearth with a small padded footstool in front of it. Someone had filled a nearby basket with throw pillows and a crochet blanket. There was a big round rug that took up most of the floor in the sitting area and Maple recognized it as one that she’d spilled tea on in one of the guest suites when she was visiting her grandparents as a small child. The curtains were thick and matched nothing else in the room. Every wall was lined in bookshelves that had been newly filled with the majority of what she’d brought with her to this exile; books upon books upon books. Every book she’d bought and had to put off reading was now lining the walls of the cottage.

“Oh good,” Mrs. Lockheed sighed. “She had time to unpack the crates. They probably aren’t in any particular order. My girl was racing a rainstorm when she was working out here, but we wanted to break up the crates before you arrived. The planks and straw lining are probably in your woodpile for firestarters. Will you be needing a firestarter?”

Maple held up a finger with a small blue flame hovering over it. “I’ll manage, Mrs. Lockheed, thank you.”

“Oh, fancy,” Mrs. Lockheed praised her, but then sobered. “Try not to flash that around too much in this neighborhood. The locals have nothing but boys here and so every eligible girl gets their background picked to pieces as they try to make sure she isn’t someone’s cousin. There haven’t been many spellcasters in these parts and everyone is desperate to marry one in. I’ve spread it around that you’re my niece, but the story might not hold up if all the local mothers band together to get you married to one of their sons. They wouldn’t usually cooperate, but having a talented witch settle down here permanently could be considered a collective win.”

“Imagine their surprise when they met their prospective in-laws?” Maple murmured and added, “You’re not concerned that any of them would recognize me?”

“No, Miss,” Mrs. Lockheed sighed and cupped her cheek. “You didn’t mix with the village much when you visited her ladyship as a little girl and you’ve, ah, grown up considerably since then. Even your hair changed tone a bit. No one expects the presence of a Duke’s daughter to not be announced.”

By ‘grown up’, Mrs. Lockheed meant that Maple had been a fat, freckled child with carroty red hair and unsettlingly catlike yellow eyes. Women in her mother’s line tended to be on the ugly side as children and would then improve as they developed into young ladies. Maple had slimmed down in the middle now that she was an adult, but she was still prone to accumulating extra weight—it just happened to be in places where men liked to see it. The fashionable silhouette was thinner and boyish right now, but Maple’s hourglass shape never went fully out of vogue. Her hair had darkened to a deep auburn as she got older and her freckles were kept at bay with the constant use of sun lotion even in the winter months. Her eyes had been huge for her face when she was little, but now they were in better proportion with the rest of her features and were a luminous shade of gold.