As a way of helping me organize my research and stay within the character’s mind, I design and write a newsletter for each book I’m working on. I send it to the Storytimers who sign up for it every Friday (along with personal stories from each book). This is the debut newsletter for the new book.

The new book is having a naming crisis. Currently, it’s The Way of Water which is a perfectly normal, perfectly acceptable, perfectly nice name. One of the character voices in the book is water itself and it fits for a lot of reasons. Water changes people…and holds things. Like bones. But I’ve spent an unholy amount of time researching Iron Age Ireland (which is, like, two thousand years in the rearview mirror) – everything from stomach contents of really, really old remains to what the charred seeds can tell us about the land that was once upon a time. When I started working on the newsletter, I needed a name for it. And I was chest-deep into research on skeletal remains. One of the sections in this issue talks about why I sort of love Móin & Marrow instead of The Way of Water, but I’d really love to know what others think.

You can read about it in the issue below – and download the PDF if you’d prefer to enjoy it in full view.