Watching my first full animé series with my teen daughters this winter (I’m in the Southern Hemisphere) reminded me of what it was like watching media in the 90s when I was growing up. It took me a while to put my finger on why.

Growing up, I lived in a tiny rural town and collected books and prints of Pre-Raphaelite art, voraciously read mostly old novels (my parents had a library that numbered in the thousands), and enjoyed BBC miniseries adaptations of classics with my mother on VHS.

We also discovered gems, films like Swing Kids and Lady Jane, that nobody else seemed to know about. Sometimes a film would surprise us in a good way, sometimes in a bad way.

Admittedly, it was sometimes hard to find movies and books that we would enjoy, because we couldn’t just jump online and check reviews and content warnings like I can and do today, and there were some nasty surprises. But equally, I didn’t have a million online voices telling me what to think about the art and entertainment we enjoyed and discussed together.

This winter, I went into Love Through a Prism pretty much blind. I craved something life-affirming, cozy, sincere, and unashamedly pretty to watch. I got all of that and then some. Sometimes the animation was jarring. I wasn’t accustomed to the conventions of Japanese animé, and the idealisation of Edwardian London was startling (this is the cleanest, friendliest version of London you’ve seen outside of Paddington), but that added to the experience.

I think art sometimes needs a little bit of strangeness in it to wake us up.

Throughout watching this series, I was blissfully unaware of any shipping wars over the characters. I knew nothing about the politics or even the gender of the people who made it, because I don’t recognise the gender of Japanese names.

Bliss.

It was a direct contrast to my experience watching episodes of the Little House on the Prairie Netflix show, which felt so clouded by all the political and cultural conversations surrounding it—not to mention the wildly different expectations of viewers who came in expecting either a direct adaptation of the book series or the previous TV show and blamed it for being neither.

While there were many things to enjoy and many things to quibble with in the episodes I watched of that show, I had a hard time switching off all the voices and just experiencing it as art. It was exhausting. Maybe I’ll try again in a little while, when all of that has died down, or when I’m less depleted.

I’m also not here to say that you shouldn’t read and participate in thoughtful, discerning discussions of the context and intentions of the artists behind popular media. (I did just join Substack, after all.)

But I think some of us are tiring of the endless clickbait carousel of “hot takes” on The Odyssey or MCU. (Not to mention Emma M. Lion, which I am relieved I discovered several years before spoilers and ships began to prowl about like, ahem, lions all over my social media. My heart goes out to readers who go into the series now and want to be surprised.)

If you, too, need a break from this, then one answer is to read older books and watch older movies. Personally, I do try to keep my ratio around 1/1 personally (adjusted from CS Lewis’s famous reading ratio), and I get most of my creative ideas and inspiration from older material, whether it be from black and white screwball comedies, Elizabethan bestiaries, or George Macdonald.

But there are very lovely things being created today (including my own books!), and living creators deserve and need to have their work noticed. I want to be the person who buys one of the two paintings Van Gogh sold, if I possibly can. (I looked it up—he only sold ONE during his lifetime. Update: I want to be Anna Boch, who bought that one painting in 1890.) I have an author career today because people took a chance on my books.

This is a gentle reminder to say that it is worth seeking out lesser-known work, or muting your social media until you have a chance to attentively read or watch that popular piece of art on its own terms, as art, and not chiefly as political commentary or tribal rallying cry. (And I say this as someone who went to my local arthouse cinema to see both The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day.)

A piece of art can be all those things, of course. But one thing I’ve learned is that good art actually transcends the intentions of the artist. (See CS Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism and the podcast The Literary Life Podcast for more on this.)

I have no idea what the intentions of the creators of Love Through a Prism were, but I can talk about what happened when I watched it.

Partway through, one of my daughters started talking about how much the series made her want to get back into drawing regularly. We talked about friend groups and neurodivergence and culture shock. We teared up and shrieked at the characters for not being more honest about their emotions. And I ended up enjoying each anachronistic blue sky with Studio Ghibli clotted-cream clouds, the like of which London has never seen.

I haven’t said very much about this show specifically, and that’s kind of the point of this little reflection. I’m inspired to look for more art that is unfamiliar, beautiful, and a little bit strange, and to enjoy it on its own terms.

And I’d love to hear any recommendations of art that has surprised or refreshed you recently.

An example of a piece of literature that touches on political and cultural conflict without becoming “a pot of message,” as GK Chesterton memorably said of HG Wells.

Please be aware that there is at least one major spoiler in this historical note. If you are interested in Wormwood Abbey and would like to experience the reveals as I arranged them in my novel, please consider reading it first.

A Note on the Dragons

When I first had the idea for a family of secret dragon keepers in England in 1899, I knew that I didn’t want to make up the dragons. I am lifelong reader of history—so the dragons had to be real ones.

For historical sources, I turned to Yorkshire legends and antiquarian sources of dragon lore. Then I stumbled across an obscure bestiary by an Elizabethan naturalist and folklorist, published in 1608. It turned out to be a gold mine (hoard?).

Thus, from Edward Topsell I have taken most of my knowledge of the typical habits of dragons. For example, that dragons emerge under a full moon, that they hibernate, their dietary peculiarities, and, yes, that there was believed to be a kind of people called Marsi who can heal dragon bites with their saliva. Personally, I would never have made that up.

You’ll find out even more about Marsi and historical dragons in the next book. (If you don’t want to wait, you can find Topsell’s original books at archive.org)

As for salamanders, I have visited the castle of Chambord in France which King Francois I embellished liberally with his personal motif. I am indebted to Martin Johnson for his article identifying Francois’s salamander with the Sri Lankan water monitor lizard, varanus salvator.

Robert Knox was a real-life memoirist who encountered this creature during his time in Ceylon (modern day Sri Lanka). He asserted, along with my character Rivers, that they do not have venom, but recent research on the species has called that strongly into question.

Edith’s mysterious pet, Francis, exhibits characteristics of both the living varanids (which are sometimes really kept as domestic animals today) and the legends of the extinct fire salamander. The amphibian we call a salamander today is quite a different animal, although it does secrete a toxic substance via its skin, in common with the legendary salamander.

The wyvern is a famous creature of legend. People disagree whether it qualifies as a dragon or not. I find it fascinating that only recently have palaeontologists confirmed that some ancient reptiles had feathers. Please note that the wyvern has always been depicted as a reptile with feathers.

Leaving dragons aside for a moment, I’ve tried to make all of my details about life in the Yorkshire Dales in 1899 as close as I possibly can to historical life. And St George’s Day in 1899 really did occur under a full moon.

There you have it! Each of the five novels in my series, The Secrets of Ormdale, has a separate historical note, which is (if I do say so myself) full of fascinating material. If you’ve listened to the audiobooks and are interested in learning more about my sources, you might consider getting the ebooks from my website, where they are very reasonably priced at a few dollars each, and 20% goes to a charity that rescues trafficked Ukrainian children.

And if you’d like a discount code for the digital omnibus of the first three books in my series, comment below!

If you clicked on this article hoping for access to the secret formula, I’m sorry. It doesn’t exist.

On the other hand, in reaction to these sorts of assumptions, I suspect I sometimes come across as a hapless novice, flailing in disbelief at her good fortune. And there’s an element of truth in that, I admit.

But the whole truth is more complicated. (Isn’t it always?)

When Wormwood Abbey first started “flying off the shelves” (I cannot think of a suitable metaphor for ebooks, so pardon me), my husband and I sat down with my dear friend, the extraordinary historical fantasy author Suzannah Rowntree, to try and take stock of what was happening. My husband asked her, “Was it something Christina did? Was it one of those self-publishing books you told her to read?”

And Suzannah patiently explained to both of us that, no, the “things Christina did” were simply industry-standard business practises for indie authors. They did not explain why Wormwood Abbey was selling, why preorders for the sequels were increasing exponentially, or why it looked like I might actually earn a living from my debut series, which hadn’t been something we’d even dared to hope.*

But here’s the thing: I do believe all of the “things I did” really helped. Travis Baldree, another cozy fantasy author who had a breakout self-pubbed debut, talked about how publishing is like waiting for rain. You can’t make it rain, he pointed out, but you can make sure your bucket isn’t leaky. And you really must do this, because if the rain comes, you want to collect as much of it as you possibly can before it stops raining. It’s not a great idea to run about looking for buckets while the rain is coming down, have them set out in advance. Just in case.

So I thought I’d gather a few things I used to stop up holes in my bucket when I was starting out, terribly time-poor and money poor as I was, and dump them right here on Substack for other author-publishers.

My non-secret, non-special toolkit

• David Gaughran’s free guide to focusing on ebooks first as a publishing business plan, starting with Let’s Get Digital. I pretty much followed all of David’s advice and you probably should, too. He’s really liberating in his view of the time-sink of social media, too.

• Travis Baldree’s summary of his publishing journey with Legends and Lattes. It really helped me to listen to podcasts and interviews with authors, and it might help you too, if only to cure you of the idea that there is one “correct” way to do things or that they succeeded because they are magical beings.

• A professional cover design that really captures the feel of your book. Writers hate this, but the cover is the number one thing you can do to sell your book. It has the potential to get your book a second look by a reader. And it doesn’t just have to look pretty, it should look pretty to the same people who are your ideal readers. If you don’t know who those people are yet, go read David Gaughran’s books. I was extremely fortunate in my cover art, but that’s a story for another time.

• Olivia Atwater’s book on writing back-cover copy. Oh, how I resisted this! If you can write a novel, you can easily pop out a blurb, right? Right?? Wrong. And don’t even think about copying the way traditional publishers do theirs, you can (and must) do better. Please save yourself the trouble of figuring this out yourself. Blurb-writing has more to do with identifying tropes and communicating them to your ideal reader (see, once more, David Gaughran) than it has to do with summarising your book.

Maybe you already knew about all of these and feel mildly disappointed. Maybe you didn’t, and you are excited to grab some resources. I hope they are as useful to you as they have been to me.

But I hope that equally you are realising that there is a lot more at play here than following certain steps to publishing success, or a lot more people would be making a profit off writing. And I’ll touch on the whole question of what success even is for a writer a bit later.

You could stop reading here, and you’ll have a bunch of helpful resources to follow up, but if you have questions, I’ve a couple of thoughts more.

Is that really it?

You might be surprised not to see any “craft” books. No books telling you that a specific thing needs to happen on page x. There are plenty of these books and I’m sure they help lots of people. Personally, I’ve been far more helped by reading really terrific novels, as well as memoirs and essays by great writers.

Reflections on the Writing Life by Diana Wynne Jones is one that I’ve loved, as is Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. They won’t tell you how to write, but they’ll tell you a lot about being a writer.

After publishing my whole debut series, I read Gail Carriger’s The Heroine’s Journey, and retrospectively it explained a lot about why people like my books. It even made me realise that I unintentionally wrote a whole retelling of the Egyptian myth of Isis when I wrote my 4th book, City of Serpents (yay?).

If you are someone who has turned your story inside-out trying to stuff it into a box marked with very specific plot points and you only feel depleted by the exercise, consider reading that book. (This did not happen to me because I had internalised the structure of dozens or hundreds of my favourite books, films, and songs, and that was the skeleton upon which I built up the flesh of my series.)

For writers who are struggling, I’ve recently discovered Becca Symes and her Dear Writer series, which I’d especially recommend to anyone who is discouraged or blocked.

Speaking of success…

One of the things Symes talks about in her first book, Dear Writer, You Need to Quit, is that success is not one thing. Some people will naturally be happier and more motivated and artistically in flow-state if writing is not their main source of income. Others only feel like “real writers” if they have a deal in the traditional publishing world, regardless of how profitable or artistically congenial it is. I recently talked with a friend who signed with a small press who likely won’t do much to promote her book, but she’s just happy she doesn’t have to sell her own books. That sounds purgatorial to me, I like nothing more than being able to check my dashboards on Kobo, KDP, and D2D and my direct store via BookFunnel to see how many people are buying my books.

But really, the most important and vital success is simply writing to the best of your ability. Less than 2% of people who try to write a novel ever finish it. Sometimes people will ask about publishing and I’ll be rambling on and then suddenly I realise this person hasn’t finished writing their first draft.

Listen, you don’t need a publishing plan or a social media platform at this point, and researching that right now is almost certainly distracting you from actually writing! Don’t feel bad—my brain plays these tricks on me too. Mine really loves to convince me to start new projects, the more involving and research-heavy the better. I wrote a whole novella last year because my brain was scared of finishing the first book in my spin-off series. (At least I got a novella out of it!)

So if this is you, save this post and come back when you’ve written the book. And then find out what holes are in your bucket and plug them up.

And then pray for rain.**

*I published Wormwood Abbey late 2023. It is now mid 2026, less than three years later, and my books have doubled our household income. We aren’t rich (*coughs* we have 10 children) but it is really wonderful to have more money for groceries, new shoes, extra-curriculars, and the occasional pizza. And I love that the whole financial weight of the family isn’t just on my husband anymore, not that he resented it.

**I struggle to put this into words because I don’t want to make it sound like God likes me more than some writer whose work hasn’t been profitable, but Wormwood Abbey was written at the end of a gruelling year in which I begged God for encouragement and provision, and I feel it would be dishonest not to acknowledge it in this context. I don’t believe that the creator of the universe is obligated to answer our every request by showering us with material gifts—I believe we are given good gifts each and every day, many of which we ignore. Sometimes those gifts come in the form of the sun rising and oxygen in our lungs, sometimes it is another copy of Wormwood Abbey selling to a reader who likes it. (Or doesn’t, as the case may be. I’m grateful for all of it.)

In one sense, there are no books “like mine,” and that’s why reviewers tend to mash together multiple titles when they try to describe them.

Real examples: It’s Anne of Green Dragon Stables! — Little Women with dragons. — Pride and Prejudice with dragons. — Emma M. Lion with dragons! (You are getting the idea now.) And the one that still haunts me: Little House on the Prairie with Lizards.

The fact is, I’m not sure what readers are wanting exactly when they want “more,” except for more books from me, which I am doing my best to supply.

Recently, in my author newsletter (which you should definitely subscribe to, especially if you want a pretty colouring page, a delicious recipe, and my undying gratitude) I talked about the false burden of Originality.

You see, I am under no illusions that my work is particularly original. I have swum happily in the waters of classic literature since cognition. Some of my earliest memories are cassette tapes of Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows, Narnia, and Jane Austen. I watched the badly-lit BBC A Midsummer Night’s Dream on VHS over and over as a child. (I also watched Disney movies and 1940s screwball comedies, which I’m sure have left a mark as well.)

I’m certain that some of the books I have loved will also be books that some of my readers will love. I am also sure that some will be despised and rejected.

So, humbly, and with trepidation, I present a book list—with caveats.

This is not a list of my favourite books. That list would be longer and stranger, and would include nonfiction and poetry.

This is a list of books that I think may have enough in common with Ormdale that a reader might find something to enjoy. Some of them have found their way into my writing DNA.

Before you race to put them all on your Goodreads TBR because “Christina recommended them,” please ask yourself what you liked about my books and what you are looking for more of.

For instance, if you what you enjoy about my books in a chatty first-person POV from a young Victorian woman who makes literary references, you might like The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, but you may not enjoy the darker Gothic books I’ve recommended here.

To help you, I have separated the titles under themes or moods.

Some readers have written to tell me they appreciate my minimal use of fantasy elements because they consciously avoid books with overt magic use. Others love nothing more than a magic system. I’ve put the books with the most magic elements into a category I’ve called Deeply Magical.

Since many of my readers share books with their children, I’ve marked books I consider suitable for a family audience with an asterisk. If the book is not marked with an asterisk, that does not necessarily mean it is inappropriate. It may have mature content or just be best appreciated by adult readers (for example, I’d listen to an audiobook of The Enchanted April or A Room with a View with children in the room, but these are books certainly not intended for a family audience). Families and readers vary, and I have neither the time nor the calling to make exhaustive content warnings. Check your favourite review sites with content warnings to make an informed choice for you as an individual reader.

One more thing! I confess I did enjoy all of these books tremendously.

Comforting/cozy/whimsical

*The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

*What the Sea Brings by Beverly Twomey

*When Marnie was Here by Joan G. Lindsay

*The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

*The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge

*The Dolls’ House by Rumer Godden

What Comes of Attending the Commoner’s Ball by Elisabeth Aimee Brown

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

A Room with a View by EM Forster

A Coup of Tea by Casey Blair

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (I’m not sure it fits very well in this category but it is a comfort read for me!)

An Episode of Sparrows by Rumer Godden (actually this isn’t any of those things but I love it and I could not figure out which category put it in—imagine The Secret Garden in Postwar London)

Deeply Magical

*The Oakenwylde/No Ordinary Faerie Tale books by Rebecca J Anderson [this series has been published under several titles, but the first book is always titled Knife]

*The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald

*The Magicians of Caprona by Diana Wynne Jones

*The Pinhoe Egg by Diana Wynne Jones

*House of Many Ways by Diana Wynne Jones

*Five Children and It by Edith Nesbit

Masque by WR Gingell

Into the Heartless Wood by Joanna Ruth Meyer

Tea & Wizardry by Joanna Ruth Meyer

Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter by Heather Fawcett

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

The Bells of Paradise by Suzannah Rowntree

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

Memorable heroines

The Legendary Inge by Kate Stradling

The Unselected Journals of Emma M Lion by Beth Brower

The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery

*Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Rich language, feels timeless

Pendragon’s Heir by Suzannah Rowntree

Lady of Weeds by WR Gingell

Chalice by Robin McKinley

The Queen’s Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner

Families working together

*When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr

*Number the Stars by Lois Lowry

*The Railway Children by Edith Nesbit

*The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright

Gothic/dark/suspenseful

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

*Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken

Some Must Watch by Ethel Lina White

The Wheel Turns by Ethel Lina White

Miss Sharp’s Monsters by Suzannah Rowntree

The Heir and the Spare by Kate Stradling

Rain Through Her Fingers by Rabia Gale

Ghost Light by Rabia Gale

The Ivy Tree by Mary Stewart

Crimson Bound by Rosamund Hodge

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Historical fiction

*The Armourer’s House by Rosemary Sutcliff

The Dean’s Watch by Elizabeth Goudge

The King’s Messenger by Susanna Kearsley

A Parcel of Patterns by Jill Paton Walsh

Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis

Victorian Mysteries by Robin Paige (I've only read the first two so far)

Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart

The Brothers of Gwynedd Quartet by Edith Pargeter

Epic fantasy that digs deeply into historical themes

The Shadow Histories by HG Parry

Watchers of Outremer by Suzannah Rowntree

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Question: Christina, why are you here?

I am very much NOT looking to increase my social media presence, so honestly this is a good question that I am asking myself, especially when I had to try and convince Substack 3 x that I am over 16. (It was the morning face and messy bun that finally did it, I think).

Answer: I am here to experiment with a reader chat.

I often feel that I’d love to share little snippets with readers but there is not enough time/space in my monthly author newsletter and I’d love to be able to share little videos about where I am in my writing life without introducing myself every time (Instagram reels are somewhat geared to new followers, I’ve found).

So far, I have no idea how to start themed chats, but when I figure out it, if you have subscribed, we will be able to chat. I hope.