Francesca's Thoughts

Hello! Happy Halloween/five year anniversary of the return of My Chemical Romance to all who celebrate.

I’m quite excited to announce that Rotting Trees will release as an ebook and a paperback on 31st January 2025 and you can pre-order it now from all major retailers at a very nice little discount. It will be available from your local bookshops too – just ask them to order it in for collection! Because of the way publishing works – books on prominent display are on prominent display because a publisher paid for the bookshop to spotlight it – you won’t necessarily find a copy on the shelf if you walk into your local Waterstones, but if you request Rotting Trees, they should be able to get it in! Same goes for Toppings and Co, Foyles and your favourite local indie bookshop. If you’re looking for the paperback specifically, use the ISBN 9781838204662 (that’s the unique code for the paperback). Some retailers take a while to pull books through on their online shops so when you search a platform it might not show up until ye distribution gods take their sweet time, but if you manually request it and use that ISBN, booksellers will be able to find it.

If you’re a library rat or have run out of space on your bookshelves, you can also request physical and digital copies to your local library; it’s on BorrowBox, and your library should have an online form for you to request a physical copy. If they don’t, ask at the desk.

As a little added extra, I’m sending everyone who pre-orders a copy of Christmas Calamities, a standalone Bezzina’s Emporium story. Just email me at francescas words [at] outlook [dot] com with a screenshot of your pre-order receipt and I’ll send it over! (Don’t send me any confidential information, I just need the bit of the email that says ‘thanks for your pre-order’.) I would have liked an automatic story-sending system, but this is a one-woman publishing operation, consisting of me, an internet connection and my imaginary personal assistant, Cup. A. Coffee.

Also, while I’m here, I need you all to know I made another little video. It took far longer to make than it will take to watch, so I will be sharing it everywhere, possibly more than once:

For those of you who’ve been watching the weekly read along at the No. 1 Readers’ Club over on Patreon this year and haven’t been sure if you want to commit, the story will wrap up in December so you’ve still got time to join us and read before it’s available for everyone else! As per the rules of talking about my work, here are my GoodReads and StoryGraph links and here are the prologue and first three chapters completely for free. If you’ve got no idea what I’m talking about, here is the info/FAQ post for Rotting Trees that I’ve been updating throughout this year.

Keep an eye on this blog and my newsletter for other updates! Today is also the fifteen year anniversary of this blog, so it is now officially older than I was when I began posting here. It is also the same age as Ariel Scarlet in Rotting Trees. Ariel has better dress sense; this blog has more MCR references.

As always, please ask if you have any questions and thank you to everyone who’s supported Rotting Trees this year. Sophey and Ariel would love to make all of you a cup of tea.

Look after yourselves!

Francesca

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to read my short stories and see behind-the-scenes work, you can sample? the No. 1 Reader’s Club on Patreon for a month with this link. No pressure to stick around! Think of it as trying a miniature dessert with no requirement to eat the whole menu. You can also find me on Ko-fi. Thank you for your support – you’re helping to fund this space and pay for other costs of running a creative business, like paying editors.

Here are the books I’ve published so far and where you can find them. If you enjoy my book recommendations, browse my Bookshop.org page here.

I’m on social media (reluctantly), via Instagram, Tumblr and Facebook. I prefer my montly-ish newsletter! You can find all my books and my unhinged reviews of books I love on GoodReads and StoryGraph.