Witch’s Daughter

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

So today is release day for Witch’s Daughter and I’m feeling lazy. You can of course discuss whatever you want in comments. There’s lots of good stuff in the news today, and some weird stuff. (Like when isn’t there.)

Witch’s Daughter was started, I want to say ten years ago, just as the wheels were coming off my ability to work, with a series of illnesses and frankly just coping with the altitude, though I didn’t know it was that. For explanation: Other than sending my auto-immune through the roof (Since we’ve been at low altitude I haven’t needed my inhaler, except when I’m ill with something that brings the asthma up) it seemed to be doing something to my cognition, and I have no idea what. Doesn’t seem to be oxygen, or at least my oxygen measured by the finger thingy never got that low. What I can tell you is that while driving to Las Vegas for the con, if we hit above 6000 feet something happened. First I became very confused, as though drunk, and then at 9000 feet I fell asleep. I could not stay awake. No clue what causes that. Sure it’s a form of altitude sickness, but not sure what.

The problem is our last house in Colorado was on a ridge and over 6000 feet, and apparently I was going… um… Odd. I held it together enough for posts and short stories, but I couldn’t carry the idea through for even short novels.

I started them. I mean, the ideas arrived on schedule and were compelling, but I’d get either to the middle or in the case of Witch’s Daughter about 2/3 in and I’d glitch and couldn’t figure out how to close it.

In the case of WD, as you know, if you follow my substack, I had so many internal contradictions and failure to follow through that I couldn’t close if I tried. It took me racing to the finish, then doing a FULL correction and fixes rewrite. Now it’s actually all working and makes sense. (And yes, I’m going to try that with Winter Prince, done on my substack, too.)

Anyway, I have… well, 10 novels off the top of my head that are half or more done, and I’ve declared this year “The year of finishing everything.” (I actually think more novels are waiting in my files, and that this will turn into the “years of finishing everything.”)

Don’t panic thought, Orphans of the Stars (Second of the Chronicles of Lost Elly) advances. The slow down on that was being sick, not the other novels. I’m treating the other novels as the morning/early stuff, then Orphans.

Anyway, you can treat this as an open thread if you wish, but I’m going upstairs to work on Rhodes to Hell. Right now reading back into it, and cussing myself for all the dead ends I dropped in. Need to clean that up. Also, why didn’t you guys tell me the WORLD is profoundly evil? (World as in the world-build.) Apparently I didn’t notice. I’m not saying I won’t write more. It’s a noir, so the evil is there for the pure of heart to fight against, but yeeech.

For now, I leave you with a book that deserves some press on its release day. (And no, you don’t need to read Witchfinder to get this. Regency with magic, tight close in third person, same as Witchfinder, but in this case only two POVs, a self-contained adventure and much shorter. I hesitate to label it a YA because the series isn’t, but it kind of is.)


Paper editions release tomorrow and the day after.

Witch’s daughter – by sarah A. hoyt

Some letters come from the living. Some come from the dead. This one comes with a formula that turns a rowboat into a miracle.

Seventeen-year-old Lord Michael Ainsling — youngest brother of the Duke of Darkwater, builder of mechanical marvels, survivor of fairyland — receives a letter from a man sixteen years dead. The inventor Tristram Blakley has not perished; he has been imprisoned by his own genius and begs the one mind in all of Avalon brilliant enough to understand his work to set him free. All Michael has to do is find seven missing brothers first and walk a magical path..

Fifteen-year-old Albinia Blakley has spent her whole life under her mother’s iron thumb — and her mother is a witch. The day Al finally escapes down a rope of knotted sheets, she lands in a world she doesn’t recognize, with no money, no magic kit, and no idea that the stranger who catches her is about to become her greatest ally.

Together, a girl with more secrets than she knows and a boy who builds machines that try to murder him must outwit a sorceress, navigate the treacherous courts of Fairyland, and unravel an enchantment years in the making — before a family is lost for good.

Witch’s Daughter is a gaslamp fantasy brimming with wit, warmth, and wonder, for readers who love their magic wrapped in velvet and their adventures served with morning tea.

75 thoughts on “Witch’s Daughter”

  1. Now, I can look forward to “Rogue Magic”. [Very Big Crazy Grin]

    Oh, seriously I’d like Sarah to “have the time” to work on it, but I’m sure that I’ll like whatever else she writes. [Smile]

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            1. I finally figured out how my characters are going to subvert a dungeon: They’re going to offer it SciFi to use as templates.

              Why fight goblins and kobolds when there are Storm Troopers and Klingons out there? Jedi as boss monsters.

              Forget creaky wooden doors. So last millennium. Dungeon doors should make whooshing noises as they open automagically.

              Chapter 12 is underway. It’s fun to look forward to writing. I might actually finish this one.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. tut-tut-tut

                Only monsters get doors that open automagically. Adventurers have to break through. Probably via the keypad.

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                    1. And the technicians responsible for those locks know that their jobs are on the line if the VIPs get locked out of their offices so of course the technicians “have ways” to unlock those locks.

                      Of course, the Rogues know of those ways. [Twisted Grin]

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  3. Congrats on the release!

    PSA for anyone on X: Apparently, Nikita Bier says link “deboosting” is “fixed”. Scare quotes because he says the deboosting was caused by a UI issue making it harder to press buttons on tweets with links, which led to lower engagement. This is supposedly fixed.

    Take it with a grain of salt, but it may be worth a test if you track analytics. Sauce: https://xcancel.com/nikitabier/status/2041911302541730237#m

    Liked by 1 person

  4. Having WAY too much fun reading No Man’s Land. Just finished book 1 yesterday. Now, today in book 2 you have me laughing AND crying through lunch. If Witch’s Daughter is HALF this good it will be an amazing book!!

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      1. I’m working on Orphans as fast as I can. I swear.
        Somewhat discouraged by so many people saying it’s confusing that it’s now an ai generated tag on the first volume on Amazon. Sigh.

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  5. The book was great and I’m glad I didn’t look at the cover too closely before I read it so my imagination was not “ reigned in “ while reading that part. That being said, the cover pretty much is what I was imagining except her hair isn’t tousled enough, lol. And the steed wasn’t quite as fierce as I imagined ;-p

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    1. Yep. It was the closest I could get the art, but yes.
      And thank you. Leave review on Amazon?
      I need to put it wide, but haven’t yet. Since I’ve been writing on Rhodes all day so far.

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        1. By the way, notice its feet. Those feet are for swimming.

          By the way, these critters can be found in British folklore.

          Liked by 1 person

  6. Amazon autodownloaded to the three active Kindles (including the one that hits official end of life in May).

    Just got an 8″ Fire to replace the old one, and all but one book successfully downloaded. (And it’s also missing on the newish Fire 10.) Now to dig deep in the “customer service” menus. Seems to be a lot easier with physical stuff. Sigh.

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  7. Anyway, I have… well, 10 novels off the top of my head that are half or more done, and I’ve declared this year “The year of finishing everything.”

    I only have three, but haven’t written anything for a few weeks except doodle on an old short story. Spending most of my time trying to get SSH ready for that copyeditor you told me about, Sarah.

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    1. Huh. Possibly related, I noticed the BBC hasn’t had much updated China news on its main news site for over a week and a half. One story a day, if that, unlike other countries and regions. I know the BBC isn’t the greatest news website around, but the slow down caught my eye a few weeks ago.

      Make of it what you will.

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    2. I don’t know whether the population is closer to 4 00 million or 16 00 million.

      (I’m not a China expert.)

      I have heard a lot of things, but I have explicitly been trying to assume, for the last 5-10 years, that I cannot back things out to the actual truth.

      I suspect that we have had another round of biological weapon, and that going after Iran has basically prevented any invasion of Taiwan through at least fall.

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      1. From what I’ve seen in the blogosphere and other sources Taiwan is a tough nut to crack.

        It’s distance (90 miles+) from the mainlaind presents some logistical issues. The landing beaches are limited and the geography around the beaches (hilly and mountainous) mean breaking out from a landing will be harder than say the breakouts from Normandy beaches in WWII. There are also some large tides at some beaches. You can make landings at beaches like that (e.g. Inchon/Incheon in the Korean War) but you get VERY restricted in your landing windows. On top of that weather in the Straight of Taiwan and the South China Sea can be VERY nasty (LIke North Atlantic nasty) much of the year, There are windows in the Spring and fall that are better, but that also has to match with tidal states. You also like to get an airhead near the manufacturing sites to get quick control of them and prevent Taiwan from destroying the chip sites (which are one of the main purposes of this). But the suitable airports are well away from your beachheads and isolated from them via very rough terrain. Keeping those airborne troops supplied until the folks from the beachhead get there is a hard problem.

        This would be a challenging task for a professional highly skilled armed forces (say US DOD circa mid 90’s). Xi has been playing at being Stalin (or Perhaps Obama) and clearing the ranks of the flag officers and slightly lower via retirement, sacking and the occasional 9mm brain hemorrhage lest someone get the idea of a military coup. Add to this that Taiwan is cognizant of these invasion goals and has had 70+ years to provision against them. Taking them is kind of like trying to invade Switzerland but with Switzerland surrounded by the ocean. China MIGHT try to add a distraction by hinting to North Korea this would be a good time to surge south. Not sure how much North Korea listens to China and how insane their military actually are.

        I think China also needs the US/Japan/Australia to be unwilling to intervene. In 2023/2024 during Biden they essentially had all 3 cowed. These days Japan and The US are looking like more of an issue though Australia is a big question both in capability and intent. They missed their best window. Given their population decline they may not be able to wait too much longer. Expect them to be VERY active for the Democrat side com 2028 and to also do everything they can to sow dissension in the US/Japan interactions or provide distractions in the Asia sphere.

        It’s going to be a spicy decade or so in that part of the world until Xi and his puppets fade away. If the feces hit the whirling blades for Xi, he might just roll the dice and try some crazed Taiwan operation, maybe even just trashing chip manufacturing. We really need manufacturing in a place far more defensible than Taiwan.

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    3. well, factory wages are reported down to $2US an hour from about $7US. Fuel prices are insane having more or less doubled in the last month. So called dim sum debt, RMB debt issued outside the PRC proper, mostly HK is skyrocketing and the PRC remains the most indebdet country on earth with very high levels of non performing loans. THe banking system continues to sell at bankruptcy levels of book value.

      as for why you’re not seeing reports, Chinese state media has stopped providing them, hence BBC and Bloomberg, etc, have nothing to say because they do not have any independent reporting on China, really no one does, I look at prices and snippets of news. ITs like reading Pravda back in the day.

      There’s a great meme floating around showing Freddy from Scooby Doo pulling the mask of a perp labeled The Economist and finding g Global Times, the PRC state media. Sums it all up.

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        1. latest report is the CCP is “detaining” the few foreign journalists that remain.

          China has real trouble. It’s a pressure vessel with the safety valve screwed down too tight just waiting to go boom. Were I to wake up tomorrow to the traditional “and then everybody dies” headline out of China I would not be in the least surprised. slowly, the all at once,

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    4. I’m no expert, but I imagine China’s gotten very concerned about petroleum. We’ve shut them out of Venezuela, Siberia is a mess, and now Iran’s supply is locked away and their whole system faces a shutdown with no easy restart.

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    5. I’m no longer any kind of expert (it’s almost 20 years since I was invited not to stay in China), but it definitely sounds likely and possible, based on everything I do know. PRC has been trying to do an economic Wile E. Coyote and walk out onto thin air pretending it’s solid ground. Sooner or later, gravity will kick in. What’s reported in that thread could be part of gravity kicking in, for sure.

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  9. Also, why didn’t you guys tell me the WORLD is profoundly evil? (World as in the world-build.)

    When you read the Harry Potter series for the second time, you start to notice how much worldbuilding J.K. Rowling was doing “on the fly”, introducing things into her third or fourth or fifth books that cause plotholes in earlier books. For example, in book one it’s a plot point that Dumbledore is on his way to the Ministry of Magic by broom and can’t be reached for several critical hours. Later books introduce multiple ways of instant travel, including fireplace-based teleportation via floo powder, and apparition which is just straight-up teleportation. So why didn’t Dumbledore just teleport to the Ministry of Magic in book one? Fanfic authors retelling the plot of book one have to come up with all kinds of explanations (the floo network at Hogwarts was on the fritz, or he didn’t like the way they summoned him and was taking the slow method of travel to make a point, or something) to work around the plot hole. (Because the fanfic authors want to stay Watsonian; if they went Doylist they could just say “Rowling hadn’t invented floo powder yet so it didn’t exist” but that would break the immersion of the fanfic).

    Why do I mention that? Because another thing that slowly gets revealed over time in the Harry Potter books is just how evil the world is. Not only is the Ministry of Magic thoroughly infiltrated by agents of a terrorist organization, even the ones who aren’t terrorists often sympathize with the terrorists’ stated goals (the whole “blood purity” thing). The government is perfectly willing to throw people into a torture-for-life prison without a trial, resulting in an innocent man being locked up in there (even if he looked guilty as sin, a simple Veritaserum interrogation would have proved his innocence, and that’s not. That. Hard). Shoot, just the existence of dementors is a horror. The currently-elected Minister is a complete idiot who follows whoever bribed him the best, meaning the entire government is in the pockets of the well-funded terrorists. And on top of that, there are people like Umbridge (one of the best villains in literature, because she’s not out to conquer the world, she’s just a petty, vindictive, spiteful, thoroughly-bigoted bureaucrat) who aren’t connected to the terrorists (though it’s amazing how many fanfics portray her as a secret Death Eater or at least sympathizer, because of her bigotry against pretty much everything and everyone: Veela, werewolves, giants, muggleborn, you name a group other than “pureblooded wizards” and she’s bigoted against them).

    None of which Rowling had figured out when she wrote the first book. It happened around book three or four, when she started introducing more and more worldbuilding elements, and fleshing out how things like dementors worked, and how many people in the government were in the pockets of the Death Eaters. Her world is thoroughly evil, and Harry and his friends are up against the full power of an oppressive government — but she didn’t even know that when she started writing Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

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    1. It’s funny. You can see the same pattern in some shonen anime, which clearly evolved from some mangaka’s high school doodles. Then the story gets traction and they have to figure out how to smooth over all the weird world-building choices and busted power scaling.

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    2. Her lack of worldbuilding was obvious to this reader on the first read. Still enjoy the heck out of the books, but there was stuff that was much more obvious than what you state.

      Like, if the entire magical population of Britain is a few thousand, as she establishes, and there is (IIRC) one all-wizard/magic municipality, then how in bloody blazes is Arthur Weasley so ignorant of muggle ways? She was definitely throwing in ideas that seemed fun to her without working through implications for the first three books. (And, honestly, really, right up to the end.)

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      1. I love how you can see her scramble to come up with something for the finale in the back half of Book 6. “Uh…horcruxes!” Fun series, not the tightest plotting or lore.

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        1. No, some of the stuff was clearly clear in her mind from the outset. Certainly, she paced them a bit oddly, but the fact that Harry and Nagini were horcruxes wasn’t backfilling, it was set up and foreshadowed from early on. Now, perhaps she didn’t hit upon the name “horcrux” until late, but the function was there from early on.

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          1. I read it casually a long time ago, so I’ll defer to your judgment, but that was the impression I got at the time. Harry fits well, Tom’s diary makes sense but doesn’t feel planned, but a couple felt like last-minute filler.

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        2. I’m not so bothered by horcruxes — they made sense, and I felt that there was plenty of build-up to them –but what really threw me for a loop was “Ok, we had a Book 6 Cliff Hanger and Clear Goal to find all the horcruxes, so let’s make Book 7 mostly about these “Deathly Hallows” that aren’t mentioned until Book 7, and almost, but not quite, derail the search for the horcruxes.”

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          1. I’m mixed on the hallows. They kind of come out of nowhere, but the wand was plot-critical and the cloak was a cute use of an existing item. (Even if the “All other forms of invisibility are not True Invisibility” thing was a kludge to make it special. Assuming I’m remembering that detail correctly.)

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          2. The fundamental problem with Book 7 was that our trio really had no good way to look for the horcruxes.

            They could have done better, they could have sat down the first day and drawn up all that they knew, and then they could have tried to guess, but they were blundering about a coalmine at midnight looking for a black cat.

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    3. It has some nasty plot holes. For instance, because Arthur Weasley is the Secret Keeper for his family, and Bill for his own home, either James or Lily could have been for themselves. Sirius would have urged it himself, because he was endangering his life every day working for the Order.

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  10. Book is bought. Thank you!

    FWIW I love Witchfinder – I think it is time to read that one again, for what, the 3rd or 4th time? ;-)

    Liked by 1 person

  13. Ms Hoyt, I’d LOVE to have you as a neighbor, life would be SO much more interesting instead of the current white bread hum drum here.

    BUT, if you’re prone to altitude illness, DON’T move to SLC. Average altitude is approximately 4000-4500 feet, and goes up as you go through the mountains (Park City 7000-10,000 ft).

    So, I’ll wave a fond hello from me to you, wherever you live. TTFN

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  14. Sometimes a Bus accident is a bus accident.

    (I have seen the headline, but have not looked into it.)

    (DC.)

    Main point is that the politics of now make this something that can be blown entirely out of proportion.

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  15. Something to check – in my download from Amazon, the first chapter (where Michael gets a gift from the servants) is missing. I thought at first it was an intentional cut, but the gift is mentioned in a late scene, so it’s most likely an error.

    Anyone else see this?

    Liked by 1 person

    1. That chapter wasn’t in the eARC so I imagined that Sarah deliberately omitted it.

      And yes, the gift was mentioned later.

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      4. You realize, old friend, this will forever be known as “the time I gave the writer a heart attack.”
        Thank heavens this is not trad pub. I’d be stuck.
        And Michael is right. Without the first chapter, the scene in the middle is just odd. WHY SNUFF?

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    3. Fixed. Should appear in your Kindle when they approve it. Honestly. This is worse than the other thing I did while sick: yes, leave the kettle on and go outside to weed.

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    4. I thought it was dropped in order to open with Albinia for the sake of in media res. Not a choice I would have made, but nobody asked me–and nobody should have. But I will be happy to see it restored.

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      2. Switching the first and second chapters could have worked; the second chapter’s start is a very strong opening paragraph, and going from Albinia falling off the skyscraper to Michael finding Tristam’s letter at breakfast and being perplexed sharpens the cliffhanger.

        But leaving out the first chapter makes the moment when Michael opens the snuffbox a complete asspull. (Why does Michael carry a snuffbox when he doesn’t take snuff? Oh, it’s a gift? OK, but why didn’t he leave it at home? Et cetera.)

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  16. Had these altitude problems a while back, but my limit was 1300 metres.

    Turned out I had lung parasites that I’d picked up from a friend’s new pet (and they didn’t tell me how new).

    Pyrantel pamoate in nasty aftertaste vanilla plus some albendazole did the trick, and the pyrantel part is OTC in the US.

    Drove near Aldous Huxley’s old place in the desert and thought he was reaching out to me with trippiness.

    No, just nasty crap in my lungs.

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  18. As to the Other Rhodes world being profoundly evil … isn’t that what the noir world is about?

    《down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything.》

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    1. But of course, she was meant to take the Path.

      If she wasn’t, Sarah wouldn’t have written about her taking that Path. [Very Big Crazy Grin]

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