I recently joined the multi-genre publishing cooperative Book View Café. Starting in 2016, I’ll be bringing out ebook versions through BVC of what I hope will eventually be my entire list of fiction publications, starting with my novel Bear Daughter.

I’m really pleased to have been accepted into Book View Café, a company of many very fine writers. They include award-winners and bestsellers, old friends and people I know only through their fiction. One is my childhood literary hero Ursula K. LeGuin — who is also one of BVC’s bloggers. The cooperative model, which gives writers control over production as well as 95% of the cover price, is an empowering one, although it comes with considerable responsibility as well, not least responsibility to one’s fellow members.

I don’t have any publication dates yet but I’ll be posting here as soon as I do.

According to William Smith’s classic 1875 tome, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (John Murray, London), ancient Greek botanomanteia was “divination by writing one’s own name on herbs and leaves, which were then exposed to the wind, &c.” Phyllomancy is my neologism (maybe) for writing words onto plant leaves, or leaves of paper, and letting the wind blow them away. Maybe it’s a pessimistic metaphor for the writer’s life, but the thing is you don’t have control of your words after you release the pages from your hands. And the image of wind in the leaves is a happy one. (I’ve spelled it filomancy so it doesn’t seem so much like divination by means of Greek pastry, although that would be a happy form of divination too, if you could eat it afterwards.)