How to Support Your Local Jackdaw

Give us crumbs.

... To be fair, if you have local jackdaws, I'm sure they'd love some crumbs. But that's, err, not quite what I meant.

"The book sounds great, but..." is a phrase I'm all-too-used to hearing.
"... it's not really my genre"
"... I don't really read any more"
"... I can't really afford it right now"

Or, alternately:
"Yeah, I loved it! Are you famous yet? Has it made you rich yet? When's the next one coming out?"

And like... I get it, folks. Trust me. My Biology teacher wanted me to proof-read his children's fantasy novel when I was in the middle of A-levels and a mental breakdown, and I still feel guilty about never finishing it. My friend is going through a rough patch and I wish I could buy them a little gift to brighten their day, but I'm just as broke and too far away to give them a huge hug.
But, if you're sincere... Well, there are some other things you can do, y'know? So if you find yourself enjoying my content (and trust me, the Sylvestus Facebook page is a f*cking delight right now), or wanting to generally show support for a tired, anxious corvid who likes to make people happy, but you can't afford to buy Sylvestus or you already bought it and want to do more or you just don't fancy reading it... How about one of these other options?

Tell other people to read it!
"Historical fantasy but also kind of YA but also too mature to be YA and there's quite a bit of gore but also emotion-driven and with some hilarious narrative bits" is a genre that, understandably, isn't for everyone. But if it's not for you, it might be for someone else! A friend who enjoys reading more than you? Give 'em a recommendation! A wannabe-writer who wants to talk about writing, editing, and publishing? Send 'em my way! A teen whose birthday is coming up? Buy 'em a copy! In a digital marketing advertising world, it can be hard to remember that word of mouth is, historically... Okay, I'm not sure what the saying is, but it's like, good, innit?
Plus, "omg my friend is a writer, they just published a book about a Roman dude and a magic tiger death god thing-" is a great conversation starter, and you may quote me on that.

Tell other people to like the Facebook page!
... We do, after all, live in a digital marketing advertising world. I am infinitely grateful to everyone who's liked and followed facebook.com/Sylvestus, and I enjoy keeping it active and exciting. But no number of active exciting updates are gonna sell more copies if they're only going out to people who've already bought a copy, y'know?
Please, share posts you enjoy, tag people who you think might enjoy them, invite friends and family to like the page... Spread the word, and get those algorithms happy! 💕

Buy my other book!
Not a fan of historical fantasy? How about more traditional YA fodder: dystopian sci-fi!
Each Separate Dying Ember is a, well, dystopian sci-fi set in an alternate UK where everyone has wings and three very different protagonists are forced to compete in a gladiatorial-Olympics with fatal stakes. It's weird and great and in my opinion Sylv is just better-written but Dying Ember is still very good and a lot of people's favourite, y'know.
So, if you enjoyed Sylvestus and want more, find Dying Ember on Lulu.com, Amazon... And the links on the side of this page. And if you didn't enjoy Sylvestus, do that anyway, because you might enjoy it more.

Buy from Lulu.com, not Amazon!
I've debated about this one for a while, but hey, better to speak out about things, y'know?
As an independent small-time author slash poet slash zoologist slash server in a nice restaurant, I don't really have a choice but to make my work available on Amazon. Having my books available on the Kindle store is the largest source of business I get, and having the paperbacks up there means that they can be reviewed, and then promoted by Amazon - a huge bonus.
Unfortunately, Amazon is a garbage company run by a billionaire piece of trash, and for every copy they sell, they take 99% of the profits, despite the fact that their staff are underpaid and their printing costs are lower than other sources. Lulu.com is the world's largest independent bookstore; they're helpful, they pay their staff and their authors fairly, and the paper they use to print their books is environmentally-sourced.
If my books weren't available on Amazon, I wouldn't really sell any, to be honest. But if you're here, that means you care enough to want to help, right? I know it's a bit more hassle, but me - and the overworked, underpaid Amazon employees, and the Lulu employees, and... Well, you get it - would be infinitely grateful if you'd consider buying your paperbacks from Lulu, Barnes & Noble, or another independent distributor, and your ebooks from Kobo or Lulu.
Consider it like adopting from a shelter rather than from a puppy farm, except not quite the same because second-hand adoption of my books doesn't get me any money at all and you're still buying a new book.
... Okay, consider it like buying from a local, reputable, responsible, ethical breeder, rather than from a puppy farm. That's a better simile.

Ask your local libraries and independent bookstores to get a copy in!
Libraries have a limited budget, but one of the main ways they decide which books to spend it on when they, a few times a year, get their haul in, is based on what people want to read. If you happen to be passing your local library, maybe hover conspicuously in the YA/fantasy/new books section for a while, then mope over to the desk and (politely) ask if they have Sylvestus by *checks hand* Tatty Anna Web in, you've heard it's really good, and then act incredibly disappointed when they say no. Then make sure to write it down. Then get all your friends to do the same so they think it's the next big thing they have to get their hands on (which of course it is).
The same goes for small independent bookstores. And then you get the added bonus that when they do order it for you, you won't have to pay for the shipping!
As a note - this unfortunately does not work for large chain bookstores such as Waterstone's. I'd have to, like, sit in a meeting with big executives and sign a contract to get them to distribute my book, and I, like... Really don't want to do that. I sort of studied a first year Law Bachelor's for a few months, but only the Equity and Criminal parts, so I don't feel qualified to do that just yet.
(and if you own a small independent bookstore or work in a local library... drop me an email, i guess? emberfell@outlook.com 😘)

Review the book wherever you bought it!
This one's easier lol. If you've already bought your copy, give it a revieeewww. It doesn't even have to be a good review (although that would be preferable)! Any rating, on whichever site you purchased your copy, tells all those complicated website marketing algorithms that people are reading this book, and that they care enough to tell other people what they thought of it. It takes ten seconds, and it's probably the easiest way on this list to help, but also one of the most effective!
 
Buy me a Ko-fi!
Finally, the, err, last resort for helping out your favourite... Okay, I have to be your favourite something, right? Like maybe the jackdaw that made a nest across the street is your favourite jackdaw, and Claire Laminen is your favourite independent author, and your best friend is your favourite broke queer... But there's gotta be some combination of details that I fulfil in a way that makes me your favourite, even if only by process of elimination.
Ko-fi is a website that allows you to send exactly £3 to a content creator you enjoy. It's a nice little way of saying, "Hey, you make me happy; here's a little happiness for you". If you have a little spare cash, if you really enjoyed the book, if you really enjoy the promotional or book-unrelated content I create... Whatever the reason, consider dropping a little something to ko-fi.com/jackdaw_t?

... And keep being ya brilliant selves!
All right, I know it's cheesy, but legit. Receiving messages and comments from people - be it about a post I write, a book I publish, or a video I put up - makes it all worthwhile.

Thank-you for reading this far. Have a beautiful day, and even if it isn't mine, make someone's day a little bit brighter with something you do today 💕

Sylv

I've been... Putting off writing this particular post, I think, at least for a little while. Sylv has been promised and then not delivered over and over again for four dang years - and no casual reader wants to know the explicit traumas and excuses I have for that.
When I was young and bad shit happened, I wrote. Furiously. Passionately. I wrote through the night, in the back of my notebook during school lessons, hiding in the bathroom at family parties because I had all these ideas and this energy and I had to do something with it and it was the most important thing--

I didn't stop writing until pretty much bang on two years ago. And then I did. I just stopped. I wrote maybe a few hundred words in the space of a year. Forced myself back into it, said I was going to finish The Fall, punished myself for not doing it... It wasn't important to me any more. It didn't matter.
I felt like I'd let Sylv down. Like I'd let him go. Thinking about him hurt too much to do anything with. This time last year, I had a fully completed, half-edited novel, just needing a few polishing touches... And I couldn't do it.
Letting myself write other stuff was probably the best thing I did on that front, but really I know it was the personal growth and finding home in one's skin and all such poetic things from the past few posts that really healed it for me.

So, I'm trying to... Articulate it now.
Sylvestus is about a magic island that appears in the middle of the Indian Ocean and the beastly gods which walk upon it. It is about the Roman invasion of that island and one seemingly insignificant man among them. It is about fire tigers and dusty moths and giant bears and sword fights and tribal warriors.
And it's about running away. Reinventing. Starting over.
Aka, what I've become very good at in my life.
And it's about finding home. Turning back. Embracing the hollow space inside yourself and calling your own life your home.
I was so full of hope a few years ago, when I first was writing Sylvestus and knew what it was going to be about. I was discovering myself and other people, falling in first clumsy love, having people tell me they hated me - I had already been through heartbreaking trauma, and I had recovered from it, I had come back, and I was going somewhere. I wrote ~250,000 words in the space of just over a year about the island and the Romans and Sylv - and even as I declared through him that one must come to terms with their trauma and face their own mistakes to truly be at peace, I kept running. I was going somewhere and I didn't know where and it was terrifying.
Which is why the re-write and the drafting and editing of what would become Vol I: The Fall was so impossible.

It won't be easy. I'm not fixed. And he isn't finished. Vol I is finally, truly, ready to be officially released to the public on the 22nd August, 2019 (aka next Thursday). Vol II is, erm... Well, I've written seven and a bit chapters of the first draft, sooo...?
I'm really struggling right now to express how much Sylv means to me. As a character, as a person, as an idea... And yes: as a story and as a book. He was one of many characters I made and wrote for with the creative writing community that I spent most of my teen years in; I only kept writing him because the community had drifted apart when we'd just come up with an awesome storyline I wanted to play through; and then, somewhere along the way... He came to mean so much to me. The original plan we had ended much, much differently. Almost exactly the same on a grand scale, but so unimaginably different in the smallest, and most important, way.

Sylv means a fucking lot to me, y'all. He's not my oldest character. He's not the most like me. He's not the hardest to write or the easiest or my favourite.
But right now, he's the one I needed. And I think this novel is the one I've put more of my heart into than any other. Hours, and drafts, and pain, and anger, and anxieties, and so much love.

So it would mean the world to me if you could support it when Sylvestus Vol I: The Fall comes out on 22nd August, 2019 (yeah, forreal this time. I gave myself less than a week between the announcement and the release date to force myself to not back out).

More details will follow closer to the date (and more art, and the playlist, aaaand...) but for now you can subscribe to this page on the right-hand side, or like the Sylvestus FB page for more frequent updates.
Apologies for the dour tone; it's extremely nerve-wracking to make this announcement for real at last, and it's very... Vulnerable. But I promise this is exciting.

And the novel is very, very good.

A Home in Your Own Skin

It's been a long one. I realised in January that I was done running, done reinventing, done leaving: I was going to learn to stay.

And I have been. I have been working, more than anything else these past few months, to come home to myself.

A home is only a home because of the space inside. We all have that hole in our chest, that empty space in our stomach. We try to fill it with a person who doesn't fit right, a hobby which flickers out when the depression hits, money which will always disappear, vanity which will always come back sour. It's a familiar story: the love stories tell us that only one true romantic love can fill the void; the motivational speeches tell us only pursuing our career passion can; the Bible studies teacher tells us that the ache is a longing for God.

I should backtrack: that last one converted me to Christianity. I still believe it. But I'd spent a fair few years trying to make clumsy prayers and a weekly meeting with people who told me I had to stop being queer to love Jesus properly fill that hole, and that wasn't right either. God was there, but He doesn't fill the hole for us.
So I asked myself, my therapist, my counsellor, the world: how do I fill it?

And the echo came back from the cavern in my stomach:

Why does it need to be filled?

This aching empty space in my chest is as much a part of me as my rising lungs, as my scarred fingers, as my short-sighted eyes. You don't need to fill up the space. A home is only a home because of the space inside.

I'm writing this on a hostel bed in Morocco. Three hours ago I was shaking, trying to hold back tears, forcing myself to recover from the gut-churning shame and terror of being stranded in a foreign city on my own, from the injustice of proving everyone right who had warned me that I was unsafe as a "lone white female", from the dissociation of wondering if this was how I died - disappointing my father after he explicitly told me how not to get robbed and murdered in Morocco - after all the bullshit I'd been through to survive this far.
I showered. I considered my options. I forgave myself. I sat on the roof terrace for a few hours reading. I made a plan to be better prepared next time.
And while I read and considered and recovered, the Muslim call to prayer began to ring through the city.

It feels like a hollow comparison, like it shouldn't be mine to claim. A white queer of Jewish descent, converted in their late teens to Christianity? How dare I find peace in another's religion, another's culture, tradition?
But I did. Every single day in the corner of the library basement where I studied, the call to prayer would come from the dilapidated, unmarked converted-seminar room makeshift Mosque which backed against the window I sat beside. Almost every day, for three years. The same call. The same words. The same intonation. The same song. The same faith. Half a world apart. I hadn't considered that I might miss the call to prayer when I graduated, but I was glad to hear it now.

And wherever I am, I am home.

I'm writing this in the same notebook on a hostel bed in Luxembourg. It's been over a month of traveling, of finding the home in my own skin in an enormous world. There's a thousand stories I could tell, amazing things and weird things and hilarious things and things that were actually upsetting at the time (e.g. nearly drowning in Venice - that's another post), but at the moment I'm just contemplating home.

I'm writing this from a train station floor in Brussels. Trains delayed and cancelled, staff unhelpful, bag too heavy, journey almost over, grades unsatisfactory, heart broken - I've spent weeks exploring every corner of the continent and seeing amazing things, taking problems as they come, but in the end it's news from home that breaks me. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. I've ridden on the back of a scooter through rush hour traffic in Morocco. I've been caught in a Venetian storm huddling in a shaking doorway with an elderly woman who I couldn't bring myself to leave alone. I've watched the sun set and rise in a dozen different cities.

But what was the point of all of it if I'm just gonna get back to the place I live and break open completely again?

It comes to me in my own lamentations.

I sat on the end of a pier in paradise - a deserted island near Borneo, wild jungle behind me and a coral reef below my feet. I watched the sun set between the islands, over the ocean. And as it did, I watched someone... They must have lived on one of the islands. And as I sat and watched, they paddled out in a kayak, into the middle of that empty space between the islands. And they put away their paddle, and they sat in their kayak in the middle of the infinite empty ocean, and they watched the sun set. And then, they paddled home.

I'm writing this from my desk in Swansea. People's hate has done such awful harm. But the world is so wondrous. And it's there, with me. When it becomes overwhelming - these things that are too close to home, the hateful people who live nearby, the nightmares that wake me sobbing, the flashbacks that come in a cold sweat and a flush of itching bones at the wrong moment - I breathe out their cruelty, and I breathe in a sunset over the ocean in Borneo, and a person in a kayak paddling out to watch it every night, and a Venetian storm, and a Moroccan traffic jam, and an ancient Italian woman's withered hands in mine.

I'm writing this from a sunset in Borneo. I hope you find yours.

A home is only a home for the empty space inside -

we do not criticise the sky for

holding nothing but the sky,

do not criticise the stars for hanging in

"empty space",

rather than being printed on the Earth's ceiling.

They say that if our atoms were the size of planets,

there would be more space between each of them

than between the two farthest stars in the galaxy.

Think of that:

galaxies in your body,

between every cell;

that hollow space no more empty than a cloudless night sky;

 your soul infinite,

illuminated by sunsets wrought

in every shade of gold,

a space beautiful for its emptiness,

not a building or person or monument in sight -

just space

and light

and you,

paddling out into the middle of the ocean

every night

to watch the sun set

and know that you are home.

You are home.

(c) Tatiana Webb, 2019

Learning to Stay

My name is Jackdaw, and for the first time in my life, I am trying to learn how to stay.

Of course, my name isn't actually Jackdaw; it's Tatiana. But it's a blog, so animal-based aliases are fine.
The other half of the sentence was accurate, though.
I've gotten very good at reinventing myself over the past few years. I spent my childhood trying to find ways to distance myself from my trauma, from my self-loathing, from my unattractive body and my unkind thoughts. I wished I was brave enough to dye my hair. I wished I was old enough to move out. I put on accents when I was alone around strangers, told Starbucks baristas a different name every time I went, lied about small things - my mother's name, the place I was born, the pets I had grown up with - and revelled in the untruth of it.

I got old enough to move out. I changed my name. I bought my own luxuries. I was brave enough to get a tattoo, if not to dye my hair. I made this blog. I started going to church.
I hated myself.
I moved again. I changed my name again. I gave every part of myself to a new hobby. I took up new sports. I got two more tattoos. I tried dyeing my hair. I had a lot of sex with multiple people. I stopped going to church.
I hated myself.
I changed my name again. I abandoned as much of the things that had dominated my life the year before as I could. I took up new hobbies. I fell hard and fast into true love. I lost everything. My home was taken away from me. My true love left. What I had not discarded withered in my hands.
I hated myself.

I moved again. I drew hundreds of tattoos in my imagination. I bought hair dye. I considered changing my name. I started going to church again. I told a therapist that I didn't know how to fill the void in my chest that had been empty my whole life, and she asked me why I was running so hard away from myself.

And now I'm here.

Not leaving. Not running. Not making a new family. Not carving a new home from an untouched cliffside.
My name is Tatiana, or Jackdaw if you prefer, and in my lifetime I have become very good at learning how to leave. To leave toxic people, to leave bad homes, to leave names that make me cringe, to leave lovers whom I did not love, to leave lovers who loved me wrong. Always making a home in someone else so that I can leave it at a moment's notice. Never being a home for anyone else in case they want to leave me.

And today, I am learning how to stay.