From Hoards to Hearths didn’t start as a novel. It started as a sourdough starter named Eustace, who lived on my counter through a long November and refused to die no matter how much I neglected him.
Most days I’d feed him, then sit at the kitchen table with a notebook and write whatever came up. By the end of the month I had a town in my notebook called Briarwell — bread and iron and rain on warm stone — and a dragon who had just fallen out of the sky and didn’t know how to hold a spoon.
Bread as plot
There’s a thing that happens when you bake the same loaf enough times. The dough starts telling you what it wants. You stop measuring by cups and start measuring by feel. You learn the difference between needs more time and needs more salt by the texture under your hand.
Writing cozy fantasy turned out to be a lot like that. Kit’s story came together one rise at a time. There were proofing stages — long stretches where nothing seemed to happen and I had to trust it was working anyway. There were the days the dough went flat and I started over with a new beginning.
What the town wanted
Briarwell surprised me. I’d written it as a backdrop — somewhere quiet for a falling dragon to land — and the longer I worked, the more the village pushed back. The blacksmith handed Kit a hammer instead of an explanation. The innkeeper remembered she takes porridge with extra honey. By the third draft, half the book was really about them, with Kit as the lens.
That’s the thing about cozy fiction, I think. The setting isn’t furniture. It’s a character. Sometimes it’s the loudest character in the room — and in Briarwell, it turned out a hoard didn’t have to glitter. It could just be the people who remember how you take your porridge.
The bread came back
The bread refused to stay a metaphor. It worked its way so far into the world that it became its own little story — More Bread, a standalone short about the morning a former dragon bakes the whole town’s loaves alone. It’s my free welcome gift to new readers, and honestly it’s the most Eustace thing I’ve ever written.
If you’d like it, it’s yours — grab More Bread free. Eustace, for the record, is alive and well.