I have been quiet on the newsletter front lately, and I owe you an explanation. The truth is that my brain needed a change of scenery. After the intensity of finishing and launching Magic Sword, I found myself drawn toward something different: quieter, more analytical, a little less chaotic than Nora’s world tends to be.

So I started writing a cozy mystery.

Not quite a fantasy this time. No gargoyles, no sentient stationery, no magical detectives. Just a good old-fashioned cozy mystery with a puzzle at its heart and a protagonist who likes to think things through carefully. There is, however, a village. A village her mother left and never spoke of again. A village where people go missing in ways that defy explanation. And where magic, it turns out, is not quite as fictional as she had always assumed.

I thought it was ready. I even said so out loud, which was clearly a mistake. I decided a final read-through and of course discovered few more plot holes. This is the particular joy of cozy mysteries: so many moving parts, so many threads to keep track of, so many moments where a character apparently teleports from one room to another without anyone noticing. And don’t get me started on the colour of the cat’s eyes… We are nearly there though. Nearly.

Back to the final pages,

Leena 🙂

P.S. And yes — Magical Midlife Detectives #4 is also quietly taking shape in the background. Nora has not been forgotten. She would not allow it.

P.P.S. The Nephilim Quest series is also in my store and of course on Amazon if ancient Egypt, mythology, and secrets older than history are more your speed right now.

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📧 Forward this to someone who loves a cozy read with just a touch of magic and a village full of secrets.

I say this not to minimise what is happening, but because history has a way of putting things in perspective. As someone who spent years studying ancient Egypt, I think about this often. In ancient Egypt, only around one to two percent of the population could read and write at all, so there was no need to hide literature from the masses. The control happened much earlier than that. The pharaoh controlled what was written in the first place. Lost a battle? It was never recorded. Only victories existed. Only the pharaoh’s perfection, carved in stone for eternity.

The inconvenient things were simply never allowed to become words.

What ordinary life actually looked like, we know largely thanks to one unusual place, namely Deir el-Medina, the village of the workers who built the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Because they needed to be literate for their work, they left us something rare: notes, letters, complaints, poems, laundry lists. The texture of real human lives. Everyone else, if they needed something written, went to a scribe.

The pharaoh did not need to ban anything. He controlled the pen.

Fast forward a few thousand years and here we are. Last year alone, over five thousand books were banned from libraries across the United States. Not by concerned parents sitting around a kitchen table. No, over ninety percent of challenges now come from organised pressure groups and government officials. This is not grassroots concern. This is a campaign.

A significant share of the books targeted feature characters who are LGBTQ+, or Black, or brown. Works by Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume. Books that tell certain readers: your story is worth telling.

That is apparently what some people find dangerous.

Living here in Finland, I found myself wondering whether we had ever had our own version of this. And it turns out we had. Between 1944 and 1946, the Soviet part of the allied control commission demanded that Finnish public libraries remove over 1,700 books from circulation — any title deemed anti-Soviet. Bookstores were handed catalogues of what was no longer permitted. The books were not burned, and owning one was not a crime, but reprinting or distributing them was forbidden. A quieter kind of erasure, but erasure nonetheless.

And there is a detail I cannot quite get over: one of the books on Finland’s own banned books list was Mika Waltari’s The Egyptian. A Finnish classic set in ancient Egypt. Given my own Egyptology background, that one landed rather close to home.

Most of the restrictions were lifted by 1958, though the shadow of it lingered for decades. Some films remained banned well into the 1980s, and the last politically banned film was not officially released in Finland until 2006. That’s fifteen years after the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.

I have been thinking about what it means to write a book knowing this is the world it enters. Every story is, in some small way, an act of faith. That somewhere, a reader needs exactly this. That the connection between a book and the person who finds it at the right moment is real.

Books do not survive because they are powerful. They survive because readers refuse to let them go.

The theme of Banned Books Week this October is “Let Books Be. Protect the Freedom to Read.” I cannot think of a better way to honour that than to keep reading widely, keep buying books from authors whose voices someone somewhere would prefer to silence, and keep spreading the word about them.

Your reading life is, quietly, a political act. I hope you enjoy every page of it.

With books in hand and history on my mind,

Leena 🙂

P.S. If you would like to know which books are currently most challenged in the United States, the American Library Association publishes the full list at ala.org. It makes for sobering reading.

P.P.S. If the idea of hidden knowledge, controlled narratives, and ancient secrets appeals to you: my Nephilim Quest series might be exactly what you are looking for. You can find it in my store and of course on Amazon.

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📧 Forward this to someone who loves books and believes they should be free.

We have been living with artificial intelligence for longer than most of us realise. The spellcheck in your word processor, the autocorrect on your phone — these have been quietly part of our writing lives for years, and nobody has been particularly alarmed by them. Because they are tools. They make the small tasks easier and leave the important work to us.

I have been thinking about this lately, because I recently started using AI for some of the duller parts of running an author business. Bookkeeping, for instance. For years I have done it by hand, in notebooks. And then it occurred to me that this is exactly the kind of task where a little help is welcome — time spent on receipts and expenses is time I am not spending writing. And writing is the point.

But then there are the advertisements I keep seeing everywhere.

One payment, and you receive 100 ready-made story prompts. Pick your genre, click a button, and out comes a book. Fast, easy, done.

I genuinely wonder what those books are like to read.

A story is not its plot summary. It is knowing why your character would walk through a burning building for one person and not for another. It is the world that needs to feel like it existed before page one and will continue after the last. It is the scene that goes somewhere you did not expect, because the character simply would not have done it any other way. I have just spent an entire month planning Magical Midlife Detectives #4 before writing a single word of it. The first draft of the first chapter took me almost 20 hours to write. I keep a log of my writing hours, and the number is humbling every time. (And this is also why I haven't sent that many newsletters.)

Amazon is filling with what readers have started calling AI-spam. Books that look like books but feel like nothing. And the saddest part is what it does to trust — a poorly written story must be AI, people say. But then a well written one? Surely that is AI too. It is a strange and dispiriting place for authors to find themselves.

One of the funniest and saddest reviews I got for Magical Midlife Detectives #1, Magic Diary, was someone saying they were tired of "this AI spam." Interesting in itself, as I wrote the story before AI was even a thing — as a work in progress, on my website, to see if readers would be interested in it. I got so many subscribers wanting to be notified when a new chapter was out that I decided to publish it. Written entirely by me. Edited by two human editors. And someone still decided to reach for the fashionable accusation of the moment.

I am not against technology. I am against the idea that a story is something to be generated rather than lived through — by the writer first, and then by the reader.

And as you can see, I often use AI to create illustrations for my newsletter — Midjourney and Canva. I have had my own paintings exhibited here in Finland and abroad, but I simply do not have the time to illustrate every newsletter myself. As long as nobody thinks I am pretending otherwise, I hope that is something you can forgive.

Still writing the old-fashioned way — one hour at a time,

Leena 🙂

P.S. If you have ever picked up a book that felt somehow hollow — like the lights were on but nobody was home — you may already know exactly what I am talking about.

P.P.S. The month I spent planning MMD #4 was one of the most enjoyable months of my writing life. The best part of writing is still the thinking.

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📧 Forward this to a fellow reader who knows within three pages whether a book has a real human heart in it..

It is a strange and wonderful thing.

On Tuesday, I sat down to write you a letter, and discovered that the publication process had squeezed me entirely dry. Not a word would come. So I made another cup of coffee, closed the laptop, and gave myself permission to simply exist for a day or two.

I promise the next letter will not be about the Magical Midlife Detectives series. There are other things on my mind — and other stories demanding attention once my brain starts to function again. I think I am a bit ADHD when it comes to writing books. I am usually writing several at the same time. When I get bored writing one, I jump to another and so on.

But today, one more time: Magic Sword.

When I started writing this series, I had a plan. I knew the tone, the characters, the general shape of where things were going. What I did not plan was Greek mythology walking through the door uninvited.

And yet here we are.

A certain ancient lady with snake hair decided she belonged in the story and wrote herself in with complete confidence. I will say no more than that — but if you have ever read a myth and thought she deserved better, you might find the Magical Midlife Detectives series satisfying (especially if you don’t mind some midlife humour).

That is the thing about writing that never stops delighting me. You think you are in charge. You are not.

If you have been waiting for the full series before diving in — your moment has arrived. Magic Diary, Magic Shield, and Magic Sword are all on Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited.

The paperback is coming soon too — I am waiting for my author copy to check the quality before releasing it. I will let you know the moment it is available.

Thank you for being here. And thank you for reading.

Leena 🙂

P.S. She who writes herself into stories uninvited is, in my experience, always the most interesting character in the book.

P.P.S. The laptop is open. The coffee is hot. Something new is beginning.

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📧 Forward this to someone who would absolutely side with the snake-haired lady.

That is all that stands between now and the moment Magic Sword goes out into the world and stops being mine.

It is a strange feeling, these final days before a book releases. The writing is done. The editing is done. The cover exists and the preorder link is live. I could have published immediately — but experience has taught me that I always find something I want to tweak in those last days. So I gave myself the gift of time, and one more careful read before I have to lock the text on Amazon for good. It feels like the right thing to do for Nora. And for you.

And then there is genuinely nothing left to do but wait. My mind keeps circling back to wondering how readers will find her in this third adventure. Which moments will land. Whether Chapter 25 — the Toledo heist, also known as the Night of the Jelly Skeleton — will make you laugh as hard as it made me laugh writing it. This is not a series for the serious reader. I say that with great affection and absolutely no apology.

I always fall a little in love with my characters. Nora especially. She arrived in my imagination carrying twenty years of being made to feel small — her confidence quietly chipped away until she had almost stopped noticing. And then magic showed up, uninvited, and she had to start finding out who she actually was underneath all of that. I find her quietly extraordinary.

I hope you do too.

You can preorder Magic Sword right here.

If you have been meaning to start the Magical Midlife Detectives series and haven’t yet — these two weeks are your moment. Magic Diary and Magic Shield are both on Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited, and May 18th has a way of arriving faster than expected.

Trying not to watch the calendar,

Leena 🙂

P.S. I believe humour is one of the most underrated things a book can offer. To laugh out loud while reading — really laugh, not just smile politely — is a rare and wonderful thing. I always try to give Nora at least a few of those moments.

P.P.S. The moment I submitted Magic Sword, a character from another story entirely tapped me on the shoulder and said: right, my turn. I am rather enjoying listening to her.

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📧 Forward this to someone who appreciates a good jelly skeleton.

The final editing stages of a book have a way of swallowing everything else whole. The past weeks have been nothing but Nora, Magic Sword, and the quiet, absorbing work of turning a manuscript into something ready for the world. Newsletters, notes, updates — all of it had to wait.

But it was worth it.

I am thrilled to tell you that Magical Midlife Detectives #3 / Magic Sword is now available for preorder on Amazon as an ebook, and it will be in Kindle Unlimited. The release date is May 18th, so not long now!

Preorder Magic Sword HERE

The paperback is coming too. I will release it once the ebook is live and I have had a chance to check my author copy and make sure it meets my standards. I will let you know the moment it is available.

There is something a little surreal about seeing a story that lived only in my head, and then only in a document full of scribbled corrections, suddenly exist as a real book with a cover and a page and a link you can click. Nora’s third adventure is on its way, and I could not be more excited to finally share it with you.

And now that Magic Sword is out of my hands and into the world’s, I get to do my favourite thing — write. The stories that have been patiently waiting while I edited are calling me back, and I am very happy to answer.

With love and a great sense of relief,

Leena 🙂

P.S. If you haven't yet met Nora, books #1 Magic Diary and #2 Magic Shield are both on Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited. A perfect time to catch up before Magic Sword arrives.

P.P.S. And yes, there are other stories brewing. A cozy fantasy village with some very unusual residents. An ancient Egyptian dynasty with secrets worth keeping. More on both when the time is right. 😊

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📧 Forward this to someone who thinks midlife is too late for magic. They need to meet Nora.

I had planned the story, knew where it was going, kept track of the characters and their lives. And then I sat down to do the final editing pass — and discovered that the book had quietly been doing its own thing all along.

A character walks into a room through a door that, three chapters earlier, I apparently forgot to put in the wall. Someone’s eye colour changes halfway through. A plot thread I introduced with great confidence in chapter four wanders off somewhere around chapter nine and never quite comes home. A conversation that absolutely had to happen... didn’t.

This is the part of writing nobody warns you about.

And yet — I love it.

There is something deeply satisfying about the editing process, once you stop being embarrassed by your own blunders. It is detective work, in a way. You are reading your own story as a stranger might, and slowly, carefully, you are polishing something rough into something real. Each small fix makes the whole thing a little more alive. Each continuity twitch you catch is a tiny victory.

The draft is where the story exists. The edit is where it becomes a book.

Magic Sword — Magical Midlife Detectives #3 — is deep in that process right now, and I can feel it taking its final shape. And speaking of final shape... I made a little something. Have a look.

Back to the editing cave,

Leena 🙂

P.S. If you haven't yet met Nora and the gang — books #1 Magic Diary and #2 Magic Shield are both waiting for you on Amazon. A good month to catch up before Magic Sword arrives.

P.P.S. I should confess that Magic Sword is not the only story I have been living in lately. I have always written two or three books at a time — when my brain needs a rest from one story, I slip into another for a day or two and let my subconscious quietly chew on the one that is resting. Right now, alongside Nora and her adventures, there is Ellie, who has found herself in a very unexpected village with some very unusual residents. And there is another story altogether — ancient Egypt, the early 18th Dynasty, and a world I have been wanting to write for a very long time. More on both when the time is right. 😊

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📧 Forward this to a fellow reader who loves a behind-the-scenes peek at how books are made.

You build the faces of my characters. Not the ones I imagined, but your own version, assembled from people you have known, faces you have loved, strangers you once passed on the street. You build the rooms they move through, the light that falls through the windows, the smell of the air. You hear their voices in a register I never specified.

You bring everything you are to every page.

This means that the book you read is genuinely not the same book your friend read, or your sister, or the person sitting next to you on the train. We all hold different versions of the same story. Different views of who the characters really are. Some imagine vast open landscapes where I only wrote “fields.” Some cry at a scene I thought was almost ordinary, and breeze past the one I agonised over for weeks.

It used to surprise me. Now it moves me.

Because what it means is that writing is never a solo act. It is a collaboration — one that starts the moment a reader opens the cover. I build the skeleton, lay down the words, make the choices about what to show and what to leave in shadow. But you bring the story to life. You are the one who makes it real, who fills the silence between the lines with your own imagination.

Every book is finished by its reader.

So if you have ever felt something reading one of my books, if a character felt like an old friend, if a world felt like somewhere you had actually been — know that you made that. I gave you the map, but you walked the roads yourself.

Thank you for being my collaborator. I could not do this without you.

Until next time — and thank you for reading,

Leena 📚

P.S. I would genuinely love to know — what do my characters look and feel like in your mind? I suspect they look nothing like mine.

P.P.S. Magical Midlife Detectives #3 Magic Sword is halfway through the edits and the cover is finished — so it is on its way. If you would like to start from the beginning, books #1 Magic Diary and #2 Magic Shield are both on Amazon.

Click HERE to get the books on Amazon

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📧 Forward this to someone who once saw a film adaptation of a beloved book and thought: "No. That's not what they looked like at all."

Dozens of them. Research papers for her books, handwritten notes, personal belongings. The kind of accumulation that happens quietly over a lifetime, and then lands in someone else’s hands all at once. It is slow, tender, sometimes overwhelming work and it has made me think about what any of us actually leave behind when we go.

I read an article this week that touched on the same question. The idea that our possessions outlive us, that they pile up, that someone eventually has to decide what any of it means.

But here is what my Egyptology studies keep whispering to me.

The ordinary people of ancient Egypt left almost nothing. No grand tombs, no golden masks. If they were lucky, they were laid in the desert floor with a small clay cup beside them, or a little figurine. That was it. That was the whole material record of a human life. And yet we know them — because of the things they wrote. Poems. Laundry lists. Work rotas scratched onto stone chips. Letters to each other on scraps of papyrus. Wisdom literature that tells us what they valued, what frightened them, what they hoped for.

The objects rot. The words remain.

Which brings me to books.

I think about my mother’s papers differently now. The research, yes — but also the books she read, the ones she kept, the ones she wrote. They are a map of her interior world in a way that no object ever could be. And I think this is true of all of us. Our books — the ones we choose to read, the ones we underline, the ones we return to again and again — are a time capsule. Not just of facts or stories, but of values. Beliefs. The particular shape of a mind.

We worry sometimes about what we leave behind. Whether it matters. Whether anyone will remember.

But I wonder if the better question is: what are we writing, collecting, making right now — that will tell the people of the future who we really were?

A clay cup. A papyrus fragment. A book with a cracked spine and pencil marks in the margins.

It turns out the small things carry everything.

From somewhere between the ancient world and a pile of boxes,

Leena 🙂

P.S. If you have ever stood in front of someone else's boxes wondering what to keep, you are not alone. And if you have ever underlined a sentence in a book and thought "yes, exactly" — congratulations, you are already leaving something worth finding.

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📧 Forward this to someone who thinks about what stories we leave behind.

I always let a draft sit for a few days before I touch it again. Fresh eyes catch things tired ones miss, and right now I’m a little too close to it to spot the blunders. So it’s resting, and so am I.

In the meantime, I’ve been poking around with NotebookLM. I uploaded my entire Nephilim Quest series to it and asked it to generate a podcast — two voices discussing the books as if they’d just read them. It was a strange and fascinating experience, a bit like overhearing someone else talk about your own life.

What surprised me most was where they put their focus. They zeroed in on Elijah and Merit’s relationship as the emotional heart of the series. Which is interesting, because when I was actually writing those books, my attention was mostly on Dana and Daniel.

You can listen to the podcast right here in this letter — I’ve added it just below.

Kinda creepy, isn’t it? 5 books, about 3500 pages read in a matter of minutes, and then creating this almost-lifelike discussion. I know at least one person who uses this podcast-thingy in her research. Uploading her material and then asking NotebookLM to create a discussion about it. She says it gives her clarity about what she has written. I also saw one author’s post where she uploaded her children’s book to NotebookLM and then asked it to analyse the book.

But talking about Nephilim Quest: I’d love to know if you’ve read the series: does the podcast match your experience? Was it Elijah and Merit who stayed with you, or someone else entirely?

Back to the editing cave soon,

Leena 🙂

P.S. I have a confession. I may have already started writing another fantasy series. It's set in ancient Egypt. I blame the characters — they showed up uninvited and refused to leave until I started typing.

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📧 Forward this to a fellow reader who loves finding their next favourite series.

The Gilded City: Rooftops above Hathor’s Quarter

The rooftops above Hathor’s Quarter were slick with evening mist. Spring air bit at exposed skin. Raef crouched against a crumbling chimney, watching her disappear into the main thoroughfare below. Silk flags rustled on balconies. Red lanterns bled into the fog.

She moved carefully now, his cloak making her anonymous. She scanned corners without turning her head. Street-bound, forced to take the long way back to Neith’s Ward. No rooftops for her tonight.

His hand still felt warm where it had rested on her back. A gesture meant to sell the illusion of a courtesan leaving with a client. Nothing more. But she had leaned into it, just slightly, letting him steer.

He should have left the moment she vanished into the fog. Returned to his post. Done exactly what fifteen years of training had drilled into him.

Instead he stayed. His knees were starting to ache from crouching and he didn’t move.

Below, the Gilded Lotus resumed its rhythm. Laughter rose. Drums thudded. Incense rolled thick on the wind. Business as usual.

But he could still smell her. Not perfume. Sweat and fear, cut with citrus soap. Real. Human.

Fifteen years said watch. Assess. Disappear.

Then the priest grabbed her and yanked her like she was property, and Raef was already moving.

Idiot.

Everything he had survived by not doing.

But he couldn’t forget how she’d trembled — not the way people did when they were scared. Something slower than that. Something that had been going on a long time. Every movement careful, measured, conserving what little she had left.

Her shoulders had sagged the moment she thought no one was watching.

He knew that kind of tired. Bone-deep, where you stopped caring about the small mistakes.

Just before fastening the cloak, he had seen something beneath her bodice. A brass scarab pendant. Not jewellery — mechanical casing. Old hinges. Etched glyphs worn smooth by use. A crystal at its centre, dark and dull.

He’d only glimpsed it for a heartbeat — but he’d seen drawings like it in resistance archives. Veil engines. Pre-Edit devices meant to confuse sentinels. People died carrying these things, usually because they trusted them too long. But this one was wrong. The reflection on the crystal had been amber, not blue-white. Older work. Older hands.

And it had been empty. No hum. No warmth.

Drained.

If she carried something like that just to move through the city, she wasn’t hiding from patrols. She was hiding from something worse.

He should return before his absence drew attention. Instead, his thoughts were already moving ahead of him.

Charging stations near Neith’s Ward. The public ones were gone — destroyed during last month’s maintenance, Amun’s technicians arriving with armed guards and leaving nothing usable behind. Temple-controlled stations required papers and payment. But Hathor’s Quarter had private ones. Safety tokens for the working girls, warming jewels for the ones with regulars who paid well enough. The kind of small infrastructure Hathor’s Quarter ran on because the temple sure as hell didn’t.

Whatever her scarab did, she needed power just as badly.

She would have to pass as one of them. In that silk dress, exhausted and desperate, she might manage it. The guards would see what they expected. Another woman stumbling out after a client. Head down. Hands shaking as she fumbled for her token.

He knew exactly how they’d look at her. He’d been in enough places like this to know.

He would follow at a distance. She would search for a charging station once desperation outweighed pride — it always came to that eventually. He would make sure the guards looked the wrong way, if it came to it. A dropped crate. A thrown stone. Noise in the right place at the right time.

He pushed off from the chimney and took the long route down, the one that ran past the private charging stations in Hathor’s Quarter.

Tactical. Obviously.

He’d told himself worse lies. At least this one had legs.

Main page with all the chapters in order.

© 2025 Leena Maria. All rights reserved.

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Not the science part. (Let’s be honest - most of us wouldn’t recognize a temporal paradox if it bit us.) It’s the longing part. The “what if” that keeps you awake at 2 AM.

What if you could go back and say the thing you didn’t say? What if you could warn someone? What if you could choose differently?

The best time travel stories aren't really about time machines. Outlander isn't about stone circles - it's about a woman who touches ancient stones and falls back 200 years, then has to choose between her 1940s husband and her 18th-century one. The Time Traveler's Wife isn't about genetics - it's about a man who vanishes unpredictably through time while his wife waits, never knowing when he'll disappear or return. Life After Life isn't about reincarnation - it's about a woman who dies over and over, each time living a slightly different version of the same life.

Time travel is just the mechanism. The real story is always about second chances.

While researching Nephilim Quest, I kept coming back to this idea: what if the past and present could actually touch each other? Not through machines or magic portals, but through the things that survive - words, symbols, love letters that refuse to stay buried.

That’s how I ended up writing about someone who gets thrown back in time and has to figure out how to get a message home. Not with technology, but with pure stubborn determination and a very long-term plan.

The funny thing about writing time travel is that you start thinking like a time traveler. Every historical detail becomes a potential message. Every ancient symbol becomes a possible clue. You start seeing connections everywhere, even when they’re probably not there.

Which is either really good for writing fiction, or a sign that you need to get out more.

Currently lost in my own timeline,

Leena

P.S. If you’ve ever wondered what you’d do if you woke up 3,000 years in the past with no way home, Nephilim Quest might be for you. It’s about someone who refuses to believe there’s no way home. On Amazon: CLICK HERE - and on my own store HERE

📧 Forward to someone who’s ever wished they could send their past self a message

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The ancient Egyptians didn’t mess around when it came to death. They created what we call the Book of the Dead - though they called it “The Book of Going Forth by Day,” which sounds much more optimistic. It was basically a detailed instruction manual for navigating the afterlife. Spells to get past monsters, passwords for gates, and most importantly, the answers for your final exam: the Weighing of the Heart.

Picture it: you die, and immediately you’re thrust into the world’s most terrifying pop quiz. Your heart gets weighed against the feather of truth. Pass, and you get eternal paradise. Fail, and a crocodile-headed monster named Ammit devours your soul. No pressure.

The whole process fascinated me because it was so... practical. These weren’t vague spiritual platitudes. They were specific instructions. “When the demon with two faces comes for you with his blade raised, say this to him.” “When you see the lake of fire, turn left.” “Don’t forget the password for the seventh gate.”

While writing Nephilim Quest, I kept thinking about this 70-day mummification process. Seventy days is a long time. Enough time to prepare for eternity. Or, in my fictional world, enough time to prepare a very elaborate puzzle.

What if someone used those burial wrappings not just for religious texts, but for hiding messages? What if the elaborate Egyptian burial process - designed to preserve a body for eternity - could preserve secrets just as well?

That’s how Merit, one of my characters, ends up turning her own mummification into the world’s most elaborate time capsule. She writes her story in English on her burial wrappings, knowing that no ancient Egyptian could read it. Then she sets up a secret society to guard the clues for over three thousand years, using a symbol only her husband would recognize.

The Sisterhood of the Bees, as they become known, spend millennia playing the world’s longest game of postal service.

I spent weeks researching actual Egyptian burial practices to make this work. Did you know they removed the brain through the nose with a long hook? Did you know the heart was the only organ left in the body because they believed it was needed for the afterlife judgment? Did you know they packed bodies in natron salt for 40 days because decomposition doesn’t wait for anyone?

Fascinating stuff. Also, the kind of research that makes you very popular at dinner parties. Nothing kills conversation quite like explaining how they packed bodies in natron salt to prevent decomposition.

But that’s the thing about historical fantasy - you need the history to be right so the fantasy can be wild. The more accurate the Egyptian burial practices, the more believable Merit’s desperate plan becomes.

Currently surrounded by books about ancient Egyptian funeral practices,

Leena

P.S. If you’re curious about Merit’s time-traveling love story and her elaborate puzzle spanning millennia, Nephilim Quest starts with Shadowhunter (the link goes to my own store) Fair warning: it involves a lot more Egyptian death rituals than your average romance.

P.P.S. You can find the Nephilim Quest series on Amazon here.

📧 Forward to someone who appreciates when authors do their homework

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Not because I’d planned to. Just one of those random brain tangents that happens when you’re supposed to be doing something else.

It struck me that horse books are almost never just about horses.

They’re about freedom - that wild, untamed part of us that society keeps trying to fence in. They’re about growing up and losing innocence, but also about finding courage you didn’t know you had. About facing down fear when running away isn’t an option.

Most of them trace back to Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty from 1877. She didn’t write it as a children’s story - she wrote it as a protest about cruelty and injustice. But what came after turned horses into symbols for everything we long for and fear about becoming adults.

Think about it. Velvet in National Velvet isn’t really chasing a horse race - she’s chasing the impossible dream that girls can do anything boys can do. The Black Stallion isn’t about a boy and a horse - it’s about finding your wild self after trauma, about healing through something that can’t be tamed or explained.

War Horse shows us that innocence gets trampled in adult conflicts. Misty of Chincoteague is about small things being fierce, about belonging somewhere even when you’re different.

These stories use horses because horses represent everything we’re afraid we’ll lose when we grow up: speed, freedom, instinct, the ability to run when danger comes. But they also represent what we gain - the power to choose our own direction, to be both gentle and strong, to carry others when they need us.

Horses in fiction are never really about horsemanship. They’re about the moment when childhood ends and you realize you’re strong enough to ride something powerful without breaking it. Or being broken by it.

Maybe that’s why we remember our first horse book so clearly. It wasn’t just a story about an animal. It was the first time we saw ourselves as capable of something magnificent and terrifying.

So tell me - what was your horse book? The one that made you believe you could run wild and still find your way home?

I’d love to know.

Leena :)

P.S. I never had a horse, but I definitely galloped around the backyard after reading these books. Sometimes the symbol is enough.

P.P.S. Speaking of horses in fiction - Magical Midlife Detectives #3 Magic Sword is 2/3 written, and it does include a famous winged horse who had a role in Book #2.

📧 Forward to someone who still remembers their first horse book

Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons. Cover of the novel Black Beauty, first edition 1877, published by London: Jarrold and Sons

If you’re feeling superstitious today, you might want to pace yourself. This year we get a triple helping - Friday the 13th in February, March, and November. Lucky us.

But before you crawl back under the covers, here’s what the actual data says about today: absolutely nothing. A study tracking millions of people found zero evidence that being born on Friday the 13th causes any life problems. No worse employment, no lower wages, no failed marriages. In fact, men born on the 13th were slightly more likely to be employed. So if it’s your birthday today, statistics are actually on your side.

Where This Fear Comes From

The history is murkier than you’d expect. Most people point to October 13, 1307, when King Philip IV of France ordered the mass arrest of the Knights Templar. Certainly unlucky for the knights, but the connection to modern superstition might be more Dan Brown than historical fact.

Then there’s the dinner party problem. The Last Supper had 13 guests, with Judas being the unlucky 13th. Norse mythology has a similar story - Loki crashed a dinner of 12 gods as the uninvited 13th, leading to the death of Balder.

Basically, 13 has been the unwanted dinner guest for millennia.

Why We Still Believe

If the data doesn’t support it, why does the fear stick around? Because creating theories for random bad events gives us a sense of control. Once we’re primed to notice “Friday the 13th disasters,” confirmation bias kicks in. We remember the one accident that happened today while forgetting the thousands that happened on perfectly ordinary Tuesdays.

The modern version really took off with Thomas Lawson’s 1907 novel “Friday, the Thirteenth” about a stock market crash. Nothing like a bestselling book to cement a superstition.

Not Everyone Got the Memo

“Unlucky 13” isn’t universal. In Italy, Friday the 17th is the cursed day. In Cantonese culture, 13 sounds like “sure to live,” making it lucky. Taylor Swift considers 13 her lucky number, and Colgate University treats Friday the 13th as fortunate because it was founded by 13 men with $13.

So enjoy your Friday. And if something goes wrong today, remember - it was probably going to happen on a Tuesday anyway.

Currently writing this on the cursed day and living dangerously,

Leena

P.S. The word for fear of Friday the 13th is “paraskevidekatriaphobia.” Try saying that three times fast. Or don’t - you’ve got enough challenges today.

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📧 Forward to someone who needs permission to ignore superstitions

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Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve been thinking about the Moon in fiction lately.

Not as magic, not as some mystical force that makes people do things. Just the Moon as... presence. The thing that’s always there, marking time, watching.

Some writers use it beautifully. In The Left Hand of Darkness, the harsh lunar cycles shape an entire society. In The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, living on the Moon isn’t romantic - it’s gravity and isolation and what rebellion looks like when Earth is that far away.

The Moon in these stories doesn’t rush anything along. It just returns, night after night, measuring everything against itself.

When I wrote The Moon Daughter - book two of Nephilim Quest - I was thinking about this too. The story follows Shuet, an albino girl in ancient Egypt. Her condition meant she couldn’t go into sunlight, so she spent her nights on the roof, watching the sky. People called her the Daughter of Thoth, the moon god.

Often, sitting there in the darkness, she felt the Moon was her only friend.

The Moon there isn’t decoration. It’s companionship for someone who lived in a world that didn’t quite have space for her. Those cycles of being visible and hidden that anyone who doesn’t quite fit knows intimately.

Maybe that’s why the Moon works in fiction. It doesn’t explain itself or apologize for being different every night. It just keeps its place in the sky.

Not a bad model for characters. Or stories. Or people, really.

Leena

P.S. If you know other books where the Moon actually matters to the story (not just sits there looking atmospheric), I'd love to hear about them.

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📧 Forward to someone who loves the Moon

LeenasBooks Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Yesterday our Aby girl Pipsa turned 21.

That feels like a proper age. An age that carries authority. She has lived through drafts, rewrites, deadlines, abandoned notebooks, and entire book series. She has supervised all of it from radiators, windowsills, and whichever page of a research book I happened to be using at the time.

Writers and cats have always found each other.

Ernest Hemingway wrote surrounded by cats and left behind generations of them. Agatha Christie was rarely without one nearby. Many writers have noted the same thing: cats understand the work without needing explanations.

They don’t interrupt with questions. They don’t care about productivity systems. They know exactly when you should stop working.

A cat will sit with you through long silences. They’re comfortable with waiting, with half-finished thoughts, with pauses that look like doing nothing from the outside. Which may be why they suit writers so well.

Pipsa has never cared whether a sentence worked. But she has always known when I’d been at the desk too long. Or when it was time to lie down and let the mind settle. In that sense, she’s been a better writing partner than most humans.

So today’s newsletter is simply this: a small celebration of companions who keep us company while stories take their time.

If you write, you probably have a creature, habit, or ritual that does the same job. If you read, you’ve likely sensed it between the lines.

Stories are rarely made alone, even when it looks that way.

Happy 21st, Pipsa. ❤️

Leena

P.S. She's currently curled up on her favorite heating pad on the couch, exactly where a dignified 21-year-old should be. Some habits evolve with age and wisdom.

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📧 Forward to someone who has their own writing companion

Yesterday I carried the last box out of my mother’s apartment.

She’s in a care home now. She won’t be coming back. The apartment needs to be sold. These are the facts we’ve been living with for months while my husband and I worked weekends and evenings, sorting through eighty-plus years of a life. I admit it - I did grumble under my breath many times, because this work stole my free time, when I could have written my books.

You don’t realize how much someone accumulates until you have to decide what stays and what goes. Every drawer, every closet, every shelf becomes a decision. Keep or donate? Important or just sentimental?

The research materials were easy - dozens of boxes of notes and documents from the non-fiction books she wrote. Those come home with us. Her life’s work deserves better than a skip. She’s still writing when her illness allows, still a writer at heart.

The hundreds of books were harder. I can’t throw away books. Can’t make myself do it. Some old book dealer is going to get very lucky, or very overwhelmed.

But the last box... that one nearly broke me.

Her bridal bouquet from 1959, dried and carefully preserved. Her wedding dress, still beautiful after all these years. And tucked right there with the flowers, a page torn from a calendar - August 16, 1959.

And I barely noticed the faint writing in the other calendar page in the box. January 11, 1959, written in pencil in my father’s handwriting - “She told me she likes me.” Seven months before they married.

From “she likes me” to “I do” in seven months. A whole courtship captured in two pieces of paper.

Their wedding date. The beginning of 54 years of marriage, until my father passed away in 2013.

I stood in that empty apartment, holding this box containing the start of their love story, knowing she's still with us but no longer able to live independently. All those books she'd written, all those research notes, all those decades of marriage and writing - and somehow what felt most precious were these fragile flowers and calendar pages.

But that wedding bouquet and those calendar pages - they're staying safe in our spare room until I find a safe place to put them.

Some things are worth preserving, even when you’re not sure why.

Especially then.

Leena

P.S. If you have elderly parents, give them a call today. Not about practical things. Just to hear their voice and tell them you love them.

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📧 Forward to someone who understands that the smallest things often matter most

But here’s the thing - I started it completely wrong.

I was maybe thirteen when my mother suggested I read Tolkien. Off I went to the local library, ready to begin this epic journey everyone talked about. Except The Fellowship of the Ring was checked out.

So naturally, I borrowed The Two Towers instead.

I dove straight into book two. No context. No idea who these people were or why they were wandering around Middle-earth. Frodo and Sam were trudging through some swamp with a creature named Gollum, heading for Mordor with a ring they needed to destroy.

Did this stop me? Not for a second.

I was utterly hooked.

A few days later, The Fellowship showed up back on the shelf. I grabbed it, started over from the beginning, and suddenly everything clicked into place. The Shire. The Ring. Why everyone was so worried about a piece of jewelry.

But you know what? Starting in the middle taught me something. Good stories pull you in even when you don’t understand what’s happening. Great characters make you care before you know their full story. And sometimes the best way to fall in love with a book is to tumble headfirst into the deep end.

Tolkien changed how I thought about storytelling. About world-building. About the power of language and the weight of history in fiction. Those books taught me that fantasy wasn’t just magic and dragons - it was about home, friendship, the choices we make when everything’s at stake.

I read the series so many times I knew it practically by heart. And of course I bought my own copies. But not just in Finnish. I bought Lord of the Rings in English, French, German, and Swedish too.

This became my secret weapon for language learning. Since I knew the story almost word for word, I didn’t need dictionaries when I hit unfamiliar words. I could just keep reading and let context fill in the gaps. English came first - I wanted to read Lord of the Rings in its original language.

Then I found Silmarillion.

Little did I know that Tolkien based Elvish (particularly Quenya) on Finnish phonology and grammar, and the Kalevala definitely influenced his mythology - especially the creation myths in the Silmarillion. No wonder it felt like coming home.

But it sure took a bit of work to remember who was related to whom in Silmarillion.

Plus, let’s be honest. If you can follow Tolkien’s genealogies and geography in four languages, you can research anything. Consider it training.

Your turn: What was the first book that really changed you? The one that made you see stories - or yourself - differently? Hit reply and tell me. I love hearing about those life-changing reading moments.

Still occasionally reading things in the wrong order,

Leena :)

P.S. I’ve been thinking about re-reading Lord of the Rings this year. Though it may be I can’t find the time.

P.P.S. Speaking of epic journeys, Magical Midlife Detectives #3 is half written. Writing it two days at a time, and then on third day I write Twice Born #1 The Vanishing Woman.

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📧 Forward to someone who also loves LOTR

Instead, I edited and posted Chapter 5 of The Twice Born here on Substack.

If you are following the story already, here’s the link.

And if you haven’t started the story yet, here’s the beginning of the story (and even if you have read the Prologue, I have edited it, eliminating fluff and making it shorter).

Each chapter links to the next, so you can follow it at your own pace.

After posting chapter 5, I sat down to write a newsletter… and couldn’t come up with anything at all.

That sometimes happens after an intensive creative period. I wrote about 20,000 words in two weeks, so I suspect my mind was suggesting a pause.

So I paused and read a good book. Went to a champagne tasting with a friend (Yes, really, though I couldn’t drink six glasses of champagne. But I tasted all of them, which was the idea after all). Spent time with our goddaughter and her family (it sure was fun to watch their 22 month old twins. And no, they didn’t cause havoc LOL.) Visited my mother in the care home she now lives in. Watched season 4 of Fargo. And wondered what to write in this Tuesdays newsletter.

I write a lot about the things that interest me. History. Worlds. Strong female protagonists. The edges between belief and reality.

But I haven’t asked what you would like to hear more about.

So I thought I’d ask you now.

Are there things you’re curious about?

Questions you’ve wanted to ask me?

Topics you’d enjoy me writing about here?

It can be about the stories, the research behind them, writing itself, ancient history (ancient Egypt, anyone? Not just examples of ancient Egyptian facts in Nephilim Quest) or something else entirely.

If something comes to mind, you can reply directly to this email or leave a comment. And if nothing does right now, that’s perfectly fine too. You can message me later.

Thank you for being here, and for reading along in whatever way you do.

Hugs,

Leena

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