Lynn Strong

By the time you’re reading this, I will (or won’t) have gotten through the 25-pages-and-4-spreadsheets launch plan for Chai and Charmcraft.

If you haven’t ordered it yet and are interested, this week (May 1-8) is a good time to do that, because the preorder 50% discount lasts through the May 8 Cozy the Day Away Sale and it will go from $2.99 to $5.99 at some point after that.

(The other Catsprowl books will also be on sale on May 8 — along with over 100 other books! I tend to open a gazillion tabs at the start of the day, go do the day job, and come back and read the details in the evening, because if I get sucked into the book shinies at the start of the day, I might be late for work.)

I… have had better weeks than this one. This is a strong contender for “top five worst weeks of my life,” between a treasured friend in the ICU, multiple tornadoes resulting in stacked migraines and power outages and most of my local friends group having refrigeration failures at the same time, day job work being aggressively too much, all the way down to completely trivial things like the lack of refrigeration meaning I couldn’t do a housebound mini book party or even have a tablespoon of milk to make a fresh cup of chai with.

The big stuff is big and hard. But I was under the delusion that surely I would be able to do something about the small stuff, right? I got instant chai packets and ordered a tin of baklava because it wouldn’t need refrigeration, except I was so tired I nearly dropped the baklava, except the adrenaline jolt from nearly dropping honey pastries all over the floor meant that I didn’t get sleep for the second night in a row… The world was already Way Too Much, and the petty stuff stacking on top of the major stuff is even more Too Much Stuff. I’m in the land of being afraid to move because I’ll drop something or break something because the universe is clearly not done saying Ha in absolutely any way it can.

But the show has to go on. So I’m trying to sound coherent on 3ish hours of sleep in 3 days and also feeding the coolest bits of foodie research I can find into the Bluesky repost game. Latest bit: a fascinating (to me, anyway) look at how the medieval cookbooks’ instructions to smoke a container with incense before filling it is still in use today!

And Siavahda’s review is giving me life. Seriously, every time I start crying at how much too much everything has been this week, I go reread parts of that, and I try to find the shining faith in humanity that Sia saw in it.

There’s some cosmic balance in that Charmcraft helped Sia through a rough spot and Sia’s review is helping me through a rough spot too.

I’m not doing 75% of what an indie author “ought to do” when releasing a new book. That 25 page list would be a lot longer if I were capable of facing down Meta’s Eye of Sauron on top of the pile of marching Murphy’s Law beasties sticking claws in this week.

I can’t do the classical book launch with a couple hours standing around mingling over canapes at a local bookstore or library. My low key, safe from red-hatted family, and disability friendly version is that Bluesky thread of lots of fun history and food research details, likely with a lot of cat videos thrown in.

(I am delighted that I get to call both pet-grooming videos and delicious-street-food videos “research time.” 😸 Also I need to go add Pyaari to the thread because I hadn’t met her when I started writing but she looks exactly like what I imagine Sahar to look like.)

So of course I need a recipe to go with the book launch blog post, and a character to talk about… and I did think about Shai Madhur’s sticky date balls, but really, I need something to be very, very, VERY simple in my life right now.

So does Irfan.

Irfan is Faraj’s extremely harried hajib / chamberlain / really-not-a-vizier, on account of how word association with “vizier” usually unearths “evil,” “scheming,” or “backstabbing” within a few guesses to speakers of English who have been exposed to Disney’s Aladdin et al. (I very nearly named him Jafar, because I feel so badly for all the perfectly decent people named Jafar who have to survive that cultural baggage, except that I knew my small indie self was not going to armwrestle the Mouse’s cultural legacy into reconsideration; it was much more likely that people would see Jafar and think I meant a villain.)

I really hope that people don’t read Irfan as the villain. If people read him as a villain, I’ve failed him as a writer. If this book wasn’t a cozy fantasy, he would likely have been the hero. The trope expectations of an epic fantasy would have meant he was absolutely correct in his fears. (Still utterly delighted that Sia saw that too!)

Since Irfan doesn’t have his shahzada‘s type of prophetic foresights, he’s got to be even more cautious than Faraj if he expects to intercept the trouble before the trouble makes its way into Faraj’s life. And Irfan is the variety of neurodiverse that takes chaos as both an affront to the way things ought to be and a personal failing. After all, it’s literally been Irfan’s job for decades to prevent as much chaos as he can, before his dear prophet catches troubling foreshadows of whatever chaos Irfan didn’t manage to avert in time.

(In Katayef and Kittens, Irfan is getting a break as much as Faraj and Ashar will be. I thought I owed him that, from early readers’ feedback!)

In bookworld, I haven’t pinned down whether the outside-the-Empire trade connections extend as far as China and Japan, or whether the Zen Buddhist tradition has an analogue here. I’m inclined toward yes, I just haven’t written anything that needed a formal answer further afield than “kashmiri goats exist in this world because Varsha-auntie deserves the softest fiber arts to play with.”

Likewise, Irfan deserves the simplest, calmest possible recipe for a man who thrives on calm, simple order that’s in short supply for both of us right now.

(I really am sorry I surrounded you with such catful chaos, Irfan!)

Chameli ki sharbat / mogra ka sharbat is what you make when you have time and ingredients and a kitchen and boiling pots and sterilized jars for storage and …a fair amount of fuss.

I don’t always have that much time or that many spoons in my life. But I discovered between last year and this that I didn’t need that much time, and sometimes a sip of jasmine-scented bliss helps refill the spoon shortage. Sometimes the simplest possible solution is an exquisite grace of its own.

On the flip side, there really isn’t a substitute for the luxury of fresh, clean, fragrant blossoms here; it doesn’t work the same way with dried jasmine blossoms, and dried herbs don’t float away from a sip the same way, and I’m just not fond of a mouthful of dried herbs in water, and if you have a jasmine tea bag, you’re getting jasmine tea, which is a delight of its own but not caffeine-free for all day enjoyment.

If you would like your own blossoming jasmine plant, and you have a pot and a sunny window, they’re wonderfully gratifying plants — sometimes so fragrant they kick off my allergies! There’s a reason I specify only three blossoms below. But you can do it with just one, if you’re patient.

I don’t live in a jasmine-hospitable climate. I didn’t plant it in the ground; I carry the pot indoors in the fall and outdoors in the spring, and I’ve done so for nearly 20 years. So if you think fresh jasmine blossoms are for other people but not for you… Charmcraft is a book about how lovely things that other people can have are also for you too. So I’m here to encourage anyone to try a jasmine plant in a pot wherever you are. And if your windows don’t get much sun, I have loved these plant halo lights for several years.

A Meditative Jasmine Infusion

Three fresh jasmine blossoms

A beautiful cup with a lid or a saucer

Cool, crisp water

Fill the beautiful cup with water to three quarters full. Float the three jasmine blossoms (stem side down) in the cup. Cover it between sips.

The space between the water and the lid will fill with a remarkable fragrance, and the blossoms last all day in cool water.

(You can also try this with other fresh, fragrant, un-sprayed flowers or herbs, such as damask roses, lavender, or your own favorite edible flowers or herbs.)