Good evening bookworms, on this very bright and sunny Tuesday. This post was meant to go live on Thursday but I had a powercut and it went or goobly-gook. Today I’m really excited to be part of the blog tour for debut novel Yesterday Crumb and the Storm in a Teacup by Andy Sagar. This has been on my TBR and I can’t wait to read it. Perfect for #MiddleGradeMarch . My stop falls on the publication day of this wonderful book and I am really excited to share a guest posts on how everyday items and objects became magical.

But before that here is a little bit more about the book.

Yesterday Crumb is no ordinary girl. She was born with fox ears that have cursed her to a lonely life working in the circus and her origins are a complete mystery. But she is about to escape into the adventure of a lifetime when she learns that she’s a strangeling who’s lost her magic.
Taken in by Miss Dumpling the flamboyant tea witch, Yesterday is introduced to a magical, walking teashop filled with fantastical customers, a flying teapot turtle called Pascal and powerful spells in every teacup!
Yesterday starts to rediscover her magic and to feel a sense of belonging. But a mysterious figure of darkness is working hard to ensure her new life comes crashing down – and it all starts with a deadly shard of ice in Yesterday’s heart…
But there’s nothing that can’t be solved with a pot of tea, a slice of cake and a BIG dash of magic!
The first in a new fantasy series for readers aged 8-12, about a girl with fox ears who has never fitted in. With adventure and magic in every teacup, this is perfect for fans of The Strangeworlds Travel Agency and Starfell.

Guest post

The Extraordinary Ordinary: Creating Magic Out of Everyday Things

In my debut book Yesterday Crumb and the Storm in a Teacup, a girl named Yesterday finds herself working in a magical teashop, owned and run by the tea witch Miss Dumpling. Building the world of Yesterday Crumb, and making it feel real, was a huge part of the writing process. In this post, I want to discuss the main lesson I learned when it came to worldbuilding, and why – I think – bringing out the magic in ordinary things is so powerful when it comes to storytelling.

Yesterday’s world is populated by many peculiar creatures and plays host to a number of unusual settings. There are dragons who run museums, dryads who grow orchards of wishes, and, of course, witches who do their witchcraft not through wands, but through teapots and kettles. When it came to brewing the ideas for the world, which I wanted to be full of joy and whimsy, I came to develop a rule of thumb of sorts:

The magical + the mundane = the whimsical

This is a bit of a simplification, but whenever I’m struggling with developing some aspect of the world, it’s a little formula I like to fall back on. A witch’s teashop is perhaps the central example of this in the book – take a café, or a bakery, throw in some magic, and BOOM! You have Dwimmerly End, the teashop at the heart of Yesterday Crumb.

The teapots on the shelves are suddenly whizzing through the air, pouring themselves into empty cups. The customers are now magical creatures – pixies and goblins and trolls and more. And the different kinds of tea on the menu, naturally, become brews very much like a witch’s potions.

Figuring out the balance between the elements of magic and mundanity can be a little bit tricky. If some aspect of the world is too magical – too peculiar – then the reader feels untethered. But at the same time, if it is too mundane, then perhaps it will feel dull when put next to things like dragons and tea witches.

The key step in this kind of worldbuilding is to select very carefully the mundane item or place that is going to become magical. When choosing candidates for enchantment, it is a good idea, I would say, to pick things that already have a little bit of magic in them. A café/teashop/bakery, after all, is already a very whimsical place – to my mind – and so is extremely accommodating to fantastical elements.

Indeed, this realisation – that the mundane is often very close to the magical, already – became not only part of the modus operandi for worldbuilding, but also, a primary theme of the book itself. Fantasy adventures are often, by definition, fantastical. They are explosive, with knights slaying monsters and pirates firing cannons and armies laying siege to castles. And that is surely to their credit: they offer wonderful escapes from our boring, humdrum reality.

But in this book, I wanted as much fantasy as possible to stem from the quiet and the domestic – from tea, and flowers, and herbs, and cooking, and books, and so on. I wanted the conflict at the heart of Yesterday Crumb to feature a set of heroes who led lives that were quite fantastical on the surface, given that they are almost all witches, but are in fact quite ordinary when you look more closely. The story sees them go on an adventure, but their day-to-day lives are quite like ours, full of baking and doing the washing-up and having conversations by the fireplace. I think this makes them much more relatable, and offers readers a gentler route into the world and the story than if they spent all the time fighting battles and going on elaborate quests.

Overall, while I never wanted to lose a sense of adventure, I think a key tip I learned from writing this book is that we can’t have grand adventures all the time. Epic action needs to be balanced, or else the world becomes too vast and overwhelming. And the best balance to big, attention-grabbing adventures, I think, is to make room for the simple, the peaceful, and the everyday – even when the ‘everyday’ means the everyday for a teashop full of witches.

I can’t wait to get this in the Easter break. I think for fans of Pages and Co. this book is meant for you.

Have a lovely evening all,