Not a Wink: A Cozy Fantasy Novella (The Dragon of Little Hushing)

She has never failed to put anyone to sleep. The dragon hasn't slept a wink in eighty years. For thirty-eight years Hester Peck was Nurse to the royal nursery. Then the palace took up a fashionable new book that says never rock, never sing and never go to them. At sixty-one, Hester has a small pension, a trunk she has never unpacked, and one wish: a door of her own to shut. So she answers an advertisement. The parish of Little Hushing requires a Keeper for its dragon (Dormant). A quiet disposition is essential. Hester does not have a quiet disposition. In a village where the horses wear felt on their hooves and men settle arguments on slates, she sings the dragon's lullaby at full voice on her first evening, and half the village falls asleep in the street. Then a voice from inside the hill tells her she was flat. Euphemia is nine hundred years old, the size of a church, partial to stewed tea with seven sugars, and secretly wide awake. Hester boasts she will have her snoring within six weeks, by Martinmas. The parish committee gives her exactly that long to learn to be quiet, or go. Not a Wink is a complete cozy fantasy novella (about 24,000 words, one evening's read) and the prequel to The Dragon of Little Hushing: a sharp-tongued heroine with decades behind her, a village of lovable busybodies, a goose with opinions, and real heart. Book 1, Officially Asleep, is available now.