Lya Badgley

October has always felt like the true beginning of the year to me. The days grow shorter, the shadows stretch longer, and the air thrums with expectancy. Between harvest festivals, book events, and the anxious excitement of a new release, there’s also that quiet voice reminding me to pause, to notice how the light fades a little earlier each evening.

This is the season of stories. When daylight slips away sooner, we turn inward, listening more closely to what lingers in the dark.

Halloween!
More than costumes and candy, it feels like an invitation—to step briefly into another life, to explore the edges of who we are and who we might become. I love the small magic of it: how even grown-ups surrender, if only for a night, to imagination. In the end, it’s just another kind of storytelling—the chance to live, for a moment, inside the what if.

Light, after all, is most powerful when surrounded by shadow.

There’s something about autumn light that feels almost sacred – low-angled, honeyed, and fleeting. It gilds even the most ordinary things: the rim of a teacup, the edge of a windowpane, a turning leaf caught mid-fall. In that slanting glow, the world seems illuminated from within, as if holding its breath before the dark descends.

The word illuminated comes from the Latin illuminare, “to light up.” In the scriptoria of medieval monasteries, scribes painted gold, silver, and other crushed minerals onto parchment so that sacred texts would shimmer when turned toward candlelight. These illuminated manuscripts weren’t merely books, they were acts of devotion, attempts to make the invisible visible.

Book News: The Thirty-Fifth Page

I’m thrilled to announce that my third novel, The Thirty-Fifth Page, released on October 28th!

Set in Bosnia on the brink of war, American art conservator Miri Adler arrives to study a medieval manuscript and uncovers unsettling secrets. When a mysterious thirty-fifth page appears twenty-three years later, she is pulled into a realm where history and folklore entwine, stirring ancient legends and a curse poised to awaken. The Thirty-Fifth Page is a luminous tale of inherited wounds, enduring magic, and the stories that shape who we become.

 

Early Praise

“Layered, moody, and deeply immersive…Badgley layers historical  suspense with a subtle supernatural current…Sarajevo in the final months before  war is rendered with heartbreaking clarity…a steady, slow-burn thriller that  lands with quiet force.”
— The Prairies Book Review

💬 A Note on Reviews

For independent authors, reviews are everything. Each one helps new readers discover stories that might otherwise go unseen.

Every post on Amazon, Goodreads, Book Bub, or Barnes & Noble makes a meaningful difference. Thank you for helping keep indie literature alive.

(You don’t have to buy the book on Amazon to leave a review only have a current account.)

 

Let’s celebrate the release in person!

 

 

Special Offer: Toasting Local Book Clubs!

Book a date for me to visit your book club before January 30th and receive a special thank-you: I’ll bring a bottle of slivovitz, and together we’ll share a Balkan toast to the new year!

Srećna Nova godina!

 

Author’s Life

Stillpoint

Krasner’s canvas moves like weather,
thundercloud of paint thrown and gathered again,
a heartbeat under the noise.

I think of Plath’s Poppies in October,
how color insists on blooming through frost.
Both women knew creation as surrender—
stepping into the whirlpool,
trusting the motion,
finding the still point inside,
where pigment thickens like a thought,
the poppy-red color of survival.

I feel that same surrender when I write.

Thank you for reading