Morning Glory Milking Farm
Morning Glory Milking Farm
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
Quizzes
NEWReading Tools
C.M. Nascosta on Morning Glory Milking Farm
In their own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why they wrote it
A bad Harlequin pitch and a necessary breakBefore monster romance, Nascosta was grinding through serious literary fiction and a bruising attempt at the mainstream romance market. A rewrite an agent and a romance author both insisted on cascaded through the manuscript until it was unrecognizable, and the whole project curdled. What came next was not a plan so much as an escape hatch: a blog, a collaborating artist, and serialized monster stories posted weekly to a readership that grew faster than anyone expected.
I’ve always been a monster lover! My first crush was on Swamp Thing, I was bitterly disappointed when the Beast turns into some Chad at the end of the movie. I’ve always been drawn to the character the ‘hero’ is trying to take down, so the seeds have been planted since childhood.
The Monster-Bait blog launched in August 2019. The orc romance that established the Cambric Creek universe followed in October of that year, and Morning Glory Milking Farm, the first full novel in that world, arrived in August 2021.
The corporate job that had consumed sixty-plus hours a week vanished in the pandemic, and Nascosta found themselves paying a mortgage through Patreon before the broader publishing world had caught up to what monster romance even was. The anxiety baked into that period did not stay outside the work.
If someone would have told me then that in 2021 my high-stress job would have disappeared in a pandemic and I’d successfully be paying my mortgage with Patreon writing monster love stories, I probably would have laughed myself sick, but here we are!
cmnascosta.wordpress.com, “About - Author C.M. Nascosta - WordPress.com”How they wrote it
Lean worlds, considered heroes, and a refusal to churnCambric Creek, the shared contemporary-fantasy setting where humans and multiple other species live alongside one another, already existed when Morning Glory Milking Farm began. Nascosta’s decision about how much of that world to explain on the page was itself a craft position, not a default.
I’m also not a big fan of — brace yourself — endless world-building. I’m out here living the ADHD lifestyle babyyy, and I don’t need to hear about the hierarchies of this race and the proclivities of that one. Tell me what I absolutely need to know and get back to the characters, please and thanks.
Years in corporate America shaped the kind of hero Nascosta was unwilling to write. The physically imposing figures at the center of their books carry that scale without the power-trip behavior that often accompanies it in the genre, and the reason is direct.
You’re not going to find a high level of toxic masculinity in my books, nor do I care to make my already physically imposing characters degradingly misogynistic. I’ve been a woman in corporate America for too long to find that sexy, and so I avoid writing it.
Nascosta’s publishing strategy on the self-publishing side ran counter to the dominant pressure in that market. The year of weekly blog posts before Girls Weekend released was a deliberate audience-building investment, and the refusal to accelerate production was just as deliberate.
The trend in self-publishing over the last few years has shifted to authors churning out book after book, writing as fast as they can, minimal time editing...and I just can not do that.
cmnascosta.wordpress.com, “About - Author C.M. Nascosta - WordPress.com”What they want us to sit with
Invented rules, real anxietiesNascosta is consistent on what fantasy buys the writer that realism cannot. The freedom is not an escape from difficulty but a different set of tools for approaching it, and the Cambric Creek books use that latitude to put economic anxiety, speciesism, and body image inside a world where the author controls the physics.
The thing I love most about writing fantasy is the freedom to leave behind the utter bullshit of our world. I can make up the rules as I go along.
The content advisory Nascosta wrote for Morning Glory Milking Farm on their own website is a document worth reading on its own terms. It names what the book contains in the plainest possible language, and its closing parenthetical is the fastest summary of the book’s premise available anywhere.
COPIOUS fluid. Millennial anxiety, job stress. Minotaur/human (that means he’s a bullman, kids.)
Placing millennial anxiety and job stress in the same list as copious fluid is not accidental comedy. The book earns its heat and its warmth through the same character, and the advisory signals that the premise is meant to be taken at face value on both counts.
Nascosta’s stated ambition for the Cambric Creek series, taken from their author bio, frames what a reader should expect from the emotional register of every book in it, Morning Glory Milking Farm included. The phrase they return to is not heat alone.
She’s always preferred beasts to boys, the macabre to the milquetoast, the unknown darkness in the shadows to the Chad next door. She lives in a crumbling old Victorian with a scaredy-cat dachshund, where she writes nontraditional romances featuring beastly boys with equal parts heart and heat, and is waiting for the Hallmark Channel to get with the program and start a paranormal lovers series.