Welcome, welcome, welcome back!

Um, sorry for disappearing for two months. They were pretty stressful personal-wise and I kind of fell of the map. But I’m back! I have stories to tell! I’ve started a new job and my stress levels are so much lower! I also had my birthday and managed not to have a major existential crisis over it. Check out my birthday painting.

Instead of a topic this week, let’s focus on a quick scan of what’s been going on since my last newsletter in December.

Writing

I was hoping to have more updates on Rebellion’s sequel, Revelation, for you, but alas. Copy edits are in so I need to contend with those, and I’m still waiting on cover art. When that’s in, you’ll be the first to know!

I’ve been querying Howl, aka Such Fatal Visions, aka my adult fairy tale that I worked on with my lovely mentor Natalie. Querying is not going great, but I still have many queries to hear back from and many more agents to try.

I’ve been writing! I wrote most of Crows, a second-world Polish-inspired fantasy about a god and four mortals caught up on opposite sides of a war. It can be described as such.

I’ve mostly pivoted recently to TarotPunk, aka What They Make Us, aka my second-world fantasy dark academia with fake dating, murder, and mayhem. Beta comments are coming in and I submitted it to #Revpit, so things are happening! Even if I don’t get into #Revpit, I’m feeling good about making changes and expanding the manuscript (forever an underwriter, RIP). The plan is for this to be the next book I query. I mean, if I have to. (Please don’t let me have to…)

I also also came up with a whole new idea a few weeks ago while watching the TV show Barbarians on Netflix. It is excellent and it’s about the Roman occupation of Germania and a German force led by Arminius that drove Rome out. So I thought, hm. What if, while Rome struggled to maintain their stranglehold south of the Teutoberg forest, they stopped by a fictional tribe called the Ascomanni? I’m calling it SeerWIP, even though it’s about necromancy now. It’s going to be three POVs: (1) an Ascomanni girl who agrees to marry a Roman soldier with hopes of using him as intel, (2) the Roman soldier, and (3) an Ascomanni girl who goes to a neighbor tribe for help and falls in love with the reik’s wife. I’m super excited about it but I probably won’t write it until after I fix Crows.

Reading

Dear god. Reading has been a STRUGGLE this year. As in, I haven’t finished a book yet and I’m in the middle of like seven. But I plan to finish a novella this week so maybe that will break my slump.

For #TransRightsReadathon this week, I’m going to read another novella, You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood by Eric LaRocca, a nonbinary horror author!

Currently Reading

Ha. Ha.

• All Systems Red by Martha Wells

• The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri

• Babel by RF Kuang

• The Witch and the Tsar by Olesya Gilmore

• Sour Candy by Kealan Patrick Burke

• The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake

• I think there might be more…

Music

Still rocking out hard to Taylor, but also investigating some other groups. My go to these days is my TarotPunk playlist.

You can also check out my 2023 Obsessions if you really want to know my weird taste. I’ll be updating it all year.

Art

I haven’t been drawing as much as I used to because I’ve gotten obsessed with candle-making and crochet! Candle-making is my newest hobby and one of the priciest, but it’s so much fun and really easy (except for adding scent, ugh). Here’s a melange of what I’ve done over the past few months.

In Conclusion

Things are going about as well as could be expected. Querying still sucks, but we’re rolling with it. Work is mostly great and I’m very grateful for that.

See you next month!

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