October Newsletter

Must be the season of the WIP

Gracious! It’s been a time. Since my last newsletter, I’ve been wonderfully, delightfully busy. A lot of that was taken up by Halcy-Con, as I discussed in-depth in my most recent post. But that was really only one facet of September and October’s packed schedule!

News

So, what else has been going on? Well, it’s development season at work. We get a bit of a lull right after the summer, as we take time to reflect on how the camps went, review our goals and how well we met them, and start thinking about our approach for the next year. Once we start cracking stories open, though, it’s off to the races! Things get very busy very fast.

I’ve also been volunteering with the local Democratic coordinated campaign, mostly assisting with event preparation, but also doing some work online — and making a bunch of friendship bracelets!

And then there’s writing. I am actually writing again, with sustained energy, for the first time in… I don’t know. Years? Since I finished The Bloodstained Shade? So I’m carving out time for that on a daily basis.

And as though all that weren’t quite enough to be getting on with, I’ve also picked up a couple of new hobbies, decided to learn Italian (well, better than I have in the past, anyway), and, oh yeah, we’re already at work on Halcy-Con 2025!

The Novel Gauntlet

This is the time of year when I would normally be getting myself ready, with either excitement or trepidation, for Nanowrimo. But, as my faithful readers know, I won’t be doing that this year.

I hated the idea of giving up on the challenge and the fantastic community, though, which is why I was so glad that Goblin City, a Discord server I’m on, decided to step up and fill the gap. They’re doing something they’re calling the Novel Gauntlet in the month of November (though likely moving to October in future years). It’s got a bit more flexibility that Nano — you can choose different levels of challenge, work on an existing project, edit rather than writing, and so forth. But I think this will bring me the conviviality that was always my favorite part of Nano. Sprints! Challenges! Virtual write-ins! Camaraderie! I’m so looking forward to it.

If you’d like to join the challenge, you can! If you otherwise meet the Goblin City membership requirements (being a 21+ author of SFF), you can join the Discord, but anyone can participate by using #novelgauntlet on your platform of choice. I’ll be tracking my progress on Instagram and Bluesky as well as within the server.

Oh? You want to know what I’m working on? Well, this is the thing I started at the end of July when Marshall Ryan Maresca bullied me into it. By which I mean: he pointed out I had a solid and workable idea; I responded with ten reasons it wasn’t solid or workable; he said “yeah but you should write it anyway”; I told him no; later that night, I found myself sketching out a map. I keep telling him this is his fault, and he keeps expressing his glee at taking that blame.

It’s a dark romantasy that I’ve given a bad case of politics, as I am wont to do. Whereas with the Aven Cycle, if I was ever asked to name tropes, I sort of blanked out, this story is a chance to indulge absolutely all of my favorites. Enemies-to-lovers, slow burn, belligerent sexual tension, battle couple, a magnificent bastard paired with a rebel leader who can throw magic fireballs simply because I want her to. I’m having such fun.

Here, have a little moodboard that I did for yesterday’s Novel Gauntlet training challenge:

Upcoming Events

On November 9th, I’m going to give a presentation/Q&A on Modular Immersive Design for a group of Halcyon fans! This will be a chance for me to talk about how the work I do with Mythik Camps is, well, weirder in its structure than a lot of narrative design for immersive experiences, since I have to build things that will work across a wide variety of locations, all with different camp and cast sizes and different constraints.

And it’s now less than a month to the Authors Event at the Carolina Renaissance Festival! I’ll be there to chat and sign books from 11:30am-5pm on November 16-17, along with Mike Allen, Megan Sheperd, Sam Parks, and Scott Reintgen.

Later in November, I’ll also be popping into a friend’s professional development course to talk to students about the things you can do with an English degree! I feel pretty well qualified to discuss that, considering the wild path my career has taken, careening from academia to publishing to entertainment and hitting all sorts of things in-between.

After that, I think I’ve got a bit of a break for a while, at least when it comes to author events and conventions! But, y’know, I’m always up for a classroom or library visit or a conference appearance, should you have a need. 😉

What I’ve Been Reading

(As always, these are affiliate links, and if you use them to buy books, I’ll get a small commission, which I will immediately use to buy more books. Bookshop is apparently about to get ebook options! Terribly exciting.)

• The Last Hour Between Worlds, Melissa Caruso

• Thornhedge, T. Kingfisher

• Medusa, Katherine Marsh

• The Sky on Fire, Jenn Lyons

• Rose/House, Arkady Martine

• Haunted Ever After, Jen DeLuca

• Paola Santiago and the River of Tears, Tehlor Kay Mejia

• Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, Judi Dench

So many excellent reads since my last newsletter! The Last Hour Between Worlds, I devoured in a ridiculously compact amount of time. It was so enthralling that I quite simply did not want to put it down. Medusa and Paola Santiago are both books I read for work — Medusa, in particular, is one I’ll be shoving at campers particularly hard and including in all of our curated reading lists, because it’s so magnificently in line with this year’s theme.

And I cannot highly enough recommend Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent. Much as with Patrick Stewart’s autobiography, I’m also telling you get this one in audio. It’s a conversation — and Judi Dench’s part is actually read by someone else, but so well that you’d hardly notice — and she talks about every Shakespeare role she’s ever played. I don’t get as much opportunity to really indulge my Shakespearean love these days, but oh, this brought me right back to conversations from grad school and my years at the American Shakespeare Center. It’s quite funny, because she swears up and down that she doesn’t analyze the plays, doesn’t think about them academically — but her instincts are so very, very keen that it’s hard to believe her! I was quite sad when I got to the end and she was out of plays to discuss. I could’ve listened to these conversations for another 20 hours.

Wrapping It Up

As a sidebar, I think I may finally have the bandwidth to look into migrating this blog/newsletter over to another platform, as I’ve been considering doing for a while. I truly am so sick of having to change because the owners of platforms make terrible choices (or are just terrible people), but, well, welcome to the modern internet, I suppose. I think I’ve narrowed my options down to Beehiiv or Buttondown (or maybe Ghost, although that one looks a bit intimidating). Once I do, I’ll migrate all my subscribers over to the new platform. Hopefully you won’t notice a thing!

Hope everyone has a spooktacular Halloween!