…a potent anti-colonialist novel that sets its stakes on not just the fate of a planet and a species, but more importantly, the heart and soul of its main character.
Now is the perfect time to preorder your copy! Preordering is like a little present to your future self, and in this case, it’s also a present to your past self: the one that dreamed of finding a door to Narnia or traveling to the stars. This book will make a great summer read—preferably
out in a garden or forest, surrounded by green and growing things.
Two ways to preorder The Final Chronicle of Yeneh:
Direct from the
publisher, where you’ll get a slight discount on the gorgeous hardcover, plus fun swag, including a sticker based on the cover art and a handwritten postcard from me!
More below on what you can expect from this genre-bending book.
What I’ve been up to
As usual, I had a lovely Balticon. I was on four panels, including a recommendation-filled discussion of cozy fantasy, a deep dive into redemption arcs, and a fun conversation about “Is violence necessary” in
sci-fi and fantasy (short answer: no! But it’s often fun to read). I met a bunch of cool people (hi, new folks!), shared some cookies while talking about The Infinite Pantry, and did my first live reading from The Final Chronicle of Yeneh.
A highlight was the anniversary party for Scott Edelman’s wonderful podcast Eating the Fantastic. For ten years, Scott has been taking writers out for meals, talking to them about their work, and sharing those conversations with the world. Scott is an insightful interviewer and astonishingly
prolific reader (I was lucky enough to be his guest in 2023, and was amazed at how deep he dove into my work), and the podcast feels like hanging out at the bar or cafe with your favorite writers while they talk about interesting things. In keeping with Scott’s generous spirit, he brought SO MANY donuts for the party, I could not believe it.
After Balticon, I crashed for a few days, then finished cleaning up the draft of book 2 of the Infinite Pantry, sent it off to my writing group for feedback, and now I’m taking it (relatively) easy, writing some guest blog posts
about Yeneh and Infinite Pantry, and fiddling with some short stories for fun.
I’ve been having a lot of fun with the next Infinite Pantry book. If you’ve read Tea & Treachery, you’ll understand why I’m excited to stay and spend time in this world, especially given all that’s happening in the real world—and I hope you feel the same way. For a little teaser: book 2 will be about Lanahii and Emmital as they discover some of the Pantry’s previously-unsuspected secrets. There’s a lot of tenderness, and a mystery, and some
new things I haven’t done before. And of course, more delicious food. You’ll be the first to know as it gets closer to publication.
A new story!
"You Know How This Story Goes" is in the newest issue of Wyldblood magazine. This story channels all my frustration with Hero's Journey stories into a very meta tale about a would-be heroine who flat out refuses to do what she's "supposed to," with fun and unexpected results.
The Hero’s Journey, as set out by Joseph Campbell, is supposed to be a sort of universal story structure that he identified in myths from around the world. It’s really not universal, though. It’s a fixed story structure with specific elements it “has” to include, and it’s a structure lots of fantasy and sci-fi writers have followed over the years. Any story where the farm boy discovers he’s the chosen one and reluctantly sets out to save the world is probably a Hero’s Journey story.
It’s Luke Skywalker.
There are some great stories out there that follow the Hero’s Journey! It’s a fine way to tell a story. But it’s only *one* way, and they tend to feel very samey and predictable. They start with the hero being called to adventure, briefly resisting the call, then being pushed to taking it up and following this well-trod path. This story
is me playing with what happens when the hero says no, and sticks to it, leaving the path at every opportunity. I hope you’ll check it out!
On Sunday June 14 at 2pm ET, I’ll be doing an interview about The Final Chronicle of Yeneh with the awesome Kevin Hearne. It’ll be livestreamed on Kevin's Instagram and my Instagram. It’ll be recorded, and I’ll share the link afterward.
On Saturday July 11th at 6pm, I’ll be making my second appearance at Charm City Spec! We’ll be at the Ivy Bookshop in Baltimore, and I’ll be reading from The Final Chronicle of Yeneh alongside some awesome other authors (including Ray Nayler, which I’m particularly excited about). This is a fun and cozy local reading series, and if you’re local, I hope you’ll come hang
out!
There’s another event in Baltimore on Saturday July 18th that’s not quite ready to be announced yet, but it’s a cool one, and I’ll let you know the details when I can.
July 25-26 is LavenderCon, an LGBTQ+ convention and book fair in DC. This will be my second time attending, and I’ll be selling and signing books as well as speaking on a panel or two.
August 8 is the Book Fair at Bel Air, a new event for me,
which is a big fair with lots of authors in northern Maryland.
Why I love genre-bending and genre-blending
Those of you who are newer to this list might know me as a fantasy author via The Infinite Pantry. But if you’ve been here a while, and especially if you’re a short story reader, you know
that my writing spans a lot of genres, from the fantastical fantasy worlds to the far reaches of space to the occasional near-future dystopian resistance.
A lot of advice out there tells authors to stick to one genre (e.g. science fiction) and better yet one subgenre (e.g. space opera)—and that might work for some writers, but not for me. I loved writing
spaceships and alien cultures in the Brennex trilogy just as much as I loved writing magic and food in the Infinite Pantry (and I’m grateful to all of you who’ve followed me from science fiction to fantasy and back again). And as you’ll soon see, The Final Chronicle of Yeneh pulls together pieces of both, and more.
What is “fantasy” or “science
fiction” anyway? There’s an old saying that if it’s got horses or wizards, it’s fantasy, and if it’s got spaceships or lasers, it’s sci-fi. But isn’t that just set dressing? Star Wars has wizards in spaceships, so is it fantasy or sci-fi? Or, as this meme I saw recently so aptly puts it:
I totally get why some readers want the familiarity of a specific beloved genre. It’s comfortable. You have some idea of what to expect. But what ties my writing together (my “brand” if you will) is not the tropes or set pieces or story structure, but the themes and characters and how it’ll make you feel. I love writing found
families, and queer characters, and weird but lovable nonhuman creatures, and mashing quirky ideas together, no matter what the genre. You can expect people trying to be good, with optimistic endings, but I like breaking out of boxes too much to stick to one genre or structure.
To me, the most interesting stories (to read or to write) are those that combine
unexpected elements from disparate places, whether it fits neatly in a genre or not. But stories that don’t fit neatly in boxes are harder to sell—and to market. What shelf of the bookstore does it belong in? What Amazon category? Categories are better for genre-benders than bookshelves because at least you can have more than one, but it’s still tricky to talk about them. As humans, we like things to fit in tidy boxes.
When it comes to short stories, I’ve found that combining unexpected elements is likely to get editors’ attentions, but coloring outside the lines of genre is a harder sell. My stories that do this, though I love them, have been among the hardest to sell:
An as-yet-unsold story, “All the Precious
Things Shall Grow” (a crypto-and-investment-obsessed dragon and his deforestation-fighting rival)
The Final Chronicle of Yeneh blends a lot of elements, and also colors outside a lot of lines:
It’s firmly
science fiction: it takes place on another planet, in a universe with a lot of space colonies and interplanetary governments. It starts out with a familiar story of colonizing and terraforming a new planet.
It’s solarpunk: it’s interested in the native ecology of the planet, and understanding what’s being destroyed.
It’s political sci-fi: it’s about economic pressures and who has power and how to leverage it.
And it’s got shades of historical, even Regency: the main character, Ada, is a duke’s granddaughter, and
one early reader said it has Downton Abbey vibes.
But it’s also a portal fantasy: Ada’s own ancestor wrote her beloved favorite childhood series, a Narnia-like series called The Chronicles of Yeneh (hence the title) that has shaped Ada’s dreams. And as the story goes on, she discovers that these books aren’t as fictional as she thought, and
that there are strange and fantastical parallels between them and the planet she’s helping to terraform.
That last was one of the most important elements to me while writing it. Without giving too much away, I wanted to juxtapose the sense of wonder of stepping through a portal into a world of magic, against the harmful colonialist and anti-ecological themes
we so often see in sci-fi that explores alien planets.
Paul Weimer’s review
explores this genre-bending in even more detail. Yeneh was fun (and hard!) to write while combining so many elements, but I know it made the story more vivid, complex, and powerful. If I pulled out any one of those threads, it wouldn’t hold together as well.
Whew, there's a lot going on right now! For making it to the end, you deserve two cat pictures!
The weather has been weirdly comfortable here for early June. Though the summer heat is starting
to set in, I was able to open the windows for several days straight, and the kitties loved it!
