An Auspicious Autumn
A veritable soupçon of newsish things on all things Song of the Scourgelands!
At this time last year, I was frenetically typing, agonizing over a deadline a little over a week away from me that felt thoroughly overwhelming. I had no idea what was just around the bend for me, a few weeks later, a few months later…. a whole year later.
This year, I am also frantically typing, though this is less for one specific deadline and more for several smaller ones. I have a lot on my plate for the rest of September, and truly, for the rest of the year if you want to know it.
First things first, though—Bringer of the Scourge is an SPFBOX Semi-Finalist!
More on the full Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off Tournament is available at the link.
The review from Arina at Queen’s Book Asylum is short but sweet—I’m pleased to have written a book that sticks with the right reader.
It’s gratifying; after all, in writing a book, this is what you can kind of only hope for, to connect with someone, however limited.
Frankly, it’s perhaps the closest thing to a core theme of these books—that connecting with others is the only way we can hope to break terrible cycles and strive for greater things, that we have to work together to prevent the things that will without question tear us apart.
Trust, hope, and love, babie.
Edits for the print edition and expanded digital edition of The Shepherd in Shadow are … well, they’re underway, in the same way that Pennsylvania roadwork is more or less always underway. I’m estimating I’ll have those done sometime after I have cleared … all of the other editing … off my docket. I’m hopeful to have print books by the end of q4.
One of the nice things about self-publishing is that you can decide to add back in the scenes you previously cut for various reasons. In my case, nothing that changes the meaning of the story, of course, but there is a segment that I cut out rather ruthlessly when my Amazon KDP deadline came down on my head and I had to choose between getting it out and getting it perfect. I had a bad plot breakage and a prolonged absolutely wretched period of illness and both of these things put my back up against the hard deadline I’d set up for myself. Mistakes were made and all of that. In any case, I’ve been sort of quiet about this book because it is: a good book, I think, that I love and enjoyed writing, and also: still missing some of the little things I wanted it to have, and feels lesser now for not having them, so I am gradually doing the work of that and trying not to feel silly about it.
(I spent about 6 weeks pretty severely ill and I’m still struggling to finish things and recover my mojo. Don’t get food poisoning or covid, kids! I am pretty sure that I caught the latter by having the former completely wipe out my immune system this spring and I still feel like hell like 25% of the time and it’s been months.)
That said, between the surprise of finding myself on the SPFBO Semi-Finalist roster for however brief a time, and making notes for the expansion of Shepherd, I realized a week ago I had not actually celebrated the book release in my favorite way to mark a milestone—art commission!
I commissioned a chibi-proportion piece of my charming duo Vi and Mehren from fellow SPFBOX contestant S. Jean (seriously, go read Born of Scourge, a dark and imaginative adventure fantasy!)
—and, let me tell you: I cannot recommend “paying an artist to draw your little blorbos” enough as a free endorphin delivery system. To date, it literally always works for me. Easily my favorite thing that happened to me this week, I think! These people who live mostly in my head can also exist visually, and that’s really, truly underrated, as author experiences go.
As promised: a series of reviews of some fellow dark fantasists’ SPFBOX entries this summer. Here’s the first installment!
The Fealty of Monsters by Ladz is a deliciously gripping and unflinchingly dark queer vampire tale on the scale of an epic saga. A story of intrigue and entrails, replete with decadent and stylish illustrations by Soren Häxan.
The political shapes in this novel echo with reference to Rasputin and the fall of the Romanovs, but with a sharp and vampiric bent that for me evoked the best of the animated Castlevania series (especially Nocturne with its advancing civilization and intricacy of night-creatures as European society advances, such as it is…) with the depictions of the bestiapiry—hybrid vampiric monsters—and the weaponry of the imperial Chosen soldiers.
Here the worldbuilding is laid on richly and benefits from a slow marination. There is a lot of detail lavished on, as I think would be expected in the foregrounding of any secondary world epic, but it is uniquely done here as a secondary-world of the technical advancements circa the first world war, with some requisite but low-key magic as needed.
I think my sole struggle with this book is the prose delivery in present tense, which adds a sensuous immediacy to the work but also made me work very hard at times to follow the chain of events as they occur in the narrative, since there is a lot of politicking between scenes and character viewpoints—it’s not a tremendous issue but it is possibly the only thing that prevented me from scarfing the whole book over one evening, and very much a “me” issue that made me draw out my reading to times when I could truly focus, rather than an abiding flaw.
The throughline character of the novel is Sasza Czarnolaski, a vampire whose unique abilities are drawn with greater clarity as the novel progresses. His ability to move about within the high society of the empire gives him a unique position of political influence, one which he exploits to great effect in the latter half of the novel’s intrigue. I hesitate to say much more than this simply because I think trying to describe the particulars would do them a disservice in my half-assed effort to explain.
This is not solely a novel of vibes, though it has them, in spades: the unrelenting darkness of Fromsoft meets the frank queerness and political machining of something like the Amberlough trilogy—another series which uses the patina and technology of the early 20th century in a secondary world of tremendous political upheaval and intrigue.
Definitely recommended, especially if you like a lot of on-page spice; it is decidedly not a romance (a significant amount of the sex is political!) and it has a list for various cautions in the link above if there’s something specific you might want to avoid.
Until next time,
Typing away, ‘til Hell won’t have it—
—M.
"Trust, hope, and love, babie." My favorite quote here haha. Congrats again and I seriously love the art!
“connecting with others is the only way we can hope to break terrible cycles and strive for greater things, that we have to work together to prevent the things that will without question tear us apart.”
Didn’t expect a big resonant thought so early this morning but there it is! Gosh if that doesn’t echo against layers and layers of things this year, phew!