2025 has been far from the best of times, on a macro scale and on a personal level. It has been a terrible year for so many people in too many ways to list, and it’s still very difficult to put into writing, even privately, some of what this year has been for me. There’s a lot of grief and anger bubbling up through everything, and all the joy I’ve had this year is mixed with that.
But there really have been joys, writing-wise and personally too!
So for this newsletter, here’s a few author highlights of 2025:
The Seaglass Blade
Sapphic lovers defending their found family at the end of the world, anyone?
That 2025 mixture of joy and loss is the heart of the book I’ve finally moved towards publishing this year, The Seaglass Blade. It’s centered on two women and their very unique family, a complicated, queer, magical, on-the-edge-of-immortal found family, targeted by a vengeful power that delights in cruelty, manipulation, and betrayal of trust. They’ll fight to save one another, and they’ll live through the grief and joy that comes with choosing to love things which do not last forever.
The Seaglass Blade is a story with a lot of emotions woven into it, and that’s part of why it took me so long; the first draft was the fastest complete book I’ve yet written, but it took three years of revisions after that, with breaks for two other novels! Even though early drafts had lots of exciting scenes, wild plot, and magical battles, it wasn’t working emotionally the way I wanted until this past May, which coincided with some of the hardest personal stuff this year.
It’s finally time to launch it into the world, beginning with my very first Kickstarter this fall, which was definitely a 2025 highlight! And working with Alyssa Winans over the summer on this incredible cover (along with a trip to Iceland that we will never forget) meant that this book was with me in some very emotionally demanding moments.
So now, as of December 2025, The Seaglass Blade is up for preorder on Amazon, on Goodreads and Storygraph for your TBR, and very soon out to ARC readers. The publishing date listed on Amazon is April 1, but between you and me and anyone on Substack who sees this, I expect the publishing date to be earlier! I just wanted to give enough time to do an actual book launch that was different from crossing my fingers and hoping for the best, which was my “launch plan” for my first two books.
The Phoenix and the Sword: Indie Ink Awards
The Phoenix and the Sword has been nominated for several categories in the Indie Ink Awards! To quote from the email I received,
The Indie Ink Awards is a joint project by WriteHive, Inked In Gray, and Indie Story Geek. Designed to showcase amazing indie books, this contest is trope and diversity focused rather than focused on genre. Our reader-nominations phase has just ended, and we’re about to go into the next phase of the contest, which is our voting phase. After voting, the top ten for each award will move on as finalists to the reading phase. You can learn all about it at https://indieinkawards.com/
This is not the first time that Phoenix has been nominated, but that makes it even more special to get that email! I deeply appreciate that readers were touched enough by the book to nominate it again. Thank you so much! And if you would like to support Phoenix in the voting phase, beginning December 15 you can vote on the Indie Ink Awards site in its nominated categories:
- Best book cover and cover artist
- Best morally gray character (I bet this is Zhu Guiren because OF COURSE it is)
- Best setting (I love being nominated for this, because Phoenix actually has three settings – the Common Federation, ancient Daxian, and the spirit realm)
- Best use of tropes (behold the trope map!)
- Side Character MVP (most likely Zhu Guiren again, because of course)
- Writing the Future We Need: Gay or Lesbian Representation and Writing the Future We Need: LGBTQ+ Representation: These two categories are especially important to me, because as a lesbian who loves SFF, my goal since I was a teenager has always been to write emotionally memorable fantasy and speculative fiction, centered on queer characters and relationships. So yay, it’s working!
To celebrate the nomination, The Phoenix and the Sword will be .99 on all platforms, worldwide, through January 2!
A Tale of Three Revisions
I’ve been in turbo revision mode this year, alternating between Seaglass, a gothic historical fantasy novella, and another completely new novel in a new world. I’ve just finished final revisions on that novel: an imprisoned musician must use her body and soul to set a magical boundary around her nation, and the brilliant mapmaker who secretly loves her must design the spell that will bind her to it forever. That one will soon be going on an adventure in agent-querying land.
After a year of edits, even though next up to finish and publish is that gothic novella, I’m really ready to start something new. I’ll take a break from revising for a bit and go back to drafting a new thing; I’m so looking forward to having that new story feeling again in 2026.
Thanks for being on this adventure with me this year. I hope that your 2025 has also had moments of joy – a lot of them! – and that going into 2026, there will be more joy and more hope for all of us. See you there!