This summer hasn’t given me a lot of writing space, but I do have time to think a lot about the main character in the book I’ve just begun to write, trying to find a way into understanding her.

For my most recent completed book (the one that’s currently on sub), I developed my two main characters through their passions, their interests, their work: a musician and a mathematician. It was easy to find my way in to my musician character, since I’m a musician (and so is my wife). The way a musician might understand the world, the effects of practicing an instrument on the body and mind, what brings joy and what’s frustrating—all that instinctively made sense to me.

My mathematician was harder, because though I appreciate math from the outside, math and I are not super close. I talked to some friends who do study math and physics, and shared some of the scenes where the character actually uses her skills, trying to get a sense of how to create “fantasy math” for her: how would such and such kind of problem be solved without computers? What steps would she need to go through in order to approximate a solution? Though my fantasy math is pretty loose, doing that bit of research gave me enormous respect for what math minds accomplish and how they see the world.

In the new book I’m working on, I kept returning to my main character’s weaponry. Picking up her weapons again is an important part of the story, because she’s been away from the field for many years. Unlike my other characters, who so far have used swords or other combat weapons (or some very unconventional kinds of magic), a sword makes no sense for her. The dangers in her life are not able to be met with swords; she doesn’t fight human beings. In a vast world of magic gone awry, she uses a bow and arrow.

I found myself looking up various pieces of archery equipment, wondering what it would be like for someone who was a skilled archer in their teens to pick it up again nearly twenty years after stopping. What would she feel about giving up archery? Would she be able to shoot again immediately? How does using the bow and arrow affect the body and the mind?

Archery has always fascinated me, but I’m a world away from flat-chested, and I assumed I just…couldn’t, or at least not well. That old myth about the Amazons cutting their breasts off must have really hit me hard, or maybe it was all those art deco pieces with incredibly slender women shooting bows in artistic fashion, or the very not-like-my-body-types of my favorite anime archers, Kagome and Kikyo from InuYasha. But my fictional character is a woman around forty who is muscular and stocky, and like most of us she’s added body mass since she was seventeen. If it would be hard for her to pull a bow, I’d need to know.

So I looked around on Reddit, discovered that plenty of people didn’t think a large cup size meant anything for archery, and then asked on Threads if anyone knew of a place in my area to find an archery lesson for adults. Threads came through! I found an archery range near me that had an intro group lesson in July, and signed up, fully prepared to make an utter fool of myself in the name of art.

Reader, it was fantastic.

I may have found a new hobby.

I learned which arm wears the guard, which is important, where to set the arrow, what it feels like to pull the bow and let go of the string and hit the target (which I did quite frequently, like a miracle), and then to do it over again and again and again. It was lovely. It was incredibly peaceful. It actually quieted my mind.

The balance of the bow against the wrist, and the feel of my thumb beneath my jaw as I held the string to my cheekbone (no problem at all around the chest, even without a chestguard). The rhythm of stance, nock, pull, aim, release. Our instructor reminding us not to think too long, not to aim for more than five seconds. The sound of the arrows, like loud raindrops at the beginning of a storm, as first one person, then another, then everyone all at once, releases an arrow and strikes the targets.

And I can confirm: a woman, even an older, heavier woman, can shoot relatively well, even if she’s out of practice (or was never in it). I imagine my character loving the feel of her bow in her hands again, being reminded of where she came from, and where she wants to go. Can’t wait to try again!

Book Report

And finally, a little book recommendation: this month I devoured the full Kindom Trilogy by Bethany Jacobs: These Burning Stars, On Vicious Worlds, and This Brutal Moon. It was sapphic space opera about vengeance and obsession on a grand, dark, twisty, complex and unpredictable scale, and I loved it. Highly recommend if you’re in a space opera mood!

From the Philippines, lower right through upper left: a giant clam in Bolinao (they’re very beautiful!); the sea at Patar before a storm; night over Sabang; me eating taho in Bauguio; me at the Igorot Stone Village, also in Baguio; the view of Baguio from our transient house.

So I missed most of Pride Month due to unstable wifi connections and jetlag, but I was able to share some thoughts on Pride via Instagram. It was one of the more vulnerable posts I’ve made, and I wanted to share it at least the text of it with you as well. Pride is a very important holiday to me, not just because I love rainbow flags, but because what Pride envisions is a better world for all people, based in protest against injustice and demands for inclusion and respect for difference. Pride is caring for one another regardless of the world’s opinion, recognizing injustice where it’s happening and standing against it.

I came out at eighteen in the 90’s. My family was super Catholic—as was I. Getting sent to have a long conversation with the priest had everything to do with why I got a doctorate in religious studies.

Having pride in myself—who I was, who I loved—meant that nothing would stop me from living the life I was given.
When the world told all of us to be ashamed, Pride is how I kept going.

Coming out is a risk. It was then, and for many people, it still is now.
I want the world to be safer for all of us.

Being out is also a joy, and so much of my life has been built from it: my family, my writing, my stories, my travels.

I attended my first Pride parade in New York City and thought:
this is the world that I want to exist.

Kids celebrated for who they are, queer trekkies, leather dykes, feathered and fabulous queens, dozens of different languages; the protests, the dancing, the anger, the joy.
How we all had pride in one another when the world despised us.

I don’t always write queernorm; the world I want to exist isn’t yet here.
Sometimes I need to write about the world that hates us,
and how we fight back with love and determination.
But always,

I want to center our queer lives and loves,
and the vast worlds we dream of.

Pride is for everyone:
everyone who celebrates those who are excluded;
everyone who fights for the rights of others to be who they are;
everyone who is afraid and longs for safety and acceptance.

Pride is for you.

Writing updates

I’m officially On Sub! That means that my agent has taken my fantasy novel to editors at publishing companies, to see if they’re interested in this story of a sapphic musician and the woman who’s secretly in love with her, who must save their nation from monsters by creating a magical border at a cost they can’t imagine. It’s my first time being On Sub, and I have no idea how it’s going to go, so it’s all just exciting.

It’s also exciting to get back to my other new novel, the one that in March was just vibes and tropes and a baby soundtrack. Before I got derailed in April and May by the release of Seaglass, freelance work, family stuff, and traveling, I had gotten to around 14,000 words plus a lot of handwritten notes and outlining. I’m just starting to dig back in this week. Drafting something completely new is hard after over a year working primarily with later revisions of Seaglass and the mapmaker novel. I know what I want the book to feel like, how I want it to be layered and nuanced and full of reveals, and I know that what I’m writing now is decidedly not it. I can only get there if I keep writing to the end, and then go back into it and do all the beautiful polishing and depth I’m dreaming of for this book…but first I have to keep writing stuff I know is not very good, and it’s hard!

P.S.: I’m looking for a few fans of my books, and fans of fantasy and sapphic fantasy in general (who might not have read my books!) to help me understand my readers and the market better by answering a few questions about the kind of books you love and how you find them. If you’re up for this, please comment below, or send an email to admin at jcsnow.com, or a DM on Instagram!

Look! It’s a trope map! I would like to state for the record that this book has two sword lesbians, but one of them prefers to throw daggers.

The Seaglass Blade is almost, almost, almost at the finish line before its release, just in time for Pride Month in June. If Seaglass were an actor, it’d be in the green room with a makeup artist putting on the final touches. I am that makeup artist. I am terrible at makeup. Good luck book!

But this is why, when one discovers that one is lost in one’s grammatical sins, one finds a trustworthy makeup artist—a copyeditor. I’ve spent the past couple of weeks intensively going through the manuscript considering my editor’s suggestions and explanations, and it has been quite the experience. Do you know what a misplaced modifier is? I sure know now! Do you know why I love them so much? I do not!

It has given me a lot to think about in terms of what precision and clarity of language means for a reader. Most of the ARC reviews for Seaglass have been very positive, and people have loved the story, and that’s thrilling to know. A few readers, though, noted a sense of creative comma placement which detracted from their ability to lose themselves in the book the way that I, as the author, want them to be able to do. Why should I let that happen?

So I decided to add a final copyedit with a sense that it is a service to the reader and to the book being its best self. My grammatical errors may not mean much to many readers, on a conscious level, but on another level, they’ve been metaphorically looking at this story through smudged glass. Even without realizing it, readers have had to sometimes intuit or guess my meaning, and as my copyeditor pointed out, The Seaglass Blade is already complex and mysterious enough. I don’t need to add unnecessary mysteries by using pronouns without clear antecedents. When the manuscript is fully clarified in this way, the reader will be able to enjoy the story through clean and unsmudged glass. All the details will be visible, and all the depth of feeling will be easier to access.

That’s my hope, at any rate! I wanted to thank my copyeditor, Shannon Knight, for her incisive and careful work, while noting that any errors that remain are mine. (Sometimes I genuinely want ambiguity!) Shannon’s also an author whose books I’ve really enjoyed, with eight books ranging from fantasy through science fiction through horror. I loved her Grave Chronicles trilogy blending necromancers, dystopian themes, and urban fantasy, and while horror is not usually a genre for me, her most recent book, Catamorphosis, is so good, with elements of thriller as well. You can check out her website to see more of her work.

All that said, please feel free to pre-order The Seaglass Blade as it prepares to make its public debut! May 31 is the big day, and I’ll try to send out another email at that point, but I’ll be on my way to the Philippines, so we’ll see if that is a realistic goal.

Wait! There’s More!

I cannot believe I nearly sent this email without telling you this! As of the end of April, I’m now officially represented by Bridget Smith of JABberwocky Literary Management. I was introduced to her through The Novelry, the online writing program that I’ve been part of for the past few years, and which has constantly challenged me to improve as a writer. Bridget is working with my sapphic fantasy about magical mapmaking, and I don’t want to say more beyond that yet, but when there’s more publishing news, you can be sure I’ll share it here!

Two fictional lesbians with serious past-life issues, Aili Fallon and Liu Chenguang, made visible by @rebiesque.art on Instagram

Hi everyone! Did you know that April 20-26 is Lesbian Visibility Week? I honestly did not know this until social media informed me, and I am somewhat annoyed that I couldn’t prepare better with a haircut or something. We had a lesbians-with-kid family trip to the beautiful, surreal world of Joshua Tree National Park, where it rained in the desert, and we saw a rainbow and I was able to see the stars in a way I’ve missed since a trip to New Mexico years ago. We saw a shooting star, too, our little family sitting in a hot tub under the night sky, and we all made secret wishes that we did not tell one another.

My fictional lesbians Aili and Chenguang, who are still dealing with their past-life issues in The Seaglass Blade, are very much on my mind at the moment. I’m working on a final copyedit for Seaglass and I’ve set a date for release: June 1, for Pride month! (You can preorder now if you’d like to plan ahead!) Seaglass is intended to work as a standalone in the Crane Moon Cycle world, but for those who want to read the duology first (The Phoenix and the Sword and The Shoreless River), The Phoenix and the Sword will be on sale for .99 on all platforms through the end of May.

So back to this lesbian visibility thing…it’s interesting as a fantasy author to try to think about how “lesbian” works in a fantasy setting. (And to be very clear, “lesbian” does include people who challenge the gender binary in all kinds of ways.) In second-world fantasy, gender and sexuality categories could be different, as they are in different cultures and time periods in history. Women whose desire is only for other women might not have had a name for what they were and who they loved, or that name might have been quite different, with different connotations and understandings of what it meant.

I am comfortable calling Aili and Chenguang lesbians, since even though their world is a fantasy world and not identical to our own, the inspiration for the setting where they met one another is the 1940s United States. Aili would call herself a butch lesbian if anyone asked; Chenguang would roll her eyes and say it’s not your business, but mostly because she wouldn’t want to discuss the nature of phoenixes with random strangers.

It’s sometimes very clear that characters in other fantasy and science-fiction settings would be called “lesbian” in my own, real-life culture, even if they don’t use the word. There’s an exchange I love in Hiyodori’s novel Three Murdered Mages, Two Broken Bonds where the main character, Clem, is talking with her partner Wist and playing mental matchmaker for some of their friends.

“You never think of pairing men and women romantically, do you?” Wist asked.

To anyone else she would have sounded unimpressed. To my ear, she sounded amused.

”My brain doesn’t work that way,” I said. “I’ll leave that stuff to the experts.”

I love Clem and Wist and all of Hiyodori’s novels, which are all set in the same magical world. And it’s a perfect example of how a second-world fantasy can delineate an identity, with its worldview and cultural structure and priorities of perception, without using a specific term. None of the characters, including Clem and Wist, have named themselves with a sexual orientation (magical identity categories are much more central in their world), but Clem experiences life as someone who simply does not perceive romantic possibilities except queer ones.

Many sapphic and queer fantasy novels are “queernorm,” in that they take place in a world where no one cares about the genders of who is involved in a sexual or romantic relationship. In a rough way, in queernorm fantasy worlds it’s still possible to sometimes notice that certain characters are only attracted to a subset of possibilities—gay or lesbian in my own cultural terms—while others are interested in a wider subset, but it’s not usually part of the story. Imagining a queernorm world means that certain aspects of being queer may not be visible, including the risks that people take to find one another and be together, the subcultures and identities that are created and the community values that develop, and the ways that it requires resistance and courage simply to exist.

One of the most interesting examples of lesbian identities in fantasy that I’ve read recently is Metal from Heaven, by August Clarke. This book is ecstatic and intense and I’ve not stopped thinking about it since finishing it last year. The worldbuilding is amazingly detailed, and one of its strengths is that it’s highly pluralistic and pays attention to class as well as national distinctions. The story touches on lesbian and other queer identities that have real historical roots, showing how there are differences even within the same culture in how social and educational classes perceive lesbian identities, how people act differently in specific contexts. The internal experience of desire and love might have some universal aspects, but the ways in which we think, speak, act, and live out that internal experience is heavily structured by the linguistic, cultural, and political worlds in which we live.

With all that, I’m glad to be lesbian, and grateful to live in a place that is relatively safe to be visible as part of a lesbian couple with my family, and will fight for our rights to continue to be visible and to be safe. I am very aware that this safety doesn’t exist for all lesbians, and that’s why, for me, it’s important to have examples of our relationships in literature. And I’m grateful for you as a reader: whether you identify as part of the queer community or not, your support is important to every queer author.

Writing stuff, though: writing stuff has been good!

Since my sapphic mapmaker book is off querying, I started a new book project, and am already both loving it and wondering can I do this? which always seems to happen as I’m getting into a new story. I haven’t been able to start something completely new since September 2024, when I began writing the mapmaker book; since then, I’ve been either revising that or revising Seaglass. And as tired as I am with all the stuff, having a new story to think about keeps me going.

I don’t want to say too much about it yet, because it’s still so early. It’s not a romance, though it does have a love story, of course, and it’s a second world fantasy, in an entirely different universe from my other books, and it is looking like a true standalone, not a series. But here are some hints…

• Second chance romance (as in, the person you betrayed is the person you most need)
• Childhood friends to lovers to enemies
• Traumatic backstory (my usual)
• Heist! (That’s a new one for me)
• Hidden identities
• Protagonist in late thirties
• Chronic pain
• An archer lesbian (I decided I needed a break from sword lesbians)
• Chaotic, catastrophic magic and dangerous technology to harness it

I’ve got two main characters that I already love, wild worldbuilding, and have written my first villain scene, and beyond that I don’t want to say too much, because it’s all still so new and changing every time I write. I do have a playlist, though, if you want to experience the next book vibes! These are all songs that have some energy I want to get at, or that connect to the characters or plot points; the various musical styles don’t really have anything to do with the setting. I have two or three versions of “I’ll Fly Away,” because I’m trying to pick my favorite.

I’ve been reading through my very piled up TBR, and finished The Sovereign, the closing book in the trilogy of The Magic of the Lost, by C.L. Clark. This book ended the series in a perfect way I would never have expected, threading through chilling ups and downs and brutal violence, political and otherwise—there was a point where I was surly for half a day and had to explain to my wife that it was because “something happened in that book and I am very upset.” You know it’s a book to remember when you have deep personal opinions about all the characters; they’re so real.

I also read two non-sapphic fantasy books (I don’t only read sapphic fantasy! I just enjoy it and there’s so much to enjoy), The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson and The Poet Empress by Shen Tao. The Poet Empress is a beautiful, dark, and tragic book about power and abuse, and I’d absolutely recommend if you’re looking for an emotionally heartbreaking fantasy story. Hodgson was first a mystery author, and you can really see it in The Raven Scholar’s intricate plotting and intense whodunit vibes (not who you think! Ever!), but the worldbuilding and the characters are also fantastic; I can’t wait for the sequel.

which of these is not cozy?

I don’t usually read reviews of my books; I approach reviews like a dog that has heard the word “bath.” But The Seaglass Blade spent a month posted on Netgalley for advanced reviews, and said reviews have started coming in, and the whole point of Netgalley is for the publisher (who is also me) to see the advanced reviews and think about what this means for the book’s publication and marketing. I receive an email containing every review posted to Netgalley, and I am prepared to remind myself softly, “All reader experiences are valid” while I cry myself to sleep.

Luckily, I do not have to cry myself to sleep (so far)! The majority of the reviews have been fantastic. Some readers have created long and detailed reviews about why they love the book, and that is such an incredible feeling; I’m really grateful to everyone who has downloaded the book and given it a chance. But here’s a genuine surprise…

Multiple reviewers described The Seaglass Blade as “cozy.”

Now you have to understand: I was afraid that people would go into Seaglass thinking “cozy” because found family is central to the story (even if said found family is haunted by tragedy, loss, and betrayal). I was afraid that they would happily pick the book up and be forever traumatized, because, as another early reader and friend said when I mentioned the reviews, “What the [bleeep], that book is NOT cozy.” The content warning list is neither short nor welcoming, the stakes are world-level, and there’s a ton of grief and death. But the same readers who loved the book and talked about it as cozy also talked about these things! Which made me think…

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT COZY MEANS.

And so the time has come: I WILL READ COZY BOOKS. I will find out what is this thing called cozy!

I had read exactly one cozy book to this point: Julie Leong’s The Keeper of Magical Things. I read this one because I went to the book launch (I love hearing authors talk about their writing), and I was intrigued about how Leong described cozy as a subgenre, and what she loved about it.

She characterized cozy as aimed towards the goal of readers feeling good and hopeful at the end of the story. Personal stakes rather than world stakes are central; the world is good and generally does not need saving by the characters, even if a little tweaking around the edges might be required. There is a guaranteed happy ending, and people helping one another is going to be part of how that ending happens. Certain kinds of events are not going to happen in a cozy fantasy, or are happening in the past or very far from the center of the story (such as wars and sexual assault). Love stories might be important but generally will not be sexually explicit. People are at heart basically good, and want to be good to one another.

I do want people to finish my books feeling hopeful (sort of? I also want them to sit at the kitchen table staring into space, thinking what just happened? which was me after Gideon and Harrow). I also tend to see people as basically good, which is probably why I have a hard time writing villains. So I thought I’ll give this cozy thing a try, and I did!

And I definitely see the appeal. While reading Keeper of Magical Things, and the other two cozy books I read for this experiment, I kept wanting to come back to it. The world itself was a welcoming place, and the characters were interesting and sweet (also some excellent sapphic yearning, and catdragons!). I wanted to spend time with it each day, as a little bit of healing from all of my own much messier life experiences.

I then moved on to Can’t Spell Treason without Tea, by Rebecca Thorne. I had already read (and loved) Thorne’s This Gilded Abyss, which is definitely not cozy, but offers enemies-to-lovers lesbians on a submersible haunted by a mysterious and deadly force (recommend). I already had two copies of Treason for various reasons, so I dived in!

Treason has a magical lesbian and a sword lesbian living the life of my dreams, so I have to admit I mostly spent this book being jealous. They opened a coffee and bookshop (do you know how often my wife and I have talked about doing this? cries in needing health insurance and providing for a child) in a small town where they are immediately welcomed and make friends and their business flourishes. I want this life! Also they have a healthy and thoughtful communication style which made me feel that I am very immature.

But despite my increased awareness of my personal shortcomings, the same thing happened: I wanted to come back to this book. It was something comforting for every day, and it was also comforting to know that there was a whole series to look forward to, about these characters and their bookshop and their griffins and the people of this world that they would meet. Adventures would continue, and they would continue to be a safe and welcoming place.

Finally (for this literary exploration), I read the OG, Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree. I immediately could see why so many people love this book, because the main character and the world were so interesting, and each of the side characters were well-crafted and unique, including the love interest. And the theme of people helping one another here is the real center of the book, the magic that the main character wielded. (The descriptions of food were also genuinely mouthwatering.) The characters went against “type” (I think in a D&D sense), where the more negative aspects of who they “should” have been were watered down or refused by the characters: the orc doesn’t want to fight, the succubus doesn’t want to influence or tempt people. I suspect this might also be part of what cozy offers.

So…did I write a cozy book without realizing it?

Talking about this with some other author friends, one thing that came up is that books primarily centered around relationships, regardless of the level of stakes or violence, have very few ways to describe them in terms of SFF subgenre. There’s only cozy and romantasy. Everything with a love story gets associated with romantasy, even when the book really doesn’t fit romance parameters. I wonder if a book that is centered around found family and their relationships, which Seaglass certainly is, might also have the association with cozy, especially when it’s combined with the underlying premise that people are generally good and want to help one another.

Generally, though, I’d say Seaglass is not cozy in the way these true cozy books are, because of the level of stakes, the level of on-page violence, and the themes of loss and grief. It might be that while cozy is about creating and living in a safe and lovely place, Seaglass is about defending such a place. That said, at an early stage in writing Seaglass I thought of it as “cozydark,” because in a world that is violent and where innocent people suffer (like grimdark), still people love one another and create beauty (like cozy). I was told that cozydark is Not A Thing, but I think it is.

So for marketing purposes: The Seaglass Blade is a queer cozydark fantasy, currently available for preorder!

Do you know any other queer cozydark books? Or how else would you describe a book with cozy and also more intense elements?

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!

art of Aili Fallon by Rebi, @rebiesque.art (instagram)

Chapter One: Aili: The Protector

Five years apart was nothing. They could come back from five years. They had eternity to work things out.

Aili took a deep breath and smoothed the wrinkles on her button-down shirt, checked that the cufflinks were where they were supposed to be, the antique belt she’d dug out of her cabinet sitting just right on her hips. Her hair, freshly trimmed, fell in her eyes again. Sometimes she missed her long hair – at least braids and pins kept everything where it was supposed to be.

Yisue said,  “You look fine, Aili.”

“Thanks,” she muttered. Getting relationship advice from her son was not what she needed today. Yisue himself was wearing a ridiculous t-shirt that said Save the Otters, from the three years he had worked at some environmental nonprofit. He’d come back home to Crane Moon very quiet, after quitting that job. If Chenguang had been here, she would have been able to get him to open up. She was always better at that than Aili was.

“Why aren’t you wearing your cultivation robes, if you want to make it a special occasion?” Yisue said.

“It’s not that kind of occasion.” She’d thought about what to wear, very carefully, and decided that the cultivation robes might remind Chenguang too much that when Chenguang had wanted to leave, Aili had insisted on staying. Wearing clothes more similar to when they’d met, that was better. It might remind Chenguang that there was more to Aili Fallon than being the Master of Crane Moon. There could be more to them. This visit would be a new start. Chenguang hadn’t come back to Crane Moon for five years, and visiting her in Easterly – well, it wasn’t the same. Aili hated Easterly, and she hated seeing her beloved people in that mess of human suffering and demonic corruption.

“Too bad she can’t fly anymore, that would make it easy, you could split your time,” Yisue said.

“Yes, too bad,” she said, distracted. The issue had never been ease of transport. “How did she look, when you saw her?”

Yisue had visited Easterly just a few weeks ago, and even though she’d asked him this dozens of times already, he patiently said, “She looks fine, the same as always. She’s working hard. The clinic is busy.”

Of course the clinic was busy; Easterly was a bustling Federation city full of sick, impoverished people who couldn’t afford Federation medical care. “And she was safe?”

“No signs of any demons checking out the place.”

“It’s not just demons,” she sighed, and let it go. She needed to let it go. Today would be her chance to show that living here again would be worthwhile. It wasn’t as though giving medical care to people was the only way to help with the way the world was going. The spiritual creatures who came to Aili to study human methods of cultivating spiritual power, they needed help, too. Life had become more and more difficult for the natural spirits of animals and plants, with the pollution and drought, and they needed her teaching more than they ever had.

Or so she argued to herself, and to Chenguang, in her own mind. It was a very good argument. It was only that Chenguang would say, but you could still teach the spiritual creatures if you came to Easterly, to be among human beings.

“She doesn’t like that you just hide here,” Yisue said baldly.

“Thanks,” she said again, meaning the opposite.

Yisue looked up at the clock on the wall of the living room. The house was extremely clean, because Aili had dusted everything, and the clock was ticking happily, since she’d just wound it up – they didn’t keep anything that required electricity in Crane Moon. Aili had carefully put Chenguang’s favorite books out on the table, and a vase with wildflowers. “If you wanted to meet her on the way – ”

“Where’s Sanmer?” Their daughter. Aili had wanted to have the whole family together, coming to welcome Chenguang back.

“She’ll catch up, that’s what I came to tell you. Two of the disciples were fighting, she had to sort it out.”

“Who?” Aili asked, incredulously. Then she stopped herself. Sanmer could handle it. She could leave some aspects of leading Crane Moon to others. She’d already decided this. So she would have more time for Chenguang. So things would be better. “Never mind.”

Yisue added, “I’ll wait for Sanmer and we’ll come together to meet you both. The disciples are all a little afraid of her, it won’t take her long to settle them down.”

Aili sighed internally. Sanmer had always had a difficult time among the spiritual creatures. Although she’d run from the demon clans as a child, and only cultivated pure spiritual power rather than the corrupted power of suffering and hatred, still, the weaker beings instinctively recognized a demon as a predator. At least, if she let Sanmer have more responsibilities, they might see how trustworthy she was.

“It’ll be all right, Aili,” Yisue said, settling himself into an armchair. “Chenguang missed you too, you know.”

As Aili walked up the hill, still trying to keep her hair out of her eyes, she looked back only once. The little wooden house she had shared with Chenguang – it was still their house, it would be their house again – was small and insignificant, high on the steep upslope from the ocean to the mountains. Her gaze caught instead on the main building of Crane Moon, which sat close to the edge of the bluff and the shore beneath it. In late afternoon, the sun had escaped from the yellowish haze in the west, sending long, heavy bars of light across the dark gray sea to bathe Crane Moon in gold.

The main building was of local stone, set together not by modern human machines but by hand, aided by spells and spiritual power. It sprawled low, all one story: the communal kitchen, the cultivation ground, the armory for weapons practice. Meditation chambers, music rooms, the library with its curved wall and high glass windows. The dormitories for the spiritual creatures that came here to become her disciples, studying human methods of cultivation, learning to use spiritual weapons. Strengthening themselves for an uncertain future.

Once, very early on, when they were still building, Chenguang had asked her why she didn’t try to teach humans. After all, the original cultivation sects had been human endeavors. Back then, Aili had said, the whole point is so we can have a safe place for Yisue, away from humans.

Which was not false, exactly. They’d left the city of Easterly originally, some two hundred and seventy years ago, because it was becoming far too obvious that Yisue wasn’t human. As a dragon, Yisue grew so differently than human children – still looking like a nine year old when the children he’d gone to school with were young adults getting married – and he couldn’t disguise his looks, either. No matter how often he cut or dyed his hair, the next morning it would fall again to his waist, shimmering white. It drew attention, the kind of attention that was especially dangerous for Chenguang. There were always dangers for phoenixes like Chenguang, if they couldn’t hide. On this remote coast, inaccessible by boat or car, no roads or towns, no electricity, warded against human discovery, Aili could make a place that was safe for all of them.

But safety and secrecy wasn’t the only reason she hadn’t wanted to bring humans into Crane Moon. Maybe that was the most honest answer, the reason she’d turned her back on human beings, when even her dragon son and her phoenix lover longed to live among humans. She was the last human cultivator, and after Chenguang had made her – whatever she was – she wasn’t sure she was human anymore. Not in any meaningful way. It was all very well to wear a human form and pretend, for beings who had never been human to begin with. Humanity wasn’t pretense for her, but it also wasn’t the truth.

Aili turned away and continued the steep climb inland, up and over the first range of coastal mountains. Chenguang would be walking to the coast from the train station in the nearest town. For a human without the spiritual powers gathered through cultivation, it would be a difficult hike. For a cultivator, the trip was easy enough, and quick, using lightness skill.

She reminded herself not to force Chenguang to make the choice again, between Crane Moon and the wider world. Surely they could find a compromise, something that worked for both of them.

I’ll do better. I’ll make it better.

The trees on the upper slopes of the mountainside had been burned in a fire some ten years before, and since the drought was so terrible, not much had grown back. Aili walked among long dried grass and low bushes, studded with black pillars of burned trunks. The thick afternoon light was still bright and hot and dusty on the western flank of the mountains, but when she went down the other side of the hill, it was already getting dark, and a little chilly.

When Aili reached the bottom of the downslope, she gave up pretending to be patient and used lightness skill to leap over a deep gully and then up the next hillside, great jumps from rock to rock, exhilarating, eating up the distance. Chenguang’s lightness skill wasn’t as good as hers. Once Aili found her, she’d carry Chenguang on her back, like she used to do, and they’d be at Crane Moon in time for supper. She’d planned it out carefully, all of Chenguang’s favorite things: braised tofu and vegetables, that sweet syrupy dessert.

Aili let her heart be eager now, knowing she’d see her again soon. Admitting how much she needed her, how desperately lonely she’d been. Her body was much more awake and aware as she drew on her cultivation, and she told her body to stop imagining other things she and Chenguang could do when they got home. Too soon for that. She wouldn’t assume Chenguang was ready. It had been a long time, she wouldn’t rush her –

She stumbled to a frozen stop.

Aili wasn’t particularly sensitive to demonic energy – she’d become a little dulled to it over the centuries – but a seething pit of it clawed at her senses, from just behind the next hill.

Someone screamed, cut off short. In a thousand years, she would not forget that sound.

Chenguang.

Her body was in motion before her heart started beating again. As she leapt down from the rocks into the shadowed side of the hill, she saw a shining dome of golden spiritual power, sparking in resistance as swords and spears of demonic energy struck it. The dome was small, covering an area perhaps the size of a bed.

Liu Chenguang sat beneath it, her back straight, her hands held at chest height with her fingers bent into the warding seal, her eyes downcast in concentration. Another person was huddled small against Chenguang’s side.

Seeing Chenguang after so long – just the same, her pale skin and her black hair cut to her shoulders, her sharp-featured face and her familiar hands – seeing her under attack –

Aili had one fraction of a moment to be grateful that Yisue was still far behind, that Sanmer had been delayed. She had worked so hard, for so many years, so her children would not know what she was capable of when she was angry.

She was angry now.

Her right hand called her spiritual sword, joyously shining golden-white with its awareness of Chenguang near, and her left hand called the phoenix-fire whip, glowering red, and eager for destruction.

Several demons, looking like beautiful human beings, as demons always did in their mortal forms, smashed down at the ward with swords and spears and maces. Others in their crow forms flew at Chenguang’s head, trying to distract her, or threw talismans at her spiritual ward to attempt to dissolve it. Corrupted spiritual power flowed everywhere in burning, turbulent waves.

More than one demon. Demons working together was shocking in itself, or would have been if Aili had been in the mood to think about it. Instead, she was just glad there were more to kill.

And then Aili Fallon leapt forward, to do the one thing she always knew how to do.

Chapter Two: Aili: Homecoming

One of the demons, a man with pale skin and short black hair, let his two swords dissolve, transformed into a crow, and flew high above Chenguang’s head. The others backed away, as he dove down and slammed the golden ward with his whole body. With a hiss and a stink of burning feathers, Chenguang’s protective dome of pure spiritual power disappeared.

The person hiding against Chenguang’s shoulder screamed, and Chenguang threw herself forward, blocking with her body. A shining dagger sank into Chenguang’s back, with that terrible, familiar sound of metal cleaving flesh, a meaty thump. She jerked, but made no noise.

She’ll heal. Aili knew a phoenix would heal, as she knew gravity would pull down, but reminding herself of it enraged her even more. Chenguang was doing what she always did, trying to protect someone other than herself, and what did it matter that any wound she took would close within minutes as though it had never been? The pain was real, even if Chenguang always made light of it. Her pain and suffering were as agonizing as any other creature’s, and now the knife was tearing at her again, slicing through muscles, grating on bone –

The old forest fire hadn’t come here, and the trees were different, huge conifers with trunks that five people holding hands could barely circle. Aili lost sight of Chenguang as she veered between them, but as a result, the demons hadn’t seen her coming yet.

Too bad for them.

“Phoenix,” came a woman’s voice, laughing in excitement. “We’ve got it!”

“We don’t need the shackle, this one can’t transform – ”

“What, we just have to walk carrying her?” A man’s voice, tight and a little anxious. “What about – ”

Then his head came off.

The demon holding Chenguang’s wrist didn’t survive for more than one gaping second before a golden blaze cut her nearly in half, the phoenix-fire whip sending blood in a miniature whirlwind all over the clearing, hissing in the air. The woman didn’t die immediately, but she certainly would, and as she turned away from the carnage Aili caught yet another demon with her sword and whip together. His body tore into three uneven pieces.

Calmness, controlling her breathing, was key to fighting with her cultivational power, but Aili’s rage was so enormous that the phoenix-fire whip was volcanic with it, nearly out of her control. The fire flicked embers against the tree trunks. In the spaces between her sword plunging into flesh, the whip searing into bodies, she saw a human girl sprawled on the ground bleeding. Chenguang bent over her, coughing.

Chenguang had blood all over her back.

Arrows of demonic power sliced through the air at Aili, at Chenguang, at the girl on the ground. Aili blocked some dozen or so as she ran for the archer, who had climbed a tree for better range, and then simply tore him down with the phoenix fire whip, burning through his arms and his weapon and his heart. Another demon leapt out from behind the tree, spear at the ready, as though he thought he could surprise her while she was busy. Aili cut through the spear, then let herself get close enough so she could see his eyes when she slashed his throat.

Then there were none left.

Breathing quickly, she stood on the little path through the trees. “Chenguang,” she said.

Chenguang’s dark eyes met Aili’s, across the clearing. For a moment everything stopped.

“Aili,” Chenguang said softly. “Behind you.”

Aili whirled and caught someone with her sword – she didn’t need to see them at such close quarters, the scream told her what she needed to know.

Then she let her sword and the phoenix-fire whip dissolve, took two steps forward, and pulled Chenguang into her arms. She could feel Chenguang’s heartbeat, fast and hard, the warmth of her skin. Chenguang smelled of blood and fire, but beneath that was the scent Aili would forever associate with her. Incense, and the slight bitterness of medicinal herbs.

Aili swallowed and closed her eyes, to avoid seeing what she’d done to the demons, the body parts strewn everywhere, half-burned. Finally she had it again, that familiar rightness, Chenguang fitting against her, and it was as though they’d never been apart.

She whispered into her hair, “I’m so sorry, Chenguang.”

Chenguang’s breath caught against her chest. Chenguang’s own wounds were already healed, but there was still blood all over her back, rents in her clothing, as Aili’s hand pressed against her skin.

The arms around Aili’s waist squeezed for one moment, then loosened as Chenguang pulled slightly away. “Let me check Lanse.”

The girl had several bleeding flesh wounds, her face terrified and tear-stained in the gloom. None of her wounds would be difficult to heal, not for a phoenix.

“Doctor Liu,” she said, and gasped. “Doctor Liu? Aili – Aili?”

Chenguang said, soothingly, “It will be all right, Lanse. I’ll do it, Aili. I’ve got plenty of blood all ready.”

Aili recognized the girl now: Chenguang’s human apprentice. Aili had no idea what Chenguang was thinking, bringing her here; Chenguang had never told Lanse about her own phoenix nature, or about Crane Moon. These were secrets too large to tell, too risky not to keep. Lanse thought Chenguang was an ordinary physician, an expert in Daxian traditional medicine, no more, and that Aili was her lover, away on business.

But it didn’t matter. Whatever reason Chenguang had, to bring a human to Crane Moon – whatever it was, Aili would accept it. She nodded at Chenguang, and caught a hint of gratitude in her glance.

Chenguang slathered her hand with the blood from her own closed wounds, and then anointed each of Lanse’s injuries, finishing with her bloody fingers between Lanse’s lips.

Lanse struggled slightly in protest and shock, and then said, “What?” in a very small voice.

Her breathing immediately eased. Beneath the torn clothing, her wounds knitted together, pink scars fading away into unblemished skin, stained with dried blood.

“Chenguang, we need to run. I’ll carry her,” Aili said. Hopefully the girl wouldn’t protest that. They needed to get to safety at Crane Moon as soon as possible, back inside the wards. This attack was inexplicable, so many demons at once. This couldn’t be a coincidence, that they had come here to attack Chenguang.

“They must have followed me,” Chenguang said, anticipating her thoughts, as usual. As though they’d never argued, as though nothing had separated them. She took Aili’s hand and said, “Aili – ”

“Aili?!” Between two darkened tree-trunks, Yisue appeared, blue-green eyes wide. Aili winced, as he took in her handiwork. Lumps of half-burned bodies were strewn all over the clearing, black feathers from demons in their crow forms scattered and hanging in the trees.

Sanmer stood next to him, taller than he was. Both of them were pale, almost ghostly, in the dim shade of the trees.

“What happened?” Sanmer asked. “Demons here?”

“I don’t know – ” Aili said.

Sanmer made a sudden noise, not quite a word, and one of her golden throwing knives flashed through the air above Aili’s head.

Sanmer was fast, very fast. But she was too late.

There had been one demon left.

#

Time slowed down. Everything happened inch by inch in front of Aili, as though she was watching something that had already happened. She called her spiritual sword and it was in her hand, but the demon dove straight down in crow form from the high branches above them.

The demon transformed just long enough to have a hand, and that hand held something sharp as ice, clear as crystal.

Aili slashed viciously up, and the demon’s hand separated from her body, which Aili’s sword slashed nearly in half through the belly on the return stroke. The remnants hit heavily next to them, blood spattering over them all. Lanse’s mouth was open in a scream. Yisue cried out in protest. Sanmer’s arm was still reaching to throw another knife.

The crystal blade had already buried itself deep in Chenguang’s chest, the demon’s dead hand still clenched around it.

The crystal blade shimmered, and dissolved.

Chenguang didn’t look at her own wound, only at Aili, her mouth slightly open, a little frown between her eyebrows.

The bleeding didn’t stop. The wound didn’t close.

“Aili?” Chenguang said.

Then she collapsed, her blood trickling out over the hard dust of the forest path.

#

After Chenguang crumpled to the ground, Aili stared, waiting for her to get up.

Lanse cried out in shock and crawled towards her immediately, because she didn’t know what Chenguang was. Lanse didn’t know that Chenguang would, any minute now, take a deep breath and then smile and brush helplessly at the blood soaking her shirt, which Aili now noticed was the dark red that Chenguang always looked so beautiful in, and also didn’t show blood very much. Lanse didn’t know that any minute now, Chenguang would laugh and say Healing and not dying, that’s all I’ve got.

Lanse didn’t know that Chenguang was a phoenix. Lanse didn’t know that Chenguang couldn’t die.

But everyone else in that clearing knew, and for a long, long, frozen time they all stared, waiting.

Chenguang lay there, not moving except the small painful breaths that Aili could hear, bubbling through the open wound in her lungs. Whatever it was that had stabbed her had disappeared completely. Blood pooled around her, soaking into the drought-hardened earth beneath the old pine needles.

Lanse tried to cover the wound with her hands, pressing down. “I need a tube,” she shouted, “anyone, a pen, anything? She needs something to keep breathing, she’s going to drown in her blood – ”

But she didn’t, she didn’t need any of that, because Chenguang couldn’t die. Because this wasn’t possible. Because this couldn’t be happening.

Yisue was the first one to move. He took a step forward, and then they were all there together.

“Aili,” he said, urgently. “What’s happening?”

She didn’t know. She didn’t understand.

“Was there a talisman, some spell?” Yisue urged, kneeling next to her.

Lanse was elbows deep in Chenguang’s blood. “She needs a hospital,” she said, “surgery – it’s a miracle she’s not already dead, she’s losing so much blood – ”

“Can you heal her?” Yisue ignored Lanse and looked up at Aili. “Aili?”

Jerkily, Aili called her sword and slashed at her own wrist with it. Lanse cried out again. It didn’t hurt much. She’d been hurt much more. She lay her bleeding arm against Chenguang’s wound.

Nothing happened, except that the cut in Aili’s arm closed.

Lanse stood, and slowly backed away.

“Aili,” Sanmer said. “Bring her back. We need to get back to Crane Moon. Tainu will know what to do.”

Aili looked up from Chenguang’s blood to see her daughter looking from side to side, as anxious as she’d ever seen her, keeping watch with her golden throwing knives ready.

“I’ll take Chenguang. Carry the girl,” Aili said to Sanmer. She took a deep breath, and carefully slid her arms beneath Chenguang’s still, limp form.

Sanmer gave one brief, sharp nod and took two authoritative steps towards Lanse, who immediately turned and fled into the trees.

Sanmer looked to Aili. “We should just let her go.”

“If she wants to go back to the town, or the train station, take her there. Make sure she’s safe wherever she goes.” Chenguang’s weight was warm against her body. Chenguang had brought Lanse here. When Chenguang woke up, what would she say, to learn that Aili had let her human apprentice wander in the woods, with demons on the loose?

“Keep her safe,” Aili said again. Sanmer nodded and raced into the trees, in the direction Lanse had gone.

Yisue said, “Just go ahead, I’ll do my best to keep up.”

Aili didn’t wait any longer, settled her breathing, and began to run.

The sun had nearly set. A soft golden edge glimmered on the hillside, as she raced up it with her top speed. Yisue was left far behind; he had never cultivated enough to run this quickly, or use lightness skill up such steep slopes. Being a dragon was no advantage on land. Even Sanmer, whose cultivation far outstripped Yisue’s, wouldn’t have been able to keep up.

Aili increased her speed until she was nearly flying, just the very tips of her feet touching the earth in effortless, impossible leaps through the air. The run became a sort of nightmare blur, hints of gold and red blended with shadows, gray and black. When she topped the final hill, the conifers ended and the long dry grass and burned trees welcomed her to the last slope, straight down towards the sea.

She didn’t stop at the house she had made ready for Chenguang to come home to. It didn’t feel safe enough, maybe nothing was safe enough. She raced down and down, stopping only when she needed to balance Chenguang’s body while opening doors.

The doors of Crane Moon had no guards, no locks. Crane Moon wasn’t a castle; it had no great gate, only an ordinary wooden door. Inside, lights glowed happily, and echoing through the corridors she could hear the distant laughter of her disciples, now in the dining hall for dinner.

No one came to greet her. The few people who knew that Chenguang was arriving today were either behind her in the forest with a confused Lanse, or had offered to stay out of the way to let her and Chenguang reunite in privacy. No alarm had been raised. No one knew that anything had happened.

Despite the fact that phoenix blood healing was available at Crane Moon, and cultivators and spiritual creatures easily healed from small mishaps, there were some cultivation injuries that required quiet and long-term recuperation. For such things, Crane Moon had a small infirmary.

The room had stone walls, with no windows, and a door that opened only into a narrow, quiet corridor, easily guarded. It was the safest place Aili could think of, insofar as she was currently capable of thinking. Her mind screamed at her, memories and guilt and ancient terrors, things from lives long forgotten.

When she had laid Chenguang on the bed, she paced back and forth for a bit, waving her hands in the air – they barely had bandages here, why would they have bandages when any bleeding injury could be cured immediately by a phoenix? Now that she’d brought her here, how long would it take Sanmer and Yisue to get back and figure out where she was? She should have taken Chenguang to the dining hall – she should have taken her back to the house – beneath Crane Moon there were caverns, those might be safer –

Then she said out loud “All right,” knowing she was going to lose her mind at least temporarily if she didn’t do anything, and took off Chenguang’s shirt, what was left of it, to see the damage.

A narrow hole in Chenguang’s chest, nearly in the center, through the sternum, angling slightly left into the lung.

Oddly, of all things, that steadied her. She’d been a combat medic, once, when she was still an ordinary woman, before Chenguang had found her. This windowless room, this simple bed, this wounded body: before she had been able to heal with her own blood, before Chenguang had bound her into rebirth and made her into whatever strange hybrid thing she now was, Aili had known how to deal with wounds like this.

Blood still oozed out, slowly, more a seep than a flood now. A human being would be near death from blood loss, but Chenguang’s heartbeat was steady, if slow. Her breathing as well, though it sounded painful.

Aili slowly tore the remnants of Chenguang’s shirt into strips and used them to create a pad of fabric, then bound it around her chest, lifting her up to do it – she was so light, it wasn’t a problem for Aili, even without drawing on her cultivation for strength. The wound was clean, with only a hint of bruising around the edges. When she’d completed the bandaging, tight enough to keep a little even pressure on the wound, not so tight as to constrict, she thought Chenguang breathed a little easier.

A demonic spell had been on whatever that crystal blade was, that much was certain.

The blood of a phoenix was the most powerful substance in the world, never fading, and demons used it for their spells and talismans. Of course a demon would want to have a phoenix like this: unable to die and be reborn, unable to heal, endlessly bleeding as a source of power for them.

Chenguang had lost her ability to fly, because she’d given part of her power to Aili, so wasn’t it Aili’s responsibility to always keep her safe? Wasn’t that the least she owed her lover?

She had warned Chenguang. She had told her, don’t stay in Easterly, alone and unguarded. They’ll notice you. There are so many demons in a city to drink the suffering of mortals, to manipulate and betray and enjoy all the results. They’ll hear about the miraculous cures. They’ll know what you are.

And Chenguang had said, I’ve been a phoenix in this realm for eight thousand years. I know how to hide. If you’re so worried, Aili, come with me.

But it had been here, after all, that they had caught her. Here, in Crane Moon. Here, in the place Aili had built, to keep them all safe.

Here. While Aili watched. While their children watched.

Aili realized that her face was wet, and her jaw was clenched so hard that she could hear her teeth grinding against one another. On the bed next to Chenguang’s body, her own hand lay helpless, useless as the rest of her.

Aili knelt next to the bed, and put her head on it, next to Chenguang’s shoulder, and let everything go dark.

Chapter Three: Yisue: The Wounded Phoenix

“How exactly was it your fault, Yisue? Stop making this about you, it’s annoying.” Sanmer interrupted his litany of self-blame without the slightest compunction.

Yisue bit his tongue and sat down at the table of thick honey-colored wood. In front of them, a window looked out over the darkening sea, and behind them, a closed door led to the room where their mother, Chenguang, had lain unstirring for days. Aili had insisted that Chenguang remain in the larger, more defensible main building at Crane Moon, rather than their private home further up the hillside. The table and chairs were set in the corridor for the guard to sit and eat, because there was always a guard. Aili had insisted on it, even though Crane Moon had its own permanent ward that repelled both demons and humans.

Yisue didn’t count as a guard. He was just there to be guilty and ashamed. The real guard was Sanmer.

His sister leaned casually against the corridor’s stone wall, arms folded, but her fingers dug into her forearms as she kept talking, even though he had already stopped. “There were at least nine demons. Chenguang can’t fight or fly, and you can’t call a spiritual weapon. You’re here and unhurt, and Chenguang is here. If anything you should say it was a win.”

Sanmer couldn’t understand. It wasn’t just that he hadn’t been able to call a weapon. He had seen the movement at the same time Sanmer had, but Sanmer at least had done something.

He put his head straight down on the table. “Ugh.”

“Yisue, you’ve never fought demons, or really anything, you’ve never had the experience. No one is surprised.”

This didn’t make him feel better. “You haven’t fought demons either.”

“False. I fought in the ranking pits before I ran away from the demon clan.”

Even wracked with guilt he turned his face to one side to stare at her. If she was bringing up her early childhood, the attack on Chenguang must have truly upset her; she’d never talked about it, at least not to him. “You were nine. I remember when Aili found you and brought you home.”

“I obviously wasn’t nine, I was closer to two hundred I think, nine was just my human form. I had only just managed to cultivate until I could shape a mortal body, before I ran away.” Her fingers dug harder into her forearm, and then she gave up and called one of her spiritual weapons, a golden throwing knife, and began tossing it up and down. Her face was completely expressionless, but the knife showed how anxious she was. Very Sanmer.

He watched Sanmer’s green eyes follow the golden blade. Chenguang living in Easterly was risky, he agreed with Aili about that much, though at the same time he could understand why Chenguang was frustrated, staying here. The natural world was collapsing around them. His own efforts to make some change in the world might have failed, but what good did it do to hide in a sanctuary invisible to humans and pretend nothing was happening?

And now it had come to Crane Moon. Or something had.

He must have said something out loud. Sanmer said, “They must have followed her from Easterly. To find out where Crane Moon is.”

“Why? Why would demons follow her to attack here?” If demons knew Chenguang was a phoenix, why hadn’t they taken her while she was unprotected in Easterly? Here at Crane Moon there were beings who knew what they were, as opposed to the helpless humans whose suffering was demonic food and drink. Here at Crane Moon, as those pieces of charred flesh on the forest floor attested, there was Aili Fallon.

Yisue shuddered. He’d never seen Aili like that.

Sanmer shook her head. “There were so many of them. It was a coordinated plan of some kind.”

“To do what? Have Chenguang bleed all over the floor for days?” He clenched his fist on the table. “To force Aili to lie there staring at her?”

“Shut up,” Sanmer said. “What is wrong with you? Don’t you think Guiren is working to figure out what they were doing? We’re all trying to do what we can – ”

She turned away, and Yisue put his hand over his eyes, ashamed for upsetting her even more. This was, possibly, even worse for Sanmer than for him. Aili and Chenguang, Crane Moon: they were her whole life. Unlike him, she’d never left Crane Moon on her own, not since Aili had found her near a broken demonic array as a child.

And she was a demon, after all, even if she was a renegade, even if she didn’t cultivate corrupted power. She probably felt guilty, even more than he did.

Yisue took a deep breath. He was the elder, even if she was the fighter. “Where’s the human woman?”

“Her name is Lanse, not human woman. She comes to ask how Chenguang is every day, but she doesn’t go in, she’s afraid of Aili. She’s still very confused. About everything.” Sanmer’s blade went slashing across the corridor to bury itself in the wooden window frame, then dissolved and reformed, glimmering gold in her hand. “She doesn’t understand anything and there’s no way that the disciples can make her welcome. They’re all a mess since Aili’s not explaining anything to anyone.”

Yisue privately thought Lanse was unlikely to enjoy the company of Aili’s disciples, spiritual creatures who studied the sword with her and shapeshifted from animal to human form. He certainly didn’t enjoy them.

“She’s stubborn,” Sanmer said.

“Who, Aili?”

“No – I mean yes, but I was talking about Lanse.”

Yisue nodded. He had been very surprised when Lanse had chosen to come back to Crane Moon with them, instead of getting on the train back to Easterly. Even after he told her flat out that Crane Moon was a place humans didn’t come, that he and Sanmer were not human beings, that Chenguang herself was not human, that she would be better off going back to Easterly and forgetting that this had ever happened.

“She comes every day,” Sanmer said again. “She…she asks how I’m doing, too.”

Well, enough of the distraction. Time for the real conversation.

“How long since the last time she left the room?” Yisue said, quietly. “Aili.”

“Four, five days?”

“And before that?”

“Five days, maybe.”

“So you’re saying that in two weeks, she’s just stayed in that room watching Chenguang – She’s going to lose her mind, Sanmer. We can’t leave her this way.”

“Who can make her do anything else? No one can get her to leave the room if she refuses, Yisue.”

“This is so useless, just waiting. We have to do something,” he said, lowering his voice even more. “What if Chenguang dies? Or whatever it is that phoenixes do?”

“She is a phoenix, she won’t die,” Sanmer hissed, “and keep your voice down, what if Aili hears?”

“They’re bound together,” he hissed back. “Chenguang would be reborn in the spirit realm, isn’t that what will happen? But what would happen to Aili?”

Sanmer narrowed her green eyes at him and opened her mouth to respond, but before she could, another voice came from behind him.

“Yisue, did you want to see Chenguang?”

He jumped a bit at the hoarseness in Aili’s voice. His  mother’s short blond hair was lank and tangled around her face, her blue eyes staring. If she had heard his whispers to Sanmer, she made no sign.

If only he had been able to fight. If only he was stronger. If only he could have kept Chenguang from being hurt.

Yes, dragons were powerless away from water, yes, he had never been a strong fighter and could call no weapon, but he could at least have transformed and used his claws or something. If only. Shock, surprise, fear, indecisiveness, weakness, lack of confidence, lack of skill, whatever it was, it all added up to failure. An all too familiar feeling.

Aili was a tall woman, muscular rather than thin, with broad shoulders, but she looked very small to him now. She sat on the side of the bed, Chenguang’s hand in hers. The stab wound in the center of Chenguang’s chest still bled, a slowly growing crimson stain through the freshly changed bandages.

“Why is she still bleeding?” he asked, helplessly, sick to his stomach.

Aili shook her head. Of course, she didn’t know anything more than they did yesterday, or the day before; why had he even asked? She traced along Chenguang’s eyebrow with one finger.

“Tainu said she may be able to hear,” she said. “So I talk to her.”

Yisue had a flash of Chenguang’s smile, laughing about Aili’s cooking, and bit his knuckle in frustration.

“Don’t you need to sleep, Aili?”

“Tainu said that if she keeps losing blood, if the wound doesn’t heal, though, then it will be a downward spiral.” She continued as though she hadn’t heard him. “I don’t understand, it’s not like them to attack in coordinated numbers like that…Yisue, don’t go anywhere unless one of the fighters is with you…” She rambled, her eyes focused only on Chenguang’s face, as though she had forgotten him.

Yisue racked his memories. He was eight hundred years old. Not old for a dragon, but still, hadn’t he ever learned or heard of something,anything, that could help? Something about demons and what powers and weapons they might have, to cause a phoenix to be trapped in her own undying body?

His mother’s best friend, Zhu Guiren, was a renegade demon, like Sanmer. Yisue had called him Uncle Demon for years, until he’d decided that he needed a more dignified way of addressing adults. Aili must have demanded everything Sanmer and Guiren possibly knew about the crystal weapon by this point. If they had no idea what had been done to Chenguang, what could he possibly offer?

But, he reasoned, as Aili stumbled into silence and laid her head against Chenguang’s limp fingers. But.

Guiren had left his demon clan centuries ago. Sanmer had fled from her clan when she was only a child. They wouldn’t know about recent things with demons.

But Yisue knew someone who would.

#

Well after midnight, he stood at ocean’s edge.

Out over the dark water, the waves crashing on the rocks around him, he could just make out the dragon gate: the sea-arched rock that stood with its feet in the water. Earth, air, and sea together.

The dragon gates linked the world together for him. He would enter the arch here, holding his pearl and his intention, and on the other side he would leave from a different dragon gate in some other part of the ocean. He’d used the gate only rarely since coming to Aili and Chenguang, just to visit his dragon parents in the abyssal zone. All this time, all these centuries, he had worn his human form to travel the human world, using his feet, trains, and once an airplane, which he’d found so excruciatingly uncomfortable that he’d sworn never to do it again.

Enough of the human world. He’d tried to live in the human world, and failed, just as he had failed as a dragon.

But a dragon lived nearly forever, and it was time now to be a dragon again.

“Going somewhere?”

He turned around, surprised – he hadn’t heard Sanmer coming at all. Probably she had transformed into a crow to fly down after him. She used to do it to tease him, when he was annoyed with the little redhead following him everywhere.

“You can’t stop me.” He was confident of that at least, since he was already touching the ocean.

“I know. And I don’t really want to.” She crunched over the pebbles to stand next to him.

“I left a note so Aili won’t worry.”

“Ha ha.”

“It’s the only thing I can do, Sanmer.”

“Where exactly are you going?”

“Daxian Republic. Shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Big brother, I hate to be the one to mention it, but you thinking you’re not going to have problems doesn’t mean problems will not exist.”

“Thanks, I had no idea.” He was touched by it. She almost never called him big brother. There had been a time where he had constantly demanded it and she had constantly called him little brother instead. Infuriatingly, she’d been taller than him within a few years of her arrival.

“I’ve been there before,” he said. “While a war was going on. It can’t be worse than that.”

“What’s your plan?”

“My uncle, Beilong. He might know about whatever spell they used to do this to Chenguang. Beilong is the bane of demons, he’s fought them for thousands of years, maybe he’ll recognize – ”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

He was stunned at the offer, and for a moment he considered it. Sanmer could protect him, Sanmer was a fighter – but no. Aili should have one of her children still with her – he wasn’t a fool enough to believe that she would be happy with his going. And Aili and Chenguang had always worried that Sanmer might be tempted to cultivate corruption again, if she were under too much pressure. Crane Moon was a safe place for her. The Daxian Republic, far from home, without guidance – it would not be safe. What good would it do to save his  mother, and send his sister into a corruption she could never return from?

Of course, it wouldn’t be safe for him either. But it was the one thing that only he could do, because no one else could use the dragon gates, no one else could find his uncle. “I’ll be all right.”

Sanmer didn’t try to give him a hug, or any other mark of affection, but her being here was enough. “Be careful.” She stood watching in the dark, as Yisue took a deep breath and ran lightly to his gate, his feet splashing in the low tide. His heart’s intention settled as he manifested the pearl in his hand: a gate off the northeast coast of the Daxian Republic, on the other side of the world. The beginning of the dusty road to his uncle Beilong, the great dragon of the Sorrowful River.

Chapter Four: Liu Chenguang: Once and Again

Something cold and blue, like ice, stabbed at Chenguang’s heart. Her blood poured out, her healing blood, to protect her. She lay in a swirl of brilliant crimson and gold, the colors of her feathers when she transformed. Blood-red and sunset.

I can’t die, she told the ice, and the ice chittered in amusement. Its edges were sharper than obsidian, sharper than the finest thread of razor wire, sharper than memory.

Chenguang wanted to get away from the ice, so she forced herself to her feet, stumbling forward into nothingness. Her chest was agony. Blood and sunlight trailed behind her, like her useless wings, but she couldn’t transform. Her wings weren’t really there.

“None of this is real,” she said out loud. The ice stabbed, tearing into her heart, and she screamed and fell to her hands and knees, the agitated swirl of scarlet surrounding her in desperation.

Aili?

Aili stood in front of her, and she herself was standing now. All her pain was gone. Aili was within her arm’s reach, but even as she stepped closer and opened her mouth to say Aili, let’s go home, she stopped in confusion. An enormous tree covered them both, hoary and winding in all its branches, dusty green leaves rustling in the hot sun. Shifting light and leafy shadows fell on Aili’s beloved face, on her shoulders and hands and the swell of her breast, beneath the uniform of an army that no one now remembered.

It was Aili, but it was Aili three hundred years ago.

Aili’s dark golden hair was long, braided around her head in that complicated way she had used when they first met. And her blue eyes were confused and hurt, because Chenguang had promised to explain, and she couldn’t. She couldn’t explain anything, because no time was left for them.

How had she come back here, to the choice she had made three hundred years ago? To this very moment, to Aili’s pain, and the unfamiliar terror of running out of time? To the last moments of her own existence as a complete phoenix?

Three hundred years ago, the heat built inside her. Inside her heart, where the rebirth fire would soon nest, burning her to dissolution and immortality.

I don’t have to do it. I don’t have to make Aili immortal.

I could let her go to war. I could let her die.

Horrified fascination at the idea crept over her.

None of this would have happened. None of this would have happened at all: Yisue, Aili, Sanmer, Crane Moon. I could just let her go, death was her nature as immortality was mine. None of it would happen if I didn’t – If I hadn’t –

But there was no time.

“Aili, I’m so sorry, sorry for everything,” she whispered. Again. As she had three hundred years ago. The fire danced in her blood like sparks. The decision was made, and she was no more than a ghost in her own past. Her hand was moving, her hand had grasped Aili’s wrist and brought it to her teeth, letting her lips feel the tearing of Aili’s skin, and her mouth the taste of her blood. Aili screamed and tried to tear herself away, but Chenguang steeled herself to give all the last strength of this body that would soon dissolve. All to hold Aili still. To make her immortal.

Blood swirled inside her, around her, lit with flames, until Chenguang felt nothing but the fire itself, and the seeking sharpness of the ice.

#

“Hmph,” said a familiar voice, deep and a little hoarse.

The blood and ice drew back like a curtain, and her hands were before her eyes, her pale fingers spread against a floor of dark polished stone, inlaid with gold and lapis lazuli. Against her skin she felt the brush of heavy silk, the formal robes of a cultivator. For some reason she was kneeling in the posture of full prostration, head to the floor.

“Get up,” Beilong said. “I’ll tell you when you need to be polite.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, sitting back on her knees, then rising to her full height, unexceptional as it was. Aili was gone, but Chenguang knew where she was, now, and for some reason here she was no longer trapped, forced to move and speak as she had in the past. “This happened three hundred years ago, too.”

“Did it?” Beilong lounged on a fantastically carved wooden couch, dressed in the royal robes of some forgotten human dynasty, brilliant gold embroidered with a white dragon. Chenguang’s gaze was drawn to it. The eyes of the embroidered dragon were a deep azure. Like Yisue’s eyes.

Beilong stood up, more than six feet tall and enormously fat. His one eye glinted at her, the other hidden behind his eyepatch. He snorted out, a rumbling “Hah” noise that made the long strands of his gray beard tremble. “You’re dreaming. And I’m dreaming. So we’re dreaming together. What do you see?”

“When I met you three hundred years ago,” she said, stumbling. “When you gave Yisue to Aili, to live with her. With us.”

“Interesting,” he said, his deep voice rumbling in his chest. “I see something completely different. I see a phoenix about to die.”

“I can’t die,” she said, automatically.

“You can. We discussed this. Three hundred years ago. Which is why you are probably dreaming about it now. Don’t you remember?”

Of course she remembered. She remembered the shock of having her own growing sense of wrongness confirmed. How she had carefully hidden her dismay beneath –

“At that time, you pretended not to know.” He coughed, a long, rattling spasm that shook his shoulders. “You gave your power to Aili, a human being, bringing her into the fire of rebirth against all the laws of spirit and nature. I do not judge. Dragons are intimate with sacrifice. I told you then: you will not have another rebirth.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m dying right now,” she said, feeling oddly petulant.

He grinned widely at her. “But I am.”

Another shock. “But – but you – how can you die?” A dragon lived as the earth lived, as the water lived. Beilong was old as the Sorrowful River itself, countless millennia of water cutting through stone.

“All things have birth and death save phoenixes. Well, phoenixes other than you. Let us be honest with one another, phoenix. I wanted to see my little nephew again. Has the great dying affected him? Is he well?”

“What do you mean, the great dying?”

His single visible eye went flat and inhuman, and he growled at something outside her field of vision.

The scarlet and gold swirled, reminding her that outside this calm memory she was trapped in endless pain, and she shouted, “No!”

The world firmed again: black and gold floor, wooden throne, the great dragon immense before her, one eye narrowed black and polished.

“There is a power in the world now that seeks out and destroys dragons,” he said. “Remember this when you wake. Tell Yisue. Warn him.”

He growled again. One hand whipped out in the air and held a simple cane, wooden with a golden head. He struck the floor with it.

Boom. The palace shook around her. Water the color of blood flooded around her feet.

“Phoenix,” he said, “why do I see you impaled on a crystal, like a butterfly on a pin?”

The pain lanced through her, and she screamed, falling again to her hands and knees in a parody of prostration. The red flood swirled up her wrists, then climbed like vines all over her, failing to protect her from the crystal shard that went all through her body, keeping her either from falling or rising, keeping her still and frozen, unable to move.

“What is that obscenity?” the dragon roared, and disappeared beneath the sea of blood and fire.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the story to this point – if you want to read more, please support the Kickstarter, and get The Seaglass Blade months before it’s released on retail platforms!

Life is complicated. It has been an incredibly rough few weeks for me for personal reasons, so I really haven’t written since mid-June. (This doesn’t even include the political reasons – for the first time in my adult life I had to stop reading the full news every day, because just seeing the headlines was atrocious enough.)

And at the same time, I took the trip of a lifetime to Iceland with my family, experiencing an immensity of natural beauty in a place that is unbelievably queer friendly, everywhere we looked. If I’d ever believed otherwise, Iceland proves that rural areas can be as queer-friendly as anywhere — we stayed for three days in a town with less than 4000 residents, festooned everywhere with rainbow flags after the West Iceland Pride celebration. I can’t show you all the pictures of beautiful Iceland, but here’s a few!

Snorkeling at Silfra between tectonic plates (photo credit by Troll.is); Djupalonssandur; midnight sun in Reykjavik; Malarrif stone formations; Kirkjufell (the Game of Thrones mountain!); riding Icelandic horses near Reykjavik; Djupalonssandur lagoons; viewing Skalholt from Mosfel (photo credits J Snow and T Valeriano)

Reading time!

My favorite read this month was probably Tideborn, the sequel to Fathomfolk, by Eliza Chan. It’s not often that I get teary-eyed while reading, but this one surprised me, at the very last pages. Tideborn is a multi-POV fantasy with a lot of political insight about xenophobia and violence, loss and trauma and identity, but it’s also about family. Especially parents and children, and what a parent will do for a child, and it was exactly right for me at this exact time, for all the reasons that life has been hard lately. It also included a lovely sapphic romance surprise for a main character, which I’d been rooting for since the first book! And although I’m not looking for comps now, Tideborn would be perfect for The Seaglass Blade, the next book in the Crane Moon world: seacreatures in human form, parents and children, love and loss, and of course queer love stories.

And writing updates…

So I didn’t write much, but I had regular updates for the cover design for The Seaglass Blade, and it is just stunning. I can’t get over how beautiful it is just as a piece of art, and how the artist, Alyssa Winans, captured the feeling of the book so well. I truly can’t wait to show it to you! Check out some of her other art and illustrations here.

I’m planning to share The Seaglass Blade first through Kickstarter, before the official publication, and I’ll be setting up the prelaunch page soon, so you can follow it and get all the updates. Kickstarter, if you’re not familiar with it, is a funding website that supports authors and creators to bring new things into the world. You might want to take a look now to see if there are other creators you’d like to support already. There are some beautiful sci fi and fantasy books there now, including queer ones, and you can hop in to support the ones that look interesting to you!

The beach at False Cape State Park, Virginia, beneath an approaching storm. Photo credit J Snow.

It hasn’t even been a month yet since the awe-inspiring joy of visiting Bryce Canyon, and wow, it has been a wild few weeks. Less than a month ago, I sent my completed revision of my Crane Moon world WIP to two readers, one of whom has read my other work and one of whom has not. One of them tore through 500 pages in two days; the second told me it was “heart-wrenching” and bittersweet and hit so hard.

Which means…it’s working?

Did I get close to what I was aiming for? An epic cultivation fantasy, focused on parents and children with points of view of both. An established couple learning what love looks like after years together, and their adult children discovering who they are. A beloved home that’s under attack, a fragile world that’s in constant danger, where not everything can be saved.

It might work. It might make readers feel things.

I got the second reader’s initial feedback while I was sitting in a plane waiting to take off to visit a sick parent on the other side of the country (and I am in the US, so it’s a big country). I couldn’t write for over a week (still haven’t, actually, except for this), because I’m not a great traveler at the best of times and I’m emotionally and physically exhausted. I’m just grateful that I have the flexibility and resources to be able to do it right now; I’m grateful that I was able to see my parents and my family. It’s a good time for me to be thinking about this story again, about family and home and how things change, how we are constantly changing and shaping one another.

Like a lot of people past the early stages of adulthood, I’m both a parent and a child, and I think being in that space where you are both, the years rushing past as your child grows up, being the child that loves aging parents while you become one yourself, made me want to try to do this, even though narratively it’s proven very difficult. They’re two different phases in life, two different stories, but in both life and fantasy they are happening at the same time and they are shaped by one another, one becomes the other, and somehow I wanted to get to that.

It would be easier to separate them into two books, in many ways, or to give up telling one story in favor of the other. But I got it to the point where someone read it compulsively for two solid days, and someone else found it satisfying and heart-breaking, and that means something real happened somewhere!

This Month’s Reading

My favorite this month was actually a YA duology from the Avatar: The Last Airbender world, The Rise of Kyoshi and The Shadow of Kyoshi. Let me say that I will have more novels about Kyoshi ANYTIME, F.C. Yee, and thanks to AmEricaNo for recommending it! It was perfect for my mental space during these travels and afterwards, and I loved the moral complexity of the Avatar that’s hinted at here, especially near the very satisfying end of the second book. Since it’s YA (and pretty young YA, I think? Though I don’t read a lot of YA so I can’t be sure) some of the themes and relationships I wanted more of were relatively lightly touched, but it was a perfect read for my mood nonetheless. I also enjoyed A Dark and Drowning Tide, a historicalish sapphic fantasy entwined with a murder mystery, and A Kiss of the Siren’s Song, by E.A.M. Trofimenkoff, a sapphic seagoing fantasy with hidden identities and dark magic. I’m back now to re-reading C.L. Clark’s The Unbroken, which at this point is practically a comfort read for me, and as always I’m awed by the character and descriptive work. I’m sure you will hear many times from me how much I’m looking forward to The Sovereign, book 3 in the trilogy, which will come out in September!