I went to Iceland so there’s that!
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!