TODAY IS THE DAY, consider getting your copy!
10.03.2026 19:59
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TODAY IS THE DAY, consider getting your copy!
QLN's 2026 Bookish (& More) Auction Lit for Queer Liberation March 8-14 - Virtual Auction! LADZ signed & personalized bundle - entire catalogue + zines + merch
LIT FOR QUEER LIBERATION VIRTUAL AUCTION
Hundreds of bookish items available to bid on from authors, agents, editors, and more in support of queer people facing financial hardship
I'm offering my entire catalogue, bid here: www.32auctions.com/organization...
Book cover for The Autarch's Heir, by Jo Graham: two woman, one dark-haired, one blond, stand behind an elegant dark man in a dark suit. A golden crown hovers in the background above a cloudy seascape. Text: The Autarch's Heir, Jo Graham. It sounds like a simple job to con man Bel Alan: pretend to be the natural son of the assassinated Calpurnian autarch Iulus and steal the priceless Solaste Crown. But his simple theft may be about to plunge Lono into a bloody civil war, and finding the Blameless Prince to wear the crown may be the only way to stop it. What's a con man to do when the stakes of his game are suddenly the fate of a world?
A quick reminder - Jo Graham's latest Calpurnian Wars space adventure, The Autarch's Heir, is now available! Link to our website, but it's on all the usual suspects.
www.candlemarkandgleam.com/shop/the-aut...
Was struck by the whimsical desire to buy a new shower curtain, and as I normally do when struck by whimsical desires, I went to see what Etsy had to offer.
... I shouldn't have been surprised at all the AI slop, and yet somehow, I was.
I will not be buying a shower curtain. And I'm out of whimsy.
Finishing things is such underrated writing advice. You need to learn your habits and what tools you use not just to have an idea or start a story, but to finish them. You need to get used to it, and then observe how you can do it better. That starts by finishing stories at all.
A lineup of characters. They are all brown skinned and wear clothes designed after southeast asian fashion. A man wearing batik and a red head cloth A man with long wavy hair wearing batik and drapery and red prayer beads A nonbinary person wearing sheer robes reminiscent of Dhaka silk A girl wearing striped robes A nonbinary person wearing visayan inspired clothes and a bone belt A trans guy with blue robes A cis man wearing embroidered clothes A cis man wearing visayan clothes
A lineup of characters. They are all brown skinned and wear clothes designed after southeast asian fashion.
A lineup of characters. They are all brown skinned and wear clothes designed after southeast asian fashion.
A lineup of characters. They are all brown skinned and wear clothes designed after southeast asian fashion.
My southeast asian inspired ocs 🥭
Every day, it seems, I discover some heretofore unknown direction to be irate in
I don't necessarily think it's extreme views followed by a reframing that counters and moderates the community's irritation; it's more like we're all mad about so many things that they have to queue
It is really fascinating sometimes to watch the latest Writing Discourse spawn opinions that swell toward one kind of ire like a rising tide, then to watch the tide of crabbiness ebb in the other direction
(Sometimes, no one reads your book, and that is the universe giving you a gift.)
(And, like. Kind of a blessing in disguise, because ten years later, I don't really recommend that anyone read Drakon. It's not representative of the work I want to do, going forward.)
Still haven't bounced back, honestly! It's pretty disheartening to spend years putting your whole heart into a book and have it go largely unread!
But as with any other setback, what matters most is what I do next. All I can do is try again, and again, and again.
Building ... builds ... look, HORROR LINE GO UP, all right
I read this book a couple of months ago, and it was absolutely can't-put-down engrossing. Atmospheric and eerie, with a slow-building dread that builds to a horrifying climax.
That one's Prism House! ... which is the one I want to write FOUR THOUSAND WORDS on right now, and I'm just hopping mad that I can only get little snatches in breaks between work tasks
The Ring and the Bell needs six words: "Baby Gay in Fantasy Fascist Appalachia"
Describe your plot(s) in five words or fewer:
1. Orcs Save Porn, Start Revolution
2. Shapechangers Caught in Border War
3. Knight Seeks Glory; Finds Love
4. Locked Labyrinth Wizard Murder Mystery
5. Cattle Driving with Your Ex
6. Furious Crone Fights Capitalism, In-Laws
Well said!
May you find the drive to write waiting for you on the other side of the shift!
One of those days where I feel like I could write thousands of words ... but alas, I must work the day job, and by the time I clock out, the impetus to write will likely bleed away.
We're over 30% of the way to our funding goal 🥳🤩
If you want more aspec stories in the world, you can back 'Phantasms & Phenomena' right now!
We have two early bird tiers for THIS WEEK ONLY where you can get the ebook and paperback slightly cheaper too 👀
🌈📚🖤📚🪐
bit.ly/4rmvErl
First stop in my project to identify queer SFF that fell thru the award gaps since the Gaylactic Spectrum Award stopped in 2019. 10 top quality titles, most of which are that sweet spot of commercial but quality that typifies the 00s big pub midlist.
Dive in, find something new; buy links included!
my hot writing take is that playing with POV is neat and you can do what you want. present tense first! close third! first-person-direct-address with bits of omniscient third! anything is legal if you look good doing it!!
I also recommend Rukman Ragas's "To Kill a Language," which is a beautiful, lyrical, horrifying short story; it plays with the format of the step-by-step guide to chilling effect. (Mind the content notes.)
In terms of short fiction: Caroline M. Yoachim's "We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read" does SUCH astonishing things with repetition and pacing and the passage of time.
Cassandra Khaw's books are so often FASCINATINGLY paced--the prose asks you to slow down, to pay attention, to notice unsettling grammar or usage choices. This is particularly true of The Salt Grows Heavy, a very short book that's so rich and dense that it feels much longer (complimentary).
Susanna Clarke's Piranesi has a distinct narrative voice, which tells a story in which for a long time "nothing happens"--the narrator merely details the features of the House that is his world, and his scientific observations within it. The "story" emerges slowly, obliquely, as if by accident.
I found it instructive to read the Dungeon Crawler Carl books, which are in some places INCREDIBLY slow--as LitRPG/progression fantasy, they include all of the gritty details of level-ups and inventory management--but rely heavily on narrative voice and shock humor to hold reader attention.
