Author Archives: Lorraine Wilson

Bathymetry

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This is a wee bit of an experimental post. I want to see whether there’s interest in me posting occasional short stories on here. I haven’t quite decided how to do it, so this time around, I’m sharing a reprint of a previously published story. Just to see if anyone enjoys this foray, you know?

Please do let me know whether this is something you’d like to see occasionally (or not!).

Bathymetry was first published by Strange Horizons in 2021 and you can still go and read it, and indeed listen to it wonderfully narrated by Kat Kourbeti here. But the short story market moves fast and a 5 year old story is buried under a veritable mountain of newer fiction. This story however, won a British Fantasy Award for best short fiction in 2022, so I figured what better story to dig out from under the mountain to give another chance at finding readers.

It’s a story about intolerance and fear, family and all the choices we face that make us the person we are. It is, of course, full of monsters and the sea. I hope you enjoy it!

It began with a phone-call from her father. Tulaya sitting un-alone on the roof terrace of Mimar Sinan Cafe, watching pigeons wheel around the Blue Mosque and delaying a return to her studies.

“Tulaya-gülüm,’“her father said.

And Tulaya knew. She knew. She knew and it was almost a relief to know because this moment had been stalking them for months.

“Oh, Baba, no,” she said. Her voice dying in the sky like a moth, her friends falling silent.

“This morning.”

“I can-“

“Gülüm. You will go to your Uncle Fazir’s today. This afternoon. To fight for your mother, I must know that they are not also coming for you.”

“But, Baba, what about-“

“They will release her, do not fear.”

But a Fear was already on the street waiting for her. Tulaya had seen this same purge-and-nightmare Manifest before in Fatih, tagging the footsteps of an old man in the spice market with its shadow like claws. She had seen it at the police station, lingering at the windows peering in. And just as she had done then, people veered out of its way now, eyes averted both for safety and because it was so much easier if you pretended not to see. Easier to deny the proof of your communal wounds when it was not you bleeding. This time, though, its eight eyes, or six eyes, or ten, stared at Tulaya lidlessly, making bile rise in her throat and her hands quake. The Fear followed her home and then to the train station, its hungry gaze pulling terror from her marrow to her skin so that it could feast. But its shadows were in the shape of her mother, and Tulaya wanted desperately to stay.

~

Exile made her restless, fidgety with worry and a locust-crawling need to … to act as she hung out laundry in the whisper-wind coming down off the hills, to act as she scrolled endlessly through news sites, to act, to act, to act. She was made purposeless though, a fearful null point with nothing but this straggling southern town of pine trees and black-stone shore, Uncle Fazir’s lowered brows and a cousin who was once friend, hero, co-conspirator, but had since grown up.

The restlessness, or perhaps memories of Ahmed as a child, drove Tulaya down to the harbour on her second evening to watch her uncle’s boat carve lines into the sea, the deck bare except for Ahmed’s long silhouette watching her. Night-fishing, they said. It was the season for squid and other beasts lured by moonlight real and false.

Tulaya thought of the fishermen with their long lines on Galata Bridge, the noises of the cafes below mingling with estuarine-and-traffic air as she walked across, the thrum of the Bosphorus and the ocean ships a pressure in her bones. She thought of the marches, all of them high on fervour and communal hope. Fleeing arrests, tear-gas scalding her eyes, sinuses an agony she’d never known; and through it all her mother publishing truths and revealing lies. Ane, she thought. Oh, Ane, how were you so brave? And are you glad even now that you were?

North of the harbour she found bays of sea-stones that chuntered quietly beneath her feet, as around her the night coalesced and the heat died. Inshore, an owl called and was answered. The tide sang in the shingle and there was someone further along but looking away from her, leaning forward as if on the very edge of falling. Their frame was thin … too thin, with the moonlight heavy on their trailing cloak.

Stones slipped beneath her feet and Tulaya gasped, and  the figure, tturned. Moons reflected in eyes the size of her joined hands, long mouth hanging. It had no arms for gathering, no hands with which to hold.

The Manifest watched her … Longingly.

But who had brought such longing here, to this hard edge of the sea? Whose were the hundreds, thousands of hearts all broken in the same way to form this hungry thing here on this beach? Its gaze pulled at her, and her yearning for her mother rose, so she backed hastily away before it could dig within her for itself. And when something broke the dark waters just offshore, her lungs decanted mourning into the air, inhaling salt. Far away, the lights of a ship tracked the horizon and when she looked back, the Longing had gone. The beach with its water-skimmed stones was abandoned, the sea quiescent. Where was her mother now, she wondered. The sea and the sky and the dark mountains were all abruptly too empty, as if the whole world were a vacuum and she was anchorless. She fixed her gaze on the fragmented water and wished she understood Uncle Fazir with his night-fishing, or Aunt Aliya’s shutter-eyed abundance. How they could live so calmly when their nation had stolen their kin.

And where had their nets been, on that wide and empty deck? Their lamps?

~

Tulaya awoke at her uncle and cousin’s return; the bass sussuration of their voices, the smell of diesel and salt water filtering under her door. She rose and walked through the dark house bare-footed. They had shed jackets over the backs of chairs and were both sitting at the table. Uncle Fazir was counting money, as the water on the stove began to steam.

“Did you catch many?” she asked, and their faces, softened by fatigue and the light, turned towards her suddenly hard. Uncle Fazir’s brows drew together heavily, and Ahmed’s hand closed and then opened again on the table.

“Yes,” Ahmed said. “Thanks, Tuli-ciğim. Would you do the coffee?”

Obediently pouring hot water over grounds that smelled like the memory of a kiss, keeping her face down-turned, Tulaya asked, “You’ve already sold them? The market is so early?” She was thinking of the pile of notes beneath her uncle’s hand, the bellows of merchants in the bazaar. She was remembering the Longing’s vast eyes and the empty sea.

“Because people want fresh fish. Why are you up so early?” Her uncle’s voice not cruel but neither quite kind, and so unlike his brother that Tulaya’s latent resentment of her father vanished all at once.

“Affedersin, Uncle,” she said, laying out tiny cups with gold-filigreed edges and spoons that reflected her face, inverted. “I am not used to the quiet.”

Ahmed laughed and took the pot from her before she could pour, letting it brew darker, and his eyes were the same colour as the grounds. He said something about how she had changed, but her mind was unfurling a possibility: that beneath the anger and frowns, Uncle Fazir might be more than she had thought. More brave, more like her mother.

She’d heard the rumours from the border-crossings since the bombings increased. Rumours of Manifests grown fat and insatiable, glutted on the heartbreaks and fears of soldiers, refugees, and shepherds. Faced with that–guns and shells and monstrosities–who wouldn’t choose instead to cross the sea? And Uncle Fazir was helping, Ahmed was helping. Notes whispered beneath her uncle’s palm.

The coffee burned her tongue and became snakes in Tulaya’s stomach. Some said that a Deceit had appeared in Ankara, and that it had serpents for eyes. She wondered what it felt like to have it pull at all your lies, to fill you with falsehood until you did not know if even you yourself were real.

~

Drawn back to the beach again, jitter-fingered from the coffee and the early start, Tulaya walked. Leaving Ahmed in the harbour, his fingers black-tipped with oil as he worked on the great ruin of a boat he’d shown her proudly. A lone plover skittered ahead of her along the shore but there was no-one else, no too-tall shape. Down where the stones became pebbles and then pea-shingle, the waves were licking at something washed up.

It was a life-jacket.

Tulaya bent to touch it but stopped, a nameless shadow-thing shivering a path through her bones. The life-jacket was sodden, stuffing showing at cheap seams. It was wrong to touch it, and yet just as wrong to leave it here, and Tulaya wavered with the sea soaking into her shoes. Further out, where the water turned to ink and damson, something pale roiled and rose, something moaned. It might have been a whale.

Watching the broken mirror of the sea, Tulaya thought of returning to Istanbul, despite her father. She did not want to be here, with snakes in her stomach and Ahmed’s unfamiliar smile, cicadas grating against her ears and hoopoes mourning. She wanted to be home, where she could rail at the police and storm the jails; she wanted to tear down walls until her mother was free. She wanted to do, but could not.

She left the life-jacket for the tide to feast on and saw from the corner of her eye a grey-white creature break the surface, shadowing her along the shore but too far for her to know what it was, to feel it subsume her until she drowned in it. Who was it borne of though and who was it hunting? Was there a Fear staring many-eyed into her mother’s cell and was her mother uncowed?

She reached the harbour and sat on a sun-hot rock, watching Ahmed work in the shade of his boat’s hull. “What are you doing, aşkım?” she asked.

“Fixing it up to be a charter,” he said without looking up.

She studied the tall sides of flecked paint and old wood, thinking of white tourist boats and ambition. A cat slunk into the shade by her feet, holding a cricket in its mouth, the back legs kicking.

“A loan,” Ahmed said, although she’d not asked. Bank, she wondered, or someone else? She didn’t know whether to admire his vision or doubt it, and yet once there would have been no doubt at all. An orange shape, half-submerged, spun slow circles in the harbour water, and Tulaya averted her eyes, watching the muscles of her cousin’s forearms as if they would tell her who he was.

“You heard from your father, Tuli-ciğim?” he said and caught the small shake of her head. “You in danger?”

“No,” she said, “Yes. Maybe. Ahmed, what are you doing,” she repeated, “at night?”

The life-jacket sank, bubbles rose and burst like sunsets. Her cousin sat back on his haunches and looked at her, raising his eyebrows. Snakes writhed in Tulaya’s bones.

“Fishing, cousin. What else?”

She canted her head to better read the shadows in his eyes. “Where do you take them–is it Crete? Can I help?” Someone shouted a name further down the dock, and two satin-brown boys ran past, laughing.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” her cousin said and held her eyes without wavering until Tulaya looked away.. The truth was a splinter that she could either ignore or not. Just beyond the harbour wall, something moaned and flexed beneath the surface, and the boys leapt from the pier into a perfect sea. Her father needed her safe.

“Okay,” she whispered to the dozing cat, and she watched Ahmed work, letting the sun roast purpose from her muscles; the hours passed like years, like the shedding of skins.

~

Two days, and then Uncle Fazir got a text message at dinner, a look passed between him and his son and Tulaya’s aunt stood to ladle out more rice, more lamb. Outside, the cicadas were falling asleep and the crickets waking, and somewhere in the house a gecko called. Ahmed flicked a glance at Tulaya then away, and something in his face made her cold.

“You’ll want coffee,” Aunt Aliya said.

Uncle Fazir said, “Wind picks up before dawn.”

Ahmed worked paint from beneath his fingernails, and Tulaya thought of his loan, Uncle Fazir’s new car, and grey-white monsters in the water. She missed her mother. The secret lay beneath her tongue, and however much she wanted it to taste of coffee and sugar, it tasted of disease. Fear was a thorn in her heart, secrets and snakes and her mother’s absence all breeding her own tiny Manifest.

And so two hours before sunrise, she was waiting for them on the dock with the wind tugging her hair into thunderstorms and driving dust into her lungs.

Uncle Fazir ignored her as he bent to tie the mooring lines. Tulaya had lain awake picturing her mother watching the night sky through bars and filthy glass, retracing the fierceness she herself had felt in the false safety of marching crowds; remembering the Longing leaning out into the sea, and the Fear’s many eyes. Ahmed threw another rope from the boat to the dock, and her uncle caught it. She waited for either of them to speak, but they did not. Beyond the walls, the water had become hill-scapes and the memory of the day’s heat seemed like a lie.

“Where do you take them, Uncle,” she asked his heavy shoulders. “How did you make it all the way across, in this sea?”

He turned to face her and in the dark, and spider’s eyes glinted beneath the brow of his cap. She wrapped her fingers into her coat and waited.

“Daughter of my brother,” he said, the words like winter. “You will go to my house, and you will not ask me these things.” Instinct twitchied in her muscles, but she held herself still. She was more than obedience, more than fear and longing and monsters manifested by the darkness in people’s hearts. She stepped away from her uncle into the shadows beyond the harbour-light.

“Tulaya,” he said. “You will do as I have spoken.” Then he left, expecting her to follow.

She filled her lungs with salt and darkness and when Ahmed lingered, hope rose like a storm-tide.

“Ahmed-ciğim?” she said.

The wind smelled of resin and rocks, and her cousin shifted his weight foot-to-foot as if still afloat. “Tuli, it’s too dangerous. You know this. Come home.”

“Is it Famagusta”’ she asked. “Is that where you take them? Can you really go so far in so few hours, in this weather?” When he did not answer, “Cousin, did you get that far?”

He reached out to touch her but hesitated, as if one of them were soiled. The wind sang and an owl called and Ahmed dropped his hand. “It’s okay,” he said. “We don’t need to go all the way. There are boats searching so it’s safer to … to let them pick the inflatables up.”

Far out to sea, Tulaya was sure she heard a voice, hollow and hungry and terrible as rust forming on a heart.

“Come with me,” she said. He took a half-step away, and Tulaya followed him. “Please come, Ahmed, cousin. You cannot leave them in this weather, you must know that.”

He looked inland, then back to her, and she wanted to take his hand but didn’t dare. “It’s not safe,” he said eventually, and Tulaya heard that noise again, far away and inside herself.

“For who?” she asked him, but so quietly that he did not hear over the wind and the waves slapping against the harbour wall. There was Fear stalking Istanbul, even though the last time she’d seen her mother, they’d parted laughing. And two days ago Tulaya had hoped. She had come down here tonight hoping.

“We’d be too late, it’s nearly daylight,” he said, reaching for her again and this time touching her arm, her wrist, his skin warmer than hers. “We can’t change anything, aşkım. It doesn’t matter what we do, nothing will change. Nobody cares, so we must look after our family, ourselves.” She thought he was not talking anymore about the inflatable boat, out there on the rising sea. She thought he meant her mother’s writing, her own rainbow t-shirt, stained with tear gas and mucus; his gambled loan.

He was right. Tulaya’s thoughts were like sand and the far horizon was becoming slowly molten. She ought to wait with her silent phone, and do nothing that might break her father’s heart.

“But our family is in need too,” she said slowly, “And who will help us, if not strangers?” Her mother and her rectangle of sky; the life-jacket and the Manifests gathering in the borderlands of the world, in all the places where humanity was dying. She could change nothing, or she could change just one thing.

~

As she turned the boat beyond the harbour walls, she felt eyes on her but did not look back, not wanting to know if it were Ahmed or her distant father, her lost mother. She did not want to know if it was Fear. She dared not turn her head from the sea in case  that Manifest was there beside her, its shadows like claws in her bones. Her hands ached on the wheel and the boat hurled itself into each wave, leaping forward as if breaking chains. Ahead, the thing in the sea moaned and roiled, and she could feel it now reaching to slow her down, to overwhelm and numb her. Futility in the salt on her skin weighed her down like rocks. Nobody cares, it whispered. Nobody cares.

Nobody cares, she thought. It might be months until she saw her mother again, it might be years. Tears made the sea and stars into a labyrinth, and her heart weighed oceans, and she was alone. She was so alone.

The Manifest rose beside the boat, and she leaned towards its open maw, pale grey against the starless sea, and her hands ached where they held the wheel, and, nobody cares, she thought again. The Manifest murmured and wept as it feasted, and she wept because her bones ached and she was lost and it would be easier … it would be easier…

Her head dipped and behind her closed eyelids she saw her uncle drinking coffee in the pre-dawn. Herself drinking coffee with her friends before the marches, fever-blooded. The sound of her mother’s voice in the dark, her father saying that Tulaya had inherited both her mother’s smile and her heart. The Manifest moaned, and the boat yawed into a wave, Tulaya’s grip was slipping. How had she become so cold, she thought, when she carried her mother’s heart within her. The boat canted heavily and she pulled herself upright,  wrestling the wheel to face the next wave, and she was still weeping because the monster was still pulling on her bones but she was trying, she was trying … Then there, tiny on the eternity of water, the inflatable appeared. An ink-stain silhouette. Low, so low, clinging to air and crawling hopelessly over each wave. Tulaya raised her hand, voices rose in answer and finally, baring its blunt teeth and sighing vastly, the Despair surfaced once then sank away.

“I’m here,” Tulaya whispered to the strangers, the sea and the defeated manifest. To her mother. “I’m here.”

Thank you as always for reading. Because accessibility in publishing is important to me, I keep all my craft and publishing posts free, so any shares or tips are greatly appreciated. And if you want to help me continue writing these things, please do also check out my paid subscriber tier on Patreon, where I share behind the scenes book diaries. Wishing you a fabulous weekend.

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The hustle

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I mentioned this post in my last good vibes one, and am returning to it now as I feel like we always need reminders to be kinder to ourselves. I have been feeling frazzled and frayed the last wee while, and was prompted recently to do a wee tally of what projects I have on the go… at which point I realised why I’m feeling so frayed. Honeys, beloveds, I am hustling as hard as a spoonie can hustle. And that’s not ideal.

First though, a writing update: Still beavering away at Quiet Walkers – it’s currently just over 90k words, with perhaps another 8k to go. But I have also been writing pitches & synopses (shudder), and might in the near future be able to announce something lovely. It’s true! Friends I am back in my vague era – there have been positive things happening chez moi! I don’t know when I’ll be able to share more, and I’ve also got a lot of balls still in the air. But here’s a small and irritatingly secretive YAY!

An old photo from the Seychelles, as an extremely cryptic clue…

I’ve been really happy with my writing progress recently, given constraints from semi-regular events and other Life Things. And while Quiet Walkers is very much A Draft, it’ll be great to get it completed in the next few weeks.

But as I said, this last year has contained a lot of not waving but drowning. As you may have detected from my subtle hints over the last 84 years, I’ve been really struggling with this whole publishing malarkey, but this article isn’t another moan about uncertainty and timelines, I promise. Instead I wanted to talk about what ‘trying hard’ and ‘doing everything you can’ and ‘hustling’ looks like outwith the perception that hustling has to equate to posting short form videos every day, or thrusting business cards on innocent bystanders at conventions.

(I’m talking about the hustle to build a career here, not the hustle to market a book.)

I’ve talked previously about book marketing and why authors need to give themselves space to only do as much as is sustainable, and a recent thread on Bluesky by the extremely experienced Delilah Dawson said similar. But we often focus on this kind of reader-facing work when we think of the hustle – events, social media, newsletters. And while that’s a part of it, the work to build a career looks a little different.

For a lucky (very) few authors, publishing support, zeitgeist, (talent,) and luck have given them a fairly stable career platform from which they can keep working with only the level of hustle they wish to commit to.

For most of us, striving to create a viable career as an author takes a lot of shapes. It definitely includes feeling pressured to perform online in ways that aren’t necessarily enjoyable or comfortable, for the sake of building a platform. But it can also include building community connections, e.g. by volunteering for organisations, chairing events, mentoring etc. Because a) community is amazing but also b) you never know when that community might open a door for you. Or perhaps it looks like creating secondary income streams around writing, both for the CV entry and so you have a little more financial resilience, or can even afford to make it your part time or full time occupation. Freelance writing or editing are common additions for a lot of writers, though they are competitive and time consuming. Or perhaps you might write IP work – whether that’s within big franchises or stand alone book packaging projects, IP can be a solid income stream for many authors, and a way of building your credentials alongside your original work. The hustle might also take the form of working hard at keeping your name in circulation by pursuing short fiction publications.

I’ve friends who are variously brilliant at all these things, and whatever route they’re following it’s all going to be helping strengthen the foundations of their career. Whether by giving them financial security from which to write, strong community support, or an expanding list of author credits – it will help them stay the course in this ridiculous industry.

I am not in a position to do most of those things. I don’t have the financial freedom to attend many events, not even my own lol. I don’t have the health capacity to commit to sitting on committees or delivering on long term mentoring support. And my health also means the extremely tight timelines prevalent in IP work, or the high turnover-high resilience needed for the short fic market would break me into tiny pieces. (I’m also profoundly allergic to video format social media, so I’m not becoming an influencer any time this millenium).

I’m not special for having these restrictions. Many writers are working with fewer freedoms than I have, and in fact I have one thing that’s in short supply for almost everyone – time. My writing time is severely curtailed by my health, but I don’t have a ‘real’ job so what healthy time I have is all my own (and my cats’, apparently) (Snicket has just appeared to shout at me).

Lemony Snicket, with complaints

So what else can hustling look like?

Well, as I have recently realised, for me, it looks like what can only be described as ‘how many projects can one person put out into the world before she combusts?‘

I have at present, a novella, two novels, some samples, some pitches, and several short stories all out under consideration in one form or another. I’ve also had a couple of short stories commissioned, and some others awaiting edits before they are yeeted at magazines. I don’t know which, or how many, of these projects will pan out, which is why I’m pursuing all avenues.

But that is a lot of projects in editors’ hands at the same time. We talk about working on the next thing, but as a friend said, this is a little like sticking your hand in a patch of nettles hoping to distract from a bee sting.

It’s definitely draining, having that many things murmuring away in the back of my mind, and I’m really glad I finally stopped to take notice of it so I can be a little more forgiving of myself for dropping various balls (to the authors who’s blurbs are/were late… sorry! I love your books!). But I’m also kind of proud of myself.

I don’t have much flexibility for how I hustle. But within the limitations I have, I am putting myself out there. I am chasing possibilities as hard as I can and in the face of fairly relentless uncertainty, I’m finding new things to hope for rather than just throwing up my hands and giving in. Which is no small thing.

It’s also a lot of fun developing different projects, of course. I love all the ideas and stories I have been working on and will be delighted if/when any of them move forward. Despite the Everything, my brain is forever thinking up new shiny worlds, and it’s always going to be a delight to get to explore them.

BUT. (Because there’s always a but, right?)

I, and my friends pursuing IP work or editing gigs or short fiction acclaim, or volunteering for every board or networking at every event possible… We need to be careful. This career is so riddled with uncertainty and instability and poor pay for the work involved, it feels like if we aren’t hustling we’ll drop off the map instantly. If we aren’t doing the thing all the time, all those doors we’ve wrestled open are going to close.

And maybe they will.

But is an open door worth it if we’ve burned out so badly we can’t write?

I talk endlessly about resilience in publishing. That isn’t just about managing your marketing efforts, or learning to process rejection and comparanoia. It’s about this too. Treading the line between doing everything you can to build a viable career as an author, whilst doing only what you can sustain without harm.

I’ve had good news this week, which has bolstered my flagging reserves no end. And I am lucky to be in a position where I get to strategise between projects. But I also have to ensure that part of the strategising is ‘having hustled a million projects into life, how much can I commit myself to without breaking?‘. My agent, bless her, is having to be the sane voice of reason as my year of uncertainty is making me a little unhinged over-optimistic.

Yes, this entire post is a letter to myself. FutureRaine is gonna be so damn mad if I overcommit now. Someone please take my pitches list away from me.

Thank you as always for reading. Because accessibility in publishing is important to me, I keep all my craft and publishing posts free, so any shares or tips are greatly appreciated. Wishing you a fabulous weekend.

check out my books here

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Good vibes only, for once

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Yesterday I wrote a draft of a post about hustling to build an author career – what that looks like depending on your skillsets and capacity, and what it looks like for me, your resident spoonie. I’ll still post it as I think it’s a useful conversation about the work that goes into trying to claw a career from this industry. BUT I also got a wee bit frustrated with myself for the element of ‘ugh publishing sucks’ creeping into my posts yet again. I mean, I’m not wrong, but also sometimes Eeyore needs to look at flowers, you know?

First though, writing update time: It’s been almost two months (oops!) since my last free post, and two weeks since my last paid one. In that time I’ve been beavering away at Quiet Walkers, which I talked about a wee bit here. It’s currently sitting at about 3/4 done, but had to be set aside for me to do a (hopefully) final pre-sub edit pass for Monstrous Theatre. Cue moodboard. And I’ve also just finished drafting a commissioned short story that I’ll hopefully be able to talk more about soon.

This isn’t really going to be a post with a specific premise about publishing or writing, it’s just going to be me looking for some nice things going on right now in my writerly bubble. And maybe some cat pics.

Good thing number 1: I’ve been really happy with my writing progress recently, given constraints from semi-regular events and my energy levels. Sometimes, when you’re jumping between writing and other things, or when the writing is a little bit of a strugglebus, it’s really easy to feel like you aren’t making much progress. But whether you tally your writing by time spent at the keyboard, or word counts, it can be really reassuring to look back at that scattered period of time and say huh, despite ALL THAT I wrote nearly 60k in two months, that’s not nothing.

Perhaps for you that might look more like – huh, I managed to sit at the keyboard 4 days a week all this month. Or – I wrote at least one sentence every day. Or – I finally figured out this goddamn plot. Or whatever. Actual volume is less important than remembering that cumulative work matters more than one-off good days, and you’re probably doing more, and working harder, than you give yourself credit for.

Good thing number 2: I keep seeing beautiful art online, like Lee Madgwick’s stuff , and Jocelin Carmes‘ too, whose pictures feel like story prompts each time. I mean look at these two:

[The Forbidden Lamp, Jocelin Carmes; The Marsh Gate, Lee Madgwick]

I keep reading beautiful books too, like The Shape Of Monsters by CL Hellisen, The Unicorn Hunters, by Katherine Arden, Nightshade and Oak by Molly O’Neill, Scratch Moss by David Barnett or The Women by Kristen Hannah. And music – I’ve been mainlining Kingfishr and Noah Kahan, First Aid Kit and Kate Rusby while I write this latest book and ugh they’re just delicious.

Having beautiful art at our fingertips is a precious thing. That sounds a bit obvious, and I feel like we do a lot of defending the need for art in These Times. But this isn’t about humanity’s intrinsic dependence on art, it’s about the fact that there are wonderful, talented people everywhere I look, bringing their creativity into my life and sparking my own creativity, feeding that part of me where my stories grow. No book is written in isolation, they are all a conversation with the art and the world around us, and I’m so glad I can nurture my stories on this Very Good Shit. I have an art images folder on my phone that I just scroll through sometimes and sigh happily.

Good thing number 3: Now then. Bear with me. There’s been A LOT (omg so much) discussion about The Odyssey film, and Emily Wilson’s critique of it. Some of that discussion has been frankly unhinged, but fortunately my wee online bubble has hung onto rationality for the most part! But it feels a little like the similarly, umm, energetic conversations around the Clarke Award shortlist this year when it was announced. I’m not going to express an opinion on that, as I’m on the list and it would be weird. BUT what that and the Nolan thing have reminded me, is that it is bloody marvellous actually to be in a community that cares this damn much about stories and storytelling.

One of the great things about the Clarke Award is that each year it generates conversation – about what it’s saying on the state of science fiction, what it’s getting wrong, what it’s getting right, and so on. It makes people read books they might otherwise not pick up, and explore their own reactions in new ways. Likewise, Nolan’s film has got people reading the book, thinking about changing societal standards, the borderlines of retelling and reinterpretation and failures of both.

We are surrounded by structures of media that want us not to care too much about anything. Not to engage too deeply with anything, because that will slow how much content we absorb. Doomscroll rather than read, multiscreen our tv viewing rather than focus, buy new fancy editions so we can make content about owning them, whilst never planning to read them. There’s a deeper corrosion to that, to do with political passivity, inaction and ease of manipulation. But this is a positive post goddamnit. So let’s just say, with a lot of engines trying to stop us caring, I love that I get to share a community with people who persist in caring deeply. About books and creators, storytelling and its future, and society and its future.

Good thing number 4: I still have not touched genAI in any form whatsoever. No, not even there. Or there. It’s not that hard, I promise. And although our politicians are woefully behind the curve on this one, it does feel like the societal tide has turned. No one wants it in schools, no one wants datacentres, and the publishing industry has the lowest sectoral uptake which is both not surprising, and nice to hear.

Good thing number 5: I promised cat pics. Have two cats and what is basically an aerial cat.

Lila, Lemony Snicket, and a baby wol

Good thing number 6: I have been writing now for 12 years, publishing short fiction for 11, and longer fiction for 5. I’ve drafted… (counts frantically)… 12 (nearly 13) novels & 2 novellas. And guess the hell what? I’ve got better in that time. I’ve learned so much and become so much braver with my writing. AND I have people in my corner who believe in me and are hustling the hustle on my behalf like absolute champions. Yes, as you’re all well aware (I apologise), I’ve been struggling through some publishing doldrums this last year, but my agent has remained impressively optimistic and determined throughout and editors have consistently wanted to work with me again. The again means a lot.

It is so hard to get a book written, harder again to edit it, a whole feat of superhuman endurance to sign with an agent, and just endless minefields and cliff edges to get, and keep being, published. If you’ve hit any one of those stages, you’re amazing. Whatever you’re doing, if you’ve hit failure and got back up again, you’re amazing. If you’ve honed your spite and stubbornness to a fine edge and refused to quit, I salute you. I have so many friends who are struggling with heavy challenges both in life and in writing, and their perseverance, skill and tenacious love of the work is genuinely inspiring to me. So here’s to all of you who are doing the thing, even when it feels hard.

Hark at that! I managed a whole post without getting sidetracked by publishing rants! I know many of you prefer the salty posts and I’m not going to lie, they’re cathartic for me too. So never fear, the Opinions shall return. But today we’re taking a moment to look for the good things, for our stupid mental health or whatever.

Thank you as always for your support. Because accessibility in publishing is important to me, I keep all my craft and publishing posts free, so any shares or tips are greatly appreciated. Wishing you a fabulous weekend.

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Reviews, authors and minding our own business

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Folks! I am back from holiday and writing this on a post-hospital rest day but I promise, as per my last post, that by the time this goes out in a couple of weeks I will be firmly back into drafting. Or you have my permission to come kick my arse.

A wee subscriber update: I have reduced my patreon paid tier to £3 a month, because of exchange rates, cost of living crappiness and my baseline guilt levels at offering a paid tier at all! Thank you so much to those of you who have joined Team Orlando over there, your support means a huge amount to me & keeps me motivated writing these things.

Another last minute update: A couple of days ago, the news was announced that The Salt Oracle is a finalist for this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award! This is HUGE for me, a real aspirational goal and I am so, so delighted (and disbelieving – you’ve no idea how many times I have re-read the email to check). The winner is announced in August, which gives me just enough time to panic about what to wear and plan how to hide in a box under my table for the evening.

Now then, onto this blog’s topic. There was chatter on the interwebs a while back, about the relationship between reviewers and authors, prompted by this interesting and slightly polarising episode of Critical Friends – Strange Horizon’s brilliant podcast on book reviewing. The guests on the show were both debut authors as well as book reviewers, and made a lot of great points about reviews as a form of storytelling in that they are an interpretation of a book, not a concrete and absolute judgement; using reviews to celebrate less visible authors; and also about how good reviews seek to assess what a book is doing, rather than what the reviewer would have done.

But the point they made that triggered a welter of conversation was encapsulated in this statement by Alex Kingsley: ‘I do think that the point of reviews should partially be … a service to the author.’ Thus that reviewers owed it to authors to be aware of the potential career and emotional impact of a bad review, and ought to take the author’s career position into account when reviewing.

This sentiment, reflected on a few times through the episode, got some push back from other reviewers, such as this Bluesky thread & related conversation from Hugo Award winning reviewer Abigail Nussbaum. The general point being that reviews were in service to the reader, and perhaps the reviewer’s own journey of critical thinking within the genre. That leniency was not owed to authors who were debuts or colleagues, but also nor was a negative review a personal attack on the author.

As an outsider to the reviewer space, I agree. But I wanted to talk about it from the perspective of a non-reviewing author who also, perhaps crucially, isn’t a debut.

I say this with absolute love, and with the knowledge that this applied to me too back in 2021 when This Is Our Undoing came out…. I think debut authors are rarely best placed to judge what makes a healthy relationship with reviews and critics. I have not yet met a debut author who was able to resist the toxic siren call of reading Goodreads reviews, or trawling for mentions on social media, and then withering into an insecure husk at any shadow of criticism. Debut authors, almost universally in my experience, feel far more strongly invested in every flicker of reader reaction than they will once their second, third, etc, books are out. Because they feel 100% invested in that book alone, in a way that’s simply not possible once you have a backlist & 6 ongoing projects in the mix. Also because they’re still learning how to navigate publishing as an author, and how to conserve their emotional energy for the things that can be controlled. It’s entirely understandable to cleave tightly to reader feedback, we all do it, but it continues to be a profoundly terrible idea.

The debut:reviewers on the podcast were insightful and interesting to listen to, and the episode was focused on debut authors so their particular perspective was valuable. But being debuts, I feel like the professed belief that critics owe a duty of care to authors is perhaps not a belief representative of authors as a whole.

So as a non-debut husk of an author, who read all her reviews for her debut (some of them bad) & now doesn’t read any reviews unless maybe if they’re flagged as positive… what do I think the relationship is between reviewers and authors?

First some things what I ‘ave learnt:

  • Reviews are not personal.
  • The odd 1 or 2 star rating on Goodreads is not worth crying over.*
  • No single review – even in the big newspapers – is enough to make or break a book. (Even the Bigolas Dickolas phenomenon built on an already successful and beloved book, and was anyway one of those stochastic and therefore irrepeatable sychronicities which will never happen again, much to every marketing departments’ chagrin.)
  • Not reading your reviews is blissful actually.
  • But also, there is nothing so lovely as reading a review that thoughtfully analyses your book, gets what you were trying to do, and teases out hidden threads you hoped someone would spot/didn’t realise you’d put in there at all. Reviewers rock.

[*Talking about reviews in this article, I actually don’t mean Goodreads reviews which are too varied in depth to count (look at me being polite about the ‘it has gay/brown/disabled people in, 1 star’ eejits). I mean instead book critics for media outlets like Locus, Reactor, New Scientist, and newspapers, or individual book bloggers.]

Traditional trade reviews are hard to come by now, and have less impact on sales, but they’re still nice

I have become friends with several of the amazing folk who’ve reviewed my books, and I feel incredibly lucky to have such interesting and interested people in my community. I love that people wish to share their thoughtful dissections of the books they read, and I hugely respect the work involved in doing so.

HOWMSOEVER, not even these reviewer-friends owe me a good review. I admit I live in fear of the day I disappoint some of the reviewers who’ve championed me for so long, but still they don’t owe me. I admit too that my career is looking fragile right now, my books haven’t had big publicity spends, and I’m not the kind of face that publishing likes to pedestal, so I desperately hope for good reviews to grant me a little word of mouth traction… but I am not owed those reviews.

In fact, a misleadingly positive review, written out of kindness or loyalty, might even backfire on both myself and the reviewer if readers pick the book up expecting something it doesn’t deliver. A healthy reviewing landscape is good for authors because it is a vital part of the magic word of mouth engine, but that very healthiness depends on reviewers being honest to their particular tastes. It’s that honesty that makes reviews a trustworthy avenue for readers to discover new-to-them books. I need reviewers to serve their readers and their own exploratory thinking, because that is what builds a network of conversations where word of mouth can happen. I hope for reviewers who read beyond the hyped-up headliners, are aware of their own lenses, willing to engage thoughtfully, and unwilling to fall into the clickbait trash-talk online discourse trap.

In my opinion then, the review ecosystem as a whole serves two functions – as a word of mouth engine that helps readers discover books and expand their reading, and as part of wider conversations about trends, issues and collective thinking within the genre space. The former is beneficial to me the author in supporting a healthy reading community, the latter in enriching the cultural dialogue I get to be part of. Neither of those benefits are dependent on my books getting inflatedly positive reviews because the reviewer didn’t want to hurt my feelings or damage my career.

Reviews specifically about my books benefit me by boosting the visibility of that book & bringing it into the community conversation. It’s a vital thing, and reviewers are a godsend particularly for smaller authors. And yes, positive reviews will surely boost our books more. (Although negative or so-so reviews can still point a book to its target readers very successfully.) But the reviewer’s duty of care towards me extends only to the limit of common decency – not being an arse, and actually reading the book before judging it (and, because these are the times we live in, not using chatgpt to barf out some glossy drivel and calling that a ‘review’).

This was my first ever 1 star review. I’m quite proud of it.

…This is the bit where my inner crone shows herself…

Because the thing is, we authors are grown adults. Negative reviews are inevitable, nay even healthy because no book is for everyone and that’s exactly as it should be. Does that make them fun to read? No, not usually. But we are responsible for our own feelings, and we are responsible for learning the blocking-Goodreads-coping-mechanisms that allow us to keep our creativity alive. When (not if, because we’re eejits) we seek out reviews and end up reading a negative one, that is wholly on us. So it is also on us to remind ourselves some less-than-stellar reviews are an inevitable part of the healthy reviewing ecosystem we depend on.

(I am refusing to discuss reviewers who tag us in negative reviews, which yes has happened to me – it’s incredibly bad manners, and thus their opinions don’t matter.)

If in our own minds, we grant critics the power not just to upset us, but to actually harm our creativity, we are giving someone a knife and asking them to poke us with it. We are giving them a power over us that we should instead hold onto. Yes, book reviews matter. They are absolutely important, but my career is better served by letting reviewers do their thing to their best ability, while I leave them to it and get on with doing my thing to the best of my ability.

The podcast conversation that sparked the ensuing debates online was interesting and the concerns of the debut authors on it entirely understandable. But I just wanted to put another perspective out there – that in fact reviewers feeling beholden to authors is detrimental to the genre community and to the readership, and thus in turn harmful to us authors. So we need honesty, thoughtfulness and a diversity of perspectives from our reviews, because that way all of us get to be part of a stronger bookish landscape.

Thank you as always for your support. Because accessibility in publishing is important to me, I keep all my craft and publishing posts free, so any shares or tips are greatly appreciated. Wishing you a fabulous weekend.

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Research, and other forms of procrastination

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Today’s procrastination comes in the form of this post! But what is good non-writing craft work/thinking time/well refilling, and what is procrastination? The difference feels blurry at the moment.

First a writing update: Well, this section feels redundant given the post subject, but for what it’s worth – I finished another short story last week, on new gods, eco-justice and a trade road Guardian searching for a missing friend. It has something good to it, but I lost my grip on it a bit so it needs a solid & solidifying edit. That makes roughly 26k words of 6 short stories, plus a fairly substantiative novel edit pass done in the 3.5 months of 2026. Not too shabby considering how much I’ve been struggling with motivation.

And a June events update: I am at Cymera Festival in Edinburgh from the 5-7th June, talking post-apocalyses with EJ Swift, author of When There Are Wolves Again. In Dundee Waterstones on 11th June with Raffael Torrubia, author of The Shipwright and the Shroudweaver. And in Edinburgh again at Waterstones Princes St on 25th June to chat Dark Academia with Naomi Gibson, author of Man, Muse, Monster.

The new wip (here, have a quick mood board!) is a speculative eco-horrorish thing that I threw 10k words down for before Christmas for an opportunity that has since dissipated for ugh publishing reasons unrelated to me. Those 10k were very much seat of my pants writing, but the world of the story is quite sociopolitically demanding and I don’t currently feel informed enough to do it justice. So I am Doing Research.

Doing research is good! I enjoy it! And for this book in particular, questions of what a post-capitalist society could look like feel increasingly vital, questions about non-human communication – well, that’s what my PhD was in, so we know reading about that is no hardship. It is interesting research to be doing, and already I can feel the shape of my book growing more cohesive in my hind-brain.

Solid worldbuilding – whether we do that in advance, as we’re drafting, or retrospectively when editing – is what makes a story three dimensional. So it is worth dedicating time to. Fantastical settings like second worlds or spaceships require obvious ground-up worldbuilding, but so do real world stories like this one. What does my society look like, what are its rules and mores and capabilities, its superstitions and power structures? I am changing more of the world in more unexpected ways in this book than in any previous one I’ve written, so these questions require considerably more thought. And thus more research.

But, and this is the tricky bit, at what point do I need to put the textbooks down and start writing again? I am not about to become a world expert in the economics of anarchical societies, nor in the molecular ecology of plant-insect signalling so somewhere between outright ignorance and expertise, there’s a line that needs drawing.

We all know that, of course. And where that line is depends on each of our processes and craft strengths.

Previously, the temptation for me has been to dive into writing fairly early. The book idea has been shiny and delicious, the joy of discovery has been upon me, and I’ve leapt from moderately-informed ideas into drafting with the confidence that I can figure the rest out as I go. This time however, the temptation is just to keep reading, keep mulling, keep turning over concepts and ideas and opening the next book rather than open the laptop.

Procrastination has several different faces, doesn’t it? Spontaneous housework, extra long dog walks, social media, fiddling with moodboards (hmm) or playlists. It’s harder to diagnose a case of procrastination when the face it wears looks superficially like productive work though. Is this reading I’m doing really a delaying tactic, or actually vital prep? How much worldbuilding is too much when we’ve all seen that iceberg metaphor? At the end of a project, it could be just one more wee edit pass, just one more tweak of the furniture. And then, we insist, we’ll be ready, guv.

So how do we diagnose a case of procrastination-disguised-as-work?

A crucial question, I think, is whether you have a clear aim in mind with this work – is there a clear worldbuilding unknown you need to clarify, is there a plot hole as identified by a beta reader you need to go back and fix? What is the specific function of this thing you are doing & is it necessary before moving onto whatever the next stage is?

A month back, I could hand on heart say I needed to understand the functioning of anarchism and commons wealth better than my then-minimal comprehension. So yes, that was necessary work. Now? Not so much. Now, the reading I’m doing, whilst interesting and useful and all of those good things, is not directly addressing worldbuilding unknowns. It is, if you like, colouring in around the edges.

some recent reading

A follow up question then, is to ask what it is you’re scared of about the next step, and what you can do to mitigate that fear. Perhaps it’s that the next step is letting someone else read your precious/trash baby. Or writing a scene you’ve been dreading. In the former case, there’s very little you can do other than choose first readers you trust to be thoughtful &/or bribing yourself with chocolate cake. In the latter, the chocolate cake will still work, as will perhaps mapping out the scene a little so you have stepping stones to get you through it. The solution will depend very much on the context and your individual needs.

But to get back to me! I know why I am dragging my feet.

And so, if you’ve been reading my blogs for a while, do you. I am feeling rather chewed up and spat out by publishing at the moment, this project in particular was part of a very hopeful moment that fizzled to nothing because of things entirely outwith my influence. It is hard, therefore, to hold onto the buzz and energy required to leap back into drafting when I don’t have the confidence that things will work out okay.

It’s also hard, and I know I’m not alone here, to remember the love of writing when so much of what I’m writing about taps into massive fears and grief at what is happening in the real world every day. To write about political violence and ecological mourning is never a light thing to do but it feels harder than ever just now.

BUT I wrote a whole damn article for Fantasy Café’s Women in SFF month about writing in the dark times, and I stand by that. Yes, it’s hard, but it’s also one of the best tools I have to hand, so it remains worth doing.

ALSO, I bloody love this book. I love the concept and the characters, I’m excited by the catharsis of writing about millionaires getting their comeuppance, and tangling up emerging communal societies with religious cults, murder mysteries and scientific research. I’m really hopeful that it’ll be both a fun read and have something powerful to say. Namely eat the rich. (But also slightly more useful explorations of societal rebuilding when we finally break the walls capitalism has built around us)

So I am torn between the lure of interesting research versus the excitement of the story; the exhausting weight of publishing expectations versus my will to keeping going despite that. Diagnosis – definite procrastination.

Generally at this point I give myself a stern talking to, print out some calendar pages to stick on my wall, and set myself (achievable) word targets & deadlines to kick myself into gear. In the last five years, I’ve had external deadlines that imposed a time-scarcity which made it easier to quit havering. I don’t have that external structure or pressure just now, so I’m having to relearn how to work without it. Whilst also knowing things might change at any moment.

So what’s my solution?

By the time this comes out, I will be on holiday (involving many trains & four countries), so I think I’m going to take that as a watershed. I will carry on reading and thinking while I’m away, and dive into drafting once I am back (and recovered). I am hoping that the serotonin boost and enforced break from publishing will mean I can come back a little more motivated and hopeful.

For what it’s worth, other solutions I’ve considered are: shelving this book and working on something entirely new (downside – a whole new research rabbit hole to fall in), or continuing to work on short fiction (downside – I want them to stay fun, not become something I’m hiding behind). If (when?) there is better news on the publishing front, things will be far easier for me if I have already got myself out of this rut and back into drafting. And I desperately want to give myself the grace to love this work again, separate from all the nonsense.

So – come May 13th ish, please feel free to kick my arse if I am not drafting! And whenever the procrastination bug gets its claws in you, I hope you know you are not alone… because I am right behind you ready to kick your arse too if you need me to!

Thank you as always for your support. Because accessibility in publishing is important to me, I keep all my craft and publishing posts free, so any shares or tips are greatly appreciated. Wishing you a fabulous weekend.

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Why are we still infantilising women in fiction?

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I know, I know, that’s a horribly click-bait article header, isn’t it? Bear with me?

First, a writing update. As I am still waiting to hear on the three projects out on sub, and had a moderately event-full January, I haven’t done much writing so far this year. As I wrote about last time, I’ve been playing with short fiction though, and finished two short stories in January – the first since I wrote Mhairi Aird for Nova Scotia 2. They are both solarpunky things about an older woman negotiating with a storm, and a bone garden in the sky, and I’m quite pleased with them though they’re still very much drafts. So far, February has mostly been editing one of my on-sub projects down to novella length in anticipation of targeting a new round of subs to that market.

In other news, The Salt Oracle, was recently included on the Locus Recommended list, and longlisted for the British Science Fiction Association awards for both Best Novel, and Best Artist for Sam Gretton’s beautiful cover. I’m particularly delighted to see his work get this wee bit of recognition & will be crossing all the fingers we get some votes in the next round.

But back to today’s mini Raine rant. This comes from a conversation with friends the other day about the new genre label ‘weird girl lit’.

It’s a slightly odd label in that it doesn’t really tell you very much, and seems to be applied to a wide range of fiction from fairly horror-heavy to upmarket bookclub type fiction with a touch of darker fabulism. The overarching connection seems to be contemporary/real-world speculative fiction that involves morally grey, oddball women resorting to questionable behaviour (generally violence, often cannibalism) as an expression of ‘feminist anger’ or the like. The bloodier end of this spectrum is also being called ‘femgore’ for obvious reasons! I have tangential opinions about how deeply the ‘feminism’ is being thought through in some of these books, but that’s irrelevant right now. The point is these are genre-blending books being hailed as more or less feminist.

While I am not a big reader of gore or body horror, I’m all for a bit of bloody vengeance, so some of these books are very much my thing. Others aren’t, it doesn’t really matter. What has got a lil bit under my skin is the fact that we are once again using terminology that diminishes women. And this time, in supposedly feminist books.

Several years ago, we had a rash of ‘Girl on the Train’ copycat titles, all using ‘girl’ to label a 30-something year old woman. We also had, god, a bazillion ‘The [obscure profession]’s Daughter/Wife’ titles which rather than infantilise the female main character, reduced her to nothing but an extension of a man. The more recent formula of ‘The [unusual thing] Of Firstname Lastname‘ feels rather samey, but at least these women are granted a name. ‘Chicklit’ got replaced with the slightly less patronising ‘women’s fiction’ and then that in turn kind of fell out of fashion in favour of catchalls like ‘beachread’ or ‘bookclub’, or, y’know, the actual genre of the book – histfic, romance or mystery. Hurrah, I thought, we are moving past reducing women to children/possessions. Progress!

And now we have ‘weird girl lit’ and I want to poke people in the eye with my crochet hook.

This time around is particularly egregious because, as I mention above, this is a genrespace that purports to be exploring feminist themes. Examining and playing with feminist rage – with the accumulated weight of anger, fear, disempowerment and repression that women have been carrying for centuries, and letting these characters express those hurts in bloodily cathartic ways. But yes, let’s call them children. Let’s reduce them to someone who isn’t fully cognisant of her emotions or choices. Let’s disempower her, let’s make her small.

You cannot, to my mind, call a book feminist while at the same time infantilising the female character (or author, for that matter). You just can’t.

To be very serious for a moment, (please skip this paragraph if you like) aside from the obvious misogyny of infantilising adult women, I do think it’s worth remembering that blurring the boundary between women and girls is a two-way street. Framing women as girls allows society to conveniently forget that actual girls are not women. And at a point in time where child rapists lurk in the white house and the royal family, that matters. So does reducing women to possessions or beings without direct agency at a time when our rights are being stripped from us, and a second husband has just pled guilty to 13 years of drugging, raping and allowing other men to rape his wife.

At the level of normal, daily life though, I know we all draw our lines in different places. I don’t mind people addressing a mixed group as ‘guys’, I know some women do. In casual settings, I don’t really care if someone calls a bunch of women ‘girls’…. actually, scratch that, I would definitely mind if it was a man! But book genre labels are not casual language use, they are labels being applied by corporations in order to shape perceptions. Whether that corporation is a publishing houses, a bookstore, social media platform or a newspaper, a genre label is a formal language decision. It is word choice that carries weight; influencing people’s assumptions and reactions in ways that are both pervasive and hard to measure.

Do genre labels enable misogynistic violence? Not directly, of course they don’t. But it’s not hyperbole to say that tolerating language which infantilises women is reinforcing systemic power imbalances rather than deconstructing them.

So why are we doing this in the year of our holy weasels 2026? And where did this term even come from?

There is, I believe, a trend of women on booktok labelling themselves ‘weird girlies’ or ‘gothic girlies’ or whatever. Apparently ‘weird girl’ is a whole aesthetic for all those misunderstood misfits out there…. Okay, maybe I’m a couple of decades too old to do anything but roll my eyes at that. My inner Gen X voice is murmuring ‘if you need to tell people you’re weird, believe me, you’re not’. Hey, we live in an era of labels though so knock yourself out, I guess. BUT being ‘weird’ doesn’t get you a pass on infantilising yourself. Just because the housing market sucks, that does not make you yourself a permanent child. Your bra-burning grannies taught you better.

Top search results for weird girl lit. I’m seeing lots of grown ass women.

Umm. Where was I?

There is another genre term – ‘sad girl lit’ which seems to have arisen just before (and perhaps spawned) the ‘weird girl’ and is exemplarised by Sally Rooney’s Normal People – books that centre a (young) woman being depressed and struggling with Life. I guess because it’s generally contemporary fiction rather than speculative, this genre label didn’t cross my radar often enough to invoke a ranty blogpost. And in ‘sad’s defence, at least these books aren’t selling themselves on their feminist themes, so far as I can tell. A minor plus, but we’ll take it.

I imagine the ‘weird girl lit’ term then was a confluence of the ‘sad girl’ formula already existing, and the hashtags on tiktok. And given that booktok is an absolute steamroller of a force, whereas I am, well, me, I doubt anyone is going to suddenly reconsider the ‘girlifying’ of adults and adult fiction as a result of this post.

So I guess I want to know why.

Why do we keep discovering new ways to reduce women in women-centred fiction? Does doing so make the sheer existence of female-led books more palatable? Or is it that anger, flaws and moral ambiguity are only permissible in a woman if she can be reduced to child proportions?

Publishing is, at the medium and lower tiers, a female-dominated industry. Booktok is a female-dominated space. So it is women coming up with these labels, and women voluntarily adopting them. Are we then, even as we think we are celebrating feminism and female power, actually proactively shrinking ourselves in anticipation of pacifying the hegemony? Oh don’t mind me being angry, uwu face, I’m just a smol bean.

That’s my best guess. That we are so well-trained in the need to take up less space, to de-escalate, to pander, that much as we intend to break free, the corporate structures around publishing are so risk averse, traditional, and steeped in bias, we must still contort our ‘feminism’ into a palatable form at the point when story meets marketing (or social media algorithms).

It’s a kind of camouflage. We cannot attract the anger of the patriarchy if we paint our angry books as small and silly and harmless, right? You’ll still review my books in your publication if I erase the female lead, or box myself in this palatable way?

The covers of these books are often (gloriously) blatantly bloodthirsty, so it’s not the individual books hiding themselves in this way, it’s the label they all get put under. Yes, they’re weird, but they’re girly, so it’s okay. Practically kidlit, amirite? (oh, hello tangential Opinions about cartoon covers lol)

Given how hard it is to succeed as an author, given how hard marketing departments have to work to get books to break out, given all of that, I can understand sticking palatable labels onto books that push against gender assumptions in ways men might find uncomfortable. I mean, god forbid, right?

But.

But most readers are women. Further, the vast majority of readers of female-authored books are women. So why are we shrinking ourselves to cater to the insecurities of a male readership which is barely there? Is it because the newspapers, publishing houses and social media platforms are controlled by men, and even though they aren’t reading our books, they will still squash ones that don’t appease them? Or because as women existing on the internet, we are used to the creepy DMs, but those DMs (and the subliminal threat they create) get distinctly creepier if we raise our heads above the parapet in any way?

I’ve seen talk that 20-30yr olds are infantilising themselves because they can no longer access external markers of ‘adulthood’ – the mortgage, the financial stability to have children etc. Even if that’s true (though please see my comment above!), the earlier iterations of this – the Girl on the Train/Time Traveller’s Wife iterations – pre-date that. Women having to contort themselves to safely fit is not a new thing, and not remotely a publishing-only problem. Of course it isn’t. But publishing and booktok both have enough women in them that we could surely resist infantilising ourselves if we tried hard enough.

I am not a ‘weird girl’, or for that matter, a ‘sad’ one. I am a woman full of hunger and hope, ugliness and beauty, belonging, alienation, gratitude, rage. I am the memories of generations of women fighting to be fully themselves in a world that wouldn’t let them. Do not shrink me, I will not have it. And for the love of god, stop shrinking yourselves.

Okay rant over. Thank you for reading! Next time… oh man, it would be nice if I had updates on books, wouldn’t it? Fingers crossed…

Thank you as always for your support. Because accessibility in publishing is important to me, I keep all my craft and publishing posts free, so any shares or tips are greatly appreciated. Wishing you a fabulous weekend.

check out my books here

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Story prompts for short fic January (and maybe February, who knows)

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Welcome to 2026! Yes, I know we’re over half way through but family life has been busy so I’m only just getting back into the swing of things now, with a slightly panicked feeling that this month is being swallowed up so fast!

As I think I mentioned in… a previous post somewhere, I’m taking a wee break from the various novel projects over the next few weeks. Partly because January is quite event-heavy so I don’t want to dive into a new project in the midst of all that. Partly also because I’m feeling the well of creative joy is running a little dry and I want to nurture that by letting myself play and explore without pressure for a wee while.

I think there’s a danger for authors of becoming so tied in to the publishing cycle – the need to produce a book a year – that we do not have the space to stop and reassess our own writing. Not in terms of does this particular novel work but am I doing with my craft what I really want to be doing? Am I thinking through my themes and storytelling deeply enough, or am I scratching the surface or treading the same ground because I need to get this book finished by next month? Am I, perhaps, writing to meet the expectations of the publishing industry rather than to challenge and reshape my own expectations of my own writing?

One of my aspirations for my writing is that I get braver – both in terms of the questions I ask, and the way I tell my stories. I’m seeing these next few weeks of short fiction exploration, then, as a way to nurture my confidence, and perhaps find new voices for some of the angers and hopes I’m feeling at the moment. I really want to explore hopeful solarpunk properly, for example, and return to cyclic narratives. At this particular moment in time, watching the news, I want to play with blending spikier, angrier voices into hopefulness too.

One of the joys of short fiction is that you get the reward of finishing something in a short time frame, which can be empowering if the act of creating is feeling a little daunting. Another joy is that it is a much more flexible form than the novel in terms of playing with voice or form or reader expectations, and the stakes for experimenting with your craft are lower. Trying something way out of your comfort zone? If it fails, pftt you’ve lost a day or two, so no big deal. Or trying something wildly unconventional? It’s okay, it doesn’t need to work for 100,000 words, it only needs to work for 500, or 5,000.

I thought I might share with you some simple solarpunky/climate fic prompts I’m going to use, in the hope you might want to join me creating wee stories. Whether you have specific craft aspects you want to explore, or just want to play and see what comes to the page, I hope these prompts will give you some ideas. I will share some snippets of what I produce in a later post, perhaps some whole pieces (although that counts as first publication, so bear that in mind if you share your writing in your own blogs or newsletters).

SO without further ado…

Prompt 1: The dice game

Get a die, roll it three times, once for each column, and ta da! There’s your starting points for a story. See what questions come to mind and what you can build around these seeds. (yes I know a child isn’t an object per se. I was going to change it to a cat (also not an object tbf) and forgot. So consider it a schrodinger’s child/cat)

Prompt 2: Headlines!

From some recent New Scientist articles, pick one of these and keep poking it with a ‘What if?’ stick until you get past the first obvious ideas into something that feels fresh and intriguing. Like – What if a carbon border tax was on people not trade…, yes and now what if we paid in flesh/seeds/labour/lifespan…, yes and now what does that mean for this, and this, and… Just keep chasing that curiosity until something fun sparks.

Prompt 3: Concepts pick and mix!

Pick 2 or 3 of these random ideas, phrases, bits of tech or concepts, mash them together and see whether anything fun emerges from the chaos! If you’re struggling pick a historic era & imagine something from that time period in the future (solarpanel crinolines, anyone?), or a favourite piece of folklore (cat sidh but make it a manifestation in the space orbital), see if that helps something emerge.

Hope these give you some fun inspiration, or perhaps ideas for how to set up your own themed sets of prompts. If I were in a dystopia or dark academia mood, for example, these prompts games could easily be tweaked to feed that kind of story. I might be blending these prompts with other media like oracle cards or rune stone castings to force myself to leap in unexpected directions, so think about doing something like that too. Throw in something you overheard in a cafe, or a sign you saw, or a song lyric, an animal species name (moths, moths have some disproportionately poetic names) – these kinds of non-sequiteur prompts will help break your mind away from lines of thought it’s travelled before, and therefore help you stumble upon exciting new story ideas.

Happy writing and please let me know how you get on!

Thank you as always for your support. Because accessibility in publishing is important to me, I keep all my craft and publishing posts free, so any shares or tips are greatly appreciated. Wishing you a fabulous weekend.

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Holiday book recommendations – gifts, reading and feeding the tbr pile

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Happy omg there’s only two weeks to Christmas to all who celebrate!

Those of you who’ve been with me for a while will know I don’t like doing ‘Best of’ or ‘Top reads’ type lists because they’re so subjective and I don’t really want to rank my favs from my friends, heroines and peers. What I do like doing every year though, is a ‘if you’re looking for X kind of read, how about trying this?’ list fuelled by things I’ve read in the last year. Yes, I might be splitting hairs with that definition and no, it’s not that catchy. But it soothes my wariness of best ofs whilst still letting me celebrate some fabulous books.

I read somewhere in the region of 120-150 books this year, and considering I only count books I enjoyed enough to finish, that means I simply can’t list here all the books I loved this year. Which stings, and I’ve spent possibly more time than I should scowling at my Kobo while I try to rationalise including so many! (I have included so many, I apologise. Kind of)

BUT, that said, behold a host of gorgeous books – some new releases, some older – divided according to vibes with no regard at all for genre label because pfft – genres shmanres.

Deep, beautiful and/or heartbreaking

The House Of Doors – Tan Twan Eng

I don’t know what to tell you. Tan Twan Eng writes too beautifully to be quite human. There’s a gentleness to this historic, continent spanning, speculative love story that makes the emotional punches hit all the harder. I could read him forever.

Under The Eye Of The Big Bird – Hiromi Kawakami

The understated, sparse prose of this novel serves the searing emotional core to this book really well, in my opinion. It’s a subtle mystery set in a far future, oddly evolved version of humanity and almost-humanity that feels original and deeply thought provoking without attempting to wrap difficult questions up with neat answers.

The Unsettled – Ayana Mathis

A hard read, in some ways, but deeply compellling. Following a mother and child, this is a powerful exploration of poverty and societally vulnerable familes, and the profound, complicated ties that run through generations.

The Fox Wife – Yangtsze Choo

Someone else I could read forever. Choo’s deft, gentle story of a woman coming to terms with her own past, and figuring out her future, is beautifully handled and hypnotic. This is the fox-changeling story you didn’t know you needed.

No One To Hold The Distant Dead – KL Schroeder

Perhaps the last novella release from the indie press Psychopomp, this is a devastating story full of eco-grief and rage in equal measure, with perhaps a dash of comfort and hope. If you have ever wanted to scream at the godawfulness of the extinction crisis, you should probably read this book.

Step into the past (kind of) & lose yourself

Year Of The Reaper – Makiia Lucia

A book to dive into, this is alt-European historical fiction with a fantastical twist, that combines plague, politics, family secrets, romance and ghosts in perfect balance. It’s a pacy and riveting read that asks some really good questions about loyalty and compassion.

The Book Of Thorns – Hester Fox

Fox always offers up a really engaging, enjoyable read and this book, following separated sisters on opposite sides of the Napoleonic wars, is no exception. I love the way she beds a light fantastical touch into her worlds so convincingly.

The Burial Plot – Elizabeth Macneal

Straight history but with definite Gothic tones to it, this book has a ‘bad guy’ you’ll want to punt out the nearest window, but the relationships unfold in exactly the right way and the odd premise (let’s build a graveyard!) makes for a fun difference from similar books.

The Bookseller Of Inverness – SG MacLean

My first MacLean book but I’ve since hunted out and inhaled a couple of others – she’s even got me started on a long series (the Seeker books), which is something generally anathema to my fried brain. I am a sucker for a bit of Jacobite historical fiction, and this was a fresh, beautiful and captivating addition to that space, exploring the quiet power of women in a way I really liked.

The Forgotten Shore – Sarah Maine

Maine knows how to write yearning on shorelines really, really damn well. I love every one of her books, and this is perhaps my new fav from her. A romance tangled up in family secrets, tragedy, and a profound sense of place in both Scotland and Newfoundland.

The Listeners – Maggie Stiefvater

Set in a hotel housing political prisoners as the US prepared to join WWII, Stievfater’s adult debut has all the gorgeous worldbuilding of her YA novels (hello The Scorpio Races, I love you), characters who get under your skin, and a bright, brave heart.

Near futures (to avoid)

Wild Dark Shore – Charlotte McConaghy

This book seems to have landed really well with a wide readership this year, not surprisingly – it has all the requirements of a thriller in a remote, isolated place, layered with secrets and the ticking clock of the flooding seed bank the characters are protecting. The climate change setting is backdrop rather than theme, but it definitely adds to the heartbreak and tension.

Immaculate Conception – Ling Ling Huang

I went into this book entirely blind and and am kind of glad I did. It was a startling exploration of the meaning of art, and of a deeply unhealthy friendship, doing interesting things with voice and ideas of ownership, culpability and consequence. I immediately added Natural Beauty to my tbr.

The 14th Storm – Daniel J Mooney

A sort of climate fiction thriller, I love the setting of this book – a future Ireland reshaped by climate change – and the core set of characters who just grab hold of you and drag you along for the ride. A lot of fun, and some pertinent questions about political messaging and power to boot.

Saltcrop – Yume Kitasei

A road trip book for the rising seas. This is a strangely gentle, urgent book about sisters navigating an altered world and their own complicated pasts. The mystery plotline weaves nicely into the more thoughtful side of the writing, and it’s made me add Kitasei’s previous books to my tbr.

The Wolf Road – Beth Lewis

What a bloody, gnarly delight this book is. Any world where the moment of apocalypse becomes known as the Damn Stupid has got to be a winner, hasn’t it? But this book is a wild, dark, unique gem of a thing. Wild west post-apocalyptic deadly hide and seek across a desperate and strange land, with a young girl forced to unravel her past and her relationship with a dangerous man.

Dark, tangled and gothic

Curdle Creek – Yvonne Battle-Felton

Yvonne’s first book, Remembered, blew me away with its beauty and power, and Curdle Creek did exactly the same for very different reasons. The dissonant voice of the main character is a brave and brilliant choice that underpins all the sinister horror of the setting. This is a twist on small town horror like you’ve never read before.

Scuttler’s Cove – David Barnett

Another small town horror, but in a much more familiar-to-me vein – the Cornish village bound to the sea through dark ritual and secrets, the incomers stirring up trouble… Yes, it’s a familiar story, but man, Barnett tells it so well. Deliciously tangled and alive, this is the kind of folk horror I adore.

Lady Macbeth – Ava Reid

A Macbeth retelling that genuinely isn’t doing the same thing as the others – the witches are remade brilliantly, and a crucial character also happens to be a dragon! I really enjoyed this as a wild and original, and properly bloody, romp through the grounds of the scottish play and the history behind it.

Ragwort – Sam K Horton

This is the sequel to Horton’s debut – Gorse – and follows the young Keeper, Nancy, after the death of her mentor at the end of the previous book. It is a stunningly told story of Cornish folklore twisted into something fresh and timeless, of coming into your own powers and learning your own skin. This is a book to savour.

The Household – Stacey Halls

Halls can always be counted on for a captivating Gothic read, and I feel that this one leans even further than her previous into exploring female relationships, alongside how women of the era must contort themselves to claim agency over their own lives. Based on a fragment of Dicken’s life, but fortunately not really to do with him at all!

The Needfire – MK Hardy

Set in the far north of Scotland in the aftermath of the Clearances, this is Gothic horror with a folkloric edge, and run through with a beautiful, hard won romance. Taking the requisitive brooding old house on a cliff, a silent laird, and local secrets, this story is far more than those dark bones – exploring environmentalism, sexuality, and quiet power with a deft touch.

Magical, fun and sometimes swoony

Asunder – Kirsten Hall

A really clever fantasy playing with ideas of gods, debts, and power in a way that feels original and just a little bit challenging. The romance, between the main character and, basically, a voice in her head, is brilliantly done. It shouldn’t work, and yet… I really hope book2 gets its chance at life, because I Need.

The Book Of Gold – Ruth Frances Long

If you want a breathlessly fun ride through an alt-history fantasy jam full of heists, flawed siblings, complicated romance, court politics, evil shenanigans, and fickle gods… well, this might be for you. A whole lot of fun. If you loved The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson (I did, I really did, why isn’t it on this list??) then give this a go.

A Song To Drown Rivers – Ann Liang

I am still a little broken by the end of this book and if I ever meet Liang, I intend to Have Words. It’s a devastating story of court politics, betrayals and power, inspired by the Ancient Chinese legendary beauty Xishi. Enthrallingly told and… no, I am too broken. Read it, join me in the sads.

The Naming Song – Jedediah Berry

I do love a train book. And this is a spectacularly original train book – in a world where the names of everything have been lost, a train crosses the landscape, rediscovering words and bringing them to the populace. The concept alone is wonderful, the plot of secrets, rebellion, murders and family makes the whole an absolute joy.

Greenteeth – Molly O’Neill

This book had been sitting in my tbr for a while, but oh what a treat once I finally got to it. I love the Jenny Greenteeth folkloric figure anyway, but what O’Neill has done with her is wonderful, rendering her simultaneously incredibly inhuman and yet utterly relatable. Aside from the plot, delightfully full of traditional mythological way points and motifs, Jenny’s personal journey is tender and heartwarming to follow.

Dramatic, dangerous and innovative

Blood Over Bright Haven – ML Wang

This is a darker fantastical tale that poses some really interesting, and pertinent, questions about xenophobia, immigration, colonial violence, and the complicity of educational institutions in that violence. Whether you agree with Wang’s answers is less important than that you have a splendid time with this riveting story, and feel something strongly about the ending.

The Library At Mount Char – Scott Hawkins

This book felt like The Umbrella Academy for grown ups. It’s not really about the eponymous library so much as it’s about the terrible, twisted bonds between the children raised within it, and the path they all are forced down by the machinations of their surrogate father. Dark and kinda devastating, this was much more than I was expecting, and I am so glad.

Project Hanuman – Stewart Hotston

This is what space opera is meant to be. A searingly clever, thoughtful adventure through space, quantum physics and virtual realities, where the aliens, the sentient warships and the higher intelligences are all bedded in a deeply interesting exploration of identity and our understanding of ourselves.

When Among Crows – Veronica Roth

I am a sucker for some Polish folklore, and this twist on that, set in the US, was every bit as delicious as I’d hoped. I love Roth’s ability to expose new, potent sides to familiar archetypes, and she did that here with figures that felt deeply folkloric but also tragically, horribly human.

There Is No Antimemetics Division – qntm

I confess I am in the middle of reading this one, but it’s such a brain meltingly ingenious book I’m sneaking it in anyway. The concept – of antimemetic objects which erase knowledge, personhood and matter – is a great starting point; building a story around not remembering plot-relevant things is a bold undertaking you just kind of have to admire! It’s a fascinating read that I’ve reluctantly set aside for some overdue ARC reading…

Look out for…

The Republic Of Memory – Mahmud el Sayed

As with Project Hanuman, I think this book is going to bring some brilliant fresh oxygen into space-based SF next year. El Sayed had me signed up at ‘Arabfuturism’ but add in generation ships, popular uprisings, and failing powers, and I am so excited to have my ARC of this queued up.

Princeweaver – Elian J Morgan

My current read is this beautiful reimagining of Welsh folkoric history, that imbues a tale of court politics, banned magic, and rebellion with a deep love of Wales. Add in a beautifully told romance, and you just know how much fun I am having right now.

OMG that was so many books to remember, and summarise without repeating superlatives too many times! I have cooked my brain, but I sincerely hope some of these titles will find their way onto your present buying lists. Or perhaps into your xmas present book token boxing day shopping cart.

Please do let me know your fav reads of the year?

Thank you as always for your support. Because accessibility in publishing is important to me, I keep all my craft and publishing posts free, so any shares or tips are greatly appreciated. Wishing you a fabulous weekend.

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Book launches – survival, celebration and chocolate

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Hello fellow creatures. I usually write a ‘the story behind the book’ post around publication day, but I feel like I’ve chatted a lot about The Salt Oracle over the last year either here or on my mothballed Substack, both in free and in paid posts. So what else around book publication time might be interesting to you, my splendid readers?

How about the odd emotional complexity of book release?

Last Thursday, We Are All Ghosts In The Forest was released in paperback, and The Salt Oracle was released in hardback/ebook/audio. Which is Lovely and An Achievement! Publication day is generally seen as an unconditionally joyous moment. In my experience though, having your books unleashed into the world is not as emotionally straightforward as a lot of people assume. Yes, it’s wonderful, no doubting that but there’s more to it than unbridled enthusiasm.

To be fair I am six books in now, which flavours this, but while there are some things that have stayed the same, others feel very different to when I was debuting. I am, for example, far better now at not looking at reviews! And far more resigned/unworried by the inevitable tagging into ‘meh’ reviews or hearing that some readers don’t like a thing you did deliberately. I am much more relaxed at and about events, and more aware of what to expect from the next few weeks both practically and personally.

However many books you’ve published though, and however big or small your publisher/deal/reach, there is excitement and tension around pub day – the sudden visibility, vulnerability and achievement of it all never goes away (or at least is hasn’t yet). But in my experience there’s also a touch of non-event-ness to publication day – not deflation per se but maybe a kind of suspension.

The excitement is understandable – this book you have loved, hated, fought with, loved again, fought for, built hopes around and yet still fear for, is finally fully out of your hands. It is going to be read by people you will never meet, and people you will meet because of it, it’s going to be adored and ignored, recommended and wildly misinterpreted, it’s going to fulfill some of your hopes and fail others but it will almost certainly fulfill all of the dreams you had when you first stepped into publishing. (Which is worth remembering, no?)

The suspension is a little more opaque. Why wouldn’t you be high on adrenaline and love on this day more than any other? Well, you are. And maybe it’s just me showing my inner zen master/energetically flatlined beastie, but the thing about publication day is that… well, let me see:

The day itself can feel a little focusless…

  • Your books have been arriving in shops/on people’s doorsteps for the last week or so, unless there was a sales embargo (in which case you’re huge and definitely not reading this post!). So the ‘released’ thing is a formality on the actual day. OR there’s the inverse – delivery issues which have left many authors wandering shops on pub day forlornly searching for books that haven’t arrived yet!
  • Your book has been read, reviewed and blurbed for the last several months, so while you will continue to cross your fingers for good reader interest, good reviews and the elusive trade review uptake, those events or statistics are spread over some time, not arriving suddenly on pub day.

So even though you’re excited, you can also feel at a bit of a loose end on the day itself. Fortunately this is where launch day events and social media come in. I always spend much of publication day keeping up with all the lovely comments I get on social media, thanking everyone and generally basking in the glow of belonging to a lovely community of supportive friends. It’s really nice.

And on that note – launch events are a great way to mark the day. Emotional complexity comes in here too though – not just because it can be hard to get a launch event organised. Booksellers might not have space or interest, publishers might not have the budget to help you organise your own, etc. But if you are lucky enough to have something organised… events on the day are generally best framed as an opportunity to celebrate with friends. You may get attendees who were curious about your book, or who just wandered in, but almost no one at the event has read your book. I’m at the truly amazing point now where people come to new book launches having loved my previous books, which never fails to make me a bit fuzzy and emotional. But they haven’t read this book.

Later events, in the months after launch are where you’ll start meeting readers who’ve read the thing and loved it enough to show up and meet you. Which means that Q&As can take on a much richer life, and reader interactions shift into a new form. That is such a joyous moment which comes some time after your launch day event.

Whether you have an event on the day or not (I did for the last book, for this one I just went and signed a tonne of stock in my local Waterstones which was still quietly lovely), it’s often a strange day full of joy and community, but also perhaps a sense of unreality or, as I said earlier, suspension.

The thing is…

(I always have to bring it back to ugh publishing don’t I?) ……There’s a lot of quiet pressure on a book around publication. We get told repeatedly that pre-orders and early sales predict the overall success of a book. I don’t know if that’s true, or just indicative of the marketing around publication. But when those early numbers will dictate recontracting decisions, it’s an odd period of time – you are doing a lot of public facing work, aware of how much is riding on it, but oblivious to whether any of it is working. I love celebrating my new books, I truly do, but the background tension around whether they are Doing Okay definitely feels more intense around launch than the rest of the book’s life (for this book more than any previous one perhaps). Some authors are told that their book is being targeted at a bestseller list – a rare privilege, but definitely a heavy expectation to add to publication week!

Do I sound like I don’t love publication day? I hope not, because I do. It’s the culmination of so much work and love, and with every book, I have reached publication day proud of what I and my publishers have achieved. It’s a waypoint that unreservedly deserves all the celebration.

But I’m six books in, and without diminishing the joy around this publication day, I am more aware now than ever that one book alone does not a publishing career make. Or one week does not… Or one event or one win.

Talking of which, I won an award at WFC! My novella The Last To Drown – a dark Icelandic ghost story about family secrets, chronic pain, the sea and recovering from trauma – won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novella. That’s extremely bloody awesome, and I couldn’t be prouder of this book and of Luna Press who are such a special small press doing amazing work within SFFH.

New award joining its friends

[An aside – Over the last 15 years of chronic migraine, I have learned to temper my emotions because any emotional extreme – good or bad – is a trigger for hours or days of extreme pain, nausea, muscle weakness etc etc. This is a bit of a superpower in publishing, in that while I will have a solid moan to friends sometimes, I can generally roll with the punches with some equanimity. The downside is that I am not very good at just celebrating, because that emotional even keel is so ingrained in me now. Hoo boy am I throwing metaphors around today, I apologise]

In the last week (at time of writing), I have won this fabulous award, met a lot of lovely readers, launched both Ghosts paperback and The Salt Oracle with a fun event at World Fantasy Con and a friendly signing at my local bookshop, and had a splendid time at WFC besides.

It’s a wonderful, gratitude-inducing position to be in. But whether it’s post-con fatigue, that emotional even keel, or the point in my career, I am finding my overall mental state to be ‘Okay, this is great, but let’s just wait to see whether it means anything‘. Will the early sales mean my editor can (or wants to) open recontracting talks? Will the award provoke interest from submission-list editors? Will early apparent enthusiasm, and mine & my publisher’s hard work mean these books get the momentum to exceed my prior reach?

I really truly hope these books – one for its first flight, and one in this 2nd format – do well, for their own sakes. Because I believe in them, and feel like I did something interesting with both of them. I also hope they do well to reward my editor and marketing team’s championing of them. We’re allowed to say that, aren’t we? Those are acceptable reasons to publicly want your books to succeed.

A little less acceptable, but no less true, is the hope that they do well because I need them to if I’m going to continue to publish. But there is little point dwelling on that hope when it’s 95% out of my hands. So as always, my question to myself when staring publishing in the face is ‘what can I actually do?’

  • I can keep working to organise events & publicity, and be as open as possible to my publicist’s suggestions and opportunities.
  • I can manage my spoons and my outlook so I am well enough to treasure all the positive things coming my way, and keep the negatives in perspective.
  • I can eat some emergency chocolate.
  • And, of course, I can work on something new. Aside from winning an award or selling lots, I can’t influence the success of books currently out on submission to editors, so the only thing I can do right now to maximise my chances of selling more books is to write another one. Write a better one, or a more pitchable one, or just a luckier one.
Launching alongside splendid authors Sam K Horton & (half of) MK Hardy

Technically, the point in the publication process where your book is fully out of your hands (editorially) is the page proofs checking stage. After that, you can’t change anything and it’s entirely up to readers to either connect with it or not. You get no further say on how your words land. But between proofs and publication you have a window of relative calm where a small number of reviewers and authors are reading the book but the wider public are yet to join the conversation. So publication day, for all that other things diffuse the singularity of the day itself, is still a huge shift in the life of a book.

That’s scary, but also freeing. I believe a book is unique to every reader who finds it, because a book is a conversation with that reader – their experiences and imagination and heart. That’s why the same book lands so differently with different people, because it is different. So finding out what your book became in different readers’ minds is a marvel, and stands apart from what your book is to you.

In my opinion, and as with so many things in publishing, it’s important to separate out your relationship with your craft, from your relationship with the publishing industry. A book release is worthy of celebrating because you should be proud of your own craft, and excited for that story to find the readers who will love it. It’s worth holding a little bit in perspective because you need to maintain your publicity momentum beyond this week, or even this month; and you need to maintain your writing momentum entirely beyond this book.

I am guilty of pinning all my hopes on this book sometimes, of focusing on how much is riding on this one doing better than the previous ones according to one measure or another. And there’s enough truth in that to overwhelm the joy of publication day, or award wins, if I’m not careful. So perspective, even keels and focusing on what I can do is good, but taking a wee moment to feel proud of myself independent of publishing’s shenanigans is just as important.

So please wish these books luck on their maiden flights, and meanwhile I will be diving into the edits and pretending that my next article will not be a Christmas reading recommendations post (scream).

Thank you as always for your support. Because accessibility in publishing is important to me, I keep all my craft and publishing posts free, so any shares or tips are greatly appreciated. Wishing you a fabulous weekend.

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The books behind the book – diving into the stories & history that inspired The Salt Oracle

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Updates from the writing cave: Since I last posted here, I have finished the first draft of the strange and challenging parallel world book that I began over the summer. I’ve done a quick first pass tidy up of it and have now shelved it to work on other things while it thinks about what it’s done. I’m really pleased to have completed such an unusually structured draft, but there’s some substantial decisions to make about what it needs next, so I’m hoping a few months of marinading will let me come back to it with fresh eyes.

Now. If you follow me on Bluesky or Instagram, you will know that I am firmly into pre-publication promo season for The Salt Oracle (and the paperback release of We Are All Ghosts In The Forest). It’s the point in time when most authors exist in the greatest dichotomy of externally doing the chirpy promo, whilst internally dying of embarrassment, awkwardness and cringe. It’s simultaneously lovely to share your excitement with your community and uncomfortable to feel like you’re hustling. But pre-orders and early sales really do matter. And I want to give these books what small boost is within my power, so I am trying to make it as fun as possible (for me, heaven knows what’s ‘fun’ to the IG algorithm!).

These two books are out on Thurs 6th Nov – two weeks yesterday – and next Sunday I get to launch them a little early at World Fantasy Con in Brighton, alongside some splendid and talented friends, Sam K Horton and MK Hardy, celebrating their books Ragwort and The Needfire. It’ll be a fun event, with cake and arty freebies and hot-off-the-press books, so if you are in Brighton please do come find us!

For today though, I figured I’d talk about other books!

As a bit of a ‘where do your ideas come from’ post, I have gone through my shelves and notebook to give you a small sample of the many stories and scraps of science, folklore and natural history that were part of the landscape from which I developed The Salt Oracle. If you’ve been with me a while, you might remember me talking about the Dark Academia elements of this book, but it’s also fairly apparent that beyond general academia vibes, my specific experiences with marine and conservation science also fed into this story.

Though I’ve never lived on a floating college fortress, I have lived in research stations or field camps in Scotland, Eastern Europe, the Indian Ocean islands, and Central America. It’s a strange microcosm of an environment, living closely with a small, often very isolated team made up of people who might be thrown together with no prior connections, and who are working long hours in often hazardous environments. There is a strange, often fleeting but always quite intense companionship that springs up in those settings, partly out of proximity and shared interests, but partly out of a need to get along for everyone’s safety and comfort. I definitely drew on my memories of such relationships in my writing the close but occasionally downright incompatible crew in this book.

Likewise I was able to draw on the marine conservation research I’ve been a part of, that includes things like whale communication, marine mammal fisheries bycatch, coral reef health, sea turtle breeding, sea bird population modelling and conservation, etc. That research wasn’t a huge part of my academic time, but I’m lucky enough to know people who work in all walks of marine research, so I had a way in to reading up on buoy and satellite tag technology, fisheries policy, renewables deployment and so on. (My work also took me to a hotel in Stromness, Orkney, which has on the wall a radar image of the Pentland Firth showing all the German submarines sunk at the end of WWII – the tangled poignancy and hidden threat of that image stuck with me, and got a tangential reference in The Salt Oracle)

As a seven year old, I decided that I was going to ‘save the whales’. I don’t know what exactly I thought I was going to do, especially once I declared that I would do so by becoming a vet! But while I never got to save a whale, perhaps this book is my inner 7 year old channelling all her undiluted rage at what we are doing to the oceans, and wishing vengeance upon us all!

Other than an undertow of eco-rage, what else fed into the making of this book?

A lot of folklore, obviously. Can I write a book without it? And would I even want to? (No, and no). (If you don’t possess a copy of Breverton’s Phantasmagoria, please correct that terrible tragedy forthwith.) As you might gather from the image below, I do a lot of happy browsing through books of lost and abandoned places like I’m shopping for my retirement home/island. This is only about half the ones I own, and I highly recommend them if you are seeking inspirations for settings or mysteries or strange scraps of history. It is, incidentally, from that wee orange one in the bottom left that I read the fragment of history which gave me my setting in Mother Sea (the godawful history of the island of Tromélin).

As well as plaguing my sailing-obsessed sister for technical details, I also adore historic maritime explorer books and their wealth of perspectives on the ocean in an era when it was still so unknown and dangerous. In the picture below is the exquisite fictionalised story of Darwin’s voyages in This Thing Of Darkness – a beautiful, oddly sad and uplifting story.

Lastly for the non-fic, there are so many vital books out there now that explore climate change and our society’s responses to it. At the time of drafting The Salt Oracle, perhaps most recent read for me was this first beautiful and heartbreaking essay collection by the wonderful Amitav Ghosh.

How about fiction?

As you might expect, I am an unapologetic sucker for anything remotely Dark Academia shaped! There are issues I struggle with in this genre, and sometimes those flaws outweigh the joys of libraries! research! existential crises! but I will never not be tempted by books which centre the corrosive seduction of learnéd institutions. If We Were Villains and The Secret History are both rightly famous and need little explanation from me other than to say that while I prefer the former over the latter, I appreciate what the latter means to the whole genre. Likewise something that I really adoredabout Vita Nostra and the Scholomance series by Naomi Novik was how they both broke so entirely away from the dreaming spires, gothic architecture vibes of most DA. It’s probably fair to say those books gave me a lot more confidence when I came to writing my creaky, rusty hulk of a college!

Just as with non-fic, I am of course a fan of the many beautiful books that tackle climate change themes in interesting and nuanced ways within fiction. There are too many to list but at the time when I was formulating this book, Claire North and the great Octavia E Butler were probably top of my mental reference piles! I loved particularly how these books fold the climate themes into other forms of plot, as this was something I wanted to do (why write 1 genre when you can write 4, anyway) in The Salt Oracle.

There’s been a bit of a madcap trend in the short fiction world recently, of writing retellings or sequels to Ursula K le Guin’s famous The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas – a short story that explores the brutal cost of utopia and who is willing to pay it. Some of these recent reimaginings have… rather missed the point of the original, in my mind, so I did my usual recalcitrant teenager act of refusing to say that Omelas was one of the core inspirations behind my book. But a wonderful author friend noted it, unprompted, in their blurb, so the (not really) secret is out, and I hope readers are intrigued and satisfied with this rather tangential take on le Guin’s posed question.

Two books in the image above that perhaps aren’t so obviously connected to The Salt Oracle are Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, and MM Kaye’s Death In The Andamans. The former is there because of the sheer beauty of his descriptions of the ocean’s liminal edge wreaking wonder and devastation in equal measure. It’s a heartbreaking book, but one climactic passage describing a terrible storm tide haunts me even now years after reading it. That vibe of awe and horror, of both the power and the powerlessness of the sea, is something that hopefully echoes in the pages of my book.

MM Kaye’s 6 murder mystery books are not the ones she’s famous for, and are definitely books ‘of their time’. But I adore them for her masterful ability to create rich, captivating settings that just ooze atmosphere and tension. In this book in particular, the key mystery events take place largely in one house, and the book includes (drumroll)… a floorplan. I am not a big fan of maps in books, but for reasons known only to the mice that occupy my brain, I adore a floorplan. Just. Perfection. Perhaps because that way I know where the library is. Anyway, as well as being a constant inspiration to me in writing atmospheric settings, MM Kaye gifted me the initial idea for the layout of the Bellwether – the college in The Salt Oracle.

And so, in case hustling on social media wasn’t mortifying enough, I’m sharing the floorplan sketches I did in my notebook for your delectation!

I am, as you are now sadly aware, not a natural artist! (also some of this changed, so don’t use it as a reference!) But this was a surprisingly essential part of my drafting process, because ooft the number of times I had to check back to see where characters ended up after running down some stairs…

A slightly random post from me today, fuelled by the dual horns of ‘I don’t want to just promo the book’ and ‘I can’t ignore the fact that it’s nearly release day’. I hope there’s some temptations in here for you, and if you pick up any of these books, or have your own strange and fascinating sources of inspiration please do let me know.

Thank you, as always for your support. Because accessibility in publishing is important to me, I keep all my craft and publishing posts free, so any shares or tips are greatly appreciated. Wishing you a fabulous weekend.

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