On her wedding night, Hraga of Hafonlea takes part in an age-old Mornal tradition.

As promised, my "Inktober" project from our writing server!

I've wanted to write about Osfrid and Hraga's wedding night for at least a year, and I'm really happy that this writing practice exercise gave me the opportunity to finally do it. Their dynamic has lived mostly in my head since GGTR was published, but it's one of my favorites -- I love a strong M/F duo, especially a strong married M/F couple. Most of what's shown in GGTR is the aftermath of a long and loving partnership, so I wanted to spend some time showing the start of that (and flexing my sex scene writing muscles, too, wink wink.)

The cover is a detail from "Girl with Cherries," attributed to Marco d'Oggiono, slightly edited by me.

32 pages and available on Amazon for $0.99!

The weather is finally, slowly, slooooowly getting colder here (I think we finally drop into the 60s this weekend) and I wish all I had to do was write. I'm so used to autumn being Writing Time even now that N*NoWr*Mo is essentially dead and buried. It's hard to get cozy to spend hours on the computer during the heat of summer but now it's like...at last. An Excuse!

In the Discord writing server I belong to we're doing a laid-back "inktober" where we are encouraging each other to write between 100-300 words a day, and I think it's been a fruitful exercise for most of us! I have been working on a coda to GGTR about Osfrid and Hraga's wedding night, and all it's missing is an an ending scene that I hope to draft tomorrow. It's not shaping up to be too terribly long but I was never able to put much of their dynamic on-page, so I'm really enjoying getting to play with their easy banter and instant connection. (Plus I think this is the first M/F sex scene I've written since at LEAST 2013.) It's been very fun. I put together a cover that I think looks really nice and will be popping it up on Amazon for $0.99, probably before the end of the month.

As for other projects, TFYOS particularly, it's starting to feel like one of those projects that maybe isn't in the cards for me, or at least not for a few more years. The difference in how it feels to write about Osfrid and Hraga and how it feels to get to know these relatively unknown characters is pretty stark! There's a comfort level I haven't reached with Maliyam and Hrena yet. Maybe they need a few short stories of their own to introduce themselves to me. But that's for down the road when I don't have so much schoolwork to think about.

Can't say I'm reading anything at the moment (see aforementioned schoolwork) but I am a few chapters into The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley (a gift and rec from my dear CM Sullivan) and from what I've read so far I really like it! I like the level of magic intruding on the realism and I know it gets queer. I have a ton of indie reads from the Narratess sale to get to eventually, I feel bad about that. I've been managing a pretty nice routine between work-school-exercise-leisure and I'm sure I can push an hour of reading in there on nights I don't feel like writing.

That's the update for now! Hopeful that I can post about the GGTR short here in a few days.

Being a self-published author is a weird position. When I initially drafted GGTR in 2021, it was mostly an exercise in seeing if I could do it--if I could write a full draft of a short novella, not having completed a manuscript in over a decade. I decided to self-publish it mostly so that my friends could read it, and also because I thought the process would be interesting and fun. And it was! I got to take in feedback, learn to format, hire my dear friend Abby Gavit as my cover designer, and relearn the ins and outs of KDP (which had changed a lot since the old CreateSpace days.)

To my surprise, GGTR did pretty well for the fantasy debut of someone who, until fairly recently, was mostly known for horror fanfiction. I have my long-time friends and their generous word of mouth to thank for that. And so I ran headlong into the next project, TM. I started trying to learn how to navigate author Twitter and the other author spaces online. And I came up short against a pretty big wall, which was myself.