admin – PretenseSoup

September 2026: Trusting the Process

The book I have been calling the new novel, as though I was suddenly going to decide I hated the title The Whole Wide World, has gone to my editor for developmental comments. This is the stage where one takes a terribly crumpled piece of knitting that is full of badly tensioned stitches and sends it to someone who has not been staring at it relentlessly for four months, and one gets back a plan for how to block it into shape.* I often get pretty anxious at this point. The structure of the novel is there, and most of the words are in decent shape, but it feels too tight in some places, too baggy in others, and I keep wondering if I could make the ending better. And so I repeat to myself: You set the process up to be like this. All art goes through an ugly stage, but if you keep working, you’ll come out the other side.** Now trust the process.

In the meantime, I have been painting and working on short things. I thought it would be fun to give you a taste of some of these, since they’re all Wisconsin Gothic related, and give you a sense of what happens when my wheels start spinning aimlessly. None of these have titles yet, and they are all in various stages of completion. They are not, arguably, even the same genre–there’s a mystery, a romance, a horror/romance, and a combination New Yorker profile/gonzo journalism piece. Maybe someday I’ll even finish one of them and you’ll ~~be sorry~~ all get to read the whole thing.

*apologies to knitters for this metaphor.
**when I say all art, I mean all, not just novels. If your painting looks weird, keep going. If the yarn seems to be doing weird things or the embroidery isn’t sitting right, don’t stop. You will find your way to beauty.

Announcements
The audiobook of Dionysus in Wisconsin is out! Interestingly, unlike ebooks, where the price I set is the one shown on every website, all the sites selling the audiobook seem to have it for a different price. I cannot explain why, either; I have little insight into the process. I actually have almost no reporting yet, either. If you put an ebook up on Amazon, you will find out within forty-eight hours if you have sold any copies. But it has been three weeks since I pushed the button to publish the audiobook, and although I’ve heard a few good reviews from early listeners, I have no idea how many copies have been sold or streamed. I don’t even know how much money I make off a single copy, either—no one seems to want to get into specifics. If you have listened already, I hope you enjoyed it! And for everyone else who’s interested, I have links:

Libro.fm
Audible
Audiobooks.com
Spotify
It’s available on Amazon…I think the price is different, which I do not understand since Amazon owns Audible.
I will add others to the list at WinnowingFanPress.com as I receive/find them.

Appearances
I will be at Booked Eau Claire on September 18–19 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, at the Lismore. Book sales run 8:30-2:30pm both days, and I’m sitting on a panel called “On the Agenda” about the importance of LGBTQ representation in literature. You can check the schedule here. You can use the code BEC2026 to get 15% off tickets until September 10th. If you are in the area and want to say hi/get a book signed but you’re not into paying to get in, I’ll be having office hours at the Acoustic Café on South Barstow from 3-4pm on Friday (and maybe a bit later on Saturday—depends on hotel check-outs and such–send me a note if you really want to hang out Saturday afternoon, and keep an eye on my Bluesky for changes).

I will be on the podcast The Historical Romance Sampler on Sept. 21st, reading an excerpt from Dionysus in Wisconsin and talking about why Dionysus is the best deity for the 1960s. Check your podcast app. (And I think YouTube? We did record this visually and acoustically.)

I will be at Rainbow Space Magic Con on October 3-4, doing a reading and sitting on a panel about building writing community. Schedule isn’t out yet, but check their website for updates. It’s free to attend and online!

Book Reviews
Wings of Fire (the series), by Tui T. Sutherland. I have mentioned these before, when I asked my then-8yo to recommend some books for kids (see the book reviews section here). At the time, I had not read any of them; now, thanks to my kids discovering audiobooks and a roadtrip, I have listened to books 2–5. As I said last year, they were pitched to me as “Game of Thrones but with dragons,” and that is…much more accurate than I expected. They cover topics like fate vs free will, dealing with the trauma of a difficult upbringing, bad parents and good, even bigotry and unethical medical experiments. And there are a lot of somewhat grisly murders. I’ve been surprised. And occasionally found myself listening ahead, because of cliffhangers. Don’t tell my kids.

Heartbreaker (M/F, both cis), by Sarah MacLean. Look, never let it be said that Sarah Maclean doesn’t know how to begin a novel. (This one starts with a brawl during a wedding and continues with a meet-cute-while-breaking and entering.) The Hell’s Belles series is more of an extended proto-feminist revenge fantasy than strictly accurate historical romance, but I find I don’t care that much–I just love a lady with a knife in her pocket. Like all of MacLean’s books, she doesn’t let it get at all gender-bendy (sadly), but I do love a heroine who can fight and gets to.

The Romantic Agenda (two M/F couples, both of which have one asexual partner and one allosexual), by Claire Kann. Malcolm is in love with Summer. Joy is in love with Malcolm. Summer has brought Fox along on the group camping trip for some reason. So Fox and Joy decide to fake date in order to make Malcolm and Summer jealous. Probably the most interesting part of this book is that the disruption within Malcolm and Joy’s long-term friendship (queer platonic relationship, really) is taken as seriously as the fledgling relationship Joy and Fox are figuring out.

Strange Rumblings in Madison

On September 11, 2001, I was eighteen. I had lately moved out of my parents’ house and started my college career. Looking at a calendar, the first day of classes must have been the previous Tuesday, September 4. My first lecture on Tuesdays was modern Hebrew at 9:50am, so my roommate woke me up when she got back to our room sometime between 8 and 8:30.

“Someone flew a plane into the World Trade Center.”

I did not process this at all. I think I said, “On purpose?” and possibly, “Are we going to have a war?” She didn’t know. No one knew anything. This had never happened before. The whole thing felt absurd–in fact, a few months previously I had watched an episode of an X-Files spinoff in which the heroes prevented a plane from flying into the World Trade Center. And I had once read, possibly in Reader’s Digest, an account of the 1993 bombing. Why was there so much interest in those buildings? I wondered muzzily.

I didn’t really know what I was supposed to do. Eventually, I went to class. My professor had turned up, along with some of the students. The prof was crying. Her son lived in New York, I think, and she couldn’t get hold of him. All the phone lines were down. People was distraught. We were half a country away from the site of the attacks. We could do nothing.

I remember the time in bits and pieces, all jumbled together. I remember standing in the cafeteria watching some reporting about the stock market–this must have been a week later when trading started again, and the Dow had its worst-ever one day loss. Someone joked, phlegmatically, “There goes my tuition.” I remember–I think this was in the evening on the 11th–a bunch of kids at the dorms ordering a pizza, and it took three hours to arrive. The driver blamed gas prices, which had immediately shot up. At some point I spoke on the phone to my father? or possibly we emailed, and he said the Sears Tower had been evacuated as a precaution. After a while, the skies were quiet. The only thing I can compare it to was the early COVID lockdown, a sense of isolation and quiet, of bad things happening somewhere else. I remember seeing a TV shot of people walking in New York (over a bridge?) and the mayor’s voice saying “If you are in Lower Manhattan, get out.”

In the weeks after, things were confusing. I wasn’t really a political person yet (I mean, I had liberal political views, but I wasn’t really engaged with discourse at the time; I hadn’t been old enough to vote in the 2000 presidential election). People were attacking those they perceived to be Arab or Muslim, even Sikhs (who are generally neither). The only Muslim person I could remember meeting was a professor at Beloit College, who was American and had once been an Anglican priest before she converted. She was amazing. I worried about her.

In the news, no one had any more answers–were we going to war? With whom? Apparently this event had killed more people than Pearl Harbor. It seemed that someone should answer for it. But countries can’t go to war with specific people. That’s what legal systems are for.

I went to a protest, which was small and felt uncertain. On the TV, in the news, were contradictory points: the people who attacked us hated our freedom. We had to give up some of the freedom to be able to catch them. Who “they” were was unclear to me. The Patriot Act got passed. The Department of Homeland Security was created, and the TSA. The Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed. (I only found out about that one years later.) There was a strong sense of you should love your country. You should support the troops (even if you didn’t agree with the war). This is right, this is patriotic. Freedom. Right. Justice. Liberty. God. Love. Happiness. Apple Pie. If you didn’t believe the government, you were wrong and hated the country. What was wrong with you? Couldn’t you see what they’d done to us? You have to love the world that they hate. Whoever they are. Because if you’re not with us, you’re against us. Like they were.

You have to believe that someone knows what the right thing to do is. Turns out they didn’t.

A few weeks ago, my husband and I were driving somewhere and I mentioned I wasn’t sure what to make of the “America 250” flags I was seeing around. As I understand it, that one is a bipartisan effort (as opposed to the Trump-only one, “Freedom 250”). But flying a flag? It just seemed so unlikely to me that anyone in my generation might do that who wasn’t a total tool.

Back in July and August 2024, an entire lifetime after 9/11, when Kamala Harris was running for office and the Olympics were on, I thought what I was feeling was patriotism, maybe for the first time. There was a phenomenal sense of energy, of joy and love, the sense that we were on the right side of history and we were going to do something historic. Like Hunter S. Thompson wrote in one of my favorite passages from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.

And that, I think, was the handle–that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting–on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…

So now, less than five years later [he was writing c.1971], you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high–water mark–that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Now when I think about patriotism I wonder how anyone in my generation can feel it uncritically. All I’ve ever learned is that patriotism is the horns of the bull that’s about to gore you to death.

August 2026: Fructidor Draws Nigh

First of all, thank you to everyone who came out to the Middleton Author Festival to say hello. Despite a damp start to the day, we had a great time, and it was lovely to see returning readers!

I spent a lot of time in July reading Pride and Prejudice, which left me feeling rather proper. The fun thing about Jane Austen, besides her books themselves, is that there’s an almost endless world of analysis and articles, rewrites and remixes. People have written academic papers arguing about whether Mr. Bennet could have gotten out of the entail or not, what actually happened to Louisa in Persuasion, feminism, what it means that Fanny Price asks her uncle Sir Thomas about the slave trade in Antigua, plus helpful articles for those of us who aren’t historians on whether it is lascivious to play the harp rather than the pianoforte (Mansfield Park), how well the Dashwoods would have lived on 200 pounds a year, why it was scandalous that Marianne wrote to Willoughby (Sense and Sensibility), to say nothing of all the newspaper and magazine articles on who Austen was and why we still love her over 200 years after her death. And then there are the Austen-adjacent novels. People have written books about Mary Bennet, Mr. Collins, Georgiana, the Bennets’ servants, Mr Darcy, Darcy and Lizzie’s daughter…there are so many. To say nothing of the queer adaptations, the modern adaptations, the zombie adaptations…

There are, in short, a divers group of things already written in this vein. I figure what we don’t need here is another article about how awesome Jane Austen is. Two hundred years in, you either like her or you don’t, but you’ve definitely heard of her. Instead, I want to tell you about something that I learned of from Northanger Abbey: the pinery.

Though careless enough in most matters of eating, he loved good fruit—or if he did not, his friends and children did. There were great vexations, however, attending such a garden as his. The utmost care could not always secure the most valuable fruits. The pinery had yielded only one hundred in the last year. Mr. Allen, he supposed, must feel these inconveniences as well as himself.”

Okay, so what’s a pinery? Basically, it is a special greenhouse for growing pineapples (a tropical fruit) in the UK (notoriously not a tropical country; they were also used in other non-tropical countries I believe, but this is Jane Austen). From about 1715 until the invention of the steam engine, a number of designs were proposed, but prior to the invention of hot-water heating in 1816, this was basically it: dig a pit. Make two walls around it, with a biggish gap between them and some small holes in the inner wall. Put your pots in tanners’ bark (oak bark soaked in water that ferments slowly) and fill that gap between the walls with manure. A lot of manure. Like, maybe a couple tons. Feel good that this is the design you’re using—earlier versions put the manure directly beneath the bark and pots; I do not wish to try and imagine the smell. Put glass over the top of this whole mad thing. The decomposing manure creates heat, which is transmitted through the holes to the plants. Wait for pineapples.

(Here I have to say “only” one hundred pineapples per annum, General? I don’t think I’ve ever grown one hundred of something in a single year. I don’t think I even managed to eat one hundred pineapples even when I lived in Vietnam, where they were cheap and delicious.)

Interestingly, unlike the general, it seems like a lot of people weren’t eating the pineapples—they were using them as decor for their parties. This was a very common thing clear through the nineteenth century—pineapples were very expensive (people could rent them for dinner parties, but they cost one guinea—i.e. expensive—to use as a centerpiece and two guineas if you wanted to eat them!). Having a pineapple on your table was conspicuous consumption. Later on, as the technology improved, Victorian gardeners began to produce very large pineapples, so they became a way of showing off how skillful your gardener was.

Sadly, after the steam engine made shipping pineapples to the UK much more affordable, people stopped growing their own. One article notes that of 52 varieties of pineapple listed in 1835, only two are still in cultivation. (I believe the article means still in cultivation in the UK; of course there are still a few rare pineapple varieties, such as the Antigua black pineapple, and different countries also have their own varieties—Thailand apparently cultivates something like twenty-seven.) Apparently, there were once pyramidal pineapples! But they have been lost, because most pineapples are bred to be tin-shaped.

One more vaguely upsetting pineapple fact: while in the wild, hummingbirds pollinate pineapples, cultivated pineapples are pollinated by hand, and during the 20th century it was consequently forbidden to import hummingbirds to Hawaii. (Not that we should be importing birds from place to place, but the poor pineapple flowers, waiting forever for an evolutionary buddy who cannot show up…)

And one more not-upsetting fact: in 1761, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore (Scotland), built a hothouse with a pinery on his estate. On top of the building, he built a stone cupola in the shape of a pineapple, now called the Dunmore Pineapple. It is forty-six feet (14m) high and was apparently meticulously designed by very clever stonemasons. You can see some photos here.

Announcements
The audiobook of Dionysus in Wisconsin will be out sometime next week, I hope. (Unlike eyeball books, you apparently can’t schedule when audiobooks become available. It’s very annoying.) If you’re interested in a review copy on Spotify or Audiobooks dot com (I unfortunately can’t do advance listener copies or free codes on other services), you can fill in my form here. I know it looks long. Don’t worry about it. Otherwise, I will update the Winnowing Fan Press website as soon as I have links to the various sites where audiobooks are sold.

Upcoming Appearances
I will be at the Summer’s Last Call Adult Book Fair in Milwaukee on August 25th from 4:30-9pm. It’s in the Deer District! Details here. I’ll have both Louise Mayberry and Rowan with me, so there will be both regency romances and tarot readings.

I will be at Booked Eau Claire on September 18–19 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, at the Lismore Hotel. I believe book sales run 8:30-2:30pm both days—check the details and get the whole schedule here. My preorders are closed, but because you all deserve something special for being on the newsletter crew, if you are going and still want the discounted preorder price, drop me an email.

I think that’s all the rest of the events I’m currently planning for the year. Others might come up, but I don’t know about them yet.

Book Reviews
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (cis, M/F). I have a hard time reading it as someone would have at the time—I still think Lydia (“untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy, and fearless”) is terrific. Mr Bennet, who’s only in it for the laughs, is also great. Also there are so many situations everyone can relate to, like “you live in a village of twenty people, so you can’t be rude to anyone’s face,” or “your BFF is marrying a drip,” or “some dude thinks he’s better than you,” or “no one loves a micromanager.” It’s a classic for a reason.

Star Shipped, by Cat Sebastian (cis, M/M). I feel like I need to talk about this because I generally love Cat Sebastian’s work—and I did like this, just not as ardently as I have loved some of her other stuff. It’s her first contemporary, and although I am still by no means a real reader of contemporary romance, I liked it. I did wonder why Simon keeps buying sweaters for his boyfriend when they live in LA, where I am given to understand there is very little call for sweaters. But Simon’s anxiety and mild OCD were well-drawn and relatable.

July 2026: July comes around again

July, July, July. How’s it going, friends?

This newsletter has been a bit delayed, in part because I was up in Minnesota over the 30th of June/1st of July in order to have a little release party for Renaissance at Tropes and Trifles in Minneapolis. It was a great night—thank you so much to everyone who came—and I left in my wake an obscene number of signed copies, so if you’re in the area, go buy one! Mostof them have swag inside. I believe you can also order the signed copies through their website (you can use the search function to find the other volumes) .

This essay in its current form is me throwing in the towel, to some extent—I keep trying to write something interesting about doing the audiobook of Dionysus in Wisconsin and getting lost in the weeds. Partially, I think this is because I’m not doing any of the real work, other than offering a few directorial comments. I did have some really interesting conversations about voice with my narrator, Scott, where we discussed ways of telling a story via the qualities of a character’s voice. For example, Scott’s Sam tends to sound unsure at the beginning of the book, and grows more certain of himself as the chapters go on. Ulysses has a low, slightly flat voice at the outset, because he’s trying very hard to be detached and unemotional. But all of that was stuff Scott brought to the table, along with ideas for the myriad characters who have at least one line, meaning they need to be vocally distinct from each other. I just mostly said, “Wow, that’s a cool idea. Sounds great. Let me know if you need anything.”

One interesting question, or at least interesting for the part of my brain that enjoys fancasting, was “Who would you cast if you were making a movie of this?” Scott explained he wasn’t looking to mimic a voice, but kind of an overall…vibe? Ethos? Something like that. Of course I originally had some actors in mind when I was writing the book—Ulysses, famously, looks like James Dean, even though at the beginning he is a few years older than Mr. Dean ever reached. (This was in part intentional; at the beginning of the series, Ulysses is sort of stuck in this…I don’t want to say a persona, but he made some choices when he was about 14 years old about clothing and swagger and just…never changed. A lot of the novels is Ulysses slowly becoming a person who can wear a suit and tie when it’s required.) But James Dean’s acting is very theatrical, what little I’ve seen of it. This was a thing with fifties movies, I think. Not his fault. And Sam was physically based on the singer Mika, who is not an actor and who I have barely seen talk outside of listening to his music (my fault for not watching Eurovision I guess, since he co-hosted one year). Plus there are a lot of characters. So if I were casting the movie today…

Tragically, I am not good at actors. I rarely watch movies or television. So I polled my friends and family. My husband immediately suggested Shohreh Aghdashloo as Ekaterina, primarily because she was very good at swearing in The Expanse, and I agree with that. He also suggested JK Simmons as Howard Sterling. Terrific. Love it. I thought maybe Gillian Anderson could play Aunt Cass, since she’s capable of being caring, but with an iron core. But who for our title role? But none of this got me closer to who could play the leads.

Someone (Dr. Jesse, maybe) suggested Andrew Scott as Ulysses, which—he is a very interesting actor and I would love to see what he does with the part, but he’s also a little British, which doesn’t always work well in an American context (e.g., Benedict Cumberbatch in Dr. Strange). And someone else suggested Sebastian Stan, who looks a lot like James Dean in my head (although I am face blind, so if you’re confused by this assertion, don’t ask me), but I mostly know him from his turn at playing an emotionally devastated man who is entirely broken and yet picking up the pieces (Bucky Barnes), and while I really love that type of character, that’s Laz. So I don’t know. And I know even less who I’d cast for Sam. I’m vaguely aware of Jacob Elordi, who is quite tall (and unfortunately pale), but in the photos I’ve seen he seems to lack the endearing awkwardness Sam has in the first book. Jacob Anderson, maybe, who I know only from gifsets, but who sometimes looks godly and sometimes looks like a wet cat?

All of which is to say the audiobook is going to be really awesome, but not because of any particular help I provided.

Here are some actual facts:
Who is the narrator? Scott Paige
When will it be released? End of the summer
Is it up for preorder yet? No
What platforms will it be on? As many as I can manage—certainly Libro.fm and Audible; beyond that, I will have to see what is available
How much will it cost? I think it will be around $19.99

Do you have any actors you’ve cast in your head to be in the film version of Dionysus in Wisconsin? Let me know!

Sales
I forgot to include this when I sent out the newsletter, but all the books are currently deeply discounted in the Smashwords annual sale! Find them here.

Upcoming Appearances
I will be spending July doing normal people things, but on August 1, I’ll be attending the author festival in Middleton, WI, which is again combined with the Mustard Museum’s Mustard Festival. Last year, I was interviewed for a local news segment in Iowa by a reporter dressed as a bottle of mustard. He asked how much I like mustard and I believe I said “A normal amount.” Who knows what this year will bring?

The author part of the festival is on Hubbard Avenue west of Parmenter (from Grace Coffee down to Long Table or so). It runs from 10-4pm. If you’re also planning to go to the mustard festival and get the fabled mustard ice cream (if that’s back this year; I don’t know for sure), I recommend coming early. They sold out last year. It’s possible I have severely underestimated how much “a normal amount” of liking mustard is.

Book Reviews
My Beautiful Enemy, by Sherry Thomas (cis M/F). If you, like me, think that the sexiest thing a woman can be is ready to kill you at a moment’s notice (preferably with a sword), this book is probably for you. I only wish it had been written ten years earlier so we could have had a film version with Michelle Yeoh as Ying Ying. (Actually, maybe we still could? Somebody get on that.) The book is set in about 1891, but much of the action takes place in Chinese Turkistan in 1883, with the hero and heroine riding all around, doing tricks with slingshots and swords, fighting bandits, sneaking in and out of the homes of warlords, and in general having a really good time. I think it would have been a little better with some amount of gender fuckery in it (as it is, the hero immediately clocks the heroine as a woman dressed as a man, but no one else does). But it was very good. Content warning for infanticide (it’s not bloody, but it is on-page—I can’t do spoiler warnings here, but if you want to skip that chapter entirely, I say which one it is in my review on Goodreads here.)

Between Two Fires, by Christopher Bruehlman. I flippantly described this as “Jesus and her two dads go on a road trip across France in 1348 to kill the Pope,” but there’s a lot more to it than that. It’s billed as horror, but the real horror is really a question of theodicy—why did the Black Death happen, how could a good god permit it, and (to some extent, I think) how can people forgive god for it. (Small wonder that this book, which came out in 2012, saw a revival during/after COVID.) Not to worry though: while this book does take on weighty philosophical issues, it’s also got a lot of action scenes in which the characters are attacked by a variety of monsters, plus such medieval favorites as the Wandering Jew, Franciscans friars, Bisclavret, the Harrowing, and more. There are lots of potential triggers here, for illness, violence, mild homophobia, mild antisemitism, monsters, and the threat of sexual assault, so be aware if that is not your thing, but it’s told in the style of a fable or parable, which kept me emotionally detached enough from the characters that it was fine.

June 2026: An Invincible Summer

Epilogue comes from the Greek “epi” meaning “in addition,” and “logos,” meaning “word.” Related to the calque “afterword” but not, in my opinion, identical; an epilogue is part of a fiction manuscript and continues the story, while an afterword allows the author a chance to have a word after the book has finished. My fellow author Felicia Davin already talked about epilogues within recent memory, so I won’t belabor any of their points, but say instead: for me, an epilogue is a chance to take a breath after the main story has come to an end. Like “Her Majesty” after the drama of Abbey Road, an epilogue lets the reader relax. It puts distance between the characters and the end of the story. It offers a a little closure.

Here is something that happened to me recently. I was driving my 5yo to preschool. We were going along a fairly quiet residential road we drive down every day, going up a hill while some bicyclists came down in the opposite direction. I forget what the 5yo and I were talking about—music, maybe. And then, suddenly, one of the bikers fell.

I don’t know why they fell. It wasn’t clear, as I slammed on my brakes and jumped out of the car, what I had actually seen. It still isn’t clear in my mind. I know that their bike kept going when they hit the ground. The bike crossed the center line of the road and hit the side of my car. I moved the bike to the parkway and ran over to where the biker’s friend was already crouched beside their unmoving body. Had the impact knocked them out, or had they lost consciousness before they fell? (Luckily, they were wearing a helmet.) As I knelt next to them, their breathing was very heavy and rough, almost agonal, and I worried I was about to have to use my somewhat rusty CPR skills. Their friend called an ambulance. I tried to take their pulse. My fingers were shaking.

They came around gradually. First they tried to sit up. We gently pushed them back down and they passed out again. Some other passersby and I carried them to the parkway, because lying in the middle of the road was probably not very safe, and then we talked to them and held their hand until the ambulance arrived. They were waking up then for real. They were able to speak to the EMTs and answer questions. When I went back to my car, they were getting loaded into the ambulance, but it wasn’t in a huge hurry to speed away, which seems like a good sign. They were fine. They were going to be, anyway.

I assume they were fine. I don’t really know. I dropped the 5yo off at preschool and went home to sit in my office and feel things. The 5yo was fine, by the way—a police officer came by and gave him a sticker.

Real life so rarely comes with any sense of closure. There’s no epilogue. There’s just stuff that happens, and then you deal with it in some way. In this sense, an epilogue is also a metatextual reminder that books, like (many? most?) other forms of art, are constructed. They mirror life, but they aren’t the same.

I suppose this is why people like telling stories, or one of the reasons. By telling you all this, I gain some amount of perspective on it. Since I’m not likely to meet the biker again or find out what actually happened to them, this is basically what I have left to hold on to—this thing happened. I did what I could.

Perhaps relatedly, I wrote this second epilogue to Renaissance back when I was working on the manuscript. I don’t remember why, exactly—possibly I had just finished editing Lazarus, Home from the War and wanted to keep writing in that point of view. Possibly I just wanted to traumatize Eli a little. It didn’t make the final cut for a few reasons: The first epilogue felt like enough of a deep breath. It was strange to shift into Eli’s voice just for this scene. I think it was at least originally longer than the first epilogue, too, which didn’t make sense given that the book was really about Sam and Ulysses. But I still really like it. I like poor, traumatized Eli trying to make sense of his experience. We didn’t really get to see that at the end of Lazarus, Home from the War. So here it is instead. It’s called “Telamones.” A telamon (a Latin adoption of the Greek word telamon, meaning bearer or support) is a male figure used as a support column. They are also called atlantes or atlantids. The female equivalent (which I think is better known) is caryatid. You can find it here in epub and here in pdf. I also added it to the collected file of shorts, Toward a Consolidated Philosophy of Ghosts. You can grab them all here in epub or here in pdf. (For the curious, I’ve also updated the series roadmap.)

Side note: the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb turns out to be somewhat linguistically interesting in that it is highly regional. Other terms include road verge, grass strip, tree lawn, park or parking strip, berm, easement, boulevard, and devil strip. “Parkway,” which I’ve used here, seems to be the common term in Chicago, my ancestral homeland.

A Telamon is a male statue used as a column or support in a building. This is a gray-green watercolor painting of a telamon.

Announcements

If you are up for some activism, there are several bills you should call your senators and congress people about. Authors Against Book Bans had a nice graphic explaining them. Check out 5 Calls if you need help thinking of what to say.

Not my announcement exactly, but Andie James, an author of historical romances with whom I am acquainted, is about to start a Kickstarter for a press called Besotted Books that would specialize in historical romance novels! With the historical romance genre increasingly abandoned by the “big 5” (i.e. big traditional publishers), this is a great time for small indie presses to step up and provide high quality historical romance! But small presses need big help to get off the ground. Check out Andie’s website here or follow her on Instagram here so you’ll be ready when she launches her Kickstarter.

Upcoming Events

I’ll be at the Well-Red Damsel’s Read with Pride pop-up event on June 13 at the Baird Center in Milwaukee, selling and signing books from 10am–3pm. We’ll also have little felt guys and tarot readings! Event announcement here.

I’ll be at the Big Gay Market on Sunday, June 21 from 10am–2pm at the Alliant Energy Center. This is a mask-only market, but if you forget your mask I believe they have them available. We’ll have little felt guys and tarot here too! Additional event details here.

Finally, on June 30th I’ll be at Tropes and Trifles in Minneapolis from 7–9pm for a Q&A + book signing. Tickets cost $12.51 and you can get them here. Bring your books to sign, or pick some up at the store. (I think they’ll appreciate preorders if there’s a book you really, really want.) Please come and bring your Wisconsin Gothic questions.

Wow, that’s a lot of events. We just passed the three-year publishiversary of Dionysus in Wisconsin and I feel very popular.

Book Reviews

The Bell and the Fog, by Lev AC Rosen. I have to admit that although I ultimately enjoyed the first book in this series (Lavender House), I felt like there was a lot of self-loading in the main character, and a lot of homophobic violence directed at him as well, in addition to not feeling extremely grounded in its (excellent) choice of setting, San Francisco in the early 1950s. But other readers assured me that the series improved, and they were right. This installment finds our detective, Evander “Andy” Mills, doing the run-down noir detective thing of living above a nightclub and scraping by on unpleasant “is my partner secretly married” cases. (I think Philip Marlowe would call them “matrimonials,” even though none of the parties are actually married.) Then Andy’s ex-boyfriend arrives to ask him to find some photographs and away we go. I was really pleased by the greater variety of characters Andy encountered during the course of the investigation, and the way that San Francisco sort of wells up into the narrative, huge and beautiful and a little bit heartless. The audiobook was also really good, although the narration was so noir it verged on humor.

I read books 2 and 3 in the Lady Sherlock series, A Conspiracy in Belgravia and The Hollow of Fear, by Sherry Thomas. Look, if you like Sherlock Holmes-type historical mysteries, where everyone is extremely competent, even intelligent, and people don’t make mistakes, these are top notch and you will love them. Support women’s rights! Support women’s wrongs! Let’s go.

The Casefile of Jay Moriarty, by Kit Walker (cis M/trans M). Includes the novellas Jay Moriarty Violates the Official Secrets Act, Sebastian Moran Gets Mauled by a Tiger, Jay Moriarty Ruins Everybody’s Childhood, Jay Moriarty Has Seen You Naked, and Sebastian Moran Inflicts Six Traumatic Brain Injuries, plus three short interstitial scenes. I read the first novella a while back and loved it. I apparently finished it the day after the paperback collecting Walker’s first five novellas in the series came out, so I bought that immediately. I’m delighted to report that all of these are as great as the first one—interesting mysteries, great capers, and a fun relationship. And apparently there are six more novellas for me to read!

May 2026: Spring is here, spring is here

The biggest news this month is that I have been informed Lazarus, Home from the War was a finalist for the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award, one of the Wisconsin Writer Awards. Edna Ferber was a novelist whose work won the Pulitzer Prize in 1924. (For fans of 1950s film star James Dean, one of Ferber’s novels, Giant, was made into a movie by the same name starring our boy Jimmy, Rock Hudson, and Elizabeth Taylor. Unfortunately he died before release, but garnered a posthumous Oscar nomination.)

The EFFBA (as no one calls it) is a prize for literary books. Previous winners include Jesse Lee Kercheval, who is an emeritus UW–Madison professor (I never had classes with her when I was there but I knew of her; she was shortlisted in two separate categories last night); Maggie Ginsberg, who I have met on a couple of occasions and whose fiction is full of moody family drama and yearning, was an honorable mention a few years back. In other words, this is an award for people who say “fiction” when you ask them what genre they write, because “genre” means fiction, poetry, or non-fiction. The only type of fiction is the literary one.

All of which is to say, I have sent them my books every year out of cussedness rather than with any expectation of winning. Often, during the winter, I hit something of a decline, and in my diminished state, I think, “I should force that judge to read my weird little novel,” and it seems like such a good idea that I put my name in the hat. Generally this comes to nothing.
As I said, this year, much to my surprise, I am, or was, a finalist. This means very little—they barely publish the list of finalists and don’t seem to archive it anywhere. But also it means a lot.

Comparing my book to the other shortlisted ones, I am one of a very few self-published books, one of two romances, and the only book that appears to be doing anything queer, to say nothing of whatever genre my work is—urban fantasy, I guess. So thank you to the judge(s). I have learned nothing from this; I will be back again next year.

Follow-Ups
I wanted to use this space to say thank you to everyone who has bought Renaissance, and especially the few people who have already read it and let me know how much they loved it. I have not been as good about promoting it the last two weeks as I probably should have been, but it has sold more copies faster than any of my previous books, which is exciting. Anyway, I always appreciate hearing nice things about the books.

I have paperback copies of Renaissance available! If you would like a signed copy, you can either email me or purchase one through itch.io here. They are $17 including shipping within the US. If you live internationally, please send me a message first so we can figure out shipping. I also still have five paperback copies of The Alignments.

For those eagerly looking forward to an audiobook version of Dionysus in Wisconsin, I expect to hire a narrator in the next few days. I will have a better idea of the timeline from here to completed audiobook soon!

Finally, if you know someone who is interested in Dionysus in Wisconsin but hasn’t bought it yet, it is on sale for $1.99 on Kobo until the 15th of May in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US (I think that’s it).

Upcoming Appearances
I will be at the Madison Night Market on May 14th along with author Louise Mayberry! Louise writes smart, politically engaged historical romances, and I’m excited to get to share a tent with her. The Madison Night Market runs from 5–9pm at the Capitol/on State Street. I don’t yet know where exactly our tent will be set up, so check out social media on the day if you’re interested in finding us. Rowan is also coming so we should have a bunch of little felt things available as well.

On June 13th, I will be at the Well-Red Damsel’s queer book fair in Milwaukee. More details to come.

On June 21st, I will be at the Big Gay Market here in Madison. This is a masks-required sale, so if you have been wanting something signed but a general lack of maskiness was a barrier, here is an opportunity! (Or email me, I can send you a signed book plate for free.)

At the end of June, I will probably be at Tropes and Trifles in Minneapolis for an author talk and book signing. Stay tuned for the exact date!

Podcast
For various political reasons, I have to point you all to this episode on the Avignon Papacy. Somehow never thought this would be relevant to anything.

We put out our 100th episode in April! On JRR Tolkien and his antifascist mythmaking! Huzzah! In a world where I didn’t suffer from SAD/have to occasionally finish novels and Dr. Jesse didn’t have finals to grade, we would probably have hit 100 episodes a lot faster. But as it is, I’m really proud that we have reached this milestone. Looking forward to the next hundred. If you have burning questions you’d like to hear addressed, feel free to email questions(AT)askamedievalist(DOT)com.

Book Reviews (Or “Wow, I read a lot in April despite releasing a book!”)
Mr. Milner Gets Divorced (cis M/M), by Jane Hadley. A brand new (4/30) release! Full disclosure: I know Jane, and therefore was able to pressure her into sending me an ARC of this. It’s a delightful little midcentury romp set in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St Paul, MN, for those not from around here). It was somewhat inspired by an actual memoir she found called The Evening Crowd at Kirmser’s: A Gay Life in the 1940s, by Ricardo J. Brown. If you enjoyed 1950s-era Cat Sebastian books, you may want to check this one out.

When the Angels Left the Old Country, by Sacha Lamb. It’s an extremely queer, extremely Jewish supernatural adventure. Think Good Omens meets The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. I loved this so much I sent my mom a copy.

River of Teeth, by Sarah Gailey. People keep asking me about this, or maybe I found it bewildering enough that I keep talking about it. In 1910, there was a proposal to import hippos to live in the bayou, where they would eat invasive water plants and eventually be slaughtered for “water cow bacon.” (By “in 1910,” I mean in real life. In 1910 in our universe, someone proposed this.) This book takes that as a jumping-off point, although she moves the proposal back in time about fifty years. In a queernorm, feminist but very Western world, a guy named Winslow Houndstooth III is hired to clear feral hippos out of the marshlands of the Mississippi River. Violence ensues. There’s a M/NB romance in this that I wish was more developed, but overall the characters were delightful and the vengeance was sweet.

A Study in Scarlet Women, by Sherry Thomas. Look, it is not a secret that I am a lover of all things Holmesian, and this was an especially good pastiche. It’s 1886 and Sherlock Holmes is actually a young lady (25ish) named Charlotte. Also, the whole thing is about women and how they are cast out by society for men’s crimes and how they get revenge. Let’s goooo.

April 2026: Renaissance Is Here

Welcome to the Renaissance.

When I was in high school debate, we used to conclude every speech by saying, “I am now open for cross examination.” I always feel like I should say that when I launch my novels, although to be honest the idea of being cross-examined about anything I’ve written is kind of terrifying. But I guess I do need to say something valedictory at this particular moment. Although there are still four more books planned, this is the last solo Sam/Ulysses book. This is the end of a big plot arc. This is a send-off of sorts. It needs to be marked.

As I was thinking about this, I found myself turning to John Donne (c1571–1631), an English poet. He is one of a few writers whose work I was dragged through in my undergrad English literature classes and came to actually appreciate. Donne lived something of a weird life that I would divide, flippantly, into the horny period, the depressed period, and the god period. He fell in love with his boss’s niece, married her secretly, got thrown in jail for said secret marriage, was acquitted at trial and saw the marriage confirmed in court. Eventually, he reconciled with his father-in-law, he and his wife had twelve children, and then later he converted to the Church of England and became a priest (at the behest of King James I), and a fairly well-known one at that. He wrote some good poems, including “Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star,” and “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” which I will now quote part of here:

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

(The whole poem is here.)

This was written at a time when Donne was leaving his wife to travel to the continent. Here, he compares his and his love’s souls to the legs of a compass. A compass (also called a pair of compasses, like a pair of scissors, hence “twin compasses”) consists of two legs joined together in a V shape with a hinge at the top. One foot has a point at the end and is placed at the center of the circle that you want to draw, and the other holds a pencil and can be moved around the first to draw the circle. As one foot travels in a circle, the other may lean, but does not move, and through its steadfastness, the other foot is able to complete its circle. Similarly, as Donne travels, his wife’s steadfastness allows him to complete his errand and return home. Also, although it’s entirely correct to say a compass might lean over as you draw and then come back to the vertical as you finish, I am pretty sure “grows erect, as that comes home” is a penis joke.

(I am sorry to all my English professors for the quality of this analysis.)

Not only does this feel somehow appropriate to Sam and Ulysses’s relationship, there’s something about traveling a far distance and ending up where one began that feels right when I look at Renaissance. Maybe when you’ve read it, you will see what I mean. (Also the penis joke feels correct. Donne viewed sex in sacred terms, which has occasionally come up in the last few novels for various reasons.)

Interesting side note, John Donne was one of the earliest users of the word valediction in print—the OED has him as the earliest quote for this sense of the word. (No one is willing to say he coined it, but they don’t seem to say they know for sure he didn’t.) Officially they date the word to 1614, although this poem was written a few years before that. He is credited with coining the phrases “no man is an island” and “for whom the bell tolls.”

Anyway, I commissioned LIS Artworks to do a little drawing of a scene from chapter 1. Here it is:
Until next month, thank you all for your continuing support. And special thanks to Eliot, my editor; Rowan, my book doula; and Bryan, my husband and alpha reader. This was a really hard book, and I couldn’t have done it without any of you. (Or about ten other people; check the acknowledgements for the full list, okay?)

Okay, here are some links:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Renaissance-Wisconsin-Gothic-Book-5-ebook/dp/B0GDZ5R2CB
Ingram Spark: https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?params=tKwOnk3uStxCbMjB0tdkZi7D4tgSOeV703KclIw2YS9
Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/renaissance-155
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/2009525
Itch.io: https://xanthippe42.itch.io/renaissance
Other sites: https://books2read.com/u/4EOE6E

Other Ingram Spark-supplied websites, such as Bookshop.org, should be available in a few days as soon as the databases update. If you want to order it from your favorite bookstore, the ISBN is 979-8-9883944-4-0. (That may also take a few days for database updates before they can find it; I don’t know for sure.)

Until next time, thank you all so much for reading. I hope you enjoy it.

April 2026: April Come She Will

One of my favorite facts is that sharks–modern sharks, that is–are older than the rings of Saturn. This is absolutely true; modern sharks are from the Early Jurassic (200 million years ago, although with some evidence stretching back to the Permian, i.e. 298 million years ago). The rings of Saturn are only 100 million years old at best. The Greenland shark, which bears the hilarious Latin name Somniosus microcephalus (sleeper shark with a small head), is also the longest lived known vertebrate, with an estimated lifespan of 250-500 years. These fascinating beasts don’t even reach sexual maturity until they’re 150 years old, and gestation takes them 8-18 years. This is life on a timescale humans can barely imagine.

I started thinking about all of this when I read about the Llangernyw Yew, which is an ancient yew in a churchyard in Wales. I have yew trees in my yard—they’re interesting plants, in part because they are very toxic. (Incidentally, Greenland sharks are also very toxic.) Also, yews are apparently very good at not dying. The Llangernyw Yew is about five thousand years old. It is not unique in its age—the Fortingall Yew is another ancient yew of perhaps the same vintage that lives in Scotland. And these are not the oldest living organisms on the planet—they’re not even the oldest living trees!

At some point in all of this, you start running into problems of how we measure age. For example, the heartwood of yews tends to rot, and in many ancient yews that wood has been removed, which makes it difficult to date the tree using methods such as counting rings. For very old clonal trees, sometimes scientists find fossilized pollen in nearby areas and can compare the genome—but is a clonal tree the same as an individual tree? A clonal tree reproduces by creating genetically identical clones of itself. Though some die and new ones sprout, the organism remains the same(?). Some clonal tree systems(?) have existed for ten thousand or sixty thousand years, but the individual trees within that system are only a few hundred years old at best. Even the roots die and are replaced over time. This is essentially the Ship of Theseus problem, but a tree; Pando, for example, is a colony(?) of quaking aspen in Utah made up of something like 47,000 separate stems, all of which are genetically identical. The tree(?) has been there for perhaps 16,000 years, meaning it was already an old organism by the time of the Clovis culture (11,100 BCE).

Humans tend to look at life on a very small timescale. I’m usually much more concerned about what I’m going to have for lunch than with what the world is going to be doing in two hundred years. But sometimes when times get stressful, it’s nice to remind myself that there are many other ways to experience life. Those sharks live through all the same minutes as I do, but they mean different things to them. (I mean…if minutes can mean anything to a shark. Someone call a philosopher and a zoologist.) At the same time, Notre Dame and Angkor Wat went up during the life of our shark’s grandparents, though they may hasve been unaware, and during her parents’ lifetime, so many things happened—Shakespeare, the Qing dynasty, the scientific revolution, the fall of the Aztec empire. The shark of our generation may have seen telegraph wires cross the ocean, telephones, and space travel. Who knows what she’ll see a century from now? Political situations—good and bad—come and go, but the shark persists. I like that.

Lake McDonald in Glacier national Park. It's a clear day and there are mountains in the background.

Events

4If you missed it, I talked to the head of the Ashman Public Library in March, and you can see the video here.

Books

The Trans Rights Readathon just finished, but in case you are still looking for books, you can find all my recs here.

That’s it for this edition! I’ll be back in two weeks to remind you that Renaissance is out.

Trans Rights Readathon

The trans rights readathon is a week-long challenge where readers are called upon to read/uplift books featuring trans/nonbinary/2spirit/etc. characters OR by authors fitting those categories. More here! It starts today (March 17th). If you’re looking for recommendations, here are a few (mostly historical romances) I have read over the years (or am currently reading) that fit those categories, organized by era. (Note that when a book is the first in a series, I’ve only mentioned the first one.)

Ancient
Sword Dance, by AJ Demas. Yes, I majored in philosophy as an undergrad.

Nineteenth Century
A Gentleman’s Gentleman, by TJ Alexander. A sort of regency fantasia.
A Bloomy Head, by J. Winifred Butterworth. Come for the gender, stay for the murder.
The Scandalous Letters of V and J, by Felicia Davin. Post-Revolutionary France gender magic!

Twentieth Century
Widdershins and Unhallowed, by Jordan L. Hawk. Two great series set in Widdershins, MA, a weird, creepy, perfect place. I also deeply love the reclaiming of Lovecraftian horror for queerness! Lovecraft would have hated it, which is reason enough.
Oh! You Pretty Things, by Jane Hadley. Set in Minneapolis in 1970; Arthur is gonna be so happy when he finally hears the word “nonbinary” in ten years.

Twenty-First Century
Rules for Ghosting, by Shelly Jay Shore. I wrote about this recently, but it’s so sweet and so Jewish, I love it.

Not romance honorable mention:
Tiger Honor, by Yoon Ha Lee. YA. This is the middle book in a trilogy, but my 8yo read it first. They appreciated the nonbinary main character and also the space battles.
The Affair of the Mysterious Letter, by Alexis Hall. Not gonna lie, this is probably my favorite of Hall’s books. It is Sherlock Holmes meets HP Lovecraft, and you should read it. This is such a weird, fun book.

March 2026: The Ides of March Approaches

The days are getting longer, and everyone’s favorite holiday is approaching: the ides of March.

Actually, every month has an ides. It was the Roman word for the middle of the month—the fifteenth of March, May, July, and October, and the thirteenth of other months. You can see it marked on the Fasti Antiates Maiores here. Wikipedia claims that the ides originally fell on the full moon, but given how messed up the Roman calendar eventually got before Caesar’s reforms, I would not bet on this having happened a ton. (We did a whole podcast on this if you’re curious—click here. It’s recent, but I still find it fascinating.) Anyway, the ides of March is of course now best known for being the day Caesar got stabbed on.

Speaking of overthrowing tyranny (haha, what a segue!), I decided to donate a portion of the proceeds from the WanderLust book event to anti-ICE shenanigans. We raised about $100 that way, so I rounded up and donated it all to Shir Tikvah’s Yesod (mutual aid) fund—it had a donation matching thing going on the week I was looking to donate, which seemed great. I later got an email that they collected over a million dollars in February! If you’re looking for anti-ICE places to send money to, https://www.standwithminnesota.com has a good list.

Other than that, things are proceeding here. I did some work on future books while waiting for the manuscript of Renaissance to come back from the editor. Now it is back, so I am beginning the final push toward having a finished book. I’m very excited about it. It is going to be the longest book I have written—currently it’s something like 92k words (probably 400 pages for those of you who are not writers). I guess this makes sense, because I originally thought it would be two books. There’s a lot of plot to get through. I hope you’re all going to love it.

I still have nine copies of the original twenty-copy run of The Alignments, so if anyone wants a signed paperback, let me know! I’m selling them for $10 including shipping.

Upcoming Events

On March 3rd, I’ll be doing a zoom event with the Ashland, MA Public Library’s Romance Book Club. It runs 7–8pm eastern (6–7pm central), and you can find all the registration info here. This is open to anyone! Please come so I’m not stuck talking to an empty room.

On March 11th, I’m participating in a romance panel discussion hosted by Forward Theater and the Wisconsin Book Festival at the Madison Central Public Library! Forward Theater is a really exciting local professional company that does great work, and they’re presenting the world premier of Lady Disdain, by Lauren Gunderson, which led to this event. I’m so excited to be a part of this evening. It’s from 7-8pm at the library, details here. Usually on Wednesdays I go to aikido–this is the only type of thing I’d change my schedule for.

Book Reviews
Wine for Roses (cis M/M), by Emily O’Malley Liu. I blurbed this! A lovely little urban (rural?) fantasy/romance novella set in Indiana. It’s a Beauty and the Beast retelling to some extent, but really it’s just a lush little piece of writing with interesting magic and sweet relationships. Now available for preorder, comes out in March.

Rules for Ghosting (trans M/cis M), by Shelly Jay Shore. A nice Jew4Jew romance centered around Ezra, whose family owns a funeral home, and Jonathan, whose dead husband was the son of Ezra’s mother’s new girlfriend. (Yeah, there’s a lot of family drama here. And ghosts, too!)

Rivers of London, by Ben Aaronovich. If you’re not into romance but you love urban fantasy, I present this for your consideration. A cop accidentally interviews a ghost who witnessed a murder and winds up as an apprentice wizard. I thought it dealt really well with the problem of is magic secret (it isn’t really, it just declined because of technology and WWII), and there are some great gods.

Post Captain (cis M/M? cis M/F? Who knows, but I ship it), by Patrick O’Brian. He really said, “You know what Jane Austen needs is more privateers,” and then he delivered. I don’t know a topsail from a topgallant, but O’Brian is so dryly funny I don’t care. I keep forgetting this was written in 1972 rather than 1812. The audiobook was very well done, too.