newsletter – PretenseSoup

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.

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.

February 2026: Six More Weeks

At least January is over. (Or, as I write these words on the 23rd of January, I hope that it will be over when I send this. I have faith that January cannot last forever.)

Living in the upper Midwest, never a picnic during the winter, has been especially stressful for the last couple of weeks owing to the ICE occupation of Minneapolis, a place where I have many friends and family members. I generally donate a book’s first day Amazon profits to a charity, and since I didn’t get that done in December for The Alignments, I wound up giving my money to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. If you’re interested in making a donation to a Minnesota organization but don’t have any particular org in mind, you might like to look at this website that lists a whole bunch of good ones.

(Just to be clear, I don’t do this donation thing to goad people into preordering from Amazon or anything; it’s just the most popular single site people buy my books from. Amazon is patently not a good company, but also I respect them for the way they have made self-publishing both accessible and very popular. Business, it seems to me, is often about figuring out how to work with awful people and keep hold of your soul. This is my way.)

I can usually tell when I’m stressed out, because I read a lot more. Right now I am at six novels and two academic articles for the year, and we won’t even talk about the amount of fanfiction I consumed. I realize this isn’t that many comparted to many, but I do have a novel to finish. Part of my stress came from trying to finish Renaissance before sending it out for developmental edits. Then with it off my plate I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I read a lot, and eventually started revising the first draft of book 6. And now I’m revising Renaissance again before copyedits.

Thank you to everyone who has preordered Renaissance already, by the way. In less than a month, it reached the number of preorders The Alignments had during its entire preorder period (which, to be fair, was only slightly more than a month). This is a stat that means almost nothing, but also I’m extremely buoyed by it. It is wonderful to hear how many people enjoyed the previous books enough to take a chance on this one, and how excited everyone is for it.

Upcoming Events

Madison’s new mobile romance bookstore, WanderLust Mobile Books, will be having its grand opening on Valentine’s Day, and I’ve been invited to participate. I’ll be selling and signing books at Giant Jones Brewing Company, at 931 East Main Street in Madison, from 3–7pm. The bookmobile will be outside and we will be inside, so come by and say hi! We may also have little felted chickens in honor of ~~Lupercalia~~ Valentine’s Day.

On March 3rd at 6pm CT/7pm ET, I’ll be doing a zoom book talk with the Ashland, MA Public Library’s Romance Book Club. It doesn’t look like you have to be a MA resident to sign up. There’s also an option to order signed copies of books 1-4 through Tropes and Trifles in Minneapolis, MN. (I will be supplying them with signed Wisconsin Gothic book plates and they will mail the books, presumably around 3/3 or slightly thereafter.)

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 an exciting local theater 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 will be at the Central Public Library from 7-8pm. I think this event is free and does not require a ticket.

Podcasts

We put out two podcasts in January—episode 98, on what the heck was wrong with Roman calendars, and episode 99, on authority! Stay tuned for episode 100 in February!

Book Reviews

I feel like I am in no way an early adopter on this, but Death in the Spires by KJ Charles was very good. It’s a mystery novel with a lot to say about bodies and liberation, about law and morality. There’s a relationship in it, but it is not a romance.

A Bloomy Head (cis F/trans M) by J. Winifred Butterworth was also delightful. It’s 1820 and the newly widowed Kate is trying to save her family farm by making cheese, her brother brought home his doctor friend who is recovering from a severely broken femur in the corner of her kitchen, and someone just found a decapitated body in the creek. You can order signed copies directly from the author if you are a lover of signed copies!

Finally, if you’re looking for something academic, I’ll recommend “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Come for the postmodernist theorist drinking game (take one drink if he mentions Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Bakhtin, Butler…maybe we better stop there, you’re looking wobbly), stay for the weirdly (annoyingly?) prescient things he says about outsiders, categories, and desire. It’s in a lot of places; I read the copy available here: https://www.qc.cuny.edu/academics/prod4/wp-content/uploads/sites/147/2024/08/FYW-Sample-Reading-B.pdf (warning, pdf).

That’s all for this month! Stay warm and fuck ICE!

January 2026 Newsletter: New Year, New Novels

Hello! It’s the new year, somewhat inescapably. So much has happened since I wrote the draft of this newsletter, I don’t even know where to start. The month of December was kind of a disaster around these parts, for reasons I will get to later, and the global political events of the last three days are so bizarre and terrible, I don’t even know what to say about them, except possibly a long and offensive string of blasphemous/curse words.

Putting that aside, about two weeks ago, when I was putting together my announcement for the release of The Alignments, I started thinking about my relationship with music, which is highly…obsessive, I guess is the word I would use. I have the tendency to fall in love with a song and then listen to it over and over again a truly egregious number of times. The song gets tangled up with whatever I’m working on, until I can later recall the circumstances of writing the novel by listening to the song. This is the way that my books get assigned theme songs—what song became special to me when I was working on it? What song came, in some warped way, to typify what I was trying to do?

These are the theme songs of the books that have been released:

Dionysus in Wisconsin: Big God, by Florence and the Machine. (I mean…)
Old Time Religion: Old Time Religion, by Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie.
Troth: Harmony Hall, by Vampire Weekend.
Lazarus, Home from the War: Half the World Away, by Oasis. (Although this book had a lot of good songs, and eventually it’s kind of what got me into Springsteen.)
The Alignments: This Will Be Our Year, by The Zombies. I didn’t realize at the time that it was from an album called Odyssey and Oracle, but when I found out…well, it’s appropriate.

As I work on the third draft of Renaissance, two songs have been battling it out for the position of theme song. I’m excited to see which one wins.

Speaking of which…

Here’s the news, in order of least to most important:
0/ Thank you to everyone who bought/read/left a review of The Alignments. I really appreciate you.

1/ At the end of the year, I usually do a blog post listing all the books I read in the previous year and short reviews of each. That post has gone live and can be found here.

2/ I have updated the series roadmap to include The Alignments and release info about Renaissance. I know I previously said it would be out 3/2. Because of all the stuff that happened in December and how stressed out everything was making me, I’ve moved the release to 4/13. I hope this isn’t too much of a disappointment. I hate having to change it. I was just having anxiety dreams and I needed to release some of the steam. But I’m very happy with the new schedule, which leads to…

3/ Renaissance is up for preorder here. Other sites to follow! Here is the cover and blurb:

June, 1971. As the academic year draws to a close, Sam and Ulysses are looking forward to a quiet summer. But when Ulysses’s grandmother is hospitalized, it becomes clear that relaxation is not in the cards. Unable to accept that her fall was an accident, Ulysses begins to investigate whether it may be related to a cult from their past whose mysterious and powerful leader seems to be popping up all over town.

Sam’s doing his best to hold things together and be supportive, but it’s hard when his new husband is barely listening and keeping him at arm’s length every time family is concerned. And on top of everything else, the library has something urgent to tell Sam…

As they reunite with old friends and prepare to bid farewell to others, Sam and Ulysses will see their marriage tried, their lives threatened, and meet an old enemy they thought long dead.

If you preorder it, let me know and I will send you one of these postcards for free!
Sam and Ulysses, wearing nice suits. Ulysses is helping Sam with a cuff link. It's a scene from The Alignments.

I know the big issue is that some people really love paperbacks, and I can’t do paperback preorders. But you can still get one!

if you buy the paperback in the first month or so and let me know, I’ll send one to you
if you come to an in-person sale, you can get one free with purchase (and I have a special Laz postcard too if you buy his book)
that’s it I guess

4/ It’s traditional at the beginning of the year for an author to lay out what they’re hoping to accomplish. The last six months of 2025 were quite stressful, riddled with my own illness (I wound up getting diagnosed with asthma); our dog dying; moving one kid to a new daycare; the unexpected diagnosis, decline, and death of a friend; and then immediately thereafter we did two rounds of the flu. As a consequence, my list of goals is a little pared-back. Still, I think it’s not bad:

Publish Renaissance in April! I’m really excited about this.
Start work on an audiobook version of Dionysus in Wisconsin. It’s time. Doing an audiobook is a little scary, but I love audiobooks so much, and I want my work to be accessible that way.
Maybe another short story or novella, I’m not sure yet. I love writing novellas, but I have learned they don’t take less work than novels.
The next Laz novel, ideally by the end of the year. This is a book about what happens when you take someone who is already kind of stressed out and on the edge and give him one more thing. Which is currently how I feel. So that should be good.

In a lot of personal ways, 2025 was not a great year. I prefer less fascism, less strife, fewer deaths among my friends. But it was also a fun and productive year—I published Lazarus, Home from the War, a book that went on to be named to the best of 2025 list by the biggest romance podcast out there. I published “Sparking Something,” which is a moody little AU scene that I really enjoyed working on. And I published The Alignments, which came out so much more awesome than I thought it would. I edited and put out seven episodes of the podcast, which is not what we usually shoot for but considering everything? I think I’m happy.

It was a year where there was a lot going on, and I think I’m proud of myself for getting through it. I’m glad you all got through it too, even if you’re feeling bruised by what you went through. I hope you have had some time off to recover, whether that meant making cookies and going to see friends or sitting in a darkened room listening to The Mountain Goats and reading hockey romances. (I have done both of these lately.) And I hope that if you had a 2025 like mine, you have a better 2026. I don’t necessarily have any clever reasons to hope that 2026 will be better, I just think at least it’s going to be different, which can be its own type of better.

Upcoming Events
In ten days, I’ll be presenting at the Wholehearted Writers Week!

At the end of next week, I’ll be selling books at the Well-Red Damsel’s Damsels Not in Distress event (January 18), which combines sword yoga with a romantasy book sale. There are yoga classes offered at 10, 11:30, and 1pm; the book sale is 11am-3pm. If tickets are still available, they’ll be here. I do not know what sword yoga is. It sounds fun? The event will be held at the Baird Center in Milwaukee (400 W. Wisconsin Ave.). You can also check out the Well-Red Damsel’s website here. We will also have some little felt things (hopefully bookmarks!). I do not know if the print copies of The Alignments will have arrived or not. Check my social media for updates closer to the date.

More events in March, but I won’t bother you with them just now.

No book reviews this month, because I just posted my list of everything I read in 2025. See you in February!

The Alignments

I hope you’re all having a good day. I went out to brunch and had a celebratory waffle because as of this morning, The Alignments is available to all!

A few useful links:

- Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Alignments-Wisconsin-Gothic-H-Lupton-ebook/dp/B0G36CHZ4S
- Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-alignments
- Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1926364
- Itch: https://xanthippe42.itch.io/the-alignments
- Universal Book Link: https://books2read.com/u/bPAL6A
- Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/244213377-the-alignments

I want to thank everyone who helped me out on this–there’s a ton of people listed in the Acknowledgments section–and everyone who has voiced support over the last year. It means a lot to hear that my writing has made you happy, or made you think, or that you were so moved you got a friend to read the book too. Special thanks to Eliot, who was not just line/copy editor but developmental editor as well.

For a bunch of reasons, including that this is a novella, so the spine is pretty thin and won’t match the other books, and because I wanted to publish a collection of all the shorter stuff down the line, I hadn’t been planning to do a print version. However, a bunch of my family members are very ride-or-die with print, so here is the deal: I am planning to do a small print run of novellas. I don’t quite know what the costs will be yet–probably about $8-10 if I have to ship them, maybe less if you find me at an event. If you are really excited about this prospect, let me know and I’ll make sure to count you when I figure out how many to order.

Finally, at the Big Gay Market yesterday, in addition to meeting some really cool people (including friends of a friend, which is always awesome), I found out that at least two bookstores in the Madison area are carrying my stuff–Garden Wall Bookshop in Verona and Lake City Books downtown on the Square. So if you’re in the area and want to support a local bookstore with your purchase, you should check those places out!

Happy Solstice/Happy Yalda, Happy (last night of) Hanukkah, Happy Birthday to my (several) relatives who have birthdays between now and Christmas, Happy Christmas, and Happy Boxing Day to those who celebrate! I’ll be back with more updates, including some January events (hint: I’m going back to a Well-Red Damsel thing!) and info about Renaissance just after New Years. (Happy New Years, too.)

December 2025 Newsletter: Hazy Shade of Winter

I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving, if you celebrate it. We did. And then we got 9.3″ of snow (that’s 23.6 cm for the rest of the world). It’s not exactly common for this to happen in Wisconsin in November (and unlike the snowstorm I wrote about in Lazarus, Home from the War, it wasn’t melted the next day, which is something that happens a lot more). So we shoveled a lot. Come, winter, and welcome.

Anyway, happy December! The year is almost over. Time to break out your copy of the Mountain Goats singing “I’m going to make it through this year if it kills me.”

The big news this month is that I have put the top secret project (a novella about Sam and Ulysses’s honeymoon) up for preorder! It’s called The Alignments. You can get it here (Amazon), or here (itch.io). It will also be available on Kobo, Smashwords, Apple Books, etc., on launch day. (Not all these sites do pre-orders.)

I have answers to your frequently unasked questions, but first, let’s look at the cover!

Three standing stones on the shore of the ocean. A moody oil painting. The Alignments, by E. H. Lupton.

All right, questions!

-Why was this top secret for so long?
I had originally planned to just release it without a preorder period, as though I were Beyoncé dropping an album. Just email you all on 12/21 and say “Bon appetit!” But the podcast Fated Mates named Lazarus, Home from the War one of their best books of 2025, so I decided I would try to capitalize on that and do a preorder.

Oh, that happened. Did I mention that? Laz is on the Fated Mates best books of 2025 list. I don’t really know what to say! I’m thrilled. And a little confused about why their affiliated bookstore decided not to carry my book. But whatever, you can order a paperback of Lazhere, or here, or from your local bookstore (give them the ISBN: 979-8988394433), or email me if you want a signed copy ($17, including shipping).

-What is The Alignments about?
Sam and Ulysses arrive in Carnac, France for their honeymoon. They’re thousands of miles from Madison and hoping for a little rest and relaxation. But when an academic rival of Ulysses’s reveals herself during Sam’s birthday dinner, they find themselves pulled into the investigation of an unexplained death that seems to be tied to the ancient, mysterious stones that litter the town.

-Is this another AU or missing scene?
No, this is canon. It’s on the series roadmap. It’s generally pretty silly, though. Except for the parts where…uh, spoilers. Suffice to say there is a plot, they do various investigatory things and have fun. And it’s set in France!

-Is there a sample?
You can hear me reading an (unedited) version of ch 6 here! I think it really gives the vibes of the whole thing—funny and a little creepy.

-Will it be published in paperback?
Eventually. I wanted to collect all the short fiction and publish them all together. But there’s at least one short thing in progress I haven’t released yet.

I know this is a little disappointing for everyone who would prefer a paperback! The problem is that the cover doesn’t match the other covers, and the book itself wouldn’t be long enough to print anything on the spine. People who like paperbacks tend to want the whole series to match. I have been working hard on the cover for Renaissance, and I will start on a black and ochre cover for all the shorts when I’m done with that book. But it’s taking a while. The cover of The Alignments (which I love) is an actual oil painting (done with water-miscible oils, which I just started using). None of this happens quickly.

In the meantime, if you absolutely don’t like ebooks, you can either get the book from itch, where there will be a pdf version available, and then print it out yourself, or send me an email and I’ll send you an ARC copy of the pdf.

-Any trigger warnings to be aware of? (Skip this if you don’t want any spoilers.)
There’s some light bondage in The Alignments (bondage in pursuit of a good time, I mean). Separately, there’s a demon and a death.

-Anything else?
It’s always extremely helpful to tell your friends about indie authors, because advertising is hard and attention spans are short, but I did zero advanced marketing for this, so please spread the word! I actually estimate that most of my sales come via word of mouth (either in person or on social media), so you can make a big difference with relatively little effort.

Book Sale
My books are currently on sale on itch for 70% off. You can find those here. Starting next week, they will also be in the Smashwords semi-annual sale. I don’t have a link for that yet, but you can find them all on Smashwords here.

Upcoming Appearances
In December, we’ll be at the Big Gay Market on December 20th (note that this is only the second day of the market) from 10am-5pm. It’s being held at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison! We will have the usual assortment of cool stuff: books; poetry tarot cards; felted earrings, crows, and nazars; stickers and postcards. Come by and pick up last-minute holiday presents! Get a tarot reading for $5! Enjoy lots of other vendors! Details here.

For those who are also writers and are looking for a chance to meet other writers, maybe hear some informative presentations about different aspects of the writing process, maybe have a little retreat from the comfort of your homes, I will be presenting at Wholehearted Writers Week in January. This is sure to be a really great conference, and no matter where you are in your writing process I encourage you to come. Find all the details here.

Podcast
We released one episode in November: Non-Roman Calendars (ep. 97). We also announced that we are joining the Nerd and Tie podcast network. Nerd and Tie is a Wisconsin-based collective of independent creators making podcasts on a variety of topics, from true crime to witchcraft to (now) medieval history! This is a great move that we hope will bring us a bigger audience while allowing us to maintain our ownership and creative control of the show.

We made this move because I got to be a fan of the BS Free Witchcraft podcast and then met its host, Trae Dorn, at Booked Eau Claire back in September. And they knew who I was because their sister read my books! So hello, Trae’s sister, if you’re out there! BS Free Witchcraft is a podcast of the genre “guy [gender nondenominational] who knows a lot about a topic ranting into a microphone,” and I honestly really enjoy it. Trae is funny and they know a lot about their subject and have interesting things to say.

Book Reviews
This is the time of year when many people start to search around for gifts for children. Especially books, because it’s fun to give children something that’s going to stick in their head for the rest of their lives. In general I am skeptical of “best of” lists (excluding the Fated Mates one above–that’s 100% gold), so I asked my 8yo what his favorite books he read this year were, and what he would recommend for kids 8-12 years old. He said:

Lightfall, by Tim Probert. It’s a graphic novel series (3 books at present, with the fourth due out in 2026) about a young girl, whose grandfather is a pig(?), who along with a friend tries to save the sun.
Wings of Fire, by Tui T. Sutherland. Described to me as “Game of Thrones but with dragons.” Also Sutherland is a lot more prolific than George R.R. Martin–there are sixteen of these now. (Sorry not sorry, George; finish your book.) The 8yo prefers the novels over the graphic novels, which is an achievement.
The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper. It’s a classic for a reason. 5 volumes.

That’s it for today. Talk to you all on the 21st!

The Gales of November 2025 Newsletter

There’s a lot going on this month. Probably the biggest news is I have a planned release date for Renaissance (March 2nd). Hopefully I’ll have things ready to put it up for preorder next month, just around the solstice (in honor of Sam’s birthday). There’s also a secret project you’ll find out about then—be ready! I am hard at work to finish the covers for everything.

I went out and volunteered with the local Dems the other day, partly because they called and asked if I was free during a moment when I was feeling particularly helpless, and I want to recommend this to everyone. It’s everything I hate (leaving the house, talking to people), and yet the people who came to the door to talk to us were almost universally excited and had ideas and things to say. I hope the exercise of talking to someone about their hopes and fears was as fruitful for them as it was for me—something about meeting someone I have never met and nevertheless finding out we have a lot in common was very heartening. In Wisconsin, many elections turn on very small margins—Harris lost by less than 1% of the vote—so even knocking on a few doors can make a big difference. Wisconsin people can get involved here. People in other states might have luck with this, or look up your local groups.

(I wrote this before the Tuesday victory of so many amazing candidates in NYC, New Jersey, and Virginia among them. Following that victory, I think I believe in the power of volunteering like this more than I did before.)

Upcoming Appearances

I will be moderating a conversation with MA Wardell in honor of the release of his new book, Husband of the Year, at Tropes and Trifles in Minneapolis, MN, from 7–9pm on November 18th. I will also be signing books afterward if you like, and I promise to bring cool free stickers, so come by and say hello. Details and preorders for both of us are on the Tropes and Trifles website here: https://tropesandtrifles.com/events/3751820251118.

I created the following Venn diagram to explain how our works are similar enough to be read against each other for this event! Hope you all find it informative.

A Venn diagram. On the EH Lupton's books side, it lists "Madison, WI, Magic, 1960s/1970s, and Literal demons." On the MA Wardell's books side, it says, "Portland, ME, No magic, Contemporary, Metaphorical demons." In the middle, it says, "Jewish writers, romcoms, teachers/professors, gay weddings, 2024 Lammy finalists."

I will be selling books at the Scorpio Market in Madison, WI on November 23. It will be at the Tinsmith from 1pm-6pm. “Masks required, misfits welcome.” We will have the usual assortment of cool stuff: books, poetry tarot cards, felted crows and nazars, stickers and postcards. More info here.

In December, I’ll be at the Big Gay Market on December 20th from 10am-5pm. It’s being held at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison! Come by and pick up last-minute holiday presents! Get a tarot reading for $5! Enjoy lots of other vendors! I went to the Big Gay Halloween Market and had a great time—I bought some quartz skulls for , some ginger tea, and a print that my 8yo immediately took from me.

For those in the audience who are also writers and are looking for a chance to meet other writers, maybe hear some informative presentations about different aspects of the writing process, maybe have a little retreat from the comfort of your homes, I will be presenting at Wholehearted Writers Week in January. My topic is revision, which is really the heart of writing! This is sure to be a really great conference, and no matter where you are in your writing process I encourage you to come. Applications and additional information here.

Other Stuff

We put out a podcast episode in October! Episode 96, on Pope Joan. Hoping we will have more regular episodes in November as our schedules calm down.

Dionysus in Wisconsin will be 40% off on Kobo from November 7–17, so tell your friends.

Books I’ve Read Lately

Paladin’s Strength (cis M/F) and Paladin’s Hope (cis M/M), by T. Kingfisher. Both of these were delightful entries in the series that began with Paladin’s Grace. I think I liked Paladin’s Strength a little better—it chronicles the meeting of a paladin, who is investigating some of the murders that happened in the previous book, with a nun whose sisters were kidnapped. Their two investigations draw them in similar directions. In Paladin’s Hope, a paladin with really bad night terrors meets a pathologist (a lich doctor, in fantasy novel parlance), and they work together to solve a deadly puzzle.

An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the Sixties, by Doris Kearns Goodwin. It’s hard not to hear about the way the Kennedy administration inspired people to get involved in public service and not also want to do something. It’s hard to hear clips of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech, or Johnson’s “We Shall Overcome” speech and not feel moved. The audiobook had actual archival recordings sprinkled in, which was great. I cried a little, even though I knew what was going to happen. To be clear, DKG is a presidential historian, and keeps her focus squarely on the events she or her husband were part of in that decade. If you’re looking for a history that includes the Beatles, Woodstock, Stonewall…none of that is here. The moonshot is, because LBJ was involved. But it’s a great history nevertheless.

Husband of the Year (cis M/M), by MA Wardell. Wardell wrote Mistletoe and Mishigas, which was up for the Lammy last year against Dionysus in Wisconsin. I tried to read it at the time and wasn’t all that into it, probably because I’m not a Christmas book person. But I was asked to participate in an event for this book, and honestly, I liked it a lot more. It was more like a book-length epilogue for the two characters (who were introduced in a book I haven’t read). It’s very sweet with almost no angst. I honestly don’t think Wardell and I have a lot of overlap in terms of audience, but if you really want to see contemporary queer romances with Jewish characters, mental health rep, and elementary school teachers, you might enjoy this series.

Decorative Gourd Season (October Newsletter)

It feels very aggressive and unkind to go around being October. I’m not ready for it. It’s time to reread that famous McSweeney’s article, It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers.

It has been a really long, rough week around here. We had to say goodbye to our older dog yesterday. Although I don’t think anyone can own a dog that is approaching her fifteenth birthday and not feel the relentless march of time, her decline at the last was very precipitous and distressing. So I’m going to keep this email short. Here is a portrait I painted of Maya almost ten years ago. She liked cheese and peanut butter, loved her people and no one else, and tolerated cats. In addition to various tricks she consented to do, she was constantly in the kitchen when the cheese drawer opened or a bag of popcorn crinkled, even well past the point when she seemed fairly deaf otherwise.

An oil painting of Dr. Maya Angelou the Dog (DFA) under a table. She is a red shiba inu. — Dr. Maya Angelou the Dog (DFA–Dog of Fine Arts)

Some bad news: I am turning off the TeeSpring shop where formerly you could buy T-shirts with the book covers on them. TeeSpring (now just “Spring” after a merger) seems to have stopped fulfilling orders—I ordered some shirts in August that had not been printed more than a month later, and an online search turned up people who had been waiting for much longer than six weeks. I don’t imagine this will affect anyone too much, but if you decide you want one, contact me directly.

Upcoming Appearances

I will be sitting on a panel at Rainbow Space Magic Con! This year, we’re talking about Writing About the Past to Talk About the Present, because once upon a time I read the in-book introduction to The Name of the Rose and thought, oh, this isn’t really about the 1100s. Or not entirely. I’ll also be doing a reading! What will I be reading? I don’t know yet. Maybe something from Lazarus, Home from the War. Maybe something new!

The panel will be Sunday at 11am CT, and the reading will be three hours later, at 2pm CT. Rainbow Space Magic Con is a queer-friendly scifi/fantasy convention that is online and free to attend. It’s a one-stream con, so you never have to make decisions about which panels to attend and which to skip. You can see the whole schedule and register here.

Finally, I will be giving a talk on finding joy and fellowship in revision at Wholehearted Writers Week in January (the 12-16)! It is tentatively entitled, “Oh no, you accidentally finished your manuscript! Now what?” Because I think we can all agree that just having a manuscript you endlessly tinker with and add to is, if not the best possible way to live, certainly the most relaxing. No publishing deadlines, no problem. If you are interested in a week-long chance to talk to other writers about your projects and problems, you should definitely check it out. Details here.

Books I’ve Read Lately

I picked up Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher (M/F, cis) knowing that Kingfisher writes a lot of fantasy/horror. I was prepared for that—ready to watch some poor sucker walk down the wrong alley and get eaten by a monster. Instead, it was a very sweet romance set in an interesting world, and it was also very funny. It lacked some of the pointed political commentary of Terry Pratchett, but I think it would appeal to people who liked Discworld and don’t mind a little romance. It was also a very comforting read, despite the fact that there are a couple of decapitations and a poisoning or two (including, actually, a poor sucker who walks down an alley and gets eaten by a monster).

That’s it for this month. See you in November.