The Herald: April/May 2025
The Herald strides in, late but full of confidence, clears throat, and announces at top volume
Hear ye! Hear ye!
Well… Better late than never? April didn’t have much news to report, though, and since I fell sick late in the month and kept putting this newsletter off, I decided to just combine these two months into one post. Efficiency!
Strap yourselves in, here are all the updates! (more concise than usual)
Upcoming Stories/Publications
My next story to be published will be on Havok Publishing this Friday!!
The Negotiator is about a mercenary with a personal code of honor who has been hired to deal with a monstrous threat. The twist? The community who hired him are all animals from a wild forest. And the mercenary is the squirrel-like warrior Phezznibbet Maplebark.
This was a very fun story to write and contains a twist that might be more interesting to me than anyone else, though I know you’ll enjoy the story for what it is.
I’ll have another story coming out on Havok in June, date tbd.
Recent Article
Watching the election of a new pope (as a history fan, that kind of thing appeals to me!) got me thinking about the much-maligned Chosen One trope. It’s one of my favorite tropes of all time, though I know it’s been overused and misused to the point of cliché.
So, I wrote an article defending it.
You can read it here, and then I would love to hear your thoughts about it!
Writing Update
What with being highly distracted by new shiny ideas and then getting ridiculously sick, I haven’t done much writing the last few weeks. I wrote and submitted one flash fiction, worked on my urban fantasy/detective noir novella, brainstormed ideas for the comedy fantasy, and came up with a new science fiction series. Not terribly productive, but I’m feeling better now and things are looking up!
Last Book Read
Just finished the audiobook of One Corpse Too Many by Ellis Peters, the second in the Brother Cadfael series. It was excellent! I love this series and am enjoying rereading it, through the brilliant narration of Patrick Tull, but this book still astonished me with how good it is. Highly recommended!
Current Favorite Read
Maybe not favorite, but I’m enjoying reading Declare by Tim Powers. It’s a sort of Cold War espionage + supernatural thriller novel, and honestly I have no idea what to expect. Much fun!
Recent Releases
I went to see Thunderbolts* in theater last weekend and loved it. It felt not just like a true return to form for the MCU, but an excellent and surprisingly thoughtful movie in its own right. I think I’ll have to write a longer article about it at some point, because it dealt with some things in a serious and competent way that I don’t often see, and that deserves a deeper dive. But it will be a very spoiler-filled article, just to warn you.
Life Updates
I mentioned that I was sick for two weeks, right?
Yeah, that was no fun. It was the kind of cold that doesn’t seem too bad, but lands you on your back anyway. It gave me lots of brain-numbing fatigue and clumsiness… which led to me injuring my hand while cooking. Don’t cook when you have a bad cold, ok?
I’m almost back to normal (though my hand still hurts a little), and I’m actually feeling good enough to write!
Coming Next on Substack
I’ve been working on a long article exploring the idea of Holy Week as an epic fantasy—not an allegory, but literally examining it as if it falls within the epic fantasy genre, which I argue that part of the gospel story does. It’s been a fascinating endeavor, but much more challenging than I expected. I’ll be putting the finishing touches on it in the next couple of days, including sharing it with a couple of people to get feedback, which is not my usual write-and-publish-fast method. It should show up on my Substack this weekend, so please subscribe if you’re interested in reading it!
Thus Spake the Lady! (Sign-off)
That’s it for now! The rest of my month will be a flurry of editing as I work on finishing up the next Whitstead anthology and copy edits for my Snow White novella. Also, gardening!
See you in late June.
(phew! I managed to keep this short for once!)