“But now I shall never get out,” said Floralinda, in tears, “there is no solution to my problem that isn’t a prince, and I’m all out of princes, and I don’t want to jump out of the window and die. This is the worst conundrum I ever heard of.”

(rolls down a dusty hill through open window) Boy! Not much has happened since I last posted on Tumblr (laugh track) but every so often I amble on to tell you, three followers and my boyhood friend Christopher who still hasn’t read any of my God damned books and yet makes fun of me ceaselessly, about all the wild things occurring:

• Gideon the Ninth is now available in paperback. This provides warm nesting material for winter, and also contains a new appendix of material, including an in-universe essay about how thinking the cavalier-necromancer relationship is ‘horny’ is an evil idea that nobody should ever commit to in fiction, which is how you know that in-universe fiction commits to it constantly; it also has a dossier compiled by Cpt. Judith Deuteros about how Coronabeth Tridentarius is NOT a babe. Talk about a challenger for Tolkien’s appendices
• Harrow the Ninth arrives in less than a month. I received my hardback copies of it (author’s privilege) and flipped through it. It landed open at a scene where Harrow gets told the whole plot of a romance novel. I write only the hardest action scenes
• My novella, “Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower”, has been announced for November 2020! That’s this year, if we live! It’s a VERY long novella. My first reader, whose name rhymes with “A.K. Farkwood”, described it as “Enid Blyton meets Slay the Spire”. If you were forced at gunpoint as a child to read “Pip the Elf” and wished dreamily that Pip would fall off a cliff already, this is for you! It’s about an awful princess who meets an awful fairy, and their adventures in being forced into the same small space together eating the same damn meal over and over (NOTE: I wrote it BEFORE lockdown).

Subterranean Press specialises in very beautiful hardback editions and the end physical product will be very specific and lovely, but for those of us with limited shelf space it WILL also be out in ebook (that’s just not available to pre-order).

I’ve received lovely messages and questions and one day I’ll get to them. Until Alecto is done, however, forgive me for that day not being today; soon. Thank you so much for all the support.

Today is the 14th of April and you can go and read the whole first act of Harrow the Ninth! 

I finished Harrow long before Gideon ever went to publication and it is extremely weird having it now be in the pipeline to be read. I’ll have also finished Alecto before Harrow is out, which will be weird in the same way. Alecto is a very different book to Harrow and Harrow is a very different book to Gideon. Gideon was about two girls crammed into a bloodstained get-along shirt; Harrow is about, as stolen from A.K. Larkwood, two girls who are not enjoying this Duke of Ed residential very much; Alecto will be about girls being annoyed that it is legal for their exes to talk to each other. The tomb is open. The get-along shirt is empty.

Naturally I had a hell of a lot of fun writing Harrow and it is very personal to me. It is about a girl staggering over the finish line with all her limbs ground down to stumps only to discover that that was the start of the marathon. It is about another girl who owns thirty thousand stupid outfits, and wears them. It is the hideousness of being a grown-up and discovering the protagonist of your sequel is some emo kid with Disney hair who hangs around Goofy and Donald. It is about meals.  

Really it is a book that, at its heart, is the bit in the Homestar Runner music video for TMBG’s Experimental Film where Strong Sad falls hard out of the sky and the spectator stand announces that it is a lion. 

I hope you enjoy. Take care out there.

The wild ride continues in Chapter 3! Here’s some of what you can expect:

• Skurch (skull church)
• Skayers (skull prayers)
• Skunger Skuames (skull Hunger Games)

If you had not read the previous chapters they are linked here too. 

This chapter contains a lot of Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus. It also hints as to the deeply nuanced backstory behind her personality (SPOILER: she was given three gifts by good fairies at her christening, the gifts of being a dickhead, being a creep, and unnatural bone love). 

Happy Monday! It’s chapters one AND two of GIDEON THE NINTH, morality novel that teaches you how to be a good space goth! 

If you love skeletons, the dark mysteries of the sealed tomb and wearing black vestments, congratulations, you are already a good space goth. If you love huge fuck-off swords, girlie mags and the army, oops, you are NOT a good space goth. 

In either case maybe read the excerpts just to be sure.

Previously you could pay no money to possess two chapters of GIDEON THE NINTH, but we heard your complaints (”That takes effort” “I cannot do it in countries that are not America” “I am very weak and feeble and have only one click to spend before expiration”). All you need to do is hit this link, and the whole first chapter will leap into your eyes!

To me this feels very much like publishing the first chapter of one’s fanfiction online, but wearier. I remember those days when I was green and jejune, earnestly letting people know on Livejournal and Tumblr that the first 10k of my latest magnum opus was up for the five people in the universe interested in Yuffie Kisaragi/Freya Crescent/Gamzee (Bad ship – Ed.), but those days were characterised by modesty and shame. When you start to publish professionally, you become filled with a hot and neurotic desperation that cannot exist alongside shame. “Maybe read this, if you’ve a mind to,” I used to say, eyelashes downcast, fanning myself shyly, hitting PUBLISH on Ao3.

Now I’m like: Read it!!!!!!! Read it to your dog!!!!!!!!!!!! Please, God, I’ve edited this so much!!!!!!! I am assured that if you DON’T read it Satan will read it to me ceaselessly in Hell!!!!! I’ve put in as many jokes as humanly possible on the off-chance you’ll laugh at one!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Before I come undooooone, save me from the nothing I’ve becoooooome.

Tor.com will be running the whole first act over the next couple months. Follow along; you might like it. 

(Were you here on the Internet when every YouTube video was a different Naruto and Sasuke AMV set to the All-American Rejects’ It Ends Tonight? I never knew much about Naruto, but this book is all those AMVs at once.)

Dear all,

I fully recognise none of you may be around any more now that the female-identified nipples have been scourged, but should you still roam these un-nippled halls I will shamelessly update you on my novel. One stops feeling guilt at self-promotion when your book’s on the way; there comes a point where you can no longer even stop, like a shark swims. You understand that to cease is to expire.

This link is to the cover of my book. The disembodied head up there is the head of my heroine. Please click through and examine. For sticking with me on this route, I will give you special information about this novel I don’t give anyone else; if you have read my fanfiction, or my short stories, or even my fanfiction and my short stories, I want to sit down warmly next to you and tell you exactly what kind of old bullshit I’m serving up to you all over again.

GIDEON THE NINTH is the story of seventeen dolts in a space shack trying to become God’s dead best friends. Here are some of the traditional heroic tropes I went with.

* GIRL FALLS FOR SICKLY COUGAR

* BAD LITTLE LEMONGRAB BOY STEEPLES FINGERS, A LOT 

* ASTEROID JUGGALOS HAVE A BONE RELIGION (That old chestnut!! - Ed.)

* TWINS BUT ONE TWIN IS A BEEFALO AND THE OTHER TWIN IS A POT OF YOPLAIT ZERO PERCENT YOGHURT

* HERO’S QUEST TO BECOME A NECROSOLDIER SPACE HUNKETTE ENDS PREMATURELY WHEN NO-TIDDY GOTH WITCH TRICKS HER INTO THE HUNGER GAMES (Biblical - Ed.) 

I have also put in a Sorting Hat system, just for you! One day you could align yourself with one of my beautiful Space Houses, which consist of:

* BORE HOUSE

* MTV’S CRIBS HOUSE

* MORON HOUSE

* YOUR MOM’S HOUSE

* DORK HOUSE

* POSER HOUSE

* ANTI HOUSE

* GOTH HOUSE

Bet you wish you’d thought of those, Rowling!!

My other plot to get this novel out was to appear above your bed as a shower of oily rain and whisper it to you in a hideous susurrus, but turns out they only do that for like, Women’s Lit

The Ninth House Trilogy is getting published with Tor under their Tor-Macmillan imprint. Both halves of that sentence are, by themselves, reasons for joy and fear so commingled that I no longer understand what either emotion means; put together, they ensure that these days I simultaneously want to gnaw off my foot to a stump and continually cause parties to happen. It’s due very much to my agent and very little to me, but it’s happening.

Carl Engle-Laird – an editor so insightful, so longsuffering and so deeply in tune with what I am trying to do here that it is not to be believed – calls the novel “epic science fantasy in which queer necromantic nuns team up to defeat the trial of the Necrolord.” You can read what he said, it is all in the article, along with my face as I stare at the camera and appear to think secret thoughts about dachshunds. (COLD REALITY: I was thinking of how to impress my photographer with even more knowledge of vanilla World of Warcraft raids.) Read his words; they’re good. Here are mine.

1. I need to share these books with you.

2. They answer my question of, What if a bunch of human-equivalent oil slicks… did space necromancy at each other?

3. How can I make sword fights… more dead and more gay?

I will leave you with a quote from Jane Austen, who felt about her heroine, Elizabeth, much the same as I think about mine, Gideon:

I must confess that I think her as complete a dumpster fire as ever appeared in print

Thank you for reading me.

Every day I worry all day about what’s waiting in the bushes for us. I’m really thrilled to link to another reprint – this time my horror story The Woman in the Hill, a piece of Kiwi Lovecraftiana set in the hills, plain and bush of turn-of-the-century Tauranga. (Having grown up in Whitford, please do not take this as a savage attack on the place, as the worst thing that happened to me there as a child was that I once dropped an egg and a dog ate it).

I wrote this for excellent editor Lynne Jamneck’s Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror and can’t recommend the full book enough. As ever, I also can’t recommend Nightmare Magazine enough – they published my debut horror story Chew back in the day and if you would like to purchase a scary gift for yourself or your loved ones there is a button linked there to do so. This month’s line-up of December spooky stories is incredible, and I have to particularly recommend Nino Cipri’s Which Super Little Dead Girl™ Are You? Take Our Quiz and Find Out! if you want to laugh, feel bad, and also not sleep well that night.

Due to my own greasy need for self-gratification I can’t pass up the opportunity here to link The Woman in the Hill being discussed here on Tor by Ruthanna Emrys and Anne M. Pillsworth as part of their Lovecraft reread. If you want to survey some incredibly intelligent discussion of the debt that The Woman in the Hill owes to H.P., and in general get some fantastic story recommendations and Lovecraftian legacy discussion in your eyeballs, do click through to this and the whole series. You might want to read it after you’ve read my story, though, because it is spoilers.

Thank you for reading me this year whatever you have read, and I hope you enjoy my own take on Lovecraftian protagonists driven demented by things they cannot understand! Happy holidays!!

Back in the back of a Cadillac, number one with a bullet I’ve got a reprint in Lightspeed.* 

“The Magician’s Apprentice”, a story completed at Clarion, published by Weird Tales and nominated for a Shirley Jackson, is free to read at Lightspeed! Wrote this in 2010 and I’m still fond of it in 2017, which is all one can ever ask for, really. Please enjoy a story about growing up, magic, comfort food, and the strong bonds we can make with our teachers. Feel-good tale of the year**.

Readers, please be reminded that you can support this truly excellent magazine what bothered to publish me for a mere $3.99, an amount of dollars that nets you not just my story but those by this month’s authors. I haven’t read them all yet or they haven’t landed, but you’ll be getting the likes of Tobias S. Buckell, Genevieve Valentine and a whole host of truly talented others. Lightspeed will give you all these stories cheap as free anyway, but I encourage you to toss money its way, it is a good thing.

(As ever whenever this story pops up, I remember how indebted I am to Dale Bailey, the Clarion instructor for that week and a truly superhuman being.)

* The actual lyrics.
** It is not the feel-good tale of the year.