Finn Longman's Blog

It’s been a long time since I blogged, mostly because I felt like I had already said everything there was to say about my writing process, about The Wolf and His King, or about the delicate dance of balancing PhD and fiction, and anything else I wrote on the subject would be a repeat. Until …

In which I share the cover of The Wolf and His King, update you on the publication date, and share further news...!

It’s Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week and it’s also LGBTQ+ History Month in the UK, which seemed like a good time to talk about a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot recently: the peculiar tension of caring about queer history as an aroace trans person whose experiences of queerness don’t primarily revolve about romantic relationships. …

After several years of constantly moving house, I finally settled long-term in the autumn of 2024, which means my parents are keen for me to sort through and reclaim or dispose of a lot of the stuff they’ve been looking after for the last ten years. Every time I come to stay, I’m invited to …

Slightly upsettingly, it is now September. Not only that, but it’s not even early September. It’s the 19th. Schools have been back for a good couple of weeks. There’s a distinctly autumnal chill to the air. The evenings are getting darker earlier and earlier. Summer, we are constantly reminded, is over. I’m feeling this particularly …

Ten years ago, in May 2014, I was revising vocabulary for my French A-Level exam and came across the phrase papillon de nuit, butterfly of night: the French name for a moth. “That’s so badass,” I posted on Facebook. “It sounds like an assassin’s nickname. And saying that, I’ve got an idea…” It wasn’t a …

Let’s talk about epigraphs. As a writer, I put way too much thought into my epigraphs, although I know that many readers skim straight past them. In fact, I often skim straight past them myself when reading: unless they’re from something I’ve read or know well, in most cases I will immediately forget what they …

My adult books may have taken centre stage in my social media posts lately, not least because I have been mired in line edits and they have been occupying my thoughts, but it’s time to turn out attention back to YA. The third book in my YA assassin trilogy, The Butterfly Assassin, is coming out …

I’m currently working on line edits for The Wolf and His King, my ‘Bisclavret’ retelling. Line edits, for me, are a multi-faceted process of nitpicking absolutely everything. This includes the grammar and rhythm of sentences, and I’ll read the whole book aloud to check for accidental rhyme, awkward alliteration, and repetition, because the feel of …

I have been waiting a very long time to write this post. Months at the very least, but really it feels like the culmination of several years of work and waiting and more work and more waiting, and now — now at last the news is here: That’s right. I’ve got more books coming. Adult …