December, 2019. I pressed “publish” on Solid, Broken, Changing. And…yup. We all know what happened next.

All launch efforts were scrubbed, replaced by efforts to shore up what was solid in life, repair or let go of what was broken, and move as gracefully in accord with what was seriously changing. 

I had thought that Kally, hero of Solid, Broken, Changing, was living in the near future. Turns out, just like Kally, I hadn’t imagined the tipping points of planetary change would let go so soon or so fast.

Fast forward. Today, year 4ish, AEC (After Everything Changed).

Tipping points have ramified these past few years. Waves of environmental and social change rock Planet Earth and her life forms. Kally’s story grows ever more resonant.

Let’s give Solid, Broken, Changing—and Kally and Stuart—a proper launch.

Let’s not leave them stuck in 2019-20.

No one should be stuck there.

Here in 2024, Solid, Broken, Changing gives readers a much needed twist on hopepunk* (see below). It’s a YA scifi novel that embraces the punk but dares to question sentimentalized, human-centric aspects of “hope.” It explores human and beyond-human realities of radical co-existence. It’s a story propelled by characters who perform acts of creative dead reckoning within the maw of continuous, deep change.

It’s time to relaunch Kally and Stuart’s story!

Next week, Solid, Broken, Changing relaunches as a work of YA scifi wayfindrpunk.

*“Hopepunk” is a term coined in a 2017 Tumblr post by author Alexandra Rowland (author of A Conspiracy of Truths and A Choir of Lies). She described it as the opposite of “grimdark”— it’s the defiant optimism to grimdark’s overwhelming pessimism. In Rowland’s 2019 article, she wrote: “There are no heroes and no villains. There are just people. That’s hopepunk: Whether the glass is half full or half empty, what matters is that there’s water in that glass. And that’s something worth defending.” It is the genre of radical kindness.--Ash, Literary Quicksand