S.M. > Recent Status Updates

I'm SO SAD Iris and William won't get their own book

If it turns out Georgiana’s brothers have orchestrated this whole thing—a housekeeper named Graves, even!—I am going to scream and then die laughing

“If ye didnae want the poetry, dinnae fuck over a poet.” ❤️‍🔥

I do expect things to pick up but my goodness we're thirty pages in and STILL getting flashbacks. And a 5yo (4yo) FMC just asked her mother how the magic cards were made: "How were they fashioned?"

"Fashioned?" Really? A 5yo?

Braaaain caaaandy

Jesus, I'd been picturing nutcracker men, not four-legged block creatures.

"We connect with the characters we love based on our core wounds."

"[S]cience fiction displaces historical atrocities onto imagined dystopian futures, fantasizing a white heroic resistance to the violences that Black, Indigenous, and non-Western subjects have already faced. If the future and fate of the West depends on the end of capitalism, the loss of material comforts, luxuries, status, access, and security is terrifying."

"There are clinical names for what the body does when our reality betrays us: shock, disassociation, [PTSD], mania, psychosis, schizophrenia. These are diagnoses based on the assessment criteria laid out in the DSM-V... [5], a book that, as I only recently found out, has been largely discredited by mental health professionals, including its own creators."

Necrobibliography: "the texts we bury to silence the past, whose silences come back to haunt us."

"According to Heidegger, poiesis is a threshold occasion, or the moment of ecstasis, when one thing steps outside of itself, outside of its old form and becomes a new one."

“AI technology learns from us every time we use it, and learns from us even when we don’t use it. Its natural language and cloning abilities are improving at an alarming rate, able to generate art, photos, film—the entirety of human creation—in any style with incredible accuracy.

Except one. AI sucks at poetry *so bad.*

Poetry is a language AI cannot fake.”

"Fantasy becomes high-stakes territory when it is reframed as what we world we can collectively imagine, and for whom."

"I now see the difference between trauma and grief: trauma is a fixation on what is lost, while grief is proof that love still exists."

Toni Morrison: "All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, that valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory--what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our 'flooding.'"

"In fantasy, and poetry, we build the memory of the world through metaphor."

One of my favorite running gags is how everyone recognizes how little time has passed from the beginning of the story. "I don't cry in front of strangers" "yeah but I'm not a stranger" "I've known you for FOUR DAYS" "sure, but it feels like forty, right?"

If you enjoyed Nettle & Bone or A Sorceress Comes to Call, you'll like this one, too.

"Loss is the condition needed for the suspension of disbelief. To truly believe in magic--to believe that words, actions, and intentions can manifest a desire into reality--one must first know the experience of profound, instantaneous, irreversible loss."

"...the act of remembering in and of itself [is] a kind of haunting."

“It is no wonder that critical fabulation and the speculative make up the narrative mode that most lends itself to writers contending with trauma, personal and generational, remembered and felt, believed and unbelieved.”

"...the speculative differs from fantasy--rather than make up a history, or tell it in allegory, it is the reparative imagination in constant discourse with the silences of the past, addressing gaps in archival and collective memory, where imagination is a mode of time travel that can excavate silenced accounts, reanimate erased histories, and even imagine radical futures."

"Magic and trauma are inextricable; both begin in the language of disbelief. 'This can't be real. I can't believe it.'"