giveaway reminder, a cool book bundle, and some thoughts on flooding.
So! I believe several people signed up for my newsletter to participate in my first queer book giveaway of three physical copies of RB Lemberg’s resplendent novella The Four Profound Weaves.
There is a second step! Please fill out this four-question form with your name, email address, confirmation that you live in the U.S., and your favorite queer book.
Done that? Great. I will do my random drawing for the winners of the book next week!
A second thing! My book Shipwrecked: Being a Tale of True Love, Magic & Goats is in the Rebuilding Western North Carolina fantasy anthology put together by Candace Harper, along with nine other great authors! Shipwrecked was an incredibly fun novella to write, and I still cackle to myself when rereading it. It’s a romance in which pirate goblins chase a goblin baby through multiple dimensions and goats commit indescribable mischief.
Among the other authors, I already love the work of Chace Verity, LK Fleet, and Arden Powell, and I am looking forward to reading books from the other contributors.
How can you get this anthology? Donate at least $20 to Manna Food Bank and send in the receipt to Candace, who will then send you the ebook. We’ve already raised $1000 with this anthology, which represents several thousand meals provided to people still trying to get back on their feet in the hurricane-devastated areas around Asheville.
I have written about flooding before, because catastrophic flooding is a constant in the part of western Iowa where I grew up. I barely remember the nightmarish flooding which covered Iowa in 1993, but in 2007, a dike broke north of my hometown. The creek inundated my parents’ house and business with water tainted with sewage and industrial runoff from nearby fields, water that then sat on the property for over a week. My parents were among the luckiest in the neighborhood — several houses farther down their street were flooded up to the gutters and had to be completely demolished. After more rounds of flooding in 2011 and 2019 covered I-29 for months and even cut off nearby towns from road access entirely, my parents finally moved to higher ground, leaving the house they had lived in for thirty-one years.
The thing about western Iowa is that there are no mountains there. The water arrives regularly and in devastating quantities, but it never has the speed and force that swept through Asheville and Chimney Rock. Iowa towns have been ruined by floods, but not erased. There was still a place for us to go back to when the waters finally receded.
By contrast, there have been over forty confirmed deaths in Buncombe County resulting from Hurricane Helene; 400 commercial buildings destroyed or significantly damaged; 900 housing units in the same condition; around 26,000 people out of work. Some towns, like Chimney Rock, were completely swept away by a combination of flooding and landslides.
That is a lot to rebuild, and a lot of people who never will.
It took my parents six months of concentrated effort to get their home back in livable condition and their business back to full speed. They got federal relief money, but the people who ripped the sodden insulation and lathe-and-plaster out of the house I grew up in were volunteers from the other side of town. The person who lovingly cleaned the sewage-muck off our Christmas ornaments was a family friend. The people who took out the unsafe wiring and rotten floorboards in our crumbling old house were from local churches and high schools and businesses.
The disaster zone around Asheville stretches much, much farther than that small flood of 2007. The stories of mutual aid coming out of western North Carolina have been incredible — bookstores becoming organization hubs and mule teams taking supplies to mountain communities — and I am overwhelmed with respect and hope.
I remember what it felt like to have the waters rush in and over and through, transforming my community entirely.
I hope you will consider chucking whatever amount of money toward Manna Food Bank you can afford, even if the anthology isn’t for you at this moment.
Thinking of all of you,
Sharon