May 15, 2025

on circling back

cover reveal for The Everlasting, plus some unprovoked thoughts on lady knighthood

news

good people: days like these are far too rare to cheapen with heavy-handed words. and so—i’m afraid without any ado whatsoever--here she is!¹

those are the cover(s) for my next full-length adult fantasy novel! The Everlasting is out October 28th, 2025. you can add it on goodreads, pre-order online here, or call your local indie bookstore. (lots of indies will have signed stock—i’m making my way through a ton of tip-ins now—but if you want to be extra sure, you can also pre-order a personalized copy from New Dominion, in Charlottesville. they ship!)

if you’re wondering what took so long, well, i’m a pretty slow writer, and publishing is a pretty slow industry (i turned in a complete and fairly clean draft of this novel in February of 2024). with our powers combined, we’re glacial.

in other news, you’ll notice this email came from buttondown, rather than substack (of all the things i resent about the 21st century, having to sincerely learn and use all these goofy-ass app names is high on the list). that’s because substack is 1) happily funneling money to white supremacists, and 2) systematically destroying traditional journalism.

the only bummer is that buttondown costs me about $80/month.² my silly little emails aren’t paywalled and never will be, but if you feel like throwing in a couple of dollars: here’s my tip jar. any extra $ is donated to Unite Against Book Bans.

on circling back

somewhere in the long, weird space between writing a book and publishing a book, you have to write another kind of story: the story of why you wrote the book in the first place. as a project it’s overtly mercenary—it’s a sales pitch, an advertisement, a hook. its job is to shrink a novel—which is definitionally unshrinkable, “a thought too long to fit in your head all at once until after it is written”—into a heartfelt instagram caption, or something witty you can say on podcasts and panels.

it's not as easy as you’d think. like, yes, before you wrote the book you had a particular set of intentions and inspirations. you had a vision of where you wanted to go and why, as every explorer should. but at some point along the way—like every explorer—you got your shit rocked. the landscape heaved beneath your feet. the map misled you. you took strange turns for reasons inscrutable to yourself. you did not arrive where you imagined you would, or if you did, it doesn’t look as you thought it should.

and then someone (usually someone nice, who is doing you a massive favor) asks: so, why did you write this book?

and if you’re good at your job, you say something like: what a good question, thank you so much for having me. this book was actually inspired by my relationship to my great-grandmother—

it will be true, in the way that any good advertisement is true, but it won’t be the whole truth. it can’t be.

i haven’t written the story of this book yet. i could tell you i wrote it because i’ve spent almost a decade watching a fascist movement rewrite history itself, turning the past into propaganda (true). i could say i wrote it because of dev patel’s absurdly, almost aggressively soulful eyes in the green knight (true).

or i could say: i wrote it because i was always going to write it. and that would be true, too.

because i think every author circles back—eventually, inevitably—to whatever they loved best when they were twelve. which, for me, was any book where a girl learned to use a sword. she might disguise herself as a boy (alanna), or fight a dragon (the hero and the crown); her kingdom might be threatened by an evil wizard (the blue sword; sabriel) or a corrupt ruler (crown duel); the details didn’t matter to me. what mattered was just the idea of her, the image she left on the back of my eyelids: a woman in full armor, hand on her hilt.

honestly, i thought everybody felt the same way??? i thought my love was the product of a publishing trend—like maybe xena:warrior princess provoked a rash of YA sword-girl books in the late nineties and early 2000s, around the time i hit middle school. but the blue sword came out in 1982! sabriel was 1995, and crown duel was 2002. i hadn’t fallen in love with these books conveniently, by accident; i’d hunted them down across decades, on purpose.

like: why?

part of it was probably a straightforward lust for violence—anyone who has developed breasts has fantasized about having a sword and the legal right to duel. part of it was also straightforward lust, full stop, conceived the moment i saw that evil princess/knight take off her helmet in willow.

but it was also a nascent, frustrated yearning for something i can still barely articulate to myself: heroism, nobility, knighthood. a kind of gendered power so unavailable to me it could exist only in the realm of myth. it wasn’t (quite) masculinity i envied but the way masculinity could transform all my undesirable traits into desirable ones: i was always a little too tall, too big, too loud, too short-tempered, too difficult, too much. as a girl, i was mid at best; as a knight, i might have been the hero.

at least, in my fantasy books. in actual history, knights were private security for wealthy landowners and/or kings, whose function was to maintain the state’s monopoly on violence.³ women who laid claim to that monopoly were generally either burnt at the stake as gender traitors or made into ghoulish mascots for the state itself.⁴ or—somewhat bafflingly—both: joan of arc went to the scaffold, in the end, because she refused to give up her soldier’s clothes. almost exactly five hundred years later, she was adopted as the national symbol of vichy france. by then she’d become a myth more than a historical figure, which is a fascist’s favorite kind of powerful woman (imaginary).

but you’ll find joan, too, on the other side: in the speeches of pankhurst and stanton, on the covers of radical pamphlets, riding at the head of every suffragist parade. as an avatar for the mainstream women’s movement, she was ideal: young, virginal, beautiful, white, friendly to both church and state. even her violence was made palatable: a suffragette with a gun would be a terrorist—but give her a sword, and she’s merely a symbol.

sometimes she’s even a radical one: think of vita sackville-west—who dressed in drag and went by the name julian—writing a four-hundred-page biography of joan ("that inexplicable character, the girl-boy-captain”); think of roan of arc (one should always be thinking about roan of arc).

really, a lady-knight might be anything—a propaganda poster, a radical mascot, a sacrificial symbol, a queer saint—the somewhat fervid fantasy of an awkward twelve-year-old—except a living woman.

this is, more broadly, how the medieval past works in the popular imagination: not as actual history, but as a series of symbols which might be manipulated into whatever narrative serves you best. it's a vocabulary inclined naturally toward the authoritarian, i think—all those rightful kings and grateful peasants, holy quests and virtuous wars. what is a knight, other than the fiction that there’s a throne worth kneeling to and a state worth killing for? what is a lady-knight, other than a sort of cringe lean-in feminism?? girlboss, gatekeep, god save the queen!

still: i circled back to her. i was always going to.

in retrospect, i can see that i wrote this book with pygmalion’s deranged ambition—to turn the symbol of a woman into flesh and blood. my lady-knight begins the book as a tool in the hand of empire, a useful piece of propaganda retold over and over. but slowly she acquires personhood: desires and resentments, scars and white hairs, complex emotions about gender, doubts, bad habits, children. she loves, and is loved, as only real people are. (this is also a romance novel).

but symbols are more valuable than people, aren’t they? the antagonism in this book is the attempt to keep the lady-knight strictly two-dimensional, the hero of a very useful story—no matter how many tries it takes. (this is also a time travel novel)(or a time-loop novel, technically?)

i guess the truth—or part of it—is that i wrote this book because i never got over alanna, even if i soured on tortall. because i still feel that yearning, lifting, hungering feeling in my chest when when aerin rides to face maur, when alanna raises her sword and cries “to me, men of fort drell! to me!”

sir una everlasting fights dragons and goes to war, too—alone, as any good western hero must. but—when you read it, or if you do—picture her riding in the wake of all the lady-knights that came before her. picture me circling back, finally, inevitably, to my twelve year old self, and saying: yeah, we became an author. yeah—she has a sword.

further reading

• if you would like an additional lady-knight novel about the weaponization of national mythologies and a pair of doomed lovers stuck in a time loop—but measurably gayer--preorder Tasha Suri’s The Isle in the Silver Sea, which is also out this october lol.

• “deus ex machina: american loneliness, ghosts, and gods in machines” is a great read if you want to feel even more depressed about the convergence of AI and the loneliness epidemic and, essentially, just how cooked we are.