I missed updating you all in May, mostly due to the speculative fiction writing conference for which I was on the executive, TriCon: The Trident Conference for Speculative Fiction. It’ll be mid-May again next year, but we haven’t nailed down the dates yet. And then I got a new temp job and visited Montreal. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind.

News on Aether and Ego:

1. You can enter to win an advance reading copy (“ARC”) at my publisher’s IG.

2. You can get an ebook copy of the pre-proofread version of the book at NetGalley. You’ll need to write a review in exchange and post it to the usual places.

3. I am most of the way through the long editing process, having finished developmental editing and copyediting and now working our way through proofreading. I took advantage of the proofreading stage to remove the hellos from my book! I happened to fortuitously read Eight things The Other Bennet Sister got wrong: Part II at Musings on the Long 18th Century, which mentioned that “hello” wasn’t used as a greeting until the advent of the telephone. Interestingly, although I didn’t know that, I don’t think I had it in dialogue anywhere, but in sentences like “they said their hellos”… something about having Fitzwilliam Darcy say, “hello!” felt absolutely wrong, though I’m surprised I didn’t have Bingley saying it anywhere.

I couldn’t be more excited about the artwork by Pei Yuan Li. Scroll down for a screenshot of Inanna’s announcement.

I don’t remember when I first read Pride and Prejudice, but it must have been as a teenager because I can remember high school conversations with my best friend about how much we love-hated Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

In 1995, I watched the BBC mini-series with my then-boyfriend’s mother, and I was really struck by how unjust Lydia’s fate was (which was, of course, part of Austen’s whole project across all her books: the perils of marriage). I thought a lot about how I would give her a happily-ever-after, which expanded to imagining happy endings for all of the women whose marriages in the original serve as a warning to the audience.

I’ve been dreaming about this book for most of my adult life, in an idle, lit-crit kind of way. When I decided to go for it and actually write the book, it came together extremely quickly, despite me making my own life difficult by relocating the whole thing to an 1840s generation ship. I feel like I spent half of my writing time just googling the dates of various inventions to work out what exactly they would have had access to, tech-wise, during the before-the-start-of-the-novel Regency space race.

Days til novel release: 182

Those of you who follow me on Bluesky, IG, or Mastodon know that I post daily(ish) small press book posts or #DSPBposts almost every day. Small presses keep book culture interesting and innovative and this is my way of supporting it.

For most of March, I've been concentrating specifically on Nova Scotia publishers because of the deeply stupid and counterproductive provincial budget cuts to the arts, museums, and heritage (and a whole bunch of other stuff like early childhood education, free bus passes for students, student summer jobs). Every $1 spent on the arts creates $29 in economic activity but our ding-dong of a premier thinks the arts are a luxury we can't afford, unlike the stuff that matters to him, like mining and AI programs and of course his own 29% raise. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway support the arts! Buy some of the books I'm spotlighting this month.

News on the novel: you can now order signed copies of Aether and Ego through Bookmark Halifax (if you’re in Canada) or Bookshop (if you’re in the US). It’s a bit weird if you’re in the US: I can’t sign the actual book, since then you’d have to pay much higher shipping rates from Canada and possibly tariffs, so just email me your address letting me know you’d like a bookplate and I’ll send it to you in September, to stick inside the book.

Hi y’all! A quick check-in between shoveling snow, my now-part-time temp job, prepping promo stuff for Aether and Ego, and working on my robot Emma draft—which are the things taking up most of my time these days—to say:

1. Happy Valentine’s Day! You folks are the best.

2. My publisher made the announcement that they’re publishing my book! Here it is at Instagram and Facebook. I’d love it if those of you who use those sites share those posts to help this book find its audience!

3. The pre-order link is also live! If you want a signed copy, hold off on ordering for now (I’m approaching a couple local indie bookstores about doing signed copies). Or if you were a beta reader, as several of you were, I’ll be sending you a copy. But otherwise order away!

4. The other books coming out alongside mine are Everyone Can’t Be Wrong by Sonal Champsee, The Antique Picker’s Daughter by Melanie Dugan, and The Golden Bracelet: A Memoir of Growing Up in 1930s Syria by Anahid Hagopian (ed. Antonia Swann).

Hope you’re all staying safe and warm, and you have plenty of chocolate or your treat of choice.

I’ve been thinking a lot about enclosure, the historical movement to enclose (fence or surround with hedges) common land, which was part of the great sweep of the history of depriving people of various commons (areas of traditional common usage by locals, for grazing livestock, foraging for berries, mushrooms, nuts, firewood, etc.) in the name of profit or efficiency. In fact, enclosure did lead to greater agricultural output, but this was not equally shared. Reading about Jane Austen’s use of enclosure in the plot of Emma in Helena Kelly’s Jane Austen, the Secret Radical earlier this year has had me thinking about how capitalism and empire insist on claiming and monetizing more or less everything.

It has tied into a lot of the thoughts I have been having about generative AI and how the highjacking of humanity by automation and machines seems to be part of the same urge: to profit and to control. I don’t think generative AI is going to turn out to be the same boon to business or culture as enclosure was to agricultural output—I notice that search and voice-to-text have both gone absolutely to shit since genAI was shoehorned into them—but I do think their benefits, such as they are, and their harm, will be unequally distributed in the usual ways.

I’m not convinced that Austen was criticizing enclosure or that she meant readers to be suspicious of Knightley (and modern readers would be much more bothered by what we would see as him grooming Emma since she was 13, than anything to do with agrarian reform, anyway). But I’ve found it helpful to think about and I have started work on an Emma where Knightley, instead of being a proponent of enclosure (albeit much more gently than most real landowners of his time, given he checks that his changes not inconvenience the people of Highbury), is working to put back into common control land that has been seized by corporate interests. I haven’t worked through the logic of how it’ll alter the plot yet but am excited by the entry it gives me into a framework for thinking about it.

Aside from all of this theorizing and plotting, I have spent the past month working at the community health centre I mentioned in my last newsletter, reading (particularly recommend Elizabeth Bear’s Ancestral Night and Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles), and creating promotional images for Aether and Ego, for when the pre-order link becomes available. Here’s a sneak peek:

I’m still working on edits for Aether and Ego (my space fantasy Pride and Prejudice retelling), finishing the substantive editing stage (currently fixing a continuity error). In between bouts of editing, I am outlining the plot of a time travel novel.

I also have a full-time temp job at the moment, filling in for a person who is out sick, doing similar work to my executive assisting at Vanderbilt, but for a community health centre in Halifax. It’s nice to use those parts of my brain again and to be able to afford our roof repairs. And I’ve started the mural I mentioned in my last newsletter (most recent progress timelapse here)!

Just published: A poem in Blue Unicorn’s autumn issue and two haiku whose publication I missed at the time in Failed Haiku’s June issue. One of those haiku is about the beautiful orchid I watered religiously for eight months before I discovered its terrible secret.

Currently reading: Murderbot, again; this is comfort reading. I also just finished Nick Mamatas’ excellent SFF retelling of Tempest, Kalivas!

I’m in the middle of edits for Aether and Ego (my space fantasy Pride and Prejudice retelling). This is the substantive editing stage, where we zero in on issues with the story or storytelling, e.g. “Lizzy’s sudden effortless leap from a moving carriage feels tricky to swallow (does she have much experience jumping out of speeding vehicles??).” (Yes, an actual example and in this case a relatively easy fix.)

Once this is done we’ll move on to copy editing, then typesetting and proofreading. This is my first time on this side of the publishing desk and it’s a big learning curve, but so far Inanna has been delightful to work with.

I’m fitting this work into the times between some fairly extensive renovations to the fixer-upper my partner and I bought over the summer and will finally move into this weekend, to my great relief (it’s felt like I’d be painting and spackling forever!) and then I will start painting a mural in the living room. The house was built in 1919 and has had time to accumulate some truly strange choices on the part of the many former owners, and I’m finding it deeply charming, aside from the murder room cold storage in the basement. My tastes run to the maximalist so I expect the mural will gradually grow out of control over time. You may picture me grinning aggressively here.

It’s always a great time to go to Montreal and last weekend was no exception. I am lucky to live a short plane ride away. I met up with one of my closest friends for a girls’ trip (I’ve posted a bunch of photos on socials for those of you interested). One of the highlights of the trip was two beautiful editions of graphic novels, originally in German and translated into French, of Pride and Prejudice and Emma, by Claudia Kühn, Tara Spruit, and of course Jane Austen. Having been born and mostly raised prior to the Charter right to French education having been passed, my French is pretty atrocious, but I can read with only a little trouble, and since I already know the stories of these books so well, it’s a pleasure to pore over them.

I have no real writing news this month. I was the featured poet in the August 2025 issue of Scifaikuest but haven’t seen my copy yet, presumably because of all the silly buggers being played with international shipping right now. Otherwise, all of my time has been spent on prepping and priming the house we just bought so we can paint over the many, many drywall patches left after we had the original 1919 wiring replaced. It’s a cute little 2 bed 1 bath fixer-upper and I couldn’t be more thrilled about it, but we’re going to have to put in a lot of sweat equity to make it workable.

Next month I will begin substantive edits on my novel Aether and Ego. I’m new to the editing process from the author side so I am interested to see how it goes, and excited to get feedback from the editor Inanna is providing. I’ll keep you all posted on how that goes!

Enormous news! Inanna Publications, a small-but-mighty feminist press based in Toronto, has accepted my Austenesque novel Aether and Ego for publication in autumn of 2026. I am, of course, absolutely over the moon.

Just published: Some poems. Jesus Murphy, who cares, I have a book coming out! Ahahahahahahahaha. OK, I’m better now, here we go: The Orchards Poetry Journal reprinted “Sealed in Nectar,” which was in my poetry collection 20 years ago. You can read it here: PDF. It also won 2nd place in their Grantchester Award. A few haiku: “her snoring”, “plovers,” and “skyward asphalt.” I’ll also be the featured poet in the August print edition of Scifaikuest, which I am pretty psyched about.

Currently reading: I’m on a Natasha Pulley run at the moment, rereading The Mars House after having read her new The Hymn to Dionysus. Also read this month: Kate Heartfield’s The Embroidered Book and The Tapestry of Time and Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey (all very much recommended).

Currently writing: Answers to Inanna’s author questionnaire, which is really a remarkable document listing items they need for promotion, and which I’m nearly done. Also still poking at The Ministry of Fae, same as last month, the ending of which is still driving me bonkers.

Just published: 50-Word Stories posted my micro flash “Miners for Valles Marineris.”

Currently reading: I’m on a Graham Greene run right now, after last month’s search for “The Ministry of” in Libby offered “The Ministry of Fear” and I thought, oh, I’ve never read any Graham Greene and he’s supposed to be quite good. The Ministry of Fear (a WWII amnesia lark actually published during the war) was great fun, and then I read Travels with My Aunt which I found rather lackluster and weirdly (since it was published in 1969 and has one very-’60s-hippie character) more typical-mid-20th-Century-British-supremacist than the one set in WWfrickinII, but I thought I would try one more and so I am currently reading Our Man in Havana, which I can’t really decide if I like. The main character is pretty gormless and no character is likable (and I don’t need a book to have likable characters if it’s a choice, but I have this sneaking suspicion Greene thought the main character was quite a good chap), but the basic concept of a vacuum salesman pretending to be a spy is pretty funny and I’m interested to see how the spy aspect works itself out. Also, content warning, the first sentence drops the n-word.

I also read Meredith Hambrock’s She's a Lamb! which is an absolute riot.

Currently writing: Anyway I’ve been inspired to use a Ministry of title and so the current WIP is The Ministry of Fae. We’ll see if I can figure out the ending, which is giving me fits.

Just published: 50-Word Stories posted my micro flash “Ring Around the Coffeepot.”

Currently reading: I’m juggling two novels right now: The Prairie Chicken Dance Tour by Dawn Dumont and The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, both very good so far.

Currently writing: I finished the ghost/vampire novel! I wanted to write something completely self-indulgent and cozy and fun and maybe a little dumb and apparently I’m not capable of that because it’s also about grief and loneliness. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I’m planning to spend June working on short stories.

Title is from “Coffee Hour” by John Frederick Frank.

Recent publications: Two online, both haiku: “your roughshod hair” in Enchanted Garden and “leaning against my mother” in Under the Bashō. Two in print only: haiku “planting the for-sale sign” in Kingfisher Journal and poems “The Rainy Season” and “The World Ocean” in Blood & Bourbon.

Recently on Metafilter: I’m a long-time poster on this discussion board and have been promoting small presses there since Small Press Distribution went out of business. Currently I’m doing a series of posts to promote Canadian small presses, three at a time. I have another 20 of these suckers lined up in a Word doc and am only about halfway through my original list so I’ll be doing this for another couplethree months. I’ve been cross-posting the link on Bluesky and Mastodon if you want reminders to check back.

Currently reading: I finished the series by Christelle Dabos that I mentioned in my last newsletter (highly recommended if you like YA) and have since read several books, of which I recommend Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model. I’m about to start T. Kingfisher’s A Sorceress Comes to Call (you can tell I’m reading Hugo noms).

Yooooo it’s a pants-on-head bonkers day but hopefully you’re all doing okay nonetheless. A very quick writerly update:

Recent publications: Three poems out this week: “Patina of a Well-Rained Street” (in Petrichor’s Pebbles section) and “Throwing Signs” and “Tighten to Bruise” (Pictura Journal), online or in pdf, along with an author interview.

Currently reading: The Mirror Visitor Quartet by French author Christelle Dabos, translated by Hildegarde Serle. These are silly but very well-done post-cataclysm/coming-of-age/magician-learning-their-abilities YA novels. I’m just at the beginning of the fourth (and final) book. The story itself is fun, but most of the charm is in the sentence-level observations, and the bonkers world-building of floating arks over an apparently dead Earth containing different families with different magical powers and different treacherous politics.

_{Title is from “Even Bees Know What Zero Is” by Christian Wiman.}

Just a super quick note. Things are getting pretty sticky, aren’t they? Some stuff to do about all that. I’ve been reading a lot of detective stories¹, because it’s reassuring to spend time with problems that are solvable, but I also just finished Chin-Sun Lee’s Upcountry, which was rather dark but very readable. Recommended. And I had the shortest of shorts published today: “Lightyears From Home” at 50-Word Stories. Hope you all enjoy it!

_{¹Josephine Tey and Margery Allingham, though I’ll warn you that occasionally they lean pretty hard into being mid-20th Century British people with all the jingoism and racism that implies.}

_{²Title is the first sentence of the story linked above.}

_{³Click “view this email online” below and you can comment at the bottom! Everything is public so take appropriate precautions if you want to say wildly intemperate things about our new god emperor.}

Recently on my website: Some current events/stuff to do on my website, with some non-news fun, like Rita Moreno & Animal doing “Fever.” Also, Dave and I really leaned into the Canuckistan activities by attending the Dartmouth Ice Sculpture Festival.

Currently reading: Just finished Josephine Tey’s A Shilling for Candles, a fun golden age detective story, aside from one jarring single-paragraph reminder of racist colonialist thought.

Currently writing: I’m 36,000 words into a ghost/vampire novel that’s also a meditation on loneliness. I’ve been spending some of my spare time playing with erasure poems, the physicality of which feel like a rebellion against the gen-AI slop being forced on us. Also, an acceptance from Enchanted Garden Haiku for April.

Yoooo. Thanks for signing up for my newsletter! I’ll try to keep these relatively short and useful.

Recent publication: “Easy Bake” at The Baltimore Review.

Recently on my website: I’ve started a monthly round-up of interesting, useful, hilarious, or explanatory links. I’ll do a new one each month and update regularly, so it’s worth bookmarking and revisiting. So far this month: a bunch of news, Zillow toilets, poisoning AI slop with .ass titles, and how to make edible geodes.

Currently reading: Helene Tursten’s An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good (Soho Press), kind of the opposite of Miss Marple.

Recommended reading: “Love Was This Alone” by David Lerner Schwartz (New Orleans Review), a well-observed short.