Subject: Exciting News, Everyone!

Dear all,

Guess what! It’s cover day!!!

I have been clutching this secret to - no, okay, it’s a little too spikey for that, let us say instead ‘lovingly concealing’ this for months now, and it has been so hard. And when we say ‘concealing.’ I have shown it to bookstore clerks. Colleagues at work. I confess it is possibly true that at one point at Endeavour I begged the audience to not take photos and briefly (briefly!) waved my tablet upon which a certain downloaded dot jpeg may have coincidentally have been open at the time. No jury would convict!!

I am perhaps not very good at secrets. But! Can you blame me? Isn’t it pretty? Look at the hand! The blood drips! The thorns! The finials!! The Resurrection Chalice has never looked so ominous… (Which is, as y’all will find out in seven months, entirely in character 👀) Artist Cho-Hyun Kim did a fantastic job, and I very much hope to work with her again for Book Two >:D

But also~

Preorders are now live! That’s right! Alongside the cover comes the release of BoQs into the wild! You can now find her for sale in all sorts of funny places, such as Bookshop.org, B&N, that one place named after a jungle… I will keep my linktree up to date with all the latest buy links, as for now these are simply the US options. I do however hope to offer an option for signed pre-orders, so Watch This Space if you would like to hold out for that. Otherwise: have at it! Heck, go nuts, order two - I am informed that books make great gifts! May release-date books do not generally make great Christmas gifts but perhaps a book featuring the Anglican church as a death cult might make a fun late-Easter blasphemy gift? Who can say! It’s very gay! Perhaps someone in your life has need of that energy. One’s elderly relatives contain all sorts.

Web Security sidebar - we all have heard about the PHP vulnerability and checked our wordpress sites got upgraded, yes? Yes, good, glad to hear it. Not to put my other hat on for a second (hello, hi, my name is Macey, sometimes people pay me to fix the internet), but the cursèd robots of Our Times are wreaking havoc* on web security, and unfortunately they’re doing so to such a degree it likely will spill over onto layfolk (such as, say, writer types) who dabble enough to own tiny websites. Stay safe, friends! Most of you should be totally fine!

* not necessarily causatively! arguably this time they helped! still.

On Reading: And now we have reached The End and I have failed utterly to serve you a book rec, haven’t I. Well, alas, for I have been Eaten by the Copy Edit Grue, so that is simply how it must be this month. Perhaps a slower rec? I have been making the acquaintance of Elsewhere - a poetry and essay anthology edited by Eliot Weinberger - for months, since confusedly discovering it on my shelf with no memory of purchase. Containing poems about ‘being somewhere else,’ largely in translation, and framing texts on the poets’ contexts, it’s meditative and curious and piercing. There’s something about seeing a place through the eyes of a stranger that renders the insights pitilessly clear, and I think I love it. Highly recommend.

May you too have a strange and piercing insight sometime soon, if you would like one,
Macey