Last month I had the honor of being on four different panels at Wiscon, discussing crossdressing sword-girls, asexuality rep, retellings, and nested storytelling! This month, I’m gearing up for BayCon! For those in the California Bay Area who would rather spend 4th of July weekend celebrating the hope, power, and fun of speculative fiction than the mess that is our country, I hope you will join me and four other awesome Bay Area debut authors as we talk about the highs, the lows, and the WTFs of having our publishing dreams come true!

But there’s more! The weekend after BayCon, I’ll also be joining WriteHive’s annual conference, where I’ll be reading a short excerpt from The Bone Brides as part of the “Read Anything” event on Saturday evening, July 11th, starting at 6pm Pacific/9pm Eastern. So if you want to be among the first to hear a tiny bit of The Bone Brides, along with lots of other cool writing, be sure to mark your calendars! The conference is both virtual and free!

In non-convention news, The Bone Brides has its first trade review—and it’s glowing! “[A] fascinating exploration of grief [...] equal parts gritty adventure and sweeping love story,” says Publishers Weekly! You can check out the full review here.

And, and, and I got ARCs! It took me until several days after the box had arrived to open them (because I am an Extremely Normal Person, and it all just felt too real), but I haven’t been able to stop staring at them since. I mean, just look at these beauties!

Giveaway Alert! Anyone subscribed to this newsletter prior to the next issue’s mailing in early August will automatically be entered in a raffle to win a print ARC! So if you’d like a chance to win an ARC of The Bone Brides of your very own, make sure that you’re subscribed!

It’s June, which, among other things, means that every queer author you know is hustling to remind you that they have books! queer books! please support queer books! it’s really, really important to support queer books!...for fear that you might forget us during the other eleven months of the year. (Please read queer all year. We don’t stop existing once the rainbow displays come down, and neither do our stories.)

It’s June, and I am a queer writer with a queer book coming out—and I am feeling the simultaneous push/pull of knowing this is an important time to promote my work while also worrying that I am not “queer enough” to do so.

I officially came out in 2016, the day after Trump’s first election. I had never been dreadfully secretive about my queerness—I’m not sure I’m capable of being dreadfully secretive about my feelings on much of anything, really—but I also had never said I was queer anywhere public before that day. At the time, I was a teacher, and I thought it important that I use my relative (white, upper-middle class, living in liberal California) privilege to be a vocal queer presence in support of those who could not safely do so.

I loved—and love—being 100% out. The thing is, though, I do not “look” queer. I have long hair in my natural color, no tattoos, no particularly cool piercings, and an extremely femme wardrobe. I want so badly for my fellow queers to know me on sight, but only once in my life have I been clocked by a stranger as queer: I was hanging out at a street festival with a friend who does look quintessentially queer, and someone mistakenly assumed we were a couple. It was exhilarating.

Complicating things further is that my partner, whom I met and fell in love with in 2019, is a man. Although I am bi, it somehow had not occurred to me that I might end up with a man? We got married; we have a child. He fully supports my queerness and is absolutely my One True Person. Queerness is still a vital part of my life, yet I have never “looked” less queer than in this moment.

So what does that mean for my very queer book? We live in a time when readers want to know whether the authors of queer books are, themselves, queer. I understand the reasoning: queer people are better suited to write queer books from a place of authenticity. The books tend to be better, truer. It’s a double-sided sword, though, and plenty of authors have been hurt. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the vicious dogpiling that drove actual cinnamon roll Becky Albertalli, author of the iconic Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, from the public eye because readers believed her to be straight. Will the same happen to me if readers know I’m married to a man? Will they deem my book “less” queer? My stories “less” authentic?

I have been asked whether The Bone Brides has lesbian rep, bisexual rep, pansexual rep—and the answer is, I don’t honestly know. Perhaps I should have chosen explicit sexualities for Nola and Lumi, but I didn’t. What I wrote instead is a book about two girls who are very much in love and whose queerness is never in question.

I love Pride Month and all excitement that it brings for queer stories. But sometimes I wish that queerness didn’t have to be a question. I’m tired of having to prove a right to my own identity.

Periodically I feel the need to remind the world of my absolute favorite underloved ingredient: hearts of palm.

What do they taste like? Creamy and vaguely vegetal, similar to a mild artichoke heart—but I frankly like them better than artichoke hearts, and they’re cheaper, so long as you buy them in the right places.

Where should I buy them? If you’re in the US, they’re only $2.49/can at Trader Joe’s!

What can I do with them? Oh, I’m so glad you asked!

For starters, you can make my absolute favorite it-only-takes-a-minute lunch. Chop 2 cans’ worth of hearts of palm into coins. Add 10oz halved cherry tomatoes and 2 cups defrosted frozen peas. Toss with your favorite salad dressing and—if, like me, you enjoy spice—add some chili pepper flakes. Voila! That’s it! I am serious when I say I make this every other week.

Or are you perhaps looking for something slightly more complex? Might I suggest trying out these fabulous vegan “fish” tacos?

Vegan “Fish” Tacos
(adapted from thestingyvegan.com)

1 lime, zested and juiced
3/4 teaspoon salt, divided
1 mango, diced
2 avocados, diced
1 red onion, diced
½ cup soy yogurt
2 teaspoons adobo sauce from a can of chipotle peppers
2 cans hearts of palm
oil for frying
1 cup flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 cup ice water (put some ice cubes in a measuring cup first then add water to reach 1 cup)
12 small tortillas, toasted in a pan or warmed in the microwave
small bunch of cilantro, chopped

1. Combine the mango, avocado, and red onion in a bowl and refrigerate.

2. Combine the yogurt, adobo sauce, lime juice and zest, and ¼ teaspoon salt in a separate bowl and refrigerate.

3. Slice the hearts of palm crosswise and lengthwise, each into four pieces. Heat the oil in a pan over medium-high heat and prepare a plate lined with paper towels. Make sure all the taco fixings are ready and the oil is hot before you mix up the batter.

4. In a bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder, and ½ teaspoon salt. Whisk in the ice water to make a thick batter. Don’t over mix this, it’s okay if there are still some lumps. Drop in a few pieces of hearts of palm and transfer them to the hot oil. Work in batches to avoid dropping the temp of the oil. Fry, flipping once if necessary, for a couple of minutes until they are golden brown, then remove them to the paper towel-lined plate to drain.

5. Serve all the fixings on top of warmed tortillas with a drizzle of sauce on top and a sprinkling of fresh cilantro.

My son turned one year old this month, and after some time spent deliberating how to celebrate in a way that felt meaningful yet also acknowledged that it wasn’t a day he’d understand as different from any other, I decided that I would start a tradition of sewing him bespoke plushies. As he gets older, he’ll be able to tell me what animals/colors/etc he wants, but for this first year, I took my best guess, settling on a purple llama, since he adores Anna Dewdney’s Llama Llama books and always grabs first for purple toys within mixed sets.

This, I suppose, is where I tell you that I consider myself a pretty good, albeit completely unschooled sewist. I’ve been sewing since I was a child, starting with Halloween costumes whose work I slowly took over from my mother. In the years since, I’ve crafted a fair gamut of cosplay of which I am proud.

However. I had only ever sewn one stuffed animal before...and let me tell you, the three-dimensionality is an entirely different ballgame.

For example, how does one sew a monstrosity like this without its puckering?? I ask you??

Not to mention the fur! The fur. Mad respect to furries who sew their own fur-suits, because it sheds absolutely everywhere, it’s hard to cut, it’s thick to pin, and it’s a nightmare to rip incorrect seams from. I also somehow managed to cut half my pieces with the fur going the wrong direction? I swear I made sure I was with the grain before I cut! And yet!

Llama-friend did turn out okay, though, and my son loves him. Now that I’ve committed to sewing one of these suckers every year, I guess I’ll eventually figure things out.

I don’t read much non-fiction, but I recently gobbled my way through Ruth Goodman’s How to Be a Victorian: a Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life. For those unfamiliar with Goodman, she is a British historian perhaps best known for the BBC show Victorian Farm, for which she lived like a Victorian farmer for an entire year. In other words: when it comes to day-to-day life of the Victorian period, she knows her stuff! (She is equally knowledgeable about the Tudor period, and I absolutely need to read her book about that, too.)

All of which is to say that I have spent a lot of this month going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole about Victorian toothpaste, “health” corsets, calisthenics, plunge pools, and more!

Always,
Marley