Summer is flying by, and somehow it’s already August—which means The Bone Brides comes out in just a month and a half! How is that possible? At this point, I feel like I’m running downhill and juuuust about to topple head-over-heels and roll the rest of the way down!

Last month I attended BayCon and WriteHive, both of which were so much fun and I hope will become regular features of my summers. My big convention news for August is that I will be on 6(!!!) panels at WorldCon in LA. So if you want to hear me talk Sapphic fantasy novels, anime gems, and SFF adapted for the stage, look no further!

In non-convention news, The Bone Brides has its second and third sparkling trade reviews! “A marvelous, metaphorical masquerade,” says Kirkus! “Readers who love eerie fantasy, lush imagery, and queer romance will enjoy this book,” says School Library Journal! You can check out the full reviews here and here.

Congratulations to [email protected], who has won the raffle for an ARC of The Bone Brides! I’ll be emailing you shortly to get the address to which you’d like me to mail the book. I hope you enjoy it! Let me know if you want the copy Lysander tasted in process of taking the below photo ;P

Thanks to an article I’m writing, I’ve recently been gobbling my way through a stack of books featuring changelings, several of which make use of the idea that faeries have “true” names. In traditional lore, knowing a faery’s true name grants a person power over them, so such names are not given away lightly. For a well-known example of this conceit, see any telling of “Rumpelstiltskin.”

Names have power—and I don’t for a minute believe that that’s exclusive to the fae.

Think about the power a name holds for a trans person in the asserting of their true identity. Or for monarchs whose names are changed when they ascend the throne. Or for people who marry and then choose whether one member of the couple takes the other’s last name or to hyphenate or to create an entirely new family name altogether. (My own last name is a bit of a combination, hyphenated but also modified.)

I think about names a lot. I imagine all writers do—after all, we end up naming so very many characters. One major advantage we have over new parents naming a baby is that we get to choose names while already knowing a character’s personality, rather than simply hoping the name ends up being their match. We don’t have to worry about if a character will be teased for their name or if their name will be detrimental to their job prospects, unless we want those to be factors in our story. Moreover, we get to choose thematically important reasons for names—or not! If we’re writing in the speculative space, we can even invent names entirely! Names say so much. They are load-bearing details of character- and world-building that pretty much no writer can avoid and that I think most revel in. Names tell us not only about a character but also about their parents (since, presumably, their fictional parents chose their name for a reason), time period and place (nothing drops me more immediately into the 90s USA of my childhood than a book of Jessicas and Ashleys), and culture (whether that culture is real or invented), among many, many other things.

Although The Bone Brides is my first faery book, it is far from the first book I’ve written to talk about the power of names. Names are, in fact, a motif I return to again and again. I have written characters who take ownership over new identities by giving themselves second names. I have written characters who wield power over others by bestowing on them nicknames. I don’t even mean magical power—I mean that when you decide what you are going to call someone, rather than letting them tell you what they wish to be called, that is power. The power can be positive—a loving nickname from a friend can make you feel warm and cared for—but there are a lot of ways it can be negative, too.

Names are a smaller aspect of The Bone Brides—the faery realm of its story isn’t one in which “true” names are of importance in the traditional sense—but they’re there, most notably in a scene in which the book’s changelings argue about whether they should be called by their faery names or the names of the human babies with whom they were once exchanged. Here’s a tiny excerpt:

“Kelly,” the changeling slurs, water in their voice, “is the name of the child I was switched with. It’s the name I grew up knowing. I lived sixteen years as Kelly. It was only when I was brought back here that they named me...” Mucusy tears fall from blue-rimmed eyes. “If I can, I would like to be Kelly again.”

Anyway, Juliet famously said, “That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet”—but Romeo’s name did matter in the end.

I have always loved baking bread. As a five-year-old, I made endless loaves of “T is for Turtle Bread” from the Alpha-Bakery cookbook my Baba had gotten for me by saving up proofs-of-purchase from Gold Medal Flour. By the time I was a teenager, I was kneading bread dough as a form of stress relief and bringing loaves of “Chocolate Cherry Bread” (from a Paul Hollywood cookbook teen-me bought at Barnes & Noble despite at the time having no idea who Paul Hollywood was) to school for my friends. So when a friend proposed that a bunch of us celebrate Lughnasadh, the Gaelic marker of the beginning of the harvest season, by baking bread together and playing board games, my answer was of course, YES!

(Side note: It only came to my attention morning-of, when my partner asked just what the heck Lughnasadh was and how it was that all of my friends knew about it, that not everyone grows up obsessed with books set in Gaelic Ireland/Scotland and steeped in traditional faerie and pagan lore. Oops.)

After dismissing any recipe that required significant proofing time as impractical for the purposes of a party, we chose two recipes, both from America’s Test Kitchen’s Everyday Bread book: “Fresh Corn Muffins with Cardamom-Brown Sugar Butter” and “Feta-Dill Zucchini Bread.” The corn muffins—more traditional for Lughnasadh—were very good but also nothing particularly exciting. The zucchini bread, on the other hand? I am obsessed and have already bought ingredients for two more loaves!

(Side note #2: Many moons ago, I was in the musical Of Thee I Sing. The show’s titular song includes the chorus, “Of thee I sing, baby... Summer, autumn, winter, spring, baby...” and all the vocal parts sing those words...except the basses. Underneath it all—and I frankly don’t think possibly heard by the audience—the basses are singing, “She can make corn muffins, she can make corn muffins, she can make corn muffins, MAKE corn muffins!” I will never in my life eat a corn muffin without thinking about this fabulous bit of lyricism, brought to you by the first musical ever to win the Pulitzer.)

Feta-Dill Zucchini Bread
(from Everyday Bread, by America’s Test Kitchen)

1 lb zucchini, shredded
2 cups all-purpose flour
½ cup whole-wheat flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp pepper
½ tsp salt
3 eggs
7 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted, divided
6 oz feta cheese, crumbled
1/3 cup chopped fresh dill

1. Preheat oven to 350 C. Grease 8.5"x4.5" loaf pan.

2. Place zucchini in a dish towel. Gather ends together and twist tightly over sink to drain as much liquid as possible.

3. Whisk AP flour through salt in a bowl. In another bowl, whisk eggs and 6 Tbsp melted butter, then stir in zucchini, feta, and dill. Gently fold zucchini mixture into flour mixture, then lightly knead batter until no dry spots remain (batter will be very thick). Transfer batter to prepared pan and brush with remaining 1 Tbsp melted butter.

4. [The original recipe says to bake for 1 hour + 5 minutes to 1.25 hours, rotating pan halfway through. We found, however, that it requires quite a bit more time to get cooked through—something more like 1.75 hours.] Cool bread 2 hours.

And my recommendation? Pop the slices in the toaster before eating!

Five or six years ago, I became fixated on the idea of having a koi pond. Sure, even if I had the money—which I don’t—and the yard—also nope—they’re nuisances to maintain and I’d probably end up sleeping outside like some kind of human scarecrow, flapping my arms at every passing predator-to-fish imaginable....but think of the afternoons spent daydreaming while watching the fish, their beautiful bodies slipping silently through the water! I have always loved water, anything that moves through water. The Bone Brides is a very watery book, and I have a very watery soul.

I will not pretend to be a reasonable person, but I am at least reasonable enough to recognize that I likely will never have a koi pond. Instead, I decided I’d have a koi pond-themed study.

This is probably a good moment to pause and say that our house...is weird. It’s a little like the Winchester House, minus the gun wealth, in that the former owner just sort of kept building odd additions. Thus it is that the room I call my study (and which he called his grow-room) is a peaked little thing, accessible only by walking through the garage, but with skylights and its own ship’s-prow-shaped deck and the most beautiful view in the whole house and a random toilet in the corner.

Anyway, I love my study, and my project of the last few months has been finally making it into the koi pond of my dreams.

Helping with that project has been my good friend Supriya—and may everyone be as fortunate as I am to have a friend who’s gung-ho to do adult arts and crafts together. (What is painting a room, after all, but adult arts and crafts?) Especially when you go at it as we did: haphazardly shoving the contents of the room from one side to the other instead of actually removing them; dribbling paint all over the place; and having an absurdly fun time of trying to figure out just how the heck to achieve a watery ombre affect.

Here are a few pictures of the end result. What do y’all think?

Speaking of friends helping with adult arts and crafts! The utterly magical koi lanterns you see photographed were made from kits designed by artist Yuumei and are exactly the kind of craft at which I am horrible—which is to say, the kind that requires method and precision, rather than simply freehanding stuff until the vibes are right. I backed the Kickstarter for the koi lanterns anyway because look at them, but thank goodness for two other friends, my partner, and my little brother, all of whom pitched in to help me make the suckers (and with only minor grumbling).

Yes, I know: you’re wondering about the toilet. It’s still a work-in-progress ;P

On December 30th, 1903, a fire at the Iroquois Theatre in Chicago caused 602 deaths and 250 additional injuries. That’s twice as many deaths as the Great Chicago Fire, despite being limited to a single building. In fact, the only single-building/complex disaster in American history to result in more deaths was the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001. The story and details of the Iroquois Theatre tragedy are haunting, and it’s the reason we now have regulations regarding marked exits, doors the open outward, and the use of crash bars on those doors.

I have always known that eventually I would write a theatre book, and I have always known that any theatre book I wrote would inevitably involve ghosts. Theatre ghosts were, in fact, the topic of my undergrad thesis, so to say they and I are long-acquainted would be an understatement.

Draw from these statements what you will.

Always,
Marley