Hello all far and wide, welcome to the last newsletter of the year!
News & Updates
I, in the Shadows is out next month!
Preorders: Bookshop.org (US) | Barnes & Noble | Waterstones | Forbidden Planet
If you want to read it early, it’s up on NetGalley US and NetGalley UK. Page Street (US) and Titan (UK) may still have some physical proofs floating around, so if you want those, reach out to them <3
I will be doing a couple of in-person UK events for Shadows, to be shared on my Instagram (and the first newsletter of next year)
The US paperback for My Throat an Open Grave is out next month! In case you missed it, I will be donating all MTAOG royalties in perpetuity (you can read more about that decision here)
The Second Death of Locke was named one of the best books of 2025 by Kobo and Amazon, so that’s fun!
If you’re looking to snag an ebook, it’s $1.99/£1.99 on a few retailer sites (definitely reduced on UK ebook sites right now, and reduced on US Bookshop.org)
I should be sending another Locke bonus short next month or the one following
We have officially revealed the title for The Hand and the Heart 2! Excited to say that it’s called THE THIEF AND THE TRAITOR BRIDE. Official copy: A ruthless spy. A deadly mission. A thief who could ruin it all.The Thief and the Traitor Bride is a standalone romantic fantasy set in the world of the Sunday Times and USA Today bestselling novel The Second Death of Locke.Nore Gordon is a woman of many talents: she can speak a variety of languages, disguise herself in plain sight, and has made a name for herself as a successful wine merchant. But unbeknownst to even those closest to her, it is all a front for Nore’s true role as the favoured spy of the Lindle crown.Tasked with infiltrating enemy lands in search of a powerful relic, Nore is forced to engage the services of a great thief. Unfortunately, the only person for the job is her estranged husband, Caspian. Both Nore and Caspian bear the scars of the disastrous end of their marriage, but if they are to survive their deadly new assignment, they must pose as a happily married couple to avoid detection.As danger closes in, Nore finds herself tangled in a web of lies and deceit—and though Caspian is at the centre of it all, she may not hate him as much as she once did. But Caspian has betrayed her before, and trust can be far more deadly than deception.
Writing Corner
I’m deep in edits for TTATTB, and have been having Feelings. Before I get into it, a snippet for you:
“Finch?”
The voice was quiet, tender, as if it had been ripped straight from her memories. Nore recoiled—she must’ve made some noise, must’ve pushed the door in the jamb or breathed too close to a sob.
Nore jumped away as if she’d been burned. Her heart pounded in her chest. He did not sound like he was just on the other side of the door—she imagined he was still restrained, in some way; his freedom intrinsically tied to her mercy—but the sound of his voice ripped straight through her as if he was just there, close enough to touch.
General Chatter
Whenever anyone has asked me over the last month how editing is going, my automatic answer is, “Do you know what the twisties are?”
The answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no. My therapist immediately said, “Oh! The yips!” Anyone who has read Deep End by Ali Hazelwood responds enthusiastically, as is right and good.
The twisties, as defined by a BBC piece on Simone Biles: “In gymnastics, it can cause a person to lose their sense of space and dimension as they’re in the air, causing them to lose control of their body and do extra twists or flips that they hadn’t intended. In the worst cases, they can find themselves suddenly unable to land safely.”
You may be wondering what this has to do with editing. Well, for me, editing has always been an intuitive process. Like most authors, I don’t think I can actually explain what’s happening in my brain as I go from draft A to draft B. I know the process, of course: I read the edit letter, I make notes; I read the book, I make notes; I go through the book and change the shape of it, chipping away at a sentence level until the things I wanted to cram in somehow end up where they should be. My brain knows when something ends up “right” and when something is off, even if I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is. I’m fairly chill about editing—I love tearing a book apart and putting it back together in a new shape.
But what if you can’t find that intuition? This has been the struggle for the last few weeks: if 80% of my process is about trusting myself, I can’t really do that if I lose the shape of things while metaphorically midair.
It has been such an odd one, because I love this book. I think Traitor Bride may be one of my favorites! So even when I’m flailing, I know I’m still working on something I love, and I just need to land. You would think that, by this point in my career, I would know that despair is just part of the process sometimes, but here we are. I drafted the book last year and only tweaked it a bit early this year before turning it in, so some of it is distance, unpicking something that I’m not as close to, and some of it is added pressure. I’m delighted Locke has done as well as it has, but that also has me feeling some type of way about book 2! I’m terrified of disappointing anyone, terrified of ruining people’s favorite characters, but I also know that I need to write the book I want to write, and I hope that y’all trust me.
If you’re also flailing mid-edit, here are some things that helped me:
Rubber ducking. This one is obvious, but sometimes you need a friend who deeply knows the plot of the book and you can just go over hypotheticals. (Related: Sorry to all of my friends who have had to listen to me.)
Editing dialogue via Excel. In particularly squirrely conversations, I’ve started pulling out the dialogue, putting it in Excel, and going line by line with no dialogue tags or other description. Here, I track the information the reader needs to get with every line, plus if there’s any sort of implied meaning or hidden meaning. It also helps me get rid of repetition, which I know I struggle with, especially when it comes to worldbuilding.
With complicated character motivation, make a map so you know exactly who knows what when and why they’re doing what they’re doing. Traitor Bride is one of the most complicated plots I’ve worked on—the whole book is about magic theory, and everyone is doing secretive things—so the motivation has to be really clear to me, even if it’s not clear to the reader at that point in the manuscript. Then, going back: that motivation, when it’s revealed, has to make just as much sense at the beginning when it’s not known as it does at the end, when it is. I was chatting with a friend the other day, and she expressed her frustration about a twist reveal of a murderer—because when the murderer is revealed, all the questions they asked earlier in the story no longer made sense. You don’t want the reveals to undo all the work of the early narrative.
Sometimes the only way out… is to start over. I tie myself in knots and overcomplicate something when a simpler (yet still enticing!) plot point or mechanism would work just as well.
Recommendations: The Year in Review
I always feel like I don’t read enough, but while I was looking through my list for this year, I realized that I actually read over 50 books! It’s sometimes difficult to feel productive when it seems that everyone else is reading SO MUCH MORE, but I’m trying not to compare my productivity with the polished version of things we see online.
So, here were some of my highlights of the year:
-Brighter Than Scale, Swifter Than Flame by Neon Yang - I’ve really been into novellas this year, and this one struck a lovely chord. Yeva, a dragon-killing knight, is sent to a neighboring country to investigate a dragon lost mid-hunt, and finds more than she anticipated in the nation’s girl-king.
-The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson - I read this one for research for my 2027 necromantasy book (which, to be clear, is not an Odyssey retelling, but is informed by it). I wasn’t expecting to be so drawn in by this, but it was masterfully translated.
-The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri - Ok yes I know I have been yelling about this one a lot, but there were so many times during this book that I just felt SO MANY FEELINGS. The book is about Vina, a knight, and Simran, a witch, who are living through a reincarnation tale that calls for both of their deaths. It features one of my favorite found family dynamics of the last decade.
-The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson - call me, cain ballari (need I say more)
-The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar - Gorgeous, stunning, bury me in El-Mohtar’s prose. Two sisters negotiate the uneasy relationship between their village and the fae next door, plus societal and familial expectations.
-The Knight and the Butcherbird by Alix E. Harrow - Another novella? For me???? Cried on vacation (if you’re sensing a theme and the theme is crying, yes). I loved this weird Appalachian tale of knighthood and grief in a pseudo-dystopia.
-In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado - Loved Her Body and Other Parties and bought this one right when it came out in paperback, yet somehow did not read it until this year. Dream House is part memoir, part essay on queer domestic violence, part critical analysis, part folkloristics. Basically, it checked so many boxes for me and I was once again blown away by Machado’s use of language.
-The Last Tale of the Flower Bride by Roshani Chokshi - Such a gem. I picked it up originally because it’s beautiful and short, and I loved the prose. I’m constantly chasing the high of Deathless, and this had that dreamy, ethereal prose with utterly gorgeous writing.
-Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou - This one snuck up on me! I started it on a transatlantic flight and basically did not put it down. A PhD scholar studying a deceased Chinese poet discovers he may not be who he says he was.
And that’s all! See y’all in 2026 <3