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Amethyst Prince

Look, I’ve loved Two Steps From Hell for a long time. I don’t bother to peruse their albums before purchasing; I just toss them into my download cart without question. Then I add them to playlists and play them, straight through or on shuffle. So I don’t actually know the titles of all the songs I love, weird as that may sound.

Tonight I’m editing the climactic scenes of The Prince’s Song. The prince in question is the Amethyst Prince, whose traditional court title happens also to recall the properties of amethyst, once considered to have purifying effects to negate alcohol or other intoxicating effects. This speaks to the character’s isolation in a performatively hedonistic culture very different from his own values.

A 3D-rendered image of a book titled "Hauntings and Hoarfrost," edited by Rhonda Parrish. The cover features an icy, dark design with intricate frost patterns surrounding the text. The book is standing upright, slightly angled.

Hauntings And Hoarfrost

A 3D-rendered image of a book titled "Hauntings and Hoarfrost," edited by Rhonda Parrish. The cover features an icy, dark design with intricate frost patterns surrounding the text. The book is standing upright, slightly angled.

A new anthology is coming!

This one is really fun, where “fun” means full of gothic fantasy and dark, wintry chills. It’s the perfect January read — or for my southern hemisphere friends, it’s a great way to cool off during the peak of the summer. (No, really, I wrote my chilling tale of shivery threat while living in brutal heat. Try it!)

This book is simply dripping with icy dark aesthetic.

Last Call for our Giftmas Create-A-Thon :)

Red logo of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), featuring a stylized figure running, composed of red lines and a red dot on a white background.

If you pledged for our charity fundraiser, please remember to make your contribution to Doctors Without Borders. If you didn’t pledge, there’s still time to join us! We are so close, but not quite to, our goal of $1,500.

Fun fact: Your US dollars can count for more because it’s a Canadian-hosted fundraiser.

If you see this after the closing time — go ahead and donate anyway. It’ll do good even if we don’t get any credit.

The Black Friday sale

Here in the US of A, we have a modern tradition of Black Friday sales and corresponding Black Friday alert emails to fill your inbox. Yeah, we’re doing that here, too.

A Holiday Sparkle Book Sticker with a tree in the shape of a book.

20% off!

That’s right, 20% off nearly the entire web store! Ebooks, paperbacks, hardbacks, stickers, pins, nearly everything!

Holiday Cards! 2024 Edition

Every year, I offer to send Christmas cards to anyone who wants one. It’s been so much fun to send cards all over the world!

After the card requests really took off, I started considering how I could manage costs while still making cards available to anyone who wanted one, free of charge. Last year’s experiment went very well, ending with a donation to a food bank, so we’re doing a simpler version this year.

Giftmas Create-A-Thon!

Many of you will remember that I typically participate in Giftmas each year, a writers’ fundraising event for a food bank. This year, we’re doing something a little different! A bunch of writers and creators are working toward various goals, and we’re asking for your pledges to support… 

Honeysuckle Must Die! (Dealing With Invasive Species)

The husband and I have been tackling invasive species on our property.

The primary offender and target is Amur Honeysuckle, also called Asian Bush Honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii). It looks nothing like a native honeysuckle, but some people deliberately planted it in gardens, and that was a terrible idea. Now, it’s freakin’ everywhere, and it’s a problem — it don’t feed much of anything here, so it spreads ferociously while reducing useful food for native insects and animals.

A narrow paved path runs alongside a grassy area bordered by trees and bushes. The foliage is dense and green, creating a natural barrier. The sky is overcast, adding a hint of gray to the scene.

Look at how this shrub spreads — it’s very dense, and the native seedlings are going to have a tough time finding a place to grow. It also dries out the soil and increases predator access to bird nests, reducing populations. And even if you don’t care about native plants and birds and pollinators, you might care that the spread of this invasive changes the local ecosystem with the result of a lot more ticks. (More ticks and thus more tick disease are already a climate-related problem; let’s not add to it!)

Thoughts on A Message from NaNoWriMo

I got an email today from the National Novel Writing Month head office, as I suspect many did. I have feelings. And questions.

First, I genuinely believe someone in the office is panicking and backtracking and did not endorse all that was said and done in the last month. From what I understand, the initial generative AI comments were not fully endorsed by all NaNo staff and board members, or even known in advance. It’s got to be rough to find out your organization kinda called people with disabilities incapable of writing a story on their own, and overtly called people with ethics racists and ablists, by reading the reactions on social media — and then your organization’s even worse counter-reactions on social media.

I still think NaNoWriMo has a good mission and many people in it with good goals.

But I think NaNoWriMo is SERIOUSLY missing a point in its performative progressivism. (For the record, I actually support many progressive policies, and I support many of the same concepts NaNoWriMo claims to support, and I applaud providing materials to underfunded schools and support to marginalized groups historically not producing as many writers, etc. The issue here is not “whether or not woke is okay” — it’s whether or not the virtue signaling is still in line with the core mission.)

Also, honesty. (That’s below.)

We are funded!

I’m currently at Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ Colorado Gold conference, both speaking and learning from some awesome authors and publishers. But also, we just wrapped up BackerKit’s first ever Booktopia, with my new epic fantasy series The Eyes of Mandoral, and we rocked it!