Patreon shorts + might work on a small side story to get back into the swing of things/build up to our next series

Hopeful despite all odds was a running theme for both of us LAST year

In 2025, Iris celebrated her first year of sobriety, Foxglove moved to a new place, we worked on a new book series (it’s coming along!) and published a Starian Tale featuring Yves and Charon. We are ready to kick off the new year!

This holiday season, bundle up with a steamy, Queer ds-verse romance set on a frozen island: a.co/d/4mQE8rB

Everyone say hi to Foxglove (who forgot to sign up for social media again)!

A professor once waxed philosophic about a misogynist’s poem before telling me that mine would never sell because it involved magic/fantasy. She said that I should stick to writing about “the real world.” The poem she’d been trashing had just been accepted into a magazine.

If you come into a public place, unmasked, and sneeze on everyone before loudly complaining to the world at large about how miserable and sick you feel, they HATE you Signed, someone who woke up sick at 3am

We have wildly different preferred writing environments. Foxglove: sitting weirdly on a chair, possibly upside-down, writing on the phone in complete silence Iris: In the middle of a sensory maelstrom, but the keyboard + computer system is immaculate

Having sudden imposter syndrome in the middle of writing an intense scene is less than fun, because in one moment, a hot man is suffering, and the next, a hot (due to HRT hot flashes) man is suffering

Speaking of cats hating the strangest things, the black cat hates the McElroy brothers specifically? I kid you not, I can put on any other podcast or music and he’s fine, but if I put on MBMBAM he will yowl and smack the phone around until I turn it off.

The kitten is now afraid of the following things: -snow -the Christmas tree -the heater -the soft warm blanket Does she just… hate winter? She might hate winter.

Every now and then I see a clickbait article run across my feed that says “it’s time for this underrated fantasy show to get a remake,” and every single time, without fail, the show in question is the 10th Kingdom

This little Christmas ghost romance is half off, if you have fifty cents and a burning urge to read something a little different from what I normally write (no jokes in this story, only hauntings and longings)

It's that day again. Try and have a good one. 🦉

I am brimming with holiday spirit

Sariel has black cat vibes because he basically IS a black cat. Sebastien: Cat energy, but the .05 percentage of cats that are actually graceful Astra: the 99.95% of cats that are NOT graceful whatsoever and keep needing to be rescued from the top of doors (how did they get there???)

Characters with big labrador retriever energy: Sasha Aleks (a little) Levi, but only because he keeps eating things he shouldn’t Hear me out, Azaiah (Good-natured, follows Nyx around like a puppy, loves people sooooo much)

I’d say that the character of ours who most accurately represents a scrungly little cat that you have to fish out of the gutter would be Marius Chastain. That man gets the worst haircut of his life, rolls down a muddy hill, is exposed to Hiking, and gets hunted by multiple burly men.

If you’re wondering why we’ve seemed quiet lately, it’s probably because we’re swimming in the deep end at the moment

“Actually, this small detail intrinsic to the character’s past will tie everything together far better than this other thing.” 40,000 words of already-written story: I hope you like combing through me instead of writing more today ha ha ha ha ha ha

Preventing writing burnout by spending the morning watching Die Hard and cleaning

Happy birthday to me (Foxglove), the guy who forgot to switch his gender on Facebook and has been confused by his notifications all day

Damian -has- given up at the start of the book. The only thing that would stop Caius from pursuing his goals would be someone putting him in a catapult and yeeting him off the map.

Heading to work in the rain so guess whose workplace will be blasting Florence + the Machine while I’m there alone, trying not to think about Damian Akti

Foxglove: Had a brutal morning because my spouse and I can’t afford to see our family for the holidays again, + postponing top surgery as usual, and I came here to find people talking about book pirating And man, right now? I don’t think I’m in a place to even think about it.

I don’t like suggesting alternatives to the wizard boarding school series because the people who continue to consume that IP don’t seem all that interested in reading other books. But if you want a coming-of-age fantasy where the protagonist grows as a person, the Prydain series slaps.

More bookstore stories: we randomly sold socks in one of the bookstores I worked at. No, I don’t know why. They were just there. Bookstore socks. We also had a thief who exclusively stole those socks and sold them at their own stand. Over time, I watched the bookstore owner slowly turn into Javert.

I once got a customer angrily insisting that she wanted to get a book “with a character who doesn’t have a dad.” Not a person with a dad who passed away or left. Someone who never had a biological parent at all. Bewildered, I suggested something from mythology, and she was FURIOUS.

Working in bookstores for most of my retail career taught me a few things. 1) A certain type of man is unreasonably worried that anything (including the glossiness of book pages) can “turn” him gay 2) a parent saying, “this has a cat on it, my kid likes cats” and buying Warrior Cats is inevitable

As a former bookseller, the only time I had trouble at a book signing was when a famous game show host showed up and people were climbing over the bookshelves, crying and shaking, to get to him. Celebrity worship still weirds me out, man.

I’m trying to write this dramatic scene, but my cat ran off with a grocery bag and refuses to be parted with it, and is now breakdancing on top of it while her expensive toys languish in the corner

Reached a milestone on the current WIP and I am celebrating by putting on A Court of Fey and Flowers and watching true love occur on screen (between a fashion icon and a hobgoblin with no pants)

This trans awareness week, consider picking up Knight of Staria, which was written by Foxglove (a trans man) and features a trans MC. If you have read it, leaving a review can really help as well! a.co/d/dArPYt5

Damian’s self-esteem is a W R E C K Caius tries too hard to seem like everything is fine and refuses to complain.

Working on a patreon short with a more comedic vibe today. It’s a welcome reprieve from *gestures at the world at large*

Cat just tore a wedding dress out of its protective covering and shredded it to ribbons “She has no concept of right or wrong,” I tell myself, lying down on the couch instead of going back to bed where the cat is sprawled where my feet would be, looking adorable

Switching gears to work on Patreon shorts today instead of a novel, and of course the WIP is standing off in the corner like, “but what if you lose momentum? What if by not getting your attention every second of the day, I shrivel up and die?”

“These characters are only kissing. This is their first kiss, so they don’t need to do anything else. They can take their time.” Five minutes later: “All right, so sucking dick counts as kissing if you try not to really think about things like what words mean…”

Going on a walk or a run helps both of us, but Iris has taken to bike riding lately! Sometimes it’s just a matter of doing something else for a while.

Was so caught up in the writing zone that I didn’t realize that: 1) It was snowing outside 2) I was freezing 3) the AC was still on Whoops. Well, at least some fictional characters got to kiss.

If you have even the slightest respect for your own work, don't touch this with a ten foot pole.

Fair warning: It may be cute to have a cat that curls up in your arms like a teddy bear to sleep at night, but if they suddenly wake up and get the zoomies… well, there’s a reason that I’m bandaging my arm at 5am

Mrs. Foxglove: I don’t know why everyone says I’m a Disney princess. Also Mrs. Foxglove: Oh, look, friends! (Two beautiful white horses run across a field to greet her, manes flowing in the wind. They are not her horses.)

Work days: Writing at 5am as though I don’t need to be at work soon, writing during 15-minute breaks, sneaking down to the basement to write during lunch Days off: Write one sentence. Despair.

If the Starian Cycle crew had a Halloween costume party: Laurent shows up in an elaborate costume based on a random fictional character from a niche historical book no one knows about. It’s a blatant excuse for him to wear something expensive and slutty. Sabre: White shirt, tight pants, collar

Boycott anything Harry Potter. It's incredibly easy to do

On Patreon now: Emile’s ancestor and Isiodore’s ancestor get along like a house on fire. www.patreon.com/posts/fool-1...

Current state of affairs: “Pace yourself.” “Write an entire Patreon short in one day, got it.” “No, pace yourself.” “….make a giant schedule for the next two months?” “Pace. Yourself.” “Spend every free second writing and forget to eat breakfast????”

The problem with researching things for your fantasy book is you start out searching for old wigmaking techniques, and three days later you’re reading about the destruction of ancient archives and the discovery of sixteen charred pages of “translated accounts” by a guy who didn’t know the language.