"How's the lead-up to publication going? Is the promo working?"

17th-19th century Irish scribal abbreviations that look like text-speak: numeral 2 edition ("cróda", "ní fada", "damh")

I'm a pacifist. Yes, I'm an idealist without all the answers to how things should work in the real world (if I knew that, I'd be a politician or something). But I don't believe pacifism is just opting out of violence: I believe it's about actively dismantling violent systems & building alternatives.

Critiquing the military is often seen as an unpatriotic act. Especially if you do it around Remembrance, which has in many ways shifted from being about remembering the enormous horror and loss of war to a jingoistic competition to see who can perform patriotism the loudest.

Poetry letters: Curly! Interesting curved fadas. Very curly Ds in particular. Prose letters: Much more angular, with more conventional fadas, more straightforward Ds, but much more complex/angular As.

Got a scribe here who uses completely different letter forms for verse and prose and yet it's clearly the same person (exact same size letters, same ink, same pen, no gap in MS, single name in colophon right below both). His special Poetry Letters are much curlier and cuter. I enjoy it.

Several people have asked me for publishing advice recently and it's made me realise that my own experiences are completely non-replicable. The website where I learned to write is gone. Twitter is functionally gone. NaNo imploded. The mentorship programme I did doesn't exist any more. Etc.

Okay, listen: The Wolf and His King comes out in <3 weeks and I just got my finished copies. So I'm going to be doing a lot more book promo. BUT also my article about the manuscripts of OCC is due in a month, so I'll be posting about that too. Stick with me through the promo & you get manuscripts.

If you’re wondering what a “least weasel” is, they absolutely live up to the name. This is the least amount of animal you can have that can still meet the bar for “is weasel”

Bicycle Jousting is Strictly Forbidden (Somewhere on the mean streets of Belfast) Actually this junction is horrible to cross whether on foot or Bicycle Jousting. #bikeart #bicycle #streetart #ireland #belfast

Typo of the day: "please take one of my hands, I have five and they're huge and nobody wants them" Um. Yeah, no, that should have been *off* my hands. I only have two hands, they're small, and I very much want both of them.

Okay, listen: The Wolf and His King comes out in <3 weeks and I just got my finished copies. So I'm going to be doing a lot more book promo. BUT also my article about the manuscripts of OCC is due in a month, so I'll be posting about that too. Stick with me through the promo & you get manuscripts.

US readers! There are 100 ARCs of THE WOLF AND HIS KING, my retelling of the medieval werewolf tale, 'Bisclavret', up for grabs in this Goodreads giveaway. The book comes out Jan 27 2026, but this is a great chance to nab it early! www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sho...

He keeps doing it. Every time somebody gets beheaded in this text, the word "head" is replaced with a little hand-drawn emoticon. And considering how many people get beheaded in this story, that's a lot of lil face drawings.

Not sure what it says about this app that my most popular posts are always the ones about random things I found in manuscripts of Oidheadh Con Culainn. Possibly that you're all nerds 😆

Ooh, I'm allowed to tell you what this was about now! This was for the special edition being sold by @thebrokenbinding.bsky.social. It's got a sprayed edge and they've all been signed in a variety of colours and one of them has a smiley face in there (the last one I did.)

The Wolf and His King comes out in ONE MONTH today! (Or three months today if you're in the US.) This book is a retelling of the medieval French poem 'Bisclavret', about a werewolf knight and the king who loves him. More info and preorder links: finnlongman.com/books/the-wo...

Hey, 19th century Irish scribe nerds, I'm sure there are some of you around... anyone feel confident identifying unspecified Ó Longáins? I've got some maybe-Seosamh maybe-Peattair probably-not-Pól manuscripts and I'm not sure I can spare the time to work out how to tell them apart at present.

Three (US) ARCs to mark three weeks until UK publication! I realise using ARCs that have a different publication date on them is confusing, but they just arrived and I couldn't resist. finnlongman.com/books/the-wo...

The best thing you can do to help your favorite author is to pre-order 150,000 copies of their next book.

Three (US) ARCs to mark three weeks until UK publication! I realise using ARCs that have a different publication date on them is confusing, but they just arrived and I couldn't resist. finnlongman.com/books/the-wo...

Yeah you know what, the description of Lugaid beheading Cú Chulainn was really missing hand-drawn emoticons, that's absolutely what we needed in this specific moment

I can confirm that not only CAN it be sung to this tune but it's quite fun to do so (as I just discovered)

Thought for five minutes I'd figured it out and then looked at a different manuscript and got confused again.

Every time I think I know for sure who's who, I get one with a colophon attributing it to someone else 😭 It doesn't help that they're all active for decades. Pól's handwriting seems to change quite a bit over time, if these attributions are correct.

Anyway I guess I'm going back through... 25 manuscripts? To double check what actually happens at the end of them and figure out what happened here. Lmao joy.

It's all very well relying on your own spreadsheet and detailed observations about manuscripts to analyse patterns across a large corpus, until you realise there are several crucial errors in the spreadsheet, and now you can't trust ANY of it...

Hey, 19th century Irish scribe nerds, I'm sure there are some of you around... anyone feel confident identifying unspecified Ó Longáins? I've got some maybe-Seosamh maybe-Peattair probably-not-Pól manuscripts and I'm not sure I can spare the time to work out how to tell them apart at present.

I also keep getting DMs and emails from people claiming to be book printers. And, like, maybe they are! I have my doubts, but whatever. But as a trad-pub author I am completely uninvolved in the printing process. I have no power and no responsibilities in this regard. I am not your target market.

There are so many things about this email that deeply annoy me but fundamentally it all comes down to the fact that all of the actual information in it comes from my bios and website (so, it's all MY work, thanks) but combined in new ways until it becomes... no longer actually true.

Today's AI generated marketing email apparently missed the part where I wrote the first drafts of THE BUTTERFLY ASSASSIN trilogy at 18, before I even started my undergrad degree, based on a character I created at 16, and it's my *other* books that draw on my PhD research...

How I spend the breaks during long virtual meetings (file under: videos in which it is hard to believe I am almost thirty)

Just reread this post for the first time in a while and I think the real reason I haven't blogged this year is that I didn't know how to follow this one, it's a banger.

this sale goes until the end of the month!

Me when two separate employees at the bike shop compliment my rainbow spokes: I'm going to get a good grade in having a bike, something that is normal to want and possible to achieve,

This 60s cover designer upon being told the title of this book: "Sword? Sunset? Yes, I can do that. No, I don't need any further details, I've got it."

Haven't blogged in months because I had nothing to say; concluded the solution was not to talk about me. So. Some books I've read recently: finnlongman.com/a-handful-of... (Inspired partly by @feliciadavin.com's newsletter, which also led me to some of the books discussed here.)

If you have followed me for more than 0.04 seconds then I have tried to convince you to read KJ's books, but just in case you're new: this is a great deal on the first book in one of her absolute best series. The level of craft!! We can only read, learn, and aspire. (And go PHWAR, HOT 🥵.)

Okay. I have a venue! I have a date! I have a bookseller! I have a performer! I have a colleague to do the Q&A/discussion! Now all I need to do is design the invites and nag people to RSVP and other than that I can probably ignore the whole thing for like, three weeks? So that'll be nice.

Have never really paid much attention to the way my blog autocorrects my double hyphen (--) to an em dash with spaces (other apps correct this to an en dash, which is actually what I'm going for), but now I'm self-conscious about it because everyone's the Dash Police thanks to AI.

Haven't blogged in months because I had nothing to say; concluded the solution was not to talk about me. So. Some books I've read recently: finnlongman.com/a-handful-of... (Inspired partly by @feliciadavin.com's newsletter, which also led me to some of the books discussed here.)

This is really close to me but I'm allergic to fruit 🥲 Will send to my local friends...

one of my favourite things was when i was on holiday in wales with friends and one of them asked another what the four branches of the mabinogi were. they went "why don't you ask néide?" and first friend replied "okay but. i only want to know a *little* bit about it" FAIR TBH

I have a sore throat and cold at the moment and the worst thing about this is how hard it makes line-editing, which for me involves reading the whole book aloud. I was doing this because I'm having a wrist-flare so can't do Big Typing, which rules out my academic priorities, but unfortunately: Bad.

I just want to clear something up about a comment I've seen in a few reviews of THE WOLF AND HIS KING. A couple of people have referred to the werewolf "as a representation for queer identity", but it's not. The central metaphor here is about chronic pain and disability.

Hmm, apparently the university students' union is having a referendum on disaffiliation from the NUS, but they haven't actually sent any information about either side of the argument, and I've been googling but have found very little substantial? Not sure how to place an informed vote.

The Star-Crossed Empire by Maya Darjani The Butterfly Assassin by Finn Longman The End Crowns All by Bea Fitzgerald Demon Song by Kelsea Yu

🌈 Hey Reading Rainbows! Happy Asexual Awareness Week! We are celebrating with 24 more asexual book recommendations! 🧵

Line-editing TAWB is really proving my point to myself that every book has its own process. No stage of this one has felt like the same stage of any other book I've written. It's got me half convinced I'm doing it wrong all the time.

Grace Spencer discusses the place of biblical language and faith in God within 21st century Quakerism in this thoughtful profile on the process of rewriting our book of discipline, Quaker faith & practice.