Oh boy, it's been a hot minute. Actually, a cold minute because despite the growing patches of warm days in Perth, it's still pretty freaking chilly most of the time, mostly due to the seasonal winds that start to pick up at this time of year.

My home and nasal passages are whirling with dust and pollen, but thanks to the magic of cetrizine hydrochloride, I can quite comfortably sit here and write this update.

Yet We Sleep, We Dream

My dearly beloved novel, Yet We Sleep, We Dream will be releasing later this month, on the 23rd although I'm not sure which time zone's 23rd it actually becomes downloadable.

I've given one and a half years of my life to this book, which makes me feel proud and panicked all at once. Anyone who hasn't erased the pandemic years from memory will likely relate to this surreal feeling of time. How does something that feels like a snail crawl also feel like a zippy race?

Well, at any rate, we are approaching launch and I am so stoked to be able to share it with you!

If you'd like to get a digital ARC copy, plenty of copies are currently available on BookSiren.

Project Lacewing

The first draft of this novelette is on a slow boil. I'm actually halfway through what my writer friends have called "discovery writing" -- how's that for a much nicer term than "first draft", "trash draft" and "dreck"? Even though an official submission-worthy draft is due in November, knowing it's half-written makes me feel less worried about taking some time off to deload from one story context.

Climate stuff

When I started learning about climate change last year, it was to answer one small question about our household. I thought it was just an "over there" interesting subject matter that I could dip into every now and then to nourish my brain. These days, I seem to be constantly thinking about it. Not with a sense of hopelessness or existential dread (at least not always), but more a very fired-up curiosity particularly around the impacts of late-stage capitalism and what kinds of influence our everyday decisions have on the bigger picture.

I've found it's really easy to get caught in negative spirals and feeling like the effort required to change things is too big and hopeless. Thus many people don't change what they're doing beacuse it feels like a raindrop in the ocean. But, you know, raindrops rarely fall in isolation.

So where I'm at right now is feeling satisfied with my raindrop of effort today. What's the raindrop, you ask? Inviting my neighbour to chuck her kitchen scraps in my compost. That means between us, our little pair of homes has just doubled its methane emission reduction, as well as doubled the amount of nutrients going into my garden, and I barely had to lift a finger to do it. I'm really excited to grow something edible to share with her at the end of next season. Teamwork makes the dream work ✨

And then, some other day, I will try for another raindrop.

Other notes

Out and about:

In July, I visited Amber Daulton's blog to share an excerpt from Yet We Sleep, We Dream. Here's the sneaky peek.

Headspace digestives:

• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• The Not So Nice Girl by Skye McDonald
• Blood of the Desert by B.K. Bass
• Warm Worlds and Otherwise by James Tiptree Jr.
• Cast Your Own Shadow by Scott Nesbitt

WIP board:

• Yet We Sleep, We Dream, an Aussie space-fantasy retelling of A Midsummer Night's Dream. LAUNCHES 23 SEP.
• "Lacewing", a post-collapse time-travel SF romance. Draft in progress.
• "Satine". The collection has been cancelled, but there is something coming on this front. Stay tuned.
• Sunset on a Distant World, a reverse age-gap adult-coming-of-age SF bodyguard romance. Under revision.

Key dates:

• 23 SEP: Yet We Sleep, We Dream release
• 25 SEP: Visiting Lyndi's Adventurous Friends
• 05 OCT: Visiting Beyond Romance
• 12 OCT: Visiting Coffee Time Romance
• 09 OCT – 23 OCT: Yet We Sleep, We Dream blog tour
• 23 OCT: Visiting Postcards from the Ledge