What it is, I think, is this: Donald Trump has lost the presidency, and is fighting that obvious, irrefutable result because it is useful to him to do so. Yes, perhaps there is some buried splinter of certainty inside him that he is the president, or that he deserves to be president, and we have seen that this is a man who has long demonstrated the emotional security of a hangry, sleepless toddler. (No disrespect to toddlers.) But it is also very, very useful for him not to let go of the presidency in idea, if not in practice. He is a man on the verge of various investigations. He has a debt column longer than the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and the script for Hamilton combined. And he has mounting legal debts. Further, he’s a man whose unnatural orange tan seems the result of a steady application of Fryolator grease, but it could very well be burned onto his flesh from the warm glow of himself — he is, in his mind, a self-illuminating creature, the center of a galaxy whose glow is all, and who thrives on the adoration of the planets he provides warmth to — or in vengeance, cold.

That’s part of the trick with him — it’s hard to know where his narcissism ends and where his grift begins, because a grift is more self-aware than the kind of bloated ego-fed solipsism that narcissism requires. A grift demands manipulation, and a manipulation suggests that while you may be the smartest guy in the room, you’re also not naturally so, and anything you get is something not given and earned but rather, taken and stolen from the rubes. He sees us as rubes, that much is clear, but he also sees himself as god, and a god doesn’t need to trick the rubes, does he? A god simply has command of them, because that is the nature of divinity. And therein lurks the a blurry, foggy landscape between how much of this is because of a cunning intelligence and how much of this is simply a reptilian mind mashing buttons in his brain in order for him to brute force attack every institution, every relationship, every norm around him.

But the reality is, it doesn’t matter.

Trump gains from chaos. Whether his understanding of this is granular and keen or whether it is in a hazy, almost feral way, matters little. What matters is, he doesn’t care about being president, because being president is work. He doesn’t care about you, because you aren’t he, and he is all that matters to him. He doesn’t care about his country because to him this country is just another company he can buy, bleed, gut, live in its carcass for a while, and then sell to the next asshole. For him, this is all transactional, and his refusal to not only concede the election (which we knew would happen) but to stop fighting the electoral outcome, is just another one of those transactions. He understands, again implicitly or explicitly, the buy-in, here: he can (and will) keep this going for the next four years. He will push the constant narrative that he is an aggrieved party, a strongman kept from his circus by the mean ol’ ringleader. He will say they cheated, you cheated, everyone cheated. He will demand now, and in six months, and in two years, that we hashtag OVERTURN this election.

And this is useful to him to do so.

It is useful because he can continue to fundraise. Never stop fundraising.

It is useful because he can try to grab the media spotlight by its privates, dragging it around with him wherever he walks on the stage because who doesn’t want to watch the big man making a racket over there? The media has only barely learned this, and it remains to be seen how long they will hold the lesson, and how soon they will return to covering every mouth-sound he makes.

It is useful because he can keep doing rallies, and a despot loves his rallies.

It is useful because he can bring people into his gaudy Trump properties, his hotels, his golf courses, because who wouldn’t want an audience with the Rogue King, the True Heir to the Red, White and Blue Throne? The man has his debts, after all, and he’s not going to pay them. You are.

And finally, it is useful because if he is less The Last President and more The Next President, it will be harder to investigate him, because investigating a political opponent is corruption, or so they’ll say — corruption he supports when it’s him doing it, but that’s true for everything. (We like to imagine that the Republicans are trapped by our identification of their myriad hypocrisies, but they are freed by that expectation — they know we think we’ve called GOTCHA on this, but haven’t got ’em. Their hypocrisies are part of the package, a feature and not a bug, and they will happily do all the things they said we couldn’t do and they’ll do it with a shit-eating grin on their faces.)

Trump has no moral center, here. He has no guiding principle. He is not a man holding onto power because he genuinely feels something, anything, about our democracy. He is not a man who grips the wheel of the vehicle because he thinks he’s the most responsible driver. He doesn’t care who the best driver is. He doesn’t care about the truck, or the road, he only cares that he likes the way this feels, and that he can drag us to wherever he wants to fucking go. He’s not here out of some devotion to democracy, to America, to us or even to his people. He doesn’t care about them, either. He just wants what he wants because — well, either because that’s enough, or because he can make hay from it.

Of course, it’s almost not his fault. Dracula is Dracula, of course, but one who is enabled by a world of Renfields — blood-bags, body-buriers, victim-procurers, glad-handing yes-men gleefully eating spiders and cockroaches to Please Their Master. And Trump, our rubbery American Vampire, is held aloft on a palanquin of bones by an unholy host of enablers, admirers, users, and cowards. Some, like Texas AG Ken Paxton, are like Trump — Paxton is currently under investigation by the FBI and likely angling for a pardon. Some are like Ted Cruz, humilation-kink aficionados who are happy to tongue-bathe the boot of the man who said his father killed JFK, who called his wife ugly, who suggested that any vote for Cruz in the primary was (here, a familiar refrain) voter fraud. Some are Mitch McConnell, the ur-vampire pretending to be a Renfield, using Trump as the battering ram to knock down the doors of democracy so that he could let slip the hounds who would eagerly fill all the roles he belligerently, shamelessly stopped Obama from filling. (Remember how the USPS is fucked right now? McConnell — with a little inadvertent help from Sanders, sadly — blocked Obama’s appointees to the USPS Board of Governors, which left the entire thing empty, which further let  the Trump Administration fill those roles from snout to tail. That board then chose LeJoy, and here we are.)

Trump is enabled by a world of dipshits and abusers, some who just want to be in his glow, some who want to avoid his ire, and others who happily crowd their hands up his asses, trying to puppet him around. And all of whom would, at the slightest provocation, be thrown under the wheels of the truck that Trump is driving, because Trump has all the loyalty of a rabid wolverine.

None of these people are acting on principle.

Not one of them.

They seek power both personal and political. They seek money. They seek escape from prosecution and consequence. They all want something, this Circle of Skeksis, from Trump, from us, from our democracy. But they don’t care about it.

And yet, their followers believe the opposite. They are told, by Fox, by Newsmax, by Breitbart and OANN and a thousand sock-puppet chodes on Twitter and Parler and Facebook, that these people are standing up for AMERICA, for YOU and ME, for our REPUBLIC (they’re hesitant to call it a democracy anymore). These people are heroes, painted into shirt-ripping beefcake Founding Fathers — if the Founding Fathers were John Rambo, a pack of flag-fucking warriors with a pair of AR-22s and a surfboard under their boots as they cross the Delaware River. And they are told again and again that these people deserve to be president. The votes against them are somehow both Real and also a Fraud, legitimate and yet, illegitimate because anything that insults these Hero Men must be the result of a grave unfairness — and if democracy allows this unfairness to occur, then it is perhaps democracy itself that is the enemy.

Because if democracy stops Trump from being president —

Well.

Then it is perhaps time to stop democracy.

We have long been deafened by this dueling banjo song of American Exceptionalism and Individual Liberty, where we are somehow both The Greatest Country on Earth and also a country full of Individuals Whose Personal Liberties Shall Not Be Infringed. Becoming only a country of disentangled individuals, we are no longer a nation of communities, of people, but rather, a series of one-person islands, and how dare you steal my fucking coconuts, and you better not cross these waters to even say hi or I’ll rap you on the head with a fucking rock, and what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is also mine because I fucking said so, that’s why. You’re not an individual, I’m an individual. I get what I want, and you get what I don’t. Communal responsibility? Community power? Fuck that. Me, me, me, oh say can you see.

But if we aren’t a place of communities, if all that matters is what I want, wah, then democracy doesn’t even matter. Because votes are a mechanism of community will, and if we have ceased to care about the will of the community and instead only care about the will of what we want personally to occur, then where do we go from there?

We are already a troubled, divided nation. Have we been more divided before? Perhaps. Probably. There was a Civil War, after all, and the Civil Rights era, and all the racist horror between those two periods (and after) (notice a pattern?). But this division feels strange, a shared cultic delusion, a Stockholm Syndrome as COVID-19 swirls around us.

Trump’s election in 2016 was already an injury to our norms — he stepped onto the national stage buoyed by lies. I said then it was an act of small petty men hacking at the roots of our democracy, hoping to fell the tree in order to sell its lumber, and they have continued to do so, and have nearly succeeded. Because now, these small petty men — selfish and without principle — have widened this chasm between us by what feels like an uncrossable distance.

That chasm is an injury.

And it may be a grievous, even fatal, one.

It’s not enough that Trump won’t be successful. And it’s likely he won’t be (though this is 2020, so who the fuck knows what hellshow could happen in the next three weeks). It’s that he’s convinced a not inconsiderable portion of this country that he’s right. He probably knows he won’t get back in the White House, at least in 2021. But they don’t know that. He probably knows he didn’t win. But they don’t. They’ve bought the lie. They’ve embraced their cognitive dissonance so hard it’s become a part of them — the only good way out of a hole is to quite digging and start climbing, but then you have to admit, oops, I fell into a hole of my own making, and that’s not something people like to admit. Easier instead to dig down, down, down, to make it look like, I know what I’m doing, I’ve been doing this all along, this is alllllll part of the plan, see you later, Surface-Dwellers, I’m King of the Hole, fuck you. 

So utterly complete is this violent attack on information, on truth, on fact, on process and democracy and science, on education and expertise that… some people are going to be really hard to bring back. They may not come back. We don’t have a National Deprogrammer. We don’t have fairness in media. We don’t have the gall or gumption to fight mis/disinformation the way the other side has fought actual information.

As it turns out, our democracy is held together by one thing, and one thing only:

A loose, flexible agreement of ideas.

In the air, it’s a tangle, and we fight over everything. But all the way down, below us, we always knew that there was a safety net of a few key principles that were braided together and that was strong enough to catch us if we fell. At the end of the day, we were a democracy, we thought. A nation of states, of communities, of a few shared principles and notions. We agreed on that.

Thing is, it was an illusion. A comforting one, as many illusions are, and maybe not useless. And hey, once upon a time there were some very real threads that held us together — the Voting Rights Act, the Fairness Doctrine, and their like. Laws and regulations which agreed that democracy was sacrosanct, and that truth mattered, even if everything else was debatable. But we cut those ropes. And now we’re in freefall, and there is no safety net. Because, oops, laws and regulations are just things we made up. They’re only there if we uphold them and keep signing our agreement to them. The garden needs tending. The fire needs tending. Vigilance was required. But now? Oof. Those laws and regulations have left us reaching for handholds that aren’t there, hoping for a safety net that has been cut to ribbons. And it’s not just the election. We’re mired in a pandemic with three thousand people dying every day, and yet there are still people who think it’s fake, who won’t wear a mask, who even in the hospital with the disease they cry it’s a hoax. And instead of a firm federal response — or any federal response — we have a piss-pants “president” whose only fight is the one to be coddled, bottle-fed, and glorified. He golfs, we go poor. He tweets, we get sick. He rallies, we die.

He doesn’t care about the injury he’s caused.

But the injury has hobbled us. And I don’t know how we heal it. It’s a sucking chest wound — it’s a compound fracture. Maybe it won’t kill us, but you don’t just heal that sort of wound the way you do a thorn-scratch or a bruise. It will take so much to heal it, so much. And we don’t know if the sepsis of fascism will settle in for good — a blood infection of autocracy, a poisoning of viral narcissism to compliment the global pandemic running through us like a chainsaw. And every GOP who signs on, every media member who trumpets this shit, they’re codifying it, they’re legitimizing it, and whatever results — whatever suffering, or starvation, or bigotry, or violence — becomes legitimate in the face of it. It becomes an act of lauding the infection, of pretending that the sickness in our political body is a natural part of us, rather than something forced into us. We accept and embrace the tick, the tapeworm, we name it and give it power. I’m King of the Hole, the tapeworm cries. Fuck you.

Trump doesn’t care. His enablers don’t care. They’ll kill the body and leap to the next one — parasites and scavengers, they hold no allegiance to you, me, or even the flag they claim to love so much. Their allegiance isn’t even to each other, though they put on a good show. Their allegiance is to them, to their own individual liberties, and that’s the ultimate liberty to stick you, bleed you, and leave you and our democracy for dead.

* * *

I don’t know what we do about it.

But if you can, donate to Jon Ossoff, Reverend Warnock, and Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight. Our democracy may very well count on it. And while you’re at it, find a food bank, local or otherwise, and donate, okay? The way we push back on this is by being a community, as good to each other as we can. We must refuse to let the injury define us. We must hobble on in the hopes of healing.

When Anna Pendragon was born, Merlin prophesied: “Through all the ages, and in the hearts of men, you will be forgotten.”

Married at twelve, and a mother soon after, Anna – the famed King Arthur’s sister – did not live a young life full of promise, myth, and legend. She bore three strong sons and delivered the kingdom of Orkney to her brother by way of her marriage. She did as she was asked, invisible and useful for her name, her status, her dowry, and her womb.

Twenty years after she left her home, Anna returns to Carelon at Arthur’s bidding, carrying the crown of her now-dead husband, Lot of Orkney. Past her prime and confined to the castle itself, she finds herself yet again a pawn in greater machinations and seemingly helpless to do anything about it. Anna must once again face the demons of her childhood: her sister Morgen, Elaine, and Morgause; Merlin and his scheming Avillion priests; and Bedevere, the man she once loved. To say nothing of new court visitors, like Lanceloch, or the trouble concerning her own sons.

Carelon, and all of Braetan, is changing, though, and Anna must change along with it. New threats, inside and out, lurk in the shadows, and a strange power begins to awaken in her. As she learns to reconcile her dark gift, and struggles to keep the power to herself, she must bargain her own strength, and family, against her ambition and thirst for revenge.

***

Women Are Mostly Just Plot Points in Much of Medieval Literature

I mean, I get it. I’ve read enough Western literature to innately understand that, for the better part of the last few thousand years, women aren’t exactly portrayed as heroes, or really anything other than convenient stumbling blocks for the real heroes. There are a handful of exceptions, of course, but it’s far from the norm.

Now, I’ve got to preface this by saying, Queen of None came about shortly after I graduated from my MA program, where I studied Medieval literature and Arthuriana in general. I came into that program with a Just Because I’m a Woman Doesn’t Mean I’m a Feminist Scholar attitude and left with I Am a Feminist Scholar and I Will Burn Down the Patriarchy mentality.

But Arthuriana, and the romances of the Middle Ages, are particularly cringe-worthy in terms of the “strange women lying in ponds distributing swords” factor. Women show up all over the place: in ponds, in forests, in towers, and in beds (there are so many Elaines in the Arthurian legends it borders on ridiculous). Granted, there weren’t a whole lot of options in terms of adventuring for a woman, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. In fact, the more I learned about the expansive Middle Ages, the more I found women who were so much more than plot points: real women who wrote books, traveled the world, had visions, and chronicled history.

The whole idea for Queen of None came from a single passage I read during my undergraduate studies in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. It simply said that Igraine and Uther had two children, Arthur and Anna. But while Arthur gets all the attention, Anna vanishes in the shadow of the king and her half-sisters.

I Can Write Books and Be a Mom

Motherhood and writing are inextricably connected for me. I’d always considered myself a writer. In fact, I don’t really remember when I started writing book-length things. I just always had stories that needed multiple pages. But I was very bad at finishing those stories, and I was mostly a copycat for the majority of my early writing life (no shade, that’s totally what most young writers do). Hell, I rewrote the better part of The Stand when I was 13 or so.

When my son was born, however, I understood that I needed to finish writing. I needed to start writing books, not just… book-shaped things that couldn’t be published. I didn’t want my son to ask me, “Mom, what did you want to be when you grew up?” and my answer be that I dreamed of being a writer someday. I wanted to be able to tell him that I worked damned hard at it, and made it happen.

Be warned though, writing with kids is not easy. When people ask me what it’s like to balance a writing career, a full-time career, and raising kids, I explain that it’s very much like wrestling a greasy owlbear. It is hard. It’s a lot of eking out words and edits at weird hours, a lot of not doing things (like watching television or hanging out). It’s, dare I say it, discipline.

And even more than that? Keeping a writing career going while raising a family means you constantly have to learn new ways to write. You have to be flexible. I have a special needs son. The only constant is change.

Trunk Novels Aren’t Always Trunk Novels

I started writing Queen of None as a NaNoWriMo project in 2009 or so. Then I spent a year or so revising it. I sent it out and it was rejected. Once. So I decided, naturally, that it was never meant to be and no one cared and it was, therefore, a trunk novel (i.e. a novel I would store in my virtual “trunk” with all the other not fit for publication books out there) and total hot garbage, and maybe I should consider quitting writing? Thankfully I didn’t go that far. But yeah. We writers can sure have some rollercoaster emotions.

Let me preface this with saying, I’ve recently been diagnosed with ADHD. And this kind of behavior is often called RSD, or rejection sensitive dysphoria. Generally, I have a thick skin about this stuff. But in the case of this book, I totally turtled.

I ended up coming back to Queen of None over and over again. I edited it more. I added new scenes. I changed the characters. I rewrote a big chunk of it. Then I did some more edits. Then, I was approached by Vernacular Books and I told them, “Hey, I have this Arthurian feminist romance that casts Arthur’s sister as a hero, but it’s kind of like Circe and maybe you’d like it?”

They did. And here we are.

Damnit, I Love the Editing Process So Much

I think I might like editing more than I like writing. And when you find the right editor? It’s just magic. Eric Bosarge, my editor on Queen of None, he told me that his favorite scene was Lanceloch’s fishing scene (you’ll have to read to understand). And what blew my mind was that in all the scenes — and far more exciting events — that was also my favorite.

Eric’s questions, like good editors should, helped me really burnish the manuscript to where you see it now. It was an intense month of editing for me (hello, hyper-focus), and I held the whole book in my head again, dreaming of it, pushing myself to make more connections and go deeper with language, with the theme, with character. All in all, even though the book is under 100,000 words, I tracked well over 10,000 changes between Eric’s edits and my own. My poor computer wanted to kill me. And it was almost euphoric for me. I love making things better.

But I’m so proud of what came out of it. The scenes I added, the edits I made, all really just enhance the story on another level. As writers, we need to be pushed out of our comfort zones in order to improve. It’s a scary business, walking outside your door, to quote Bilbo. But stasis isn’t just a creativity killer, it can be a career killer. Especially in this raucous, unpredictable, wild world of publishing in the digital era.

Heroes Don’t Always Carry Swords

In many ways, Queen of None is a quarantine novel.  No, there isn’t a pandemic in the book. But Anna, but dint of her status and relationships, doesn’t leave Carelon during the entirety of the narrative save for one instance. She lives in castles. She haunts the halls. She becomes a shadow. While the knights of the Table Round are out slaying beasts, hunting grails, bedding dames, and knocking skulls for the realm, she’s doing embroidery (albeit begrudgingly).

That doesn’t mean, however, that she can’t have power. Like the medieval women of my studies, she still exists. She still finds power, both from within and through her relationships. If there’s anything that defines Anna Pendragon, it’s her patience, her willingness to wait. Maybe she’s a little bit of Aaron Burr in that respect (there really are some parallels, now that I think about it). Time and again, she puts herself, her body, her mind, and her soul, on the line to fight for what she believes is true. That doesn’t always mean she gets it right, or that she’s a good mom or sister or wife in the process. But a complex heroine is a lot more fun to write than one who is the pinnacle of purity and sweetness.

And that resounds with me, as well. I’ve always loved epic fantasy, heroic tales, and swashbuckling adventures: but there aren’t a lot of women for me to look at. The tale of Arthur is not new, but Anna is. That meant she had to bring something different to the table (pardon the pun, or don’t). As a writer, that was such a satisfying experience. As a woman, a mother, and someone who’s had to stand up for what she believes in time and again, it was also a powerful experience.

***

Natania Barron has been traveling to other worlds from a very young age, and will be forever indebted to Lucy Pevensie and Meg Murry for inspiring her to go on her own adventures. She currently resides in North Carolina with her family, and is, at heart, a hobbit–albeit it one with a Tookish streak a mile wide.

Natania Barron: Website

Queen of None: Indiebound | Bookshop.org | Amazon

In Essa Hansen’s space opera debut NOPHEK GLOSS, Caiden’s planet is destroyed and his family is killed. He is taken in by a mismatched crew of aliens and a mysterious ship that has a soul and a universe of its own. Together they show Caiden that the multiverse is much bigger than he ever imagined, but Caiden has vowed to do anything it takes to get revenge on the slavers who murdered his family, or die trying. Alastair Reynolds said NOPHEK GLOSS is “a delicious and delirious head-trip into an intricate, vivid and psychedelic cosmos of nested universes, exotic tech and gorgeously strange characters … wrapped around a killer story with real heart and soul.” Library Journal gave the book a starred review and said “Hansen’s marvelous debut is a fast-paced, action-filled ride through the multiverse, introducing a complex found family of gender- and neurodiverse characters.”

My way of thinking is stranger than I realized.

When my book entered the hands of readers and early feedback trickled in, I quickly realized that they were all saying the same things: my ideas and word choices are so unusual, my world so sensory and immersive, how did I craft this?

At first, I was surprised, because these aspects of my writing feel unremarkable to me. I’m neurodivergent and have synesthesia to boot, so the fact that I can bring an unusual angle to my storytelling shouldn’t have come as a surprise! In a good way, it made me think more about how I process my senses and how I translate abstract things into cool concepts on the page.

I also realized that I have the opposite sort of challenge than readers assumed. Rather than working hard to seek out and craft these surreal ideas and evocative words, I have too many of both and must actively work to clarify my meaning. The challenge feels steep—at worst, my readers will be overwhelmed and confused—but at best, my neurotype and sensory reality are a strength that could bring fresh experiences to the genre.

Re-articulating my own ideas is challenging.

While feedback to my writing taught me how my thinking is unique, trying to navigate interviews has taught me why I find it so difficult to articulate my own ideas to others.

This may be a shared truth that I’m slow to catch on to, but I find that my brain works unusually well with abstract concepts. I can store a huge amount of research or worldbuilding in abstraction, then discard the concrete language of it. I can then deploy these ideas automatically as I write. But! When I’m asked questions about things like my world, themes, or process, I’m prone to freeze up because I must re-congeal my answers from the abstract and re-find the language to express them. How frustrating to know the science of a thing but not recall the correct terms to talk about it!

As with anything we learn about ourselves, this has been an opportunity to find new ways to make my challenges easier, and to capitalize on strengths I might not have recognized.

Sometimes you find the science after the fact.

While I adore quantum mechanics and astrophysics, I didn’t try to research accurate science when I created my bubble multiverse. I drew from years of existing studies on all kinds of topics, and focused on evoking a sense of wonder and imagination in my fiction rather than accurate science.

Toward the end of edits on this book, I binged a bunch of World Science Festival lectures and discovered ideas that sounded very similar to my own multiverse structure. Astrophysicist Andrei Linde’s inflationary multiverse theory posits—instead of a single spherically symmetric balloon universe—a multiverse that is “a collection of many different exponentially large balloons with different laws of physics operating in each.”

A separate talk by physicist Raphael Bousso explained how more information is stored on surface area than in volume, making me rethink the nature of the “rind” membranes that separate universes in my world. Might the rind itself contain all the information to project the interior contents in holographic spacetime? My mind also looped around the 11-dimension arena posited by string theorist Michio Kaku, a space inhabited by many bubble universes where the content is on the skin of the expanding bubble rather than inside it. These bubbles can split, pop, or combine.

As I jumped through theories that were new to me, I kept finding more and more bits that made my multiverse sound more plausible than I ever thought it could be.

There is no end to the work.

I’ve always felt that my imagination and the stories and messages I wish to explore are boundless and would easily consume years of steady work. But pursuing this passion at a leisurely pace is much different than viewing boundless work while on a tight deadline.

As a newer author, I have so much to keep improving at. As a newer author with a series, I realized that Book One is not the end, and I can and should be working on the sequels when I have time—leveling-up my craft all the while. This isn’t bad in itself, but add in deadlines and you have a cocktail that any workaholic type will find challenging. I can let myself keep analyzing and sculpting the novel until “pencils down,” and still doubt if I’ve learned enough or had time to do my best. Rather than perfectionism, it’s an intersection between imposter syndrome and recognition of how (wonderfully) far there is still to grow, how much potential the story still has.

I find writing and worldbuilding genuinely energizing, and will happily spend hours at. But in finalizing this novel I’ve learned for myself where that seemingly boundless energy can and will burn out!

We can be more mindful when comparing books.

The stage of a “debut” author sounds like a level playing field, an entry point, but as I make new friends and share journeys, I’ve learned how multifarious this stage truly is.

Everything varies, from the number of manuscripts the author has produced leading up to their deal, the scope of their revisions and length of their deadlines, to the support or burdens they field at home. The knowledge that we cannot compare ourselves to other authors may not diminish doubt or imposter syndrome, but it will make me personally far more mindful of how I assess novels from here on.

This is not a level playing field, but we can make it a compassionate one—toward ourselves as much as others.

***

Essa Hansen is an author, swordswoman, and falconer. She is a sound designer for science fiction and fantasy films at Skywalker Sound, with credits in movies such as Dr. Strange and Avengers: Endgame.

Essa Hansen: Website | Twitter

Nophek Gloss: Indiebound | Bookshop.org | Amazon | B&N