Charity Blake became a nightmare. But there are far more dangerous monsters out there than her.

Train-wreck antihero Charity Blake thrives at being a winged avenger, but exacting vengeance takes as much from her as it gives. To retain the humanity she’s fought tooth and claw to keep, she tries to walk away from her monstrous side for good.

With no sense of purpose and a lifetime of failures haunting her, Charity struggles not to fall back into old, murderous habits. Until she meets a little girl who is more broken than herself. Rose presents a new direction for Charity. One where they can combine their carnal abilities to rewrite a horrendous history of wrongs that have impacted so many like themselves.

While Charity revels in the idea of following a new path, Rose drowns in her own power as she tries to piece together parts of her life her mind has buried deep. As Rose unearths hidden truths about her past, her catastrophic abilities spiral out of control, threatening everyone’s future. Overcome with debilitating grief and a world-altering rage, Rose becomes a danger beyond anyone’s control. A colossal threat that Charity must stop.

***

Go nuts, you’re an artist.

Not only is this book a sequel to some shit that a few pretty scary producers were afraid of, it’s even fucking weirder than the first one. There were *counts on fingers* 400 times that I thought who the hell do I think I am, writing this? It’s too much. Well, I’m too much. Henceforth, if my books aren’t too much then they’re not enough. I’m not the first person to write a book with Hell as one of its top 5 destinations—but I damn well had better be my own version of the best to do it. That means go bigger, go weirder, go the places nobody thinks of, and remember that the only boundary I need to know is the one I bust through like a hyena into a butcher shop. Or something.

Acquired Savant Syndrome is goddamn amazing.

You guys ever hear the story of Dr. Cicoria? He was an orthopedist, not like, an exciting doctor. He was in a phone booth when it was struck by lightning. Long story short, this foot doctor with no musical talent before the accident is suddenly waking in the night to write down the classical music he composed in his dreams. The guy goes on to become a pianist and composer in life. I read as many of these cases as I could find. To have unsurfaced abilities is pretty much the way of life—but many of these folks showed no glimpse of interest in the area during their pre-trauma lives. I fully subscribe to the old adage that we only use 10% of our brains. It accounts for all the glitches in our cranial Matrix(es). Like that time you dreamed of your aunt giving your cousin the same birthday present as you and then it happened, or déjà vu, or the ability to understand the new math. But I hadn’t ever wondered what else is in there. The brain is the depths of the ocean we can’t reach. Anything could be down there. The buried possibilities are endless.

The question becomes, Is there something hiding in me? Something I’m totally unaware of? What would I become?

Wendig’s right: Make it worse.

It’s a simple guideline: Whatever the crucial point, make it worse. If the character coughed, she hacked until her next breath was a question, not an expectation. If she’s freaked out by worms, she sees them everywhere—in the scrollwork on her bedposts, in every bowl of Ramen, they’re the eyelashes of the leering neighbor. Once this little girl, Rose, showed up in this sequel to The Harpy, she became worse in every way. It’s probably why I love her so much. Her secrets, once uncovered, don’t free her—they ruin her. She holds onto the worst and turns it on the monsters, the traitors, and the ones who tried to help but failed her alike. Her childhood wasn’t traumatic—it was good, healthy. Then destroyed. Then returned to her and destroyed again by her own hand.  I give you a special kid, with a tragic backstory which destroys her future, and she orchestrates part of her own doom. So, you’re welcome. *jazz hands* WRITING!

Pantster 4 lyfe.

I know HOW to write an outline. I’m actually pretty good at it, with college and all that. I try to start with an outline sometimes when writing a novel, but a chapter in I realize I’m still learning what the book is about. It’s like The Neverending Story that way, but without killing the horse. When it comes right down to it, I can’t create with boundaries. I have to construct the boundaries as I go because let’s face it—if I were good at following rules I probably wouldn’t be a writer to begin with. Not to mention that every book I write has a different process to it. I don’t have a formula. What the hell kind of response to our current world would it be if I wrote the same way all the time? The process has to change or the product remains the same. I can’t grow as a writer if I do the same thing every time. And it’s kind of a goal of mine to be able to stick to an outline someday. I wonder what that book will be like!

I can do it in the house. I can do it near my spouse. I can do it while I mom. I can do it when everything’s wrong.

I wrote Harpy 2: Evoloution during so much stuff. Both kids home 24 hours a day. The therapy and doctors’ appointments and filling of the prescriptions and trying to make sure they feel emotionally supported and get enough exercise and also eat. The over-the-top attempts at providing enriching experiences and celebrating the everyday things in life (I mean, at one point I even used the National Day Calendar to make up celebrations. There was a National Cake Day, that one was easy. But National One Cent Day?) I wrote this book while I worked my part-time medical supply warehouse job, which I loved—but going out every day during the pandemic because I was essential still scared me. And while I was there, my kids were in the same place they were every day, all day. That scared me too. I never want to see my kids complacent. The ability to bring them to all the fun places we go or even to play with their friends was erased, leaving only me to fill their social needs. And be their gym teacher. Yet, I loved it. To have them with me was all I’d ever wanted. Between March of 2020 and September I had not one moment alone in my own home. Not one, and I am a person who needs to be alone sometimes. My struggle wasn’t so different from so many others but what I’m getting at is this: I wrote a book in that time. Proving to myself that I don’t need the alone time, the special spot on the couch, the quiet, the right background, the clearest space in front of me, or any of the other things that make me comfy as a heated throw blanket. No. These are things I enjoy—but I didn’t always write under idea conditions, and truth be told, I was happier without the ideal conditions. I love the urgency of writing ideas on post-its. Nothing compares to the stolen feeling of typing a few paragraphs when no one needs anything and it’s just me and that laptop. The feeling that the book is always there, waiting for me to have a moment for it is intoxicating to me. A secret little world away from the chicken nuggets and bills. Writing isn’t an event, it’s a presence. That’s the kind of enveloping sensation that makes writing my home.

***

Julie’s a mythology-twisting, pizza-hoarding karate-kicker who left her ten-year panty peddling career to devote all her time to writing. She is the author of Running Home, Running Away, The Wind Between Worlds, and forthcoming The Harpy. Julie revels in all things Buffy, Marvel, robots, and drinks more coffee than Juan Valdez and his donkey combined, if that donkey is allowed to drink coffee. Julie lives in Plymouth, MA, constantly awaiting thunderstorms with her wildly supportive husband, two magnificent boys, and a reptile army.

Julie Hutchings: Website | Twitter

The Harpy (free until 1/20): Amazon

The Harpy 2: Amazon

I’m a writer (er, obviously, are you new here?) and with everything going on, with the Capitol Siege and Stupid Coup and all of it, I want to give voice to it, I want to write about it, to make sense of it, but I have no sense of it. I have no meaningful words. I have a lot of anger. And it’s frustrating, being a writer, being someone who would very much like to articulate all of this into something cogent, something clarifying, something with a little context to it, but I don’t really have it. It’s elusive — or perhaps sense and sensibility are cowering in the shadow of anger and anxiety over what this country is experiencing right now.

So, instead of approaching with some bring-together point, or some manner of thesis, I’m just going to put words down in an order. I do not know if these words will be useful to you, or even to me. I can barely promise they’ll even make sense.

I think this country has been injured.

It has been bled and hobbled. And it’s not just the Capitol siege, full of its gaggle of militant dipshits and troll-faced traitors. That’s an injury, too, a sucking chest wound in our democracy that is currently being covered over with a wad of Band-Aids, not even with their adhesive strips exposed — no, it’s just a gummy, inelegant wad of them shoved into the hole as triage. It’s been the death-by-a-thousand-cuts against truth and fact and expertise. It didn’t start now, it didn’t even start under Trump. It was the GOP under Obama, and it was the GOP under Bush, too, and arguably under Reagan and on and on, backward through time, and it’s this ceaseless assault on collective reality. I was going to say it’s an attack on our agreed-upon reality, but even there — “agreed-upon” shouldn’t even be a thing you have to say. We shouldn’t have to agree about facts. Agreement didn’t used to be necessary. Sky’s blue, water’s wet. Now, you can find a reality to suit your desires — as if the world is a simulation, and all we have to do is dial up our preferred Truth, we just need to ask it to tell us what we want to hear. We call upon Alexa and say, Alexa, please tell me that Obama was Kenyan, and there are WMDs in Iraq, and Trump is a masculine genius God-King who will rout all the Satanic Pedophiles hanging out at Tom Hanks’ house. Siri, please confirm for me that vaccines are bad, that the coronavirus isn’t real, that Jesus was a capitalist with a machine gun. Google, show me the UFOs, the healing comet, the flat earth.

And where does that come from? I don’t know. I really don’t. It comes out of bigotry, in part, I’d guess — white supremacy protecting itself in the only way it can, which is by building for itself a temple of lies in which to dwell. (It can’t be built on truth, because if you believe white people are somehow supreme, boy howdy do I have some white people to prove you wrong.) Obama was a smart guy, an intellectual, but he was also a Radical Black Islamic Socialist, wasn’t he, so shit, I can’t believe him going on and on about these quote-unquote BOOKS he’s read, about these quote-unquote VACCINES that don’t cause autism, about these quote-unquote HUMAN RIGHTS that he must’ve just made up. And that bigotry also comes from the people who want to use it, who aren’t True Believers in the bigoted sense, they just know they can point a finger away from themselves. They blame THE CARAVAN or CHINA or BLACK LIVES MATTER or TRANSGENDER BATHROOM ATHLETES while they pick your pocket and stick you with pins, bleeding you and saying, “Oops, wasn’t me, wasn’t me, it was THEM over there.”

Problem is, that’s a dangerous gambit, isn’t it? The GOP started a forest fire, thinking, well, hey, lookit that. Got us a nice fire here. We can warm ourselves by it, we can use it for light, and it’ll rage on and burn down the houses of all our foes. Ha ha, burn, fire, burn. Then they realize the fire has turned toward them, roaring up on their houses, on their families. Because you don’t control a forest fire. You don’t leash a tornado, can’t ride chaos like a horse. And they learned that lesson on Wednesday — cowering with their Congressional cohorts while a mob of terrorists came looking for them with zip-ties and nooses. Because at the end of the day, they didn’t save Trump, and that meant they were not “patriots,” and had to go. Of course, they didn’t learn the lesson for long. Hell, that night, some of them were back at it. Hawley’s smug horse face, looking at the camera instead of the Congresspeople he just spent hours huddled with — going on about electoral integrity, spreading that lie around mighty thick. Cruz, too, digging in his heels. Mo Brooks, Jim Jordan, all of them. Some of them, like Lindsey Graham, said they were off the Trump Train, but sure enough, they bought a new ticket and are back on board. Graham was traveling with Trump just today, wasn’t he? Best buddies.

Then they go on and instead of acknowledging any of it, they cast blame away. They point fingers. They deflect, duck, dodge. They don’t talk about COVID deaths or the people who died in the riot. They just piss and moan about lost Twitter followers, about how it’s not nice to impeach Mister You’re Special And He Loves You President. How dare you be divisive, and try to hold someone accountable for their actions? This, from the party of personal responsibility. (Also, from the pro-life party, from the party of state’s rights, from the Christian party — all while demonstrating a love of death, a dismissal of state’s rights, and vices that would make Jesus Christ himself wanna throw fists.) They say, you impeach Trump, you’re just being divisive. You’ll cause more violence, tut-tut, tsk-tsk. It’s a threat. It’s an abuser trick. Oh, I know I hit you, but don’t tell anyone, or I’ll hit you harder next time. They talk of wanting unity and healing? Go fuck yourselves.

You don’t unify with people who tried to tear you apart.

You don’t build new bridges to the people that burned the first bridges.

You can’t heal when people keep ripping out the damn stitches.

They first have to stop doing the harm. Then they have to own the harm they caused. There must be accountability. That comes from apologizing, from saying, well, shit, that really got away from us — ha ha, oops, our fucking bad, by the way, Joe Biden is president and we lied for political gain and accidentally unleashed a violent insurrection on ourselves. It’s leadership they need, someone to step in and say, we’re going to return to the party of personal responsibility, and not rely on victims to do our redemption for us. Because that’s not how any of this works.

But they’re not going to do that. They’ve proven that. They’re still out there caping for a man who would gladly shove them into a woodchipper if it earned him a moment’s entertainment. They, with him, incited this. They unleashed this. They gave these people, their deplorables, a wagon train of lies leading to some fake-ass promised land — a chosen people for a chosen reality going to a utopia of guns and white people and personal liberty and American exceptionalism. So, I dunno. I dunno what we do. Hold them accountable where we can. Demand that no one work with them, that if they do, they’re done. Close the door any any cultists in our lives. Gotta say no more of this. But I really don’t know. I’m not sure what happens next. As long as they keep offering up their choice of realities, as long as they refuse fact and truth, they’re going to continue to embolden these people. They’re stirred by the lie, driven by inequities that they think are their burden instead of the reality, which is that they’re the ones who are more equal than equal. This isn’t economic anxiety. This is bigotry and madness. And the Republicans still think they can steer that forest fire. They can’t. They’ll learn that the hard way — as if last Wednesday wasn’t enough. Worse will come and they’ll try to skirt blame then, too. Because that’s who they are. Craven, soft-spined lickspittles in service to their God-King, a man who has been like this since the beginning, since 2016, since 2015, since the 90s, since the 80s, always a vapid, lying narcissist whose only love is the spray-tanned naugahyde fuckhead in the mirror. He’s a tumor drawing bloodflow to himself, and they think they can siphon a little for themselves, but they can’t. He’ll eat them up, too. Because he’s a cancer. And that cancer is very advanced, now. BTW, it’s not like we didn’t fucking tell you. Anybody with a spit-depth understanding of history and twelve brain cells to bounce together looked at that guy and said, “Yeah, he’s cancer.” But you all kept on chewing asbestos thinking it was cheese crackers.

(Not YOU all, you all. I know you’re not the ones.)

Jesus. I mean, I didn’t know that when I was writing Wanderers, I was putting this out there. I know I’m not a prognosticator — it’s never the point of science-fiction, to tell the future, but just the same, a white supremacist militia coup of the government driven by a narcissist and using a pandemic as cover, welp. Welp, welp, welp. WELP.

Anyway.

Fuck.

I’m just sort of angry? John Scalzi noted that though this was different from 9/11, it’s also very 9/11 in how it feels, and… yeah. It does. That was an injury, too. Feels like that’s one more sucking chest wound that got us here, somehow. I’m angry and worried and feel helpless to watch what’s to come next week. I’m hoping it isn’t much. That it’s like the Twitter protest that just happened, which is to say, nobody showed up. Sound and fury, signifying nothing. But the threats are big, and it’s just as likely that Wednesday was only a trial run.

I’m really not sure what happens now. I hope it’s okay. But I don’t think it is. I think they opened the door to something — opened it wide in 2016, widest in 2020, but it had been slowly drifting open for a long while before that — and now the horror behind that door is out. Snakes out of a bag. Gonna be hard to get them back into it, maybe. Stay safe, everybody.Love to you for reading. Be good. Be vigilant, I guess. Care about each other best as you know how.

If you need some more (and better) reading than what I put here:

I Lived Through A Stupid Coup. America Is Having One Now.

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