Dear Side Questers,

First off, the big news:

I’m thrilled to announce that artsnb has awarded me a grant to write a novel with the working title A Binding of Story and Spellwork! I’ll be drafting this book over the next year and I’m so thankful to everyone who wrote me a letter of recommendation, helped me with my grant application, and especially to artsnb for believing in this story!

(if you’ve noticed the date, please note that there is a significant delay between when I receive this news and I’m allowed to share it publicly.)

Some of you may have also noticed that I didn’t send out a newsletter last month. The short story is that I was in zero shape to write a newsletter.

The LONG story is that I caught a virus in late June/early July and it spread to my ears, cutting off my hearing entirely on one side, and partially on the other. At first I made some jokes, haha, it’s summer and the kids are home but somehow I’ve still got quiet time.

Then the first round of antibiotics didn’t do anything and it wasn’t funny anymore. Nothing sounds right, which is disorienting. Birdsong sounds like a distant banshee wail. The sussurrus of the wind in the leaves sounds like bacon sizzling. A big truck with a jake brake going down the mountain sounds like nothing I can place but let me tell you it opens a void of horror at my feet until someone explains what I just heard. I can’t tell what direction sounds are coming from. Everything is WEIRD.

I never realized how much I depend on sounds to navigate my world, how changes of pressure can alter sounds. Details I’ll definitely be considering the next time I write a portal fantasy.

And yeah, mental health. I fell in a pit.

Then I got a second, longer round of antibiotics. That also did nothing to help, brutalized my guts, and at this point, people are fed up. At first, people are frustrated that you can’t hear them. Then they give up, or get mad. You can read it in their face. “You’re not even trying. You just don’t want to listen to me. You aren’t worth the trouble it takes to talk to you.” At one point my seven-year-old burst into tears because she “has no one to talk to anymore.”

I’ve come to realize that people don’t buy hearing aids for themselves, they buy them for other people.

The pit got deeper.

Last week I went back to the doctor and finally got some answers. Basically, I have a fluid buildup in my middle ear caused by that bad cough we had in late June, but it isn’t an infection, it isn’t contagious, it’s just… there. And it should clear up on it’s own within twelve weeks. If it doesn’t, there’s an outpatient surgery, the same one little kids get when you hear they’re getting tubes in their ear. Three months of deafness sounds like a long time, but not if you’ve been in a super deep pit of depression worrying that this might be permanent.

I can do three months. Three months is a ladder down the side of the pit that I can use to climb out. Heck, it’s already been one month. Two to go!

If you spend a lot of time in the woods, you’ve probably noticed that birds go quiet when there’s a predator around. Quiet woods, like when you’re temporarily deaf, aren’t an easy place to relax, so my forays have been short. But long enough to see this cutie:

I have been spending all of this quiet working on a novella that is very much what I needed. Someone in my workshop group calls it ‘message fic’ which once would have horrified me, but yeah, it is and I should probably just lean into it. It’s a fairy tale for people who are horrified with all the book banning that’s been happening to the South.

Originally, this was a YA short story I wrote for Cast of Wonders’ annual Banned Books Week. It ended up being held for consideration, but then returned with the kind of feedback that made me trunk the story completely. A recent newsletter from Charlie Jane Anders made me pull it back out and I decided to see how it would work with a mature protagonist and more space to tell the story. This rewrite is really turning into something that I’m proud of. I’ve kept the original title, Care and Feeding of Your Little Banned Bookshop and I’m happy to say that this time around, the feedback has been positive thus far (finger crossed!).

Not incidentally, Charlie Jane Anders ALSO wrote the book Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories which I’ve been rereading this month, for obvious reasons. I highly recommend the book and her newsletter!

That’s it for this month Side Questers. I hope you’re having a wonderful summer with lots of wild adventures. Feel free to hit reply and tell me about them so I can live vicariously through you!

Until next month,