One day I will return to your side

a) be Emperor

b) kill a series of enemies

This is so fun, I love the brightness and joyfulness of the art, and Elliot so clearly being a little menace and their very different angry expressions. And the scar on Luke’s head from the trigon ball!

I absolutely love the progression here, not just Elliot from lil snot to much bigger snot in jock denial, but the progression of the weird table’s dynamic. Luke and Serene, who were platonic love at first sight, Elliot’s undeniable bisexuality and the celebratory way it’s shown.

And since it is the last day of Pride, I do have some other things to say. Things are rough right now. I hope in an extinction burst way, where people are being awful because they know the tide is turning against them. I hope things will get better and better. In some ways they are! LGBT representation has come a long way since I was first published in 2009. There was behind the scenes pushback then I don’t get now. I watched Queer as Folk back in the day, but all my friends weren’t watching it the way they all watched Heated Rivalry.

At the same time, the way is rocky and full of stumbling back. Tasha Suri (genius author of the lady knight/witch Arthuriana tale ISLE IN THE SILVER SEA) showed me this link about how Heated Rivalry spawned… straight hockey shows? (Well said by the lead and writer of Fire Island, a very excellent gay modern take on Pride & Prejudice.)

And my head spun round and round. And yet… before Heated Rivalry, last year publishers in various markets were saying no thanks to LGBT fiction, and now they’re saying yes again. Baby steps through the rocks.

There is a reason I wrote IN OTHER LANDS on my blog, and that it was published by a small press. For the record, if any book with a straight romance at its centre had made the sales numbers IN OTHER LANDS did, it would have been SNAPPED up by a big publisher. And several editors over the years have tried. (Whenever I talk critically about publishing, I mean the institution, most people in publishing are beautiful story-loving souls.) All of this is incredibly frustrating for those of us who want to celebrate love and share stories.

Still I do think there’s a rising tide of love and change. There are more writers sharing more diverse stories than ever before.

For obvious reasons, LONG LIVE EVIL is the story that means the most to me, and that I think of as my best. (I’d hope my writing has improved in 10 years, or what is it all about). And Time of Iron is making a lot of points about queerness as a way of breaking free from the narrative that I couldn’t quite articulate, back then.

But I know for many of my readers IN OTHER LANDS will be the book that means most to them, the big magical joyful bi coming of age tale that came to them at an important time. I have read and cried over emails and letters telling me that they read it and came out, to their families or themselves, that Elliot was their first bi MC. I’ve heard from other writers that it inspired them, as books like Swordspoint inspired me. And this book survived, and in a large part my career survived, when books I published with big publishers went out of print, because of readers loving this book which for so long I didn’t even know was a book. I wrote it long enough ago now that I experience the book through my readers most: I love it again through their eyes. You bring the tale and the joy back to life for me.

I wrote some of this book sitting in the London beer garden of a gay pub with my friends, drinks in jamjars, drenched in sunlight, lying to them that I had a deadline. Playing with my awful and awfully good Elliot, Serene-Heart-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle, and golden Luke. Telling the story mattered, and so does love and celebration.

“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.

“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.

“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.

“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”

“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”

i agree and i made a generator! if someone wants to do something with this please be my guest 🤗 https://perchance.org/trekrarepairs

As someone from a hot country that's regularly on fire, here's some tips:

WATER IS YOUR FRIEND! WATER! IS! YOUR! FRIEND! You can transfer SO much heat into this bad boy! You cannot cool down without water!

Wrists under the cold tap. Splash your face and the back of your neck. Fan yourself.

In some countries you can buy a little handeld fan with a water sprayer.

Damp tea towel around the neck. Stick an ice pack in there on hotter days.

Half fill a water bottle with water, stick in freezer. If you use a bottle with a straw, make sure it's lying on its side with the straw side up and out of the water. When frozen top up the rest of the way with tap water and off you go.

Desperate to cool off? Wet T-shirt. Sit in front of a fan. This will nuke it, just don't get hypothermia and don't fall asleep like this.

Cold showers are also your friend in summer. Some people get psyched up by these. Personally, I sleep like a baby, so I'm good to have them before bed. Just keep in mind that it takes a bit of time for the cool to circulate, so your body will tell you that you're colder than you actually are. I find that when I have cold showers I need to step out of the spray when I think I'm cold... I'll just wait, and thirty seconds later the temperature has evened out and I actually need to step under again. Rinse and repeat until you maintain coolness even after stepping out for a bit.

If you can't do cold showers, turn the cold shower on anyway and just stick your arms under. When they're cold, lift your arms up above your head. The sensation of cool blood draining into your body is fucking weird and kinda unpleasant but less unpleasant than being hot.

Feet in a tub of water with ice. Blood naturally flows to your extremities when hot, so take advantage of this. If you don't have a tub of ice water, sticking a wet rag on your feet in front of the fan works too, it's the less powerful version of the wet T-shirt.

Drinks lots of water but make sure that water has electrolytes as well. Stay in the shade.

Keep air circulating. Fans don't actually cool rooms down, they just help transfer heat from your body to the moisture on your skin or the air via evaporative cooling.

Block north facing windows early in the morning so the sun doesn't get in. If you're in the northern hemisphere, this is opposite for you. Keep in mind that if your home is brick, the bricks will still heat up and slowly release heat into your home even after the sun goes down so this will only do so much.

If it's hotter inside than outside, close all your windows but two, making sure they're on opposite sides of the house/unit you're in. Point a fan out of one window, making sure that the doors between the rooms with the open windows are all open. This will help create a mini pressure system in your home, pulling cooler air in and pushing the hotter air out via the fan. Bonus points if you can get that fan high up where the hot air rises; even within a single room the top is much hotter than the air by the floor. Adjust the amount of open windows based on how many fans you have, but generally you want more windows with fans open than windows without fans to keep the pressure correct.

Obviously, use your common sense for these. Not everything WILL work for you, just use the stuff that does and adjust what needs to be adjusted. Some of these will be impossible to use in the workplace but others you can still use. Others are best used at home. If humidity impacts your ability to use any of these, get a dehumidifier if that's an option, or use more ice instead of evaporation.

“Depends what you mean by that,” Eric said thoughtfully. “Is a man a great thing to be? If you mean someone who will not be bullied, who will guard what he cares for against the world and care nothing for the world’s opinion, I try. If you mean someone who scares women and children, who grinds down everyone he thinks weaker than him to paste for sheer love of destruction – then I suppose you think of yourself as a man.”

I was inspired by lots of cute Polly Pockets from the 80s and 90s for this piece! 💕 I love how each Polly Pocket has a unique world inside it so I drew some dolls exploring other toys and making friends! 😊

Dear diary this list came to me in my dream! Looks like AU-gust 2026 is here...

What is AU-gust? It stands for Alternate Universe August, and it is a creative challenge for everyone. Writers, artists, fans; anyone can join! Be sure to check out our FAQ for more answers! Join us on BlueSky, AO3, Discord and under the tags #au gust and #au gust 2026.

Special thanks to @yaoyorozoops for creating our wonderful graphics!