Tiny Navajo Reads

This was a cold open to a youtube video and I am crying LOL

So excited to share this illustrations I had the pleasure of creating for Bloomberg Businessweek for the article “The Steamy, Magical and Now Very Lucrative Romantasy Business” by Hannah Miller and Madison Muller.

Such a fun one to work on!

Obviously a publisher is a business and a business needs to make money, but the idea used to be that you'd have a couple of very successful authors who bring in so much cash that they subsidise the new kid who is building a back catalogue of books that sell okay until they get name recognition and pay for themselves. I was told back then that a couple thousand pounds was very reasonable for a debut novel because you want to get royalties for the sales exceeding your advance and that way the publisher sees you as a profitable investment. The last couple of years I keep hearing about six figure book deals for debut (!) literary fiction (!) novels, what on earth?

My day job is as a freelance editor for nonfiction books, and I can safely say that if the publishing industry were operating as intended, I would either not have a job at all or be working for a specific press. Authors pay me directly to do the work that a press editor used to do as part of publication contracts. This is because so many presses have started outsourcing all their editorial work to either third-party contractors or, even worse, to genAI.

Anyway, I love editing. I think I love editing almost more than writing, and I'm pretty sure that I'm better at it. Last year I edited an academic article from 11k to 9k words for my supervisor and I felt like a god when I finished it, but when my supervisor asked if I'd thought about doing this professionally, I had to tell her that there's just not a viable career in editing anymore. Publishers used to employ! editors! Several different kinds of editors for different stages of the process! That used to be my dream job!

Editing is so essential to making a text good. It doesn't matter how talented or dedicated you are as a writer, you cannot achieve the level of quality by yourself that you could achieve by working with a skilled editor. That's normal! The lone genius who comes out of the cave with the perfect novel does not exist! The manuscript that gets sold to a publisher is supposed to be handed off to an editor who tells you to tighten up that plotline and reminds you that every day can't be Tuesday and sharpens your prose so your voice really shines. Skimping out on that part of the publication process takes money out of the hands of skilled professionals, leads to consumers (ew) receiving subpar products (ew!), and is such an injustice to the writers whose work can't reach its full potential (and the writers who won't get published because they can't afford to pay an editor out of pocket!).

truth over solace in lies

finished one of the most amazing reading experiences in my recent memory! these two are my very favourites.

Do we ever think seriously about how amazing it is that in Discworld, no female character ever gets fridged for the ‘benefit’ of a male character’s story arc?

I mean, it may not seem like a big deal until you remember these are actually 40 books and how incredibly common this is as a plot device in mainstream media.

Let’s take Sybil Ramkin (also known as dragon goddess of my heart) as an example. The one time she plays damsel in the series is in Guards!Guards when the King (actually dragon, actually Queen. Or maybe not. We shouldn’t presume on their gender identity) is going to eat her, and that’s because she was knocked out stone cold by several guards. Once she’s freed, she proceeds to kick ass and take names like you would expect from a dragon breeder, and you can also appreciate the fact that she kicks off probably the most practical courtship in the history of fantasy as a genre.

(also there was that time she knocked out a werewolf with a steel bar because they were holding her captive and apologized afterwards I swear to gods this woman)

And she is never fridged. Think about how easily most male authors would just go, ‘You know what? The protagonist isn’t having enough angst. Let’s kill his love interest.’

Then, tuppence more and up goes the donkey.

And she is such a positive force in the story! We start out with Vimes seemingly as a clichéd anti-hero cowboy-cop, the kind you’ll find in anything from Lethal Weapon to The Maltese Falcon. He is an alcoholic, utterly miserable and deems himself basically worthless. And then something (a combination of Sybil/Carrot/Vetinari support/scheming and Vimes’ own barely contained rage against the universe) kicks him in the pants and he gets character development like wowza! and we end up with a Lawful Good, incredibly clever (it never ceases to sadden me how he thinks he isn’t really that intelligent) protagonist with probably the strongest moral code I have ever seen in a fictional character. I mean, it had a mental/physical manifestation, for gods’ sake.

And they have this most elusive of fictional things; a marriage free of unnecessary drama and full of mutual respect and kindness, and she does her own thing with the dragons while he solves crime (she tends to help, though) and never is she killed off to 'advance’ his development as a character.

Because a) that would be a really gross (although frustratingly common) thing to do and b),

That is how we stop abuse.

The Works of Vermin (Hiron Ennes)

This was hands down the best book I've read this year. I hope I can make a good case of why I think it's so great without spoiling it, because I think it deserves to be experienced directly, but here goes.

The Works of Vermin mainly follows two characters (in an exquisitely detailed and textured omniscient third person): Guy, who works as an exterminator, is riddled with debts, and trying to protect his little sister from getting swallowed up by poverty, and Asther, a perfumer contracted to the Marshall (who is essentially the second most powerful man in the city). The city of Tiliard is almost a character itself: it is socially stratified, it is rotting from the inside out, it craves beauty and theater and music, it gives birth to ginormous insects that in turn change the city itself. The magic in this book permeates things, from the insects and their exudates to the way perfumes can be used to bend the minds of those who smell it.

Those two perspectives are used delightfully to give insight on the politics of the city, and on the cycles of violence it goes through. There is so much worldbuilding woven into the story, and in a fashion that I adore (though I know can be an obstacle to some readers): Ennes does not hold anyone's hand, and trusts their readers to piece things out themselves.

Reading this book was a slow (to me) but extremely rewarding experience, the prose feels almost tactile with how vivid and atmospheric it is. Queerness and gender fuckery is woven throughout the plot, while avoiding making any romance the main focus: the politics of the city, and the brotherly relationship between Guy and his sister Tyro are front and center of the book. All the characters are morally complex, though somewhat emotionally obscure. Everything is evoked rather than outright stated.

I don't know how to conclude other than say this book was a treat to me, specifically <3 also it's a standalone which I love for a book that manages to pack so much in it!!

I often wonder if this is why you so commonly see the sentiment that we are in an era of uniquely bad literature, or at least that the fact that most books don't have artistic aspirations and are not aiming to be anything other than mindless entertainment is new. In fact what's new is the idea that everything is worth preserving (and also the internet making it easier to preserve it). The dumb artistically unambitious trash books of the past have survived only sporadically, because people thought of them as literally disposable.

🧶 Sandry’s Book by Tamora Pierce (Circle of Magic #1)

Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟/5

With her gift of weaving silk thread and creating light, Sandry is brought to the Winding Circle community, where she meets three other misfits who all have different mysterious abilities. When disaster strikes, can she help weave together four kinds of magic and help save the place they grow to call home?

The first book in the Circle of Magic Quartet was a hard hitter. Tamora Pierce is a rare gem in fantasy and younger reader books, introducing you to strong and complex characters while also forming a story that’s hard to put down. A friend of mine recommended this one, since I mentioned liking the Alanna books, and it did not disappoint. I was happy with the pacing of the book and I loved the perspectives from each misfit, but also keeping them unique so it wasn’t writing the same story four times over.