always on those yang's lady generals

haha it's an original space opera that i write. the title is in the shadow of heaven but I always abbreviate it because i have engineer acronym disease. i started writing it as a web serial in 2018, wrote about 800k words of it across 2.5 books, put it on hiatus in 2020, and came back to it in 2025 with the intent to rewrite it from the ground up now that i'm a much better author than I was in 2018 + try selling it to tradpub + finish the series. it's a 3 book series plus a standalone prequel (titled every hateful instrument [EHI]).

i'm quite bad at describing what this book is about (which tbh is part of my problem) so i'll copy/paste the relevant section of my query letter here (slightly edited so I don't straight up spoil the ending of the first novel lol)

Yan BarCarran was engineered before birth to be her family’s ticket into the upper caste of Imperial society— and that is one fact she can never allow herself to think about. Fastidiously devout and terminally lonely, Yan’s greatest and only joy is in losing herself, dissolving her own mind completely in a group prayer with other psychics. When the leader of the Empire, Aymon Sandreas, looks for apprentices, he sees Yan’s openness as weakness, one he can use to shape a perfect successor. He woos her with the thing she craves: total intimacy, allowing her to look directly into his mind, and be seen clearly in return. For Yan, who knows and fears that her purpose from birth is to be a tool for others, Aymon’s offer of usefulness combined with love is one that she won’t refuse. But the costs of belonging to Aymon soon become too terrible to ignore. During a diplomatic mission gone wrong, Yan’s fellow apprentice, Kino, secretly mercy-kills several criminals to protect them from interrogation and torture. Kino confesses to Yan, hoping to find an ally, and while Yan keeps Kino’s secret to protect her, she doesn’t want to think about what Kino’s choices mean. When Aymon asks the apprentices to use their psychic power against a helpless prisoner of war, turning the spiritual communion Yan loves most into an unforgivable weapon, Yan can’t remain both herself and Aymon’s obedient apprentice— and one of those is much easier to escape. Complete at 93,000 words, IN THE SHADOW OF HEAVEN is a literary, psychological science fiction novel, combining the political richness of Arkady Martine’s A MEMORY CALLED EMPIRE with the moral horror of Mary Doria Russell’s THE SPARROW.

the way i'd describe it tonally is like, it's a classic space opera setup (like star wars) in the "lesbian space atrocities" vein of modern sff (like the traitor baru cormorant) but with a much denser literary leaning interiority than is typical for sff. it is probably not everybody's thing but people who like it do seem to really like it haha

anyway the status of the project is book 1 is Done done*, and I'm in the process of querying it to try to get a literary agent [this is going extremely badly lol]. the standalone prequel every hateful instrument is at the "extremely readable first draft" stage, but I plan to tear up the back 1/3 of the novel and replace it with a different setting/do some major B plot restructuring later this year, with the goal of finishing the edit and sending it out to agents in january 2027. book 2 of the main series i'm technically in the middle of writing but is on pause rn so I can write short stories, hoping to finish it this year but it might end up getting kicked to 2027. book 3 is a 2027 project. there's some other stuff too but it's mostly irrelevant lol.

if you're interested in reading it, it's available on my discord, or i can link you my gdocs lol. you may also peruse my #natalie writes a web serial tag for all my posts going back to 2018 about the project.

*there's maybe a few more edits I can and should do someday, but I'm not fiddling with it now because it would be rather pointless

i shall leave you with a picture of yan (right) and kino (left) i drew ages ago that i like

making my One (1) promo post for the maybe three people who follow me who have never read my beloved trunk novel. If you liked Netflix's 2013 version of House of Cards but thought "wow I wish this was just a little bit more cyberpunk and Slavic" or, if you enjoyed Han Kang's 2014 Human Acts but thought "what if this was worse but did have trans people to some degree and all the history was fictional," well, do I have a novel for you. Written during my time as a Queer|Arts|Mentorship fellow, revised enough to be agented and then die on sub, finally out in the world in full for free on ao3, I present: DACHA.

Chapters 1- 3 stand alone, and chapters 4-8 sort of do, hence the three promo pics.

This young coyote was playing around in the dirt, digging and jumping around until he finally found the prize- a tissue or something 😂. It was almost dark, so a little challenging getting the shots. Los Angeles County, June 2026.

Chacoan Peccary Catagonus wagneri

Also called the taguá, it is found in Paraguay, Bolivia, and Argentina. It lives in the hot, dry Gran Chaco region, dominated by low-lying succulents and thorny bushes. It uses its tough snout to roll cacti on the ground, rubbing the spines off before eating. It may pull off the spines with its teeth and spit them out.

It increased our error rate while reducing the overall ticket count by two. And redistributed numbers.

It smoothed out our data trend, erasing the actually important-to-report information (that big dip and increase is important):

It erased my security and networking practices and came up with resubmitted tickets out of nowhere and shows an overall downward trend in ticket counts when only one of the five categories is actually trending down.

On another slide it also changed the status of a device from "attention needed" to "healthy," and on yet another slide it removed the captions that I'd grouped with a set of images.

This is your reminder that the robots are stupid and if you work with them you need to check their work.

I don't say this because I think that YOU should be using AI for stuff (and if you hate AI, I get it, I don't want to use it either) I say this because one of the absolute best ways I've found to get people to step back from believing everything the AI tells them is to ask the AI a question about something the person you're speaking to is an expert on, or ask it something that YOU are an expert on and point out where the AI's answer is wrong.