We’d been looking at old family photos, and the one below, of my paternal grandfather and I, caught my eye. He really did love to create complex horoscopes that were beautiful. That memory was the inspiration for the following story.

My story starts with my grandfather dying. That probably sounds sadder than it is, but I’d only met him once when I was six, and I mostly remember that he loved to calculate my astrology birth chart. Big charts, too, not the mini horoscopes you’d get at home in England. He’d lay the paper out, and it’d be wider than my dad’s desk, covered in swooping curves and intricate golden symbols. He took it very seriously, like a science.

Read the rest here:

In the silence of the Sacrificial Atrium, where the only sounds are the drip of faith and the flutter of crimson wings, my ceremony goes quietly, terribly, wrong.

The air is cool, smelling of stone and incense and the faint, metallic tang of blood. I kneel on the polished obsidian disc, the chill seeping through the thin linen of my robe. Before me, looming beyond the arched window, is the god. Unlike the gods of nearby heathen villages, this god is not a statue but a vast, fibrous cocoon the colour of a storm cloud, hanging above the silent abyss of the sacred chasm. It has been there for twelve generations. It is why my city clings to the canyon’s rim.

High Priest Durai’s voice is a dry riverbed of sound, reciting the Litany of Approach. My own blood is a quick, hot rhythm in my ears, drowning out his words. I have been chosen. It is the highest honour. My blood will be the ink of a prayer, my life the postage for a message they have been sending for centuries. Better to die now, connecting to the god, than starve in the gutters, poor and alone.

The silver knife is cold, then briefly fire, as Durai draws the ritual cut along my left forearm. Deep and precise. A line of perfect, welling red that flows towards the cocoon. The prayer begins.

From the shadowed niche above the window, it comes. The blood moth. Its wings are the colour of wine dregs in the sacred cup, a shocking, living crimson against the grey stone and the greater grey of the god. It is two-hands-spread wide, its body velvet-black. It descends on wings that make no sound, a piece of the night given purpose.

Read the rest here:

Check out the full TOC and preorder here:

Dragons! Romance! A little bit of banter!

Check here for more details and the full table of contents:

I wrote a blogpost for Milford Writer’s Workshop on why, and how, to backup. I’ll link it here: Don’t Lose The Plot: Back Up Your Work

*I also was a day late submitting a story, but thankfully I was allowed to submit, and that story was accepted! More on that in a couple of days…

This piece came from a discussion about creativity with my partner. We had both been struggling to get to sleep due to the unusually warm weather, and how that lack of good rest had made it harder to write.

You don’t remember the first night she came. Witches, like regrets, arrive softly, slipping through the cracks of your mind to take root in the dark places where memory blurs into myth.

Her name was Sapana, though names were slippery things when it came to her kind. She smelled of overripe flesh, and when she smiled stolen dreams flickered between her teeth like dying stars.

At first, you didn’t notice the theft. You’d wake with the ghost of something dissolving on your tongue; a sensation of wings, a whisper of laughter, the echo of a kiss that never was. By morning, only a sense of loss lingered. But the words that once danced at your pen stayed silent and still. Your work suffered.

Read the rest here:

When asked to split my 3,800 word story into seven so that it could be posted in this way, I was provided with were excellent guidelines. Still, it was an interesting thing to do. I started out by working out how many words a segment would be if split exactly by seven, then from that loose idea, it allowed me to read each part and find the best natural split. It’s not something I’ve done before and I really enjoyed the challenge.

My story starts tomorrow!

I’m on Playing With Gender and Gender Expectations in SFF (Friday August 9th, 13:00 GMT+1, Alsh 1) with CL Hellisen, Finn McLellan, J.S. Fields and Krys Keller (moderator).

From Melisa Scott’s Shadow Man to Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit, speculative fiction has long been a place to play with ideas of gender. We will consider the ways that authors have used the freedoms and limitations of speculative fiction to explore the space of gender and expand on the boundaries around gender expectations.

Hope to see you there!

Please see the full article here.