(You can also read this post on Buttondown.)
I’m so happy to announce my next book, a fantasy novel called THE PRIEST OF CRAWLING THINGS, which will come out from Canadian press Wolsak & Wynn in May 2027:
There will also be an audio version, as usual, from Recorded Books.
If you’ve been with this newsletter for ages and ages (like back in the Substack days) then you may actually recognize the premise of this one: I wrote about it back when I finished the first draft of the manuscript. Back then, it was called MOTHER DRAGON.
I knew it was hubris to write publicly about a manuscript when it was still at the draft stage, but I was just so delighted to have come out of burnout and written something. And then, of course, the writing writing’d; there were rounds of revisions, and a long slow submission process, and contract negotiations that took a while because it was summer and everyone kept going on vacation, and then the original PM announcement had a typo in it which also took a while to fix, but now, three or four years later, here we are.
It was my idea to approach Canadian publishers with this one; looking at the whole geopolitical situation, it just seemed smart to put in some effort to make those connections. I met two of the editors from Wolsak & Wynn in person a few weeks ago, at Can*Con, and they’re lovely and we’re all super happy to be working on this together. That’s a new one for me: actually hanging out with the people I work with in this business. I’d like to do it more.
Anyway, THE PRIEST OF CRAWLING THINGS is going to be splendid. It’s got a trans coming-of-age story and a complex, evolving relationship between a pair of queer characters (if you liked that stuff in IGNORE but wished that the angst of growing up queer wasn’t quite so heavy, you might like this one a lot.) It’s got a semi-anarchic, non-state society where there are absolutely no kings (but a lot of councils, traditions, respected elders, and, of course, DRAGONS.) It’s got some of the trippiest magic I’ve written since the Outside books, and a creepy chthonic spider goddess who I can’t wait for you to meet. It’s got falconry and wrestling and horses and feasts. It’s got a plot that hinges on restorative justice – and on the kind of marginalized protagonist who doesn’t have to run away or burn their society down, not because their society is perfect, but because there’s enough good left in it that, if they can find a way to make themselves understood, people will hear them.
More soon, once pre-orders start and the publicity campaign or this one begins in earnest. It’s already less than seven months away!
Meanwhile, it’s been a hot minute since I gave a news update that wasn’t just book reviews. Here’s a few more stray bits of publicity from the summer:
- New reviews of IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS have popped up in Locus, on Shades of Orange, in Kirkus (for the audiobook edition) and on Whimsical Dragonette.
- You can listen on the CFRC FM website to the IGNORE pre-launch event that I held at my workplace in April, which includes a Q&A and live reading from an early chapter of the book.
- I also noticed shout-outs to IGNORE in Ruthanna Emrys’s Seeds of Story column, on Book Riot’s list of Best Pride Month Reads, on What We Reading’s list of Best Books To Read For Pride, on BiblioLifestyle’s list of best SFF for summer 2026, and in Sword and Laser. You can tell how behind I am on these updates from the fact that I’m only just now telling you about Pride Month stuff that happened in June. But I’m so happy to see the book being talked about – especially since I am a big fan of Seeds of Story myself!
Oh, and I got onto the Top 10 SFF list in a June issue of ALA Booklist:
