Behold: the Rook and Rose wiki!

This has been in the works for quite some time.

The roots of it go all the way back to when Alyc and I started writing The Mask of Mirrors. We knew there was going to be a lot of worldbuilding information and so forth to keep track of, so my husband very kindly set us up with a privately-hosted wiki we could use for that. And then, well . . . I don’t believe in astrology at all, and also I am such a goddamned Virgo. Which led to me meticulously documenting basically everything.

Having done so, it seemed a pity for all that effort to be locked away where only Alyc could see it.

Behold, the Rook and Rose wiki! We were recently approached by a fan who works at wiki.gg, who helped us export the private mediawiki and set it up over on their site. It has had some art added (check it out in dark mode; the background numinat gets super pretty then), and a fancier front page, and there are all kinds of things we can do now that I didn’t bother with before — like hiding spoilers. (There was no point in hiding those when the only people who could see the wiki were the authors.) Also, thanks to the wiki.gg folks, I now know that the total content of the wiki is a hundred and ninety thousand words, which makes it longer than any novel I’ve written that isn’t part of the Rook and Rose trilogy, and very nearly on par with those.

So if there’s anything you ever wanted to know about the world, our characters, the plot, or anything else, go check it out! It contains mentions of deleted bits, details of the setting that never made it into the story — all kinds of stuff. There’s only one specific tidbit of information we removed before making this public, as it’s a reveal we might want to deploy if we write some future work in this setting. (It is, however, an aspect of the world that a reader could potentially deduce, so have fun guessing what that might be.) Other than that, if you read this, you will know basically everything we know about the world and this story!

Three poems make a pattern!

My third published poem is out today and free to read online: “To the Angels Alone,” in Augur Magazine. It’s kinda sorta a stealth Onyx Court poem? I wrote it for an anonymous contest in a writers’ group, so that precluded writing anything that would have directly linked it to the series, plus I don’t know if I would have done that in the first place — within the confined space of a poem, it might feel a little shoehorned in. But it’s about faeries and Mary, Queen of Scots, so it’s definitely in conversation with that series!

Possibly of Use: Special COVID Edition

Last week, after four and a half years of successfully dodging it, my husband and I got hit by the covid bullet. Not too badly, and Paxlovid helped to reduce our symptoms more rapidly (at the cost of, yes, a very unpleasant metal taste that came and went for five days), but it nevertheless wiped us out pretty hard. A week after first testing positive, I still don’t quiiiiiiite have a negative test result, and I am still sleeping far more than I used to.

This experience prompted me to experiment with two things that — per the mission statement of these posts — could possibly be of use to others. Big asterisk this time, which is that I’m about to pass on Internet Medical Advice, and we all know what that’s worth . . . but hey, this at least one comes with PubMed citations? It’s also stuff that in most cases will, at worst, do you no harm, which puts ahead of some of the other Internet Medical Advice out there.

The straightforward one first: melatonin. A friend linked me to this study, which says that in addition to helping address the sleep disruption caused by covid, it may — more studies are needed — actually do something against the virus itself, up to and including making vaccination more effective. Since I got absolutely shitty sleep the first two nights I was sick, I figured that if all it did was help me sleep better, I was already ahead, and if it did more than that, bonus! It made a massive difference in my ability to rest, which is good for healing all on its own. (I did, however, have to check for potential interactions with the small mountain of other medications I was taking. The only real flags were that it + dextromethorphan, aka cough suppressant, might make me extra drowsy — oh no, don’t throw me in that briar patch — and that ritonavir, one of the components of Paxlovid, might make the melatonin less effective.)

The slightly less straightforward one comes from this blog post, which collects sources in support of a certain antihistamine protocol. The short form is that combining two classes of antihistamine — one found in most OTC anti-allergy medications, and one found in most OTC acid controllers — may improve your chances of full recovery and reduce the risk of long covid, improve the symptoms of long covid, and (weaker evidence here) even lower your chances of catching covid in the first place. There’s more explanation there if you’re interested, along with the specifics of the protocol.

Take all this with a grain of salt, of course (provided there are no negative interactions between salt and any other medications you might be on). IANA doctor of any stripe, your own personal medical situation might include factors that make one or both of these a bad idea, and all of them need more study. But in my case, there was no compelling reason not to try them. Whether they helped against the virus itself, I don’t know — but at least I got some better sleep out of it.

Stories and a sale!

Two stories of mine have come out recently, one while I was out of town, the other not long after I got back:

“In the Paradise of the Pure Land” is a little piece of folkloric flash, inspired by my yōkai research for L5R novels. But you won’t find well-known things like kitsune or tanuki here; instead it’s a tale about a very special karyōbinga . . .

And then at the opposite end of the short story length spectrum, we have the not-quite-novelette “Any Rose My Mother Raised, Any Lane My Father Knows.” I won’t say what exactly it’s based on, but I suspect some of you will tumble to it pretty darn fast.

As for the sale, I am delighted to say that I have sold a poem to Strange Horizons! It took many fewer attempts than with short fiction, even accounting for the fact that SH lets you submit up to six poems at a time. “A War of Words” is likely to be out fairly soon, September or maybe October; I can’t wait.

Let’s do this

I think I was somewhere over Hudson Bay, about thirty-five thousand feet in the air, when I heard the news that Biden had dropped out of the race. I’ve spent the last two weeks on vacation in Europe (more about that later), and I’d really been enjoying the extent to which that put me out of daily engagement with political news; when a flight attendant oh-so-helpfully shared that particular bombshell with me, the bottom dropped out of my stomach, because I thought, this is going to be fucking chaos.

But it’s . . . not, is it? I mean, yes, the racists and the sexists are going to lose their goddamned minds over Harris, and yes, there will be other people who are definitely not racist or sexist but nevertheless find ~other reasons~ to not support Harris. (Maybe she has some emails they can freak out about?) This will be chaos in the sense that the ugliest aspects of America are going to scream their bigotry to the skies. But she has the party establishment behind her, and she has an absolute FLOOD of support from grass-roots donors in the aftermath of the announcement. I think the whole “I’m not excited about this candidate” thing is sometimes overblown — my ideal president is honestly a boringly competent administrator who puts their head down and gets the job done — but it’s true that excitement can get people to the polls who wouldn’t have otherwise gone. And we’re gonna need that to make sure Team Bigotry doesn’t fuck this country over and enshrine the King of Orange to rule over us all, with a compliant Supreme Court behind him.

So, yeah. Let’s fucking DO THIS. Let’s get our first female president into office, not through the GOP trotting out some conservative mannequin to show how much they care about The Ladiez, not through Biden stepping down during his second term (which I honestly thought had a decent chance of happening), but through us actually electing her. Let’s put the female mixed-race prosecutor against the sexist, racist felon. And let’s elect a tidal wave of Democratic candidates into the House, the Senate, the governorships, the mayoralties, everything down to the local dog-catchers, because it’s that patient attention to down-ticket races that has let the GOP build the leverage they needed to screw us all over the way they’ve been doing lately.

And if you don’t have a lot of money to donate — to Harris or to those down-ticket races — or if you do, but in either case if you have free time, consider volunteering with Vote Forward. They work to encourage unregistered and low-propensity voters to engage with an election, and their success rate is pretty damn good. All you need is a printer, envelopes, stamps, and the will and ability to write a brief personal message on each letter. Said message has to be non-partisan, but since we’re at a point where saying “democracy good” is simultaneously non-partisan and anti-Republican, it’s not a tough needle to thread. Let’s get people to the polls.