Some news!

Hopefully of the good variety

I am still alive!

I’ve been quiet on socials lately, but for exciting reasons! Some of you probably guessed (because I have been dropping unsubtle hints) that there is a sequel for House of the Beast in the works. I turned in a rough first draft to my editor a couple of weeks ago, and we’ll be announcing it soon via Publishers Marketplace. But I got the go ahead to share the news a bit early, so I wanted to talk about it here first.

The book will follow Fion and Kaim’s adventures post-Pilgrimage, and will also expand on the years they spent growing up together in House Avera. While I’d sold HOTB as a standalone, I knew from the start that there was so much more story to these two than what got to be included from Alma’s perspective. I’ll confess that I entertained the thought of publishing fanfiction anonymously, just to get it out there one day. Amazingly, however, HarperVoyager wanted another book and liked my pitch!

So it’s been a lot of fun to revisit this world and finally put all these ideas on the page. I messaged my writing group chat so many times just to giddily be like “they’re paying me to write toxic yaoi”. And it is TOXIC. I let myself indulge so hard on this first draft. Who knows, maybe my editor will tell me to tone it down, but at least I lived decadently first!

Other than that, I have been violently addicted to Anno.

I’m about to sound like the biggest fucking nerd, but there was this minigame on the League of Legends client called ‘Demacia Rising’ that was basically a civilization-building strategy game, which I had a lot of fun with. So I decided to look into other similar games and came across the Anno series. Oh, boy. I have already logged 280 hours on Anno 117. Like, I am BADLY addicted. My League buddies are filing a missing report as we speak because I haven’t been on in about two weeks. It’s been a great way to exercise some creativity without the stress of work being involved, and it’s so nice to play a game where I’m not in danger of being called a slur or having my relatives insulted by the enemy team. I’m sure I’ll get bored of it at some point, but for now, I am letting myself enjoy this hyperfixation to the fullest.

I’ve also been on a horror binge.

I read ‘Strange Houses’ and ‘Strange Pictures’ by Uketsu, which put me in the mood for a book that I’ve seen making the rounds on social media lately, called ‘About A Place in the Kinki Region’ by Sesuji. I LOVED this book. It was evil. I don’t remember if I’ve said this before, but I have both a fascination with and fear of East Asian (and Southeast Asian) horror. I generally don’t get too scared when it comes to western horror, but Taiwanese horror?? Japanese horror???? And I straight up will not touch Thai horror. I’ve watched it before and felt like I narrowly avoided being cursed by what I saw on screen afterwards. Anyway, I’m finding that I can stomach creepiness much better in book form than in video form, so I’ve been enjoying my time with it. Next up on my TBR is ‘The Graceview Patient’ by Caitlin Starling.

Here’s the Santa Chin tax.

He’s as cute and mischievous as ever.

We’ll have an official announcement for the HOTB sequel soon, so keep an eye out, and thank you for reading!