if you follow me on social media at all you may have seen that i officially announced the title, release date, and official summary for the sequel to the daughters of izdihar!
the weavers of alamaxa is coming to a bookstore near you on march 26, 2024, and it’s ready for preorders (on amazon and barnes & noble thus far). you can head to the instagram post to read the official summary, but i’ll say here that it essentially picks up right where the daughters of izdihar left off! so you will very quickly learn what happened to nehal and giorgina after the events of the first book.
since coming off deadline i’ve been immersing myself in books, films, and television.
what i’ve been watching:
i marathoned the entire alien series (that is, the first four films with sigourney weaver, and then the most recent films with michael fassbender), and also watched the first alien vs. predator film. i’d actually never seen any of these before, ever, in my life, which is wild, because they’re very much my vibe. well, except for the third and fourth movies, which were kind of…awful. i really, really loved prometheus and alien: covenant, though, moreso even than the original alien films.
x-men: first class was a rewatch for me, and i really enjoyed it the second time around. then i watched days of future past and…didn’t really like it very much. like it was fine as a film but as a sequel to first class it completely sucked. i kind of want to watch the remaining two films to see sophie turner as jean grey, but i’m wary, because i know they received some pretty terrible reviews.
i finally watched interview with the vampire, and i’m OBSESSED. i also had a lot of issues with the way some things were adapted, particularly concerning claudia and her arc starting about halfway through the series. i think i’ll make a whole separate post about that though, because i’ve been an anne rice girlie since i was 11 and i need to talk about it.
shadow and bone s2 was mostly enjoyable until the very last episode. up till then, the issues i was having with how they’d chosen to adapt this season could have been ignored, but the last episode…was truly one of the worst episodes of literally anything i’ve ever seen, ever, in my life, and i’ve watched a lot of terrible television. it kind of soured the whole thing for me, but i will inevitably be excited about season 3 when it airs.
i binged the third (and final?) season of happy valley, which is a british crime drama set in yorkshire featuring james norton as a psychopathic criminal. it’s really, really good, realistic without being too bleak, and i think it wrapped itself up very well — it managed to be moving and human without being maudlin or unrealistic, which i think can be tough to do. but it was smart, too — it chose to go for realism over drama, and i think that elevated the ending overall.
what i’ve been reading (books/long form):
i just finished ninth rain by jen williams and absolutely loved it. the worldbuilding is astonishingly original, the characters are memorable, and there’s a ship in there that’s making me remember what it was like to actually ship people. i already bought the sequel, and i’m frankly astonished that jen williams doesn’t have a us publisher for her fantasy books!
i also really loved seven faceless saints by m.k. lobb! it’s a ya fantasy inspired by the guilds of florence and features a childhood friends to enemies to lovers. the writing was so good and i had such a good time with the murder mystery plot.
what i’ve been reading (short form):
i’m very interested in the recent history of television, so naturally i loved this article about tv’s broken streaming model
an excellent rumination on how AI technology assists capitalism’s injustices
an orpheus and eurydice retelling/reimagining in the form of a short story by alix e. harrow called the long way up
what i’ve been writing:
trying to figure out what i want to focus on as a new project. i always struggle to settle on an idea because i have so many half-formed ones (oh, the sheer number of scrivener documents full of half-assed worldbuilding), but after some thought, i’ve settled on two: one is an epic fantasy and the other is a gothic supernatural murder mystery that may or may not be YA. i don’t know. i don’t think i’d be good at writing YA, honestly, but i also think the plot feels like it would fit in YA, and i do enjoy YA horror.
i’m more heavily focused on the epic fantasy because it’s, well, epic, and very large in scope, much more so than the alamaxa duology. it’s got four POVs and counting, spans two continents and four countries, and likely will have multiple magic systems. so i’m trying to be very intentional about my worldbuilding before jumping into the plot too much (though, i already have about 20k words written).
and that’s all i’ve got! thanks for reading, and i hope everyone’s having a good start to their summer!