Le Belle Fool Sans Merci - December 2022

Who’s doing it like her

THE MOONLIT KNIGHT, my first book in the ELEGY OF AN EMPIRE series, is coming out 1st July 2025!

The Lady of Ruby was a beautiful dream from which Sir Gawain never wanted to wake. King Arthur's famous nephew, Sir Gawain of Orkney, Knight of the Round Table, is known by many names: Hawk of May, Dawnbreaker, Maiden's Knight. With great acclaim comes even greater expectation. When a challenge from Persian knight Sir Gromer Somer Joure draws Gawain east of the Mediterranean Sea, a new confrontation arises from Gromer's outspoken sister. The Knight of Maidens' reputation could be his undoing. Zoroastrian widow Osti Mahtab, granddaughter of Iran's revolutionary Mobed Mazdak, detests violence. And the men who make names for themselves through it. While long resigned to her devout life within the Old City's walls, she would sooner die than admit her little brother's challenger to the inner sanctum uncontested. Yet by forestalling this game of blows betwixt paladins, has Mahtab inadvertently entered the fray herself? In this retelling of The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, Persian mythology clashes and mingles with Arthurian to create a new and exciting tale of romance, self-discovery, and fantasy. The Moonlit Knight marks the first installment of the Elegy of An Empire epic that promises to entice old and new fans of the legends for years to come.

Pre-order your copy today in print or as an ebook!

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or your local bookshop or library!

A big thank you to @mortiscausa for this beautiful cover. Go show her some love!

the best part of The Traitor Baru Cormorant is when she said It’s traitoring time and traitored all over those guys

I needed to do some proper art for Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, which has shaken me so so deeply.

fitz & kettricken designs for RA

tagging @littlegumshoe and @missveils bc im readin it im READIN it

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

Do you know this queer character?

Tonkee is transgender and wlw, and uses she/her pronouns!

i get why ppl say that babel was too 'telling not showing' with the cohorts' friendship; robin's internal monologue says his cohort were all in love with each other, but we mostly get dialogue of them fighting *cough* and letty being racist *cough*. i just think that that was kind of the point!

robin is a great flawed protagonist and most importantly an unreliable narrator, and the disparity between what he tells you and the dialogue scenes we actually get feels intentional to me, because you can feel the disconnect between what robin wanted and his reality. when he was still in love with babel, he wanted their cohort to be a perfect romantic ideal, wanted to think their fights were overcomeable, that ramy and victoire felt the same that he did. but the cracks were there from the beginning; their relationships were always fucked up. the effects of colonialism/imperialism robin wanted so badly to ignore had doomed them from the beginning. babel in ramy or victoire's perspective would be wildly wildly different because it's clear they did not have robin's privilege

i just love that robin is like truly such a damn liberal for half the book, never truly committing to hermes, holding onto his whiteness and desire to belong, and that this flaw is what dooms his relationship with ramy. people celebrate babel for its scathing critique of white feminism, and they should, but it's also so damning of liberal activism too imo. robin as a protagonist exemplifies the way fellow poc will often uphold racist structures for their own benefit and to avoid complicating themselves--and that this will always be a futile selfish endeavour. robin must, like all of us, come to the conclusion that he will never belong while this system remains intact, that his privilege isn't worth the suffering of those alike him, and that resisting it however he can is the only moral and just thing to do. wow i got sidetracked but robin swift wasian character of all time fr

It's wild how "women are reading frivolous and immoral novels that are rotting their brains" is such an evergreen moral panic. You'd think we'd have figured this one out by now.