Moonshine’s 1st Birthday!

Today, Moonshine celebrates the 1st anniversary of its US release!

One year ago today, my little book about bisexual flapper wizards living in a volcanic hellscape full of gang violence, gentrification, and sexy fae monsters had its Stateside debut.

Haven’t picked it up yet? Let me make it easy, since I’m so very helpful:

(You can also try checking your local library! I know quite a few have bought copies or have the ebook available.)

If I can get raw for a second, my debut year was, um, hard. Turns out full-time grad school and part-time day job/full-time day job and part-time grad school really eat up a lot of the hours that a debut author needs to work on editing and book promotion and writing more books. There were also a couple of walls hit that didn’t have anything to do with my non-writing life, and rolling with those punches has been a challenge. (You wouldn’t think that an author would forget what rejection feels like from the querying process, and yet here I am like, “Who could have predicted how disappointing this would be?”) And of course there’s forces outside of my life entirely that have impacted my debut experience for the worse–remember when a violent fascist rally in Seattle took place on the same day and a block away from my first author reading ever? Because I do.

I’ll remember that one into my grave.

But! Overall it’s been a delight to have Moonshine out in the world (and to not have to worry about editing it anymore, whew!), and I’ve been so glad to see people connecting with it, even all across the globe. (There are people buying it in Iceland, what!) People have expressed so much passion for Soot City and Daisy and Vicks and even Andre Swarz, and it’s just been so cool. Maybe that sounds a weak descriptor of how it feels to know that my story is resonating with people, but it’s true. And besides, what do you want from me? Powerful, impactful descriptions? Like I’m some kind of writer or something?

As for what’s next, there’s a lot up in the air right now, so it’s hard to say. My main focus is graduating, which is coming up in June, so hopefully once that gets cleared out of the way I’ll have more concrete writing updates. I can say that at the moment that there is no more Moonshine content on the horizon. If that changes, trust me, I will be shouting about it as soon as I can, but for now, I’m working on a few new projects–my current draft, which is still in its infant stages so much so that I don’t even have a working title yet, and good ol’ Hellslayer (if you’ve been following my writing pre-Moonshine, you might recognize the name), which is still… what it is. I don’t even know what to say about Hellslayer anymore. I’m hoping as I hammer things out with my new book, I’ll have more content-wise to chat about here, but it’ll mostly be word count updates for a while.

But, this post is about Moonshine, and there’s plenty of Moonshine content to keep you, uh… content. Sorry, it just occurred to me that “content” (n.) and “content” (adj.) are spelled the same. Distracting. Anyway, enjoy all these links for Moonshine miscellanea: