Update

Recently I went to a talk with Gail Carriger. She emphasized the importance of maintaining a newsletter. So if you end up disagreeing with whatever platform hosts your website, or the de-platform you, you still have a away to reach your audience. I actually tried updating this a few weeks ago with a well-thought-out video blog, but it did not upload.

It’s weird. I feel like I should be writing about things going on in the world, but 1) I’m tired 2) everybody knows things are fucked and 3) I process the world through fiction. There are many blogs out here talking about this obscene SCOTUS ruling that nullifies the 14th Amendment. At the outset it will target immigrants, but they will definitely use it to target black folks and anyone else they feel like removing citizenship rights from. And I can’t write about it because I feel everyone knows. The time for being on the internet reading thinkpieces has passed. But all this is, of course, on my mind. Stay safe out there.

Since my last update I won the 2025 Whiting Award. I was also nominated for a Locus Award for Best Collection. I’m working hard on my novel The Age of Ignorance, on the second revision. I also got a piece accepted for a queer sword and sorcery anthology. Keep an eye out for that.

The call for this anthology specifically cited Charles R. Saunders as an influence. I actually corresponded with him before he died. He was a very lovely guy, with ties to Pittsburgh, and he blurbed my first book. It was a bit shocking to read news articles later about how he was this “lost writer” lying in a neglected grave in Canada, like Zora Neale Hurston in Florida. Because I was corresponding with him and sending him birthday wishes on Facebook pretty much up to the point he passed. Was he a lost writer or someone who chose a quiet death after a quiet life?

Writing the sword and sorcery piece helped focus my next couple novels quite a bit. I enjoyed dipping into that well so much, and I thought: what if wrote sword and sorcery again? All of a sudden, I had inspiration for stories that were going nowhere—because I was writing them in genres I didn’t actually enjoy. I don’t like high fantasy that much. I never read Lord of the Rings. But I read Conan and Elric, blue-collar fantasy about thieves and vagabonds. I wrote a ton in that genre as a kid and feel that’s where my fantasy is going.

Along those lines, I’ve been thinking about what got me into fantasy in the first place. One is utopian narratives. Another is stories about restoring the balance. As a kid, I loved reading gaming magazines for the JRPG artwork. I even played a few in the late 90s, though I missed the golden SNES era. (My family had Sega Genesis.) And these stories were about restoring the balance of nature, very much influenced by Miyazaki. Sure, there was usually some douchebag corporation or emperor to fight along the way, but these stories are not war stories. Those bad guys’ main crime was upsetting the balance, and it is up to you, the hero, to align the elements. Obviously Avatar: The Last Airbender also plays with this concept.

Once I started looking at certain stories I’m writing through that lens—restoring something instead or destroying or killing something—I suddenly had guidance for pieces I’ve been stuck on. Because I’d been writing them in ways that did not really interest me. Once I went back to my influences, and thus writing with a basis of understanding, I found energy for the pieces. In these stories, the balance must be restored. I’m talking specifically The Piper’s Christmas Gift, a story from my third collection I’m making into a novel.

For me, fantasy is about the search for the source. Going back in mythology and finding those archetypes that cause an emotional response in your reader. Honoring and resurrecting the past. The further back you pull from for your myth, the more compelling and universal your story becomes. So figuring out, through writing sword and sorcery, that I should go to my personal sources has been really cool. It took me twenty years to get there, but I’m there.

You know what’s not cool? Fascism. Keep fighting.

-Elwin