There is a Beast. There is a boy. Corey Grimm is not a person, and he never was. A changeling left in the place of a human babe, Corey did not understand what he was until bone broke through his skin and he turned into a monster. He lives a stolen life. Something is coming to take it from him.

The Kingdom of Amory is starving through the winter while the King’s storehouses are piled high with food stolen from the people’s fields. The princess Aurora and her group of rebels fight the kingsmen in the streets to keep dissenters from being imprisoned. The odds are stacked against her, but with her knight at her side and her cousin watching from the sky, she may have a chance. Meanwhile, the princess’ love - a magician called Briar - is trapped in an unnatural slumber.

But princesses do not belong with rosabellas, and a prince from over the sea has come to win Aurora’s hand. And how better to prove himself than by hunting down the Beast that has plagued the land?

Twelve dancers take the stage. One walks off. Darling has been dead for over forty years, and they are beginning to remember. But like all fae things, they cannot linger in the land of the living. They are running out of time before they must take their final bow.

This story cannot be sung - only wept.

WEEP OUR WRETCHED LAND

COMING FEBRUARY 2021

cover art by gillian.gormley on Instagram

Sequel to SING THE ANGRY CHILDREN

https://www.amazon.com/Sing-Angry-Children-So-Rise/dp/B08BF2TZ2M

Friendly reminder! If you’re looking for a sapphic book with fairy tale elements, check out my book Sing The Angry Children! It’s a queer retelling of sleeping beauty and Cinderella with a backdrop of political unease leading into revolution. I’ve only sold around 200 copies, but people who have read it have liked it, and the ebook is only 3 dollars! Plus it has a pretty cover!

https://www.amazon.com/Sing-Angry-Children-So-Rise/dp/B08BF2TZ2M

The Rootshade Nest is a comic about Finding You Again

if you liked this comic, would like to see it at full resolution, or would like to keep it forever, you can buy it here: https://gumroad.com/products/XLai

Patrons always read my independent comics for free: https://www.patreon.com/posts/34856240

Thanks for reading! 

No sweeter kiss, Apocalypse

Than yours upon my mouth

So ruin me, my cruelest Queen

And I will sing your truth!

"A girl lost in the woods is a different sort of creature than a girl who walks purposefully through the trees even though she does not know her way."

Erin Morgenstern, 'The Starless Sea'

Alexis Chopper in Come Tumbling Down:

What happens when firearms are introduced to a fantasy setting? Read Sing The Angry Children, my debut YA fantasy novel.

...

Here is the story of the deadliest things:

It begins with a need. The need to be stronger and better. The need for land or oil or the love of a god that doesn’t answer questions. The need for just a little more demolition.

It begins with a human. A human person who has been happy and sad and small and outrageous in the way that every human has always been.

It begins with a sketch, or a note, or a conversation, or an idea.

A man needs to fight better, needs to hunt better. He sharpens a rock and ties it to a stick. For a moment, he is the deadliest player on the board.

In this way, the invention of the gun is not so remarkable.

It is created by a man who needs to win like he needs to breathe. He just needs to kill a little bit faster, a little bit hotter, a little bit louder.

People have known other tricks. Spears and swords and bombs, these things are all better with magic. The magic that has been taught to the rich by the rich. The ones with white gloves over their bloodstained hands, who do not need to lower themselves to combat. The ones who use magic to mark status, rather than as a tool of survival.

How does a poor man drive a sword through the throat of a rich man, when the rich man can still it in the air? And so the rich man steals and steals and eats and eats, and he knows that he will be safe from the angry many.

Magic goes as fast as the mind.

Magic cannot stop a bullet.

In this way, the invention of the gun is revolutionary.

Because maybe violence can bring peace, but everyone knows the way of

man. He is holding a gun, now. And it is his way to always say ‘just a little more demolition’.

In a crumbling stone building in the forest, men and women put together all the pieces on assembly lines. On a King’s desk sits a gun with a royal seal. It kills faster than the last gun. The next gun will be even faster.

Look alive, says the sky. They’re making death.

...

Bullets tear through fairy tales. Castles of gold mean a hundred thousand starving. Children are queerer than the prophesies say. This is how the story goes.

Ebook available on Amazon for 0.99

So my book Sing The Angry Children will be available on Amazon NEXT WEEK

I plan on publishing on the 30th, but it will take 72 hours to become available.

Please consider buying my book to see

Oh so there's a white guy and you make him evil? Like soz guys I had to do this to have diversity but it's okay, I made him evil. Want to have diversity in your book? Don't associate races, accents, nationalities with evil characters. And by the way? Discriminating white people is racist, too.

When you include a lot of races in the book, and make the one white character evil, you have to realise that's racist, and it's not excused by all the other poc. And you even flaunted it as promo. Nice.

Hi. This is a book about a group of young people resisting colonization. I’m not going to give that narrative to white people. This story has told itself again and again and again, and it is almost always the same.

And also, racism comes from a place of socioeconomic or social power. In a world where white people have repetitively robbed and pushed down people of color in order to have money and power, racism against white people does not exist (at least, white people as a broad group). Prejudice? Sure. Racism? Fuck right off.

And of course I used it in my promo. I am angry. Many, many people are angry. And this book is for us.

So happy to announce that my book is now available on Amazon for 13 USD (it says 17 here but! That’s because I’m in Canada)!

The kindle version will soon be available for only 0.99, if you want a cheaper option or don’t want to give your money to Amazon.

Sing The Angry Children has been my whole life for the past year and a half. It’s a product of being queer and furious with the system, and I know a lot of you share that experience with me. That’s the nature of our existence in a world where the people in charge care about nothing but money and their inherent sense of superiority.

But it’s also a product of loving stories, and fairy tales, and adventure, and knowing that people like us are just as worthy of songs as the picturesque heroes and princesses we all grew up with.

This book is for the angry and beautiful children, and I hope you like it.

The cover is finished! The artist, gillian.gormley on Instagram, was awesome enough to make a few versions, but this was both of our favorite!

I’m so excited with how this project is coming along, and so glad it’s finally coming together! Stay tuned for an exact release date!

Just made an insta for promoting my book! If you like queer YA fantasy then consider giving me a follow and buying my book when it comes out this February!

Hey so here’s the prologue of Sing The Angry Children. Hopefully you guys like the writing enough to be curious about the book, and maybe read it when it comes out in 2020!!

...

Prologue

Time is a steady march of stories through the darkness. They are a tangle of light and song and tears. The trees bow low and the stars weep. The are endless. They are The Night Parade.

First comes a story that you already know. The One-day Queen will turn seventeen. She will turn seventeen at the end of a long hot summertime, and then she will be kissed twice. Once by the bite of a spindle upon her finger, and once by the softness of a true love. With the first kiss, she will fall into a sleep deeper than the wine-dark ocean as it stretches across the horizon.

The fae things tell this story again and again in the dances of their endless procession. They set the scene with shadows. A ballroom made of twirling skirts and tables piled high with tangerines and apricots and bread pastries and lamb. Wine flowing red and sweet. A small brown lump of a babe, swaddled in a satin lined blanket. Her name is wound tight inside her chest, a gift newly received.

Aurora.

Lords and Ladies have come from neighboring kingdoms. A Valtinian man bows as he takes the hand of an Amorian maiden. She does not betray the hatred in her eyes as he twirls her under his arm. Her brother died during The Conflict.

A little Ushakkish girl with a hundred thousand beads in her hair accepts a sweet cake from a woman with eyes blue as death, and pretends not to remember the slave ships that came in the night.

This is peace.

And the baby, snug in the arms of her mother as the lords present their gifts. A golden rattle. A diamond necklace. A bottle of wine that will grow sweeter and stronger as she does and mark the last day of her youth with a stain upon her lips.

The father stands beside his wife. Their marriage was a marriage between nations. A threat. A dead diplomat. A raised fist. A siege. A treaty and a vow and a kiss and a painful wedding night and a childbirth. She is subjugated.

His God, the new God, is raised like a song by a man in white as he blesses her child. Her own god is not welcome here, in the place where she was born. Her god has no face to etch bearded and smiling into chapels, no name to call in worship. They are not a god like other gods–they are the spirit of a place that is flipped over onto its back.

Still, she would have worshipped. She would have smeared honey over her daughter’s eyelids and pressed gold and iron into her hands. She would have carried her into the forest until she found a place where the veil between worlds grew thin as a spider’s silk, and she would have prayed to her nameless god of the Nether.

No more and no longer. She is a defeated kingdom, bleeding under the foreign rule that shares her bed.

They are angry, her Nameless One of a Nameless Place. They are angry and so are their children–their children who raise their fists in rebellion to this subjugation, this unholy matrimony, this troubling conclusion to troubling times.

They come uninvited, the fae children with Nether on their tongues. Because the babe is small and dark and crying as a handmaiden takes her up in her arms and shields her with a blanket, but she is the blood of the conquerer as much as she is the blood of the conquered. And the Nether with their hundred animal eyes and blackened wings would not see her eat the fields and forests and livelihoods as her father has done before her, with fire and steel in his hands.

They would have killed her. The Nether cursed The One-day Queen to grow up as kind or cruel as she pleased, and then it–they–would have her prick her finger on a spindle and fall cold and still as the razed fields.

They would have, if her mother’s handmaiden had not saved her that morning with honey and iron, hand in hand at the edge of the forest. The Veil had not been thin and the Nether had been far, but she had been consecrated.

The Nether wove one kindness into the fate of The One-day Queen and set it upon her small head like a crown.

With a second kiss from one who loved her dearly, she would wake up to a world that might have changed by a day or a hundred years.

The nameless god does not give away their secrets. They do not share the hopes and dreams of an aching land. They only lay their curse and hope that one day their children will grow wild and free under the hands of the Golden King who is fated to come.

The baby clutches at her handmaiden’s necklace as the fae dance back between the shadows and through the veil, her small fingers caressing the smooth metal. She does not yet know that she is not a person in the way she is supposed to be. But that is for later.

Now, all will be good. All will be gold.

Hey, I made this blog mostly to see if people would be interested in reading my book Sing The Angry Children, which I plan to self publish in 2020. Of course I mostly wrote it for fun but I’d love it if people read it.

I’m 18 years old, lesbian, and non-binary, and I filled the book with all the representation I want to see in literature.

Sing The Angry Children is a queer retelling of the classical fairy tales Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, woven together into a story of love, death, and resisting colonization by an oppressive foreign power.