Cherae // C. L.

2025 was a THREE BOOK YEAR for me. I'm gonna break them down for you in this thread, but head to my website at the link in bio for more details and sign up for my newsletter to keep tabs on future books, giveaways, sneak peeks, and events!

is #TheFaithless more exciting than watching someone get stabbed? Read it and find out!! 😂

this was so much fuuuuun

preorder WHERE FIRE REIGNS out in February from award-winning author Jared Pechaček, whom I coincidentally am

Thank you for reading it!! 🙏🙏 And if you don’t read it yet, you can subscribe to get next week’s letter which will include all the shenanigans I got up to this weekend, like sword fights and critical role meetings and shows, and the current state of some upcoming projects….

and! we have breached 120k! Full steam ahead! aka I have hit a patch of first draft that is mostly sound at the core and doesn’t need a lot of bottom-to-top reconstruction! hooray!

this reminds me that, somewhere out there, are copies of the unbroken signed by each of my siblings and my dad because we have the same initials 😜

Christening a baby is nothing like christening a ship. I know that now. Once again I can only apologise.

I have quite strong feelings on publishers taking 92.5% on paperbacks and 75% on ebooks and not actually providing a competent human editor. And I think an additional factor in the great GenAI discussion is that if you're going to provide less of a service you shouldn't expect to take the same cut.

Actions have consequences? Sounds fake but okay.

CONSEQUENCES??? POUR MOI??!!!?! unfortunately, yes.

😈

if you are my editors do NOT look at this

look, i just want to talk book worm shit with my friends! i don’t remember a thing we said but it was certainly unhinged

my main memory of this conversation is my own giddy, manic high, as of a child at a sleepover! whatever i said cannot be held against me in court!!

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of our first podcast, Read Receipts, a weekly show about speculative fiction, genre, and nerd culture.

i gotta say, i still think i cooked with that sex essay 👨‍🍳

the subject of one of my favorite essays I've ever gotten to work on reactormag.com/everyones-in...

Okay so we are announcing a big thing tomorrow morning that I've been working really hard on for a long time so I need you guys to like...really engage with it if you can??? Please I love you I'm feeling so anxious about this

Like, yes, I totally enjoy melodrama and romance and to feel warmly held (in a number of ways!) by books, films, and so on But I also think it's really important to develop the capacity for not just approaching but *enjoying* difficulty, discomfort, and intensity alongside that

Reflecting today on how my core advice to other artists is always: read and engage and explore so, so widely outside the neighborhood of your specific practice/genre/personal community Breadth and depth of experience, feeling, life, and praxis... that's where the good shit is!!

ohhhhhh i think i need this very badly

you can read more about it + big feelings about fairy tales in my newsletter: buttondown.com/alixeharrow/...

The happiest of book birthdays to The Slantwise Histories: Collected Stories by @alixeharrow.bsky.social, a dazzling collection of short fiction!

Sometimes we’re unsatisfied with a thing we made because when it only existed in our head, we saw all the things it could have been and when it’s done we know all the things that it isn’t, but we can’t see the way it expands into a million new things when someone else unpacks it in their head. 🖊️🦑

We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.

if you are an old school historical romance reader, i am taking you ungently by the cravat and looking deeply into your eyes when i say: read this

112,112! progress is lovely! today, i revised one of my favorite moments! it involves butch v butch arm wrestling and if you’re going to ask, the answer is probably yes 😏 really trying to get the dialogue to match all the tensions beneath the surface and right now it feels exquisitely torturous.

one of my favorite series running, on the off chance you don’t know that by now

LET'S GO LESBIANS!!! This week the great @amalelmohtar.com joined us to talk about "Metal From Heaven," a truly wild novel about building parallel power structures, workers' uprisings, lesbian sex, gender, and becoming Commie Jesus. Listen for free wherever you get your podcasts!!

If you're on wordpress, as I am (at velveteenrabbi.com), there's a free plugin that blocks AI crawlers. (Called Block AI Crawlers.)

fwiw this includes Squarespace, where 'block known AI crawlers' is under settings>website>crawlers

every set of armor by enric pujol and every sword by malleus martialus and a custom sword from balefire blades and—

Another useful thing - if you use Buttondown for your newsletter, did you know you can disable crawling by type? buttondown.com/blog/crawlin... covers how to disable (identified - so, it can't block bad actors) AI scrapers.

I regret to announce that this post has encouraged me. I was hoping the internet would stage an intervention. Instead you bought fonts. 𝘪𝘮𝘮𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘴 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 100…

did you know that a disproportionate amount of our books are relevant for spooky season? use code BOO for 33% off ebooks until nov 14th yes that date is arbitrary spookiness does not truly have an end point but i had to pick something www.neonhemlock.com/ebooks

It is rough out there. One of my favorite authors wrote 2 books that were widely celebrated and won major awards. His most recent book was a commercial flop despite being equally excellent and garnering glowing reviews. There is no "hack." This isn't a marketing prob. It's an attention economy prob.

In which Nev Gets It Right(ish) 🌚