Love in Netherford and Queer Joy in the Time of a Coup

The good news: the second book in my Love in Netherford series, The Viscount St. Albans, has officially released from Solaris Nova. It’s a Regency Era, queer-normative historical fantasy series that quite literally came to me in a dream, and has since been a wonderful, joyful escape for me (and, it seems, my readers).

The bad news: well, have you seen what’s happening in the United States right now? I was sitting down to write my newsletter this week, and I just felt nauseated thinking about promoting my books. I swear, the dismantling of our country is happening so fast that I can’t keep up. I’m terrified for my fellow queer siblings (especially trans folks), for immigrants and minorities, federal employees, and for women. And honestly? For anyone. This is the insidious part about what’s happening. Even people who think this is good and cool and fun and whatever, they’re going to suffer, too.

When I first started Netherford Hall, it was late 2020 and I was wrestling with a lot of anger and frustration over the pandemic, the administration, and seeing the downward spiral of democracy happen in real time. Turns out, that was just an appetizer. The world I live in now, publishing The Viscount St. Albans, is drastically different.

I honestly don’t have the energy to catalogue what’s happening. It’s no exaggeration to say I’ve been losing sleep over the state of my country and living in rage fatigue, sprinkled with a good heap of existential dread.

But, here’s the thing: writing is resistance. The fact that I was born female and have enough of a public education to write at all is terribly modern in the West. My mother is an immigrant; my great-grandparents are all immigrants. My maternal grandmother was pulled out of school in the 8th grade to work, and I got a Master’s degree.

Netherford Hall was about queer joy, first and foremost. I made a queer normative version of the world because people like me deserve to have stories where their queerness isn’t the plot point. Where love is love, and one can simply fall for whoever one might. I desperately needed stories like Edith and Poppy’s as a teen and young adult, because I literally didn’t know that bisexuality existed. I didn’t know that my deepest thoughts and desires and passions were shared will millions of other people and, more importantly, were valid and true and beautiful.

My own coming out was slow. Years of religious trauma had festered in me, coupled with self-hatred and then, a feeling as if I had “missed out” on my queerness because I married a man. But eventually, keeping that in was just too difficult for me. In my 30s, I came to understand that for me to grow and flourish as a person, I needed to embrace who I was. I needed to follow the path of queer joy. And, wow, what a difference it made when I finally let it go. I truly can’t express how different I feel about myself and my place in the world now.

These books have been healing for me, especially now as I’m finishing The Game of Hearts. Sitting down to write every day, following Basil and Roland into Faerie and giving them their own love story filled with longing, misunderstandings, passion, and adventure, is everything this current government is trying to quash. It is rebellion to keep writing these stories. And it’s scary, but it’s necessary.

But I think about Roland, and his larger-than-life, unapologetic self, and realize I could do with some of that, too. He may be an idiot sometimes, but he goes forward in a world that judges him as a bastard and a werewolf, and he does his own thing, no matter the consequences. He lives loudly. It does get him into trouble, sometimes, but no one is ever in danger of forgetting him. And ultimately, though none of you know this yet, he is capable of remarkable things. He will make a difference. He will be remembered.

That’s the best any of us can ask for, as creatives. Whatever happens, I want my readers to have experienced love in Netherford, in all its shapes and sizes. I hope they laugh and cry, sigh and kick their feet, and feel that magical tide of romance, no matter what. Because we need it now, perhaps more than at any point in my lifetime.

And I will keep writing them. Even when it’s hard. Especially then, I suppose.