on time & travel (& some news!)

Hello friends,

I hope you’re well! It’s been a minute! Have a Spot pic!

Things have been busy around here in the past (mumblemumble) months—I did more school, revised a new novel, and made a Bluesky account (find me @lowph.bsky.social)!

I also finished my first round of These Deathless Shores edits, had an emotion about it, and wrote a little essay:

The thing about me is that I forget what I write almost as soon as I hit the end.

A new WIP rotates in—I have three or four right now—and my personality changes; anxiety stores itself in different places in my body. I gravitate toward different books, different music, feel the pattern of my thoughts switch cadence and tense.

Some of this is by design. My brain favors trees over forest, so setting aside manuscripts for weeks or months at a time allows me to return as if to someone else’s work; gives me the courage to move the halfway point to the 25% mark and fill out the middle, rewrite the premise or a world or a main character’s backstory. Sometimes on day 30 of working on other things, an idea for a major change will strike me in the middle of a walk—because I have such a loose hold, at that point, on what actually happens on the page—and I’ll be glad I didn’t jump into edits sooner. Obviously this method doesn’t work for everyone, but it gives my slow-processing brain time to think through the implications of various plot and character choices, and keeps me from burning out.

A side effect of this, however, is that I may or may not move on too easily.

Before my first round of developmental edits for Orbit, I hadn’t looked at These Deathless Shores in seventeen months (I went straight from querying to acquisitions at Angry Robot to waiting on my edit letter). TDS was the book I’d drafted mostly before the pandemic, when I was still fighting through the New York subway system every morning and evening. It was two cities and three major life transitions ago, two novel projects and a bunch of short stories prior; it was before I began reading romance and writing about gentleness and comfort and characters who knew they were loved.

Back when I was an overwriter. Back when I thought in past tense. I’d spent six weeks editing the book for Pitch Wars in 2022, but the things that defined it—the rage, the sentence rhythms, the characters’ hard edges—felt like artifacts of a different era.

And then: slipping back in. There was the initial surface tension of unfamiliarity (who wrote this thing? they must have been going through it), and lines I didn’t remember sometimes hit me like buses. But in the slow shaping and re-shaping of sentences—in becoming, again, these characters I’d come to know—it was the same feeling as, toward the end of this pass, when I found myself rushing through some Manhattan subway station with two suitcases (which I would never recommend, especially in summer), sidestepping people on the platform and slotting myself in and shallowly breathing in the reek like some nasty madeleine and thinking: the body remembers.

Because maybe your past selves don’t always leave you behind. Because sometimes if they’ve poured out enough of themselves for you, in words and phrases and shadings of sense-memory, you can slip in among them, breathe in time to their heartbeats. Because one day this version of you, too, will join their ghostly crowd.

I’ve been thinking about a passage in This is How You Lose the Time War: “There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning…You could leave me for five years, you could return never—and I have to write the rest of this not knowing” (42). And I’ve been wondering if stories, or any kind of human art—even that which we create mostly for ourselves—are letters, too, to the people we will become. Telling them it was like this, and this, and this—do you remember?

In case you missed it:

Joining the Robot Army: As mentioned above, I’ll be working with Angry Robot to bring These Deathless Shores to UK/Australia/New Zealand readers! Desola Coker picked TDS out of slush during the publisher’s open submissions call, and I’m absolutely thrilled to be working with her and the rest of the Angry Robot team. The deal was announced in The Bookseller; I also did my very first TDS-related interview at Fantasy Hive, which I am inordinately proud of, in that I remembered enough of my manuscript to talk about it despite not having looked at it for so long.

ARC requests: If you’re a UK/Aus/New Zealand blogger, reviewer, librarian, etc., you can request an ARC of These Deathless Shores through this form. Marginalized readers and reviewers will be prioritized! Also, anyone who submits before 31 December 2023 has a chance to receive an early ARC and exclusive merch (!!) in Spring 2024!

If you’re not in the UK/Aus/NZ, you can email me or DM on Twitter, Instagram, or even Tumblr (where I have been bravely and single-handedly populating the these deathless shores hashtag) and I’ll add you to the other ARC request list :)

Tiktok things: I am not on there but my editor, Brit Hvide, made a video about editing TDS and I am Extremely Normal about it.

Inbox things: (suppressed pterodactyl screeches)

Solidarity: WGA and SAG are on strike! If you’d like to support them, you can donate to these mutual aid funds and read about other ways to help.

Things I’ve been reading / watching:

• The Likeness by Tana French—maybe my fourth or fifth reread: doppelgangers, dark academia, a grand old house, prose you could get drunk on.

• Painted Devils by Margaret Owen, the sequel to Little Thieves—I’ve never before had to stop reading because I was laughing so hard. But also: what a gut punch of emotional arcs? What compassion for the characters in the face of trauma? This is a masterclass in how to sequel.

• The Skull by Jon Klassen—I have intense feelings about the Camilla / Palamedes vibes.

• I’d Rather Burn Than Bloom by Shannon C. F. Rogers—a lyrical, vivid, heart-shattering meditation on grief.

• If Found, Return to Hell by Em X. Liu—the most wholesome bodyshare + late-stage capitalism angst.

• Shanghai Immortal by A. Y. Chao—I feel like Lady Jing would be BFFs with Tony Liang in Bitter Medicine. That is all.

• Nimona (2023)—GENDER FEELINGS

• Heartstopper by Alice Oseman—because Tumblr was yelling about it and they were right.

Thanks so much for reading!

All the best,

Phoebe