↳ in which wren is a woman with a ruinous ability, kai is an enslaved wolf shifter, and circumstances conspire to have them relying on each other for survival. ​

I really like prompt challenges; I find I write more easily, without overthinking every little thing, and get motivated by the engagement that taking part in a writing challenge automatically grants me. So when the 2026 OC kiss challenge came across my Tumblr dashboard, I committed!

​Here is the first of seven excerpts!

​ ↳ in which there is a cyborg named sacha, a shapeshifter named cipher, a missing heir to a global conglomerate, a virtual reality called FAE.REALM that just might be carnivorous, and a quest

​It was impulse that moved her. 

He just looked so pathetic, with his body and his form both wracked by shivers—his hair curling and then straightening, plastered against his face; one iris going purple and the other orange, pupils rounding and slitting with each staccato breath; nose broadening and then narrowing, the bridge sometimes high, sometimes low; and his cupid’s bow flexing as his lips changed shape. ​

I've been writing! Here are some sneak peeks from both The Storyteller, The Prince, and The Djinn and Rivener. ​

I. My heart leaping with anticipation, I pushed at the wall. It required some effort, but I shoved as hard as I could and it opened inward on silent hinges, the bottom grating against the floors, and revealed a dark tunnel and, luckily, no sign of the Wazīr. I was too excited to think about it at the time, but he would hardly have been pleased to find out I’d been following him. 
I could hardly contain my excitement. I was about to have my first real adventure!

II. Hajja was buried on the twin hill to which Qahtan was built upon. It was called Madinat Al-Raha, or the City of Rest, and was enrobed in pale green grass, dotted with yellow and fuschia flowers in the midst of spring. Holm oaks stood here and there to provide shade under their sprawling branches. White, pale blue, and pale yellow tombs covered the hill like a field of fallen stars, interspersed by grander mausoleums.

So far I've managed to hit 3 of my 2025 goals: update this site monthly (at minimum), write at least 100 words for LofM, and join a writing group. (Well, I sort of restarted an existing writing group, but I'm excited about it anyway).

As for LofM: I've so far written 3,800 words! Most of them new, too, instead of rewritten old words. I'm trying to zero-draft LofM again, with some changes to the plot and structure. I'm experimenting with an Arabian Nights-esque ​formatting where I write multiple short stories, all linked together into a larger narrative, and I'm enjoying it so far. Here's an excerpt:

 So......I am shocked. Delighted. Bemused. And baffled.

I wasn't feeling LofM's latest start (what else is new) and I could feel that the plot & premise was almost, but not quite, right....so i went scrolling through my hundreds of pages of drafts and snippets and scenes and--

I have some good stuff here! Ten years of working on this wip has left me with some fantastic fragments that I can cobble together and polish into something I'm really, really excited to write.

​I'm so glad I rarely deleted anything! I just now have to hunt through everything I have for what I want to try and patchwork into one single draft. But ah! this is so fun! and makes me feel so much better about the insidious voice in my head deriding me for having worked on this wip for 10+ years with nothing but pieces to show for it.

Hello hello! Having recently revamped LofM's beginning and overcome some issues I was having with the manuscript, I wanted to share a bit that I'm really happy with! Please enjoy this first draft of the prologue of my fantasy series, a retelling of the first frame narrative of One Thousand and One Nights (aka Arabian Nights). I'd love to know what you think of it!

Once there lived, in the kingdom of Mourra, a woman as beautiful as the night sky. Her face was as round and bright as the faces of the moons-in-full, her eyes the pale grey of starlight, her hair as dark as the space between stars and falling in a lustrous veil to her feet, with beads of pearls woven through the strands. Her name was Nur-al-Hayat, and she was a poet and songstress of surpassing ability, her voice so lovely it was said to tame wild beasts and move even stone to tears.​

So! November is over! Last post I said I hoped to have a whole⁠--if rough⁠--draft of LofM completed by now, and I really have to laugh and wonder what in the heckity heck I was thinking. A whole draft? A whole draft????

Needless to say that did not end up happening (a whole draft! which would've been between 50 and 70k?!). But I did write, and enjoyed writing, even though it wasn't every day. After all, I went from having nothing at all to having something that I am, crucially, pretty happy with.

I also didn't end up posting excerpts weekly here, though I did share a few on tumblr. I've gathered them all here for your perusal. I also made two posts corresponding with some entries in my worldbuilding encyclopedia, featured below! I love them and am excited to create and share more!

Enjoy!

Several months passed where I stopped writing almost entirely but didn't stop thinking about this, and after some more recent chats with Trade and Hyba, I decided to scrap my first rewrite of Rivener (which, if you don't know, I'd been sort of attempting to do) and properly pick up this AU. 

And now it's an actual thing! I've written 6k for it so far over the past couple days, planned a good chunk of it out, and have the writing bug again (such a good feeling, when you just wanna write and write and write, like an itch). It's going fantastically, if I do say so myself. However...

I was (am still? sorta?) a little nervous to share this version of my story (creatively titled Rivener 2.0) because...this Wren is awful. She does awful things and is complicit in awful things. Internet purity culture has me worried about what the response will be to this character who can lightly be described as ~problematic~. She changes, of course. This story is still about two very damaged people healing, the journey they go through together and because of each other. But it's also a lot darker. Or I delve into the darker aspects more.

Wren is not exactly a villain, but she's not a hero either, not for a long while. She is, in fact, closely aligned with the main villain. Not entirely of her own free will, but...well. Some may think she's irredeemable, which is valid. But I think it's rare that people are truly irredeemable. I do believe everyone has the capacity to change, if they want to, if they decided to, if they commit to it and keep trying and learning and unlearning, if they work hard to not repeat their mistakes or the way they've hurt people, if they apologize by word and action.

I don't think anyone is owed forgiveness, but I believe everyone can earn some sort of...grace? I don't know if that's the word I'm looking for, maybe redemption is closer to the mark.  So yeah. Wren will have a pretty significant redemption arc. I hope I can do a good job conveying the complicated person she is, with pretty severe faults but equally admirable qualities and depth to her. Her journey is not easy. She can never erase the things she's done. But I hope you cheer her on as she grows to be a better person, even if she can never fully make up for who she was. I hope you understand where she's coming from, even if it doesn't excuse her actions or beliefs. 

Now this AU is not all about Wren, and Kai too is changed from the original story. Firstly. we're meeting him in vastly different circumstances, when he's arguably a much rawer character? In the original, he'd been enslaved to Cormac for a while by the time he met Wren, and a few years before that he was "stock" on a "farm" (for spoiler reasons, I won't explain what that means).

In this AU, he meets Wren having just been removed from the farm. He's less docile, but at heart, still the same sweet, gentle, traumatized Kai of the original. They have a long way to go before they like each other, given who Wren is and how they meet in this AU. She treats him pretty terribly. Not as terribly as she could've, and not as terribly as others, but...oof. They have an uphill battle ahead of them.

Still! I'm really excited to write this story, difficult (in topics and tone) as it is! I get to explore the world a little bit more, flesh out Cormac a lot more, and write some scenes I always wanted to, which didn't end up having a place in the original! I hope you guys will come along with me on this journey!

Have you ever written or read a character who starts out as awful and slowly transforms for the better (or the reverse)? How did it go? Do you think they managed to become sympathetic or appealing to the reader, despite their faults? Do comment below, or drop me an email, and let me know! I'd love to talk about this!

In the meantime, have an excerpt:

Stay tuned for P.3 of my writing updates, where I will talk about my Glitch wip! Happy reading and writing!