May 23rd 2023.
Another year has passed, it’s time to update this thing: I’m kind of … a woman? Have been the whole time really, forced undercover into masculinity, but over the last few years I’ve been coming in from the go. So, hi. I’m Sascha. I’ve been a lot of things: law school dropout, legal editor, information security journalist, cryptid, literary critic, and now apparently a novelist.
After almost a decade of writing short fiction (some of which you can find on this very site) in secret underground full-contact tournaments, in late 2017 I sat down with an old scrapped novel draft and decided to see whether I could make something of it. I self-published my debut The Dawnhounds in November 2019. It went on to win Best Novel at the 2020 Sir Julius Vogel Awards at Worldcon 78, and got picked up by Saga Press for a June 2022 trad pub re-launch. Tamsyn Muir said things so nice about it that I most definitely did not cry a little bit and then cry a whole lot. You can find them on the back cover, and I won’t spoil them for you here.
It’s about 30,000 words longer than the 2019 edition. I worried the US wouldn’t let it be itself, would demand I water it down until I barely recognised it. Instead, they let me get really weird. Joyously weird. There’s a lot of stuff in the second edition that I self-consciously cut because I thought it wouldn’t cross the Pacific intact, but after a grueling editing process I came away with something not just better, but more itself.
God, I’m proud of it. So very much. I’m my own worst critic, but if this book makes you half as happy as it makes me, I’ll call it a win. Right now you can buy from Barnes & Noble and Amazon, as well as whereever books are sold.
I’m current finishing revisions on The Sunforge, a sequel currently scheduled for release in May 2024.
peace and haere raa,
Sascha