THE RAVEN SCHOLAR has me in an absolute chokehold, what an incredibly well-paced jewel of a book, I love the feeling of looking at the 400 remaining pages & feeling the anticipatory loss of it coming to an end
(if it seems like I was supposed to post this back in October when I started my new job, shh)
In case you missed it, the second issue of my newsletter's up! Subscribe to catch the next update!
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Have not been able to get this passage from @vajra.me out of my head:
Thank you for the shout out! ❤️☀️
A LEGIONNAIRE'S GUIDE TO LOVE AND PEACE by @skrutskie.com
- bi MCs
- the war against the Demon Lord is over
- now it's time for Infrastructure Week™️
- but things are a little awkward around the guy you hooked up with when you thought you were gonna die
- & you have to think about the future?? rude
Panel from Chainsaw Man depicting Denji in the bath singing "Union job, paid days off" while beating the side of the bathtub. Off-screen Aki shouts "You're taking too long in the bath!"
genuinely how it feels to go from working in vfx to working in animation
Seconding, I need it!
*trying to ignore state of universe for 2 seconds*
It's week 2 of A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe's SUPER SALE! Just $1.99 on eBook at most fine retailers and also Jeff's. (Pls share, it helps)
Bookshop
bookshop.org/p/books/a-bi...
Jeff's Amazon
www.amazon.com/Ship-Edge-Un...
free shipping on bookshop! the perfect time to get a book! and do I have one for you! weird medieval guys, gender™️, cannibalism, living beehives, illustrations, and big monster ladies
the cover for a book entitled Villain by Natalie Zina Walschots. the cover is a bright magenta with dark blue and teal lettering for the title, and the author's name is in yellow. there is an image of the silhouette of a woman carrying a cane, surrounded by the silhouettes of five superheroes.
Getting to show you all this cover and announce that VILLAIN is officially coming out in May of next year is such a joy and a relief i don't even know how to express it.
www.harpercollins.com/products/vil...
🌟COVER REVEAL🌟
Howl’s Moving Castle meets Six of Crows in THE LIBRARY OF AMORLIN, releasing 3/3/26 from Kensington Books. Art by Simon Prades.
Preorder: www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-librar...
Add on GR: www.goodreads.com/book/show/22...
FEEL THAT. Especially because my primary form of exercise is climbing, so it's like my technique is getting better and I'm getting stronger, but my overall ability isn't improving at the same rate and I'm still mostly working the same grades I was a few years ago 🥲
There's almost 190lbs of me! That's so much to pull up! But maybe if I bind it to my roguelike grinding, we'll get somewhere 😂
Whatever I can do 12 reps of with dumbbells and a mat! Mostly upper body stuff because I have a dream of doing a pull-up someday 😂
Playing a game I call "Swole Hades," where every time I beat a boss in Hades 2, I do a set apiece of three different exercises. At the rate I've been ripping through Hades 2, I'm on track to get both the true ending and that Nemesis Build by like... next week.
Cannot WAIT!!!
NEWSLETTER: on purple prose this isn’t an essay about how writers used to be good and now they’re bad (untrue, boring). i think it’s an essay about my fear that we have pruned our gardens too ruthlessly, and saved no corners for the impractical, the vivid and wondrous, the joyous and fantastic. that we call prose “purple” because we’ve gotten too used to prose without any color at all.
wrote a little essay about prose, 90s historical romances, and why fascists love AI so much 💕
subscribe to my newsletter to enter a giveaway for a physical arc of the everlasting!
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New story from me @lightspeedmagazine.com, maybe the bleakest I've ever written. It's about:
-AI’s effect on teaching literature
-what literature can (& can't) actually teach us
-trans fatherhood
-the road to hell being paved with white saviorism
www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/tell...
Every week or so across the last decade, I think about this shattering @alexanderchee.bsky.social essay on his catering work for the Buckleys.
Officially kicking off the newsletter with an intro post! If you'd like to keep up with all the hot updates going forward, please subscribe!
skrutskie.beehiiv.com/p/tpigu-1-an...
Elsie the cat on a quilt, curled up around Lesbians in Space.
It was an honor to contribute a short story for the gorgeous Lesbians in Space: Where No Man Has Gone Before anthology. The Kickstarter for Lesbians in Space 2: The Sapphics Strike Back funded in 24 hours. Help them reach their stretch goals: www.backerkit.com/c/projects/s... @wctracy.bsky.social
The Third Period Comeback started in the drive-through of the Bank of Montreal in St. Albert Alberta. It's older than The Story of Owen, and grew from the same seed. I cracked a 14yo plot problem last summer. AND NOW IT'S A BOOK.
decided to turn this mood into impetus to launch a newsletter. sign up for all the hottest skrutskie updates!
skrutskie.beehiiv.com
A picture of a pigeon captioned "Hit by a Car and Dumped in the Trash, But This Pigeon Isn't Giving Up"
monday(/eternal) publishing mood
This is the cover of a comic, which would ordinarily be a bit cumbersome to do alt-text for in a comprehensive manner. HOWEVER, this happens to be based on my book, so I'll just paste in the excerpts from the book that explain what's happening on each page!
Inside of the front cover, with a bit of context that reads: "THE FOLLOWING is an excerpt from an early chapter of Little Thieves . . . kind of. I’ve adapted it to be a comic! This means that there are minor changes to the text in order to give more context or explain things where words are, for once, worth a thousand pictures. If you’d like at least a little context before diving in, we can do that here too: Our heroine (?) Vanja is on her way back from yet another party she’s attended in the guise of Gisele, the princess who she used to serve . . . until Vanja stole her identity. Vanja has, in fact, used Gisele’s identity as a cover to spend the last year infiltrating high society events, stealing from the rich and giving to, well, herself, mainly. Tonight is no exception. But Vanja is distracted by the news that Gisele’s loathesome fiancé is demanding a wedding in two weeks, and that he’s summoned highly-trained detectives to find the thief who’s been harrying his nobles. And Vanja has yet to realize that the party hosts she stole from, Ezbeta and Gustav von Eisendorf, had a better security system than she thought . . ."
The footman helps me into the Reigenbach-blue coach, and I glance to the corner. The satchel is there, ceramic jars clinking quietly as the coach rocks from my weight. I seat myself nearby, sweeping my skirts over it, and accept a steaming waterskin from the footman. It’s been filled with boiling water for heat, and I settle it on my lap as the door shuts, then draw a soft, heavy fur wrap over myself to make a cozy cocoon against the chill. It’s going to be a long ride back to Minkja, but at least it will give me time to think. The coach lurches forward, and I burrow deeper into the fur. The way I see it, I have three problems. First: I don’t have enough money to leave right now. A thousand gilden is enough to last a spendthrift countess five months, a shrewd laborer five years. It’s enough to get me out of the Blessed Empire of Almandy, through one of the borders that isn’t a bloodbath, and it will buy . . . I don’t know what. A ship? A storefront? A farm? All that matters is that it will buy me a life far from here. And it must be far, if I am to escape my godmothers. Far enough for them to lose their claim to me. Death told me once that she and Fortune are different beyond our borders of the Blessed Empire. That the Low Gods and their believers are like rivers and valleys, each shaping the other over time. In other lands, she is a messenger, a black dog, a warrior queen; Fortune is a horn of plenty, an eightfold-goddess, a serpent-headed titan. They wear different forms, abide by different laws. So maybe, outside the Blessed Empire, they will no longer be my godmothers. It’s the only way I can think to be free of them. Right now, I have just enough to get past the border as is, but I will be a commoner again, alone and friendless and without a penny to my name, and I know what happens to girls like that. I’d planned to solve this problem with another theft, but . . .
Now that Adalbrecht’s on his way back, I have two weeks to handle the money issue and figure out how to flee from my second problem: Gisele’s husband-to-be. Ordinarily, the only trouble with solving a problem like Adalbrecht would be deciding between arsenic and hemlock. But that route is cut off by my third problem: the prefects. Well, not Junior Prefect Milksop really, just the impending Prefect Klemens. A full-fledged prefect will be able to trace Adalbrecht’s murder back to me, and convene the Low Gods themselves to decide my punishment. I don’t think even Death or Fortune could save me then. It’s a puzzle, like picking a lock, trying to nudge each of the tumblers just so until the way is clear. If I arrange a visit to another noble family . . . no, Gisele is too high-profile, especially with the upcoming wedding, and will surely be connected to the crime. If we host celebrations at Castle Reigenbach? That could be something . . . It takes a moment for me to realize the coach isn’t moving anymore.
I decided to reformat the Little Thieves preview comic I drew so it could read easier on Instagram, and realized I hadn't posted it here AT ALL despite it being four years old! Time to fix that!
Avatar (2009) was the first time I really articulated "I want to work in film as a bridge between tech and artistry." And then I did. On Avatar: The Way of Water and Avatar: Fire and Ash.
