Dear Goldsboro reader,
I write to you from the across the ocean, in the near-past, under a regime that is actively rewriting our national history in order to justify its current atrocities. Please enjoy my new fantasy book, which is about a regime rewriting history in order to justify its current atrocities (unrelated).
Which is a pretty grim intro for a book with dragons and time travel in it. Sorry! I used to think of fantasy as an inherently escapist genre, and this is in some ways the most classically fantasy book I’ve ever written—there’s a map in the front, for god’s sake!—but writing it didn’t feel very much like an escape. It felt like work, mostly. But it also felt like hope.
That’s the thing about time travel: it’s an inherently hopeful device. It’s a promise that wrongs can be righted, that nothing is permanent. That the future isn’t set in stone. Maybe that’s why so many time travel books are also romances—every romance is fundamentally, almost deliriously hopeful. How else could you promise a happily ever after, in such a brutal world?
Thank you, for hoping along with me—
