Happy saturday! Today, we have an interview by a fantasy writer duo, Valea Denarr & Micah Iannandrea! They tell us all about their newest book, She Who Earned Her Wings, their writing process and so much more!
And that's not all! We'll have a giveaway running from 5pm on Instagram, where three lucky winners will receive a free ebook copy of Moonlight Love and She Who Earned her Wings!
Together, you've written four books. How did this partnership come to be and what is your process like as co-writers?
V: Well. Let me tell a story. It starts, as it so often does, with a closeted trans lesbian being bored out of her skull, deeply in denial, and looking for a change. So she starts a DnD game. It goes… some sort of way. By pure chance she ends up having a queer player in her group. By pure chance, he catches on to all the gay shit and invites a friend of his to join. And for some reason that friend thought I was cute and one fake dating situation later, here we are.
M: She says fake dating, but it only lasted for a few seconds, and then we actually dated properly.
V: Three years long distance. But yeah, that was how we met. Stuff happened, as it does, and I needed a job. So I tried one. HO BOY. Capitalism, am I right? So anyway, that didn’t really work out, but by this point we were already 2 years into an RP group chat about gay characters, and somewhere along the line, this idea of writing a book had formed. I’ve always wanted to write, but I’d never had the… encouragement and support of someone who cared for me. Now I did. So we decided I’d write full time, just to try it out, just to SEE if we COULD.
M: We were talking about what books to write. We didn’t have a full plan yet. I made a vampire character, and Vaela really liked her. And somehow we got the idea, hey, why don’t we write a story about her?
V: Yeah… Ryann from The Gift of Blood was supposed to be our tiny, tentative foray into writing. After all, writing is hard, right? That’s what I’d always been told. SO HARD. Only the BEST of the BEST can EVER finish a book.
Yeah so turns out that’s some gatekeeping bullshit.
Anyway, that was still meant to just be an attempt at making it work. Turns out, though, I’m much better at that than anything else, so we just kept going.
Part of the reason— I think —that I wanted to write was that I had/have some memory issues. I wanted to at least be able to have something that could remind me of the time I shared with Micah, and the characters we made and stories we told. And then they supported me and enabled me to do just that.
M: Regarding our process as co-authors: It’s mostly Vaela writing. But I’m there to assist with details, character work, and helping to nail down a final form for the project. A lot of the times it’s my characters, so I help with detailing how the character would act as a person when faced with different situations.
V: I don’t have a lot of confidence in my own stories and characters. Ones I make fully by myself, I mean. Not because they’re bad or uninteresting, but because I’ve dealt with a lot of shit in my life, and I’m still unraveling a lot of that insecurity. It helps to have another set of eyes there, and it especially helps to be presented with characters I don’t know. The novelty and the challenge of figuring them out really scratches that ADHD itch, and the words just flow.
I’m good at talking. I can talk for hours, and I can write just about as much. Micah is the one who generally gives me direction, keeps me on track, and supports me when I get second thoughts. I know I can trust them with any idea, that they’ll do their best to help me make this story as good as it can possibly be. And then there’s of course the advantage of having a second person to remember details of characters and elements of the story.
Plus, they do all the marketing graphics, which is very helpful!
Tell us about your newest fantasy, She Who Earned Her Wings, and what inspired you to write it.
M: She Who Earned Her Wings was very much inspired by our DnD campaign. Nomi, at least. Vaela really liked the character because she’s a trans woman, and she’s so… Idk, what do you like about her, babe?
V: Oh, that’s a good question. What do I like about Nomi… There are things I like about her, and then there are things I like about the way Micah played her. I’ll start with the former: Nomi is trans, and she was my gateway into realizing that trans people exist and I happen to be in fact one of them. Without Nomi, I would probably be in a pretty bad spot by now.
Other than that, Nomi is just so… warm. Everything about her. Her voice always has a certain softness to her, even when she’s angry. She’s kind. She’s gentle. She’s a big, happy, lovable girl and just having that ray of sunshine in my life helped a lot.
M: Most of the RPing that we did, and the in-game stuff, we wanted to turn into a story that people would be able to see and experience. Because Nomi is great, she deserves to be seen, and all of her wives as well.
V: Oh, right, that’s another thing: Nomi went along with all the girls liking her. And now I know that that’s called polyamory. Funny how you sometimes just know you are something without having a word for it. Nomi’s existence gave me the terminology to describe and understand myself. That’s invaluable to me.
The second thing I mentioned, the way Micah played her? That was important too. I mentioned earlier that I was bored before I met Micah, right? I meant that. Boredom honestly doesn’t begin to describe it. Apathy would be more apt. My world felt lifeless, drained of all joy, creativity and colour. And here suddenly is this incredibly smart, charming, gorgeous person who keeps surprising me. Who keeps teaching me more and showing me more just by playing a character. I feel like those two things are deeply linked, too. It’s maybe a bit hard to describe, and—
M: You’re adorable, love.
V: Babe, I’m trying to write. Anyway, yeah, it’s hard to really put into words, but every game session was invigorating, made me look forward to the next day… It meant a lot to me.
Can you tell us a little bit about your characters? Which, if any, did you identify with most and why?
V: I probably identify with some of our characters way more than Micah does. I have sort of a thing about figuring out things in my subconscious based on what I write or the characters I make. (Like, “Oh, this character you’ve had since you were a kid is a polyamorous lesbian? Might mean something!”) But Micah can still tell you some fun stuff about the characters, I’m sure.
M: I feel like, when I make characters most of the time, I add something of myself into them and make them just… act a little better than I would in the situations they’re in. I like to make characters confident and strong. Most of the time, anyway. I want to identify with that someday. Sort of point at that character go “Yeah, I’m like them. Because they’re cool. And powerful.”
V: Never mind, we’re the exact same lol.
M: As for just talking about characters, when I made Nomi, she didn’t have so much of a personality. She was just a character I made up a few days before we played DnD. And I’ve noticed this about myself, once I start playing with them or we start writing, it helps me subconsciously work on them, and I figure out how they work, how they think and speak. A lot of the time this happens quicker with the more hyperactive and excitable characters.
V: I think I’m similar to Micah in that regard, pointing at characters and just… wanting to identify with them. There are certain aspects in which I already do. Some of them have scars. Some of them have rage. A lot of them just want the same things I want. To be free, be safe, and be able to love who they want to love. I can strive to be a little more like them every day, to be a little better. And until then, living through them helps a bit, especially in the times we live in. There is a sort of catharsis by proxy that comes with writing your feelings onto the page and seeing them acted upon in a way you never could.
If I had to pick one to identify with most and why, it would probably be Calia. The one thing that defines her more than anything else, more than the scales, the claws, more than even all the pain she had to endure in her life, is love. How she loves, her capacity to love. That was the one thing that’s never changed about her no matter how she evolved. The difference between her and myself is, she gets to express that love in person to the people she loves. I’m still trying to get there.
Did you come across any challenges while writing She Who Earned Her Wings? How did you overcome them?
M: We didn’t have too many challenges, but we changed a lot in Nomi’s story. It was kind of a challenge to change that all and keep it straight. A lot of characters had to be removed from her story, and others had to be added. But luckily we had already changed a lot in the prelude, so adding to that wasn’t too difficult.
V: Yeah, I have definitely evolved in the story telling department over the past years, so that gave us a lot to work with when before there was very little. I think one of the biggest changes was how Nomi and Calia got together. We wanted it to feel well paced— Not just in the way you pace a story, but for their personal relationship, and we wanted that reflected in the feeling you get when you read the book.
M: Yeah, the way they got together in the game was too fast. In a story it doesn’t feel realistic, and we wanted to make it less rushed.
V: It’s that old issue with dnd. You play for 3 years and it turns out 2 weeks have passed in the game. We also had to make to bring out how Calia’s trauma influences how she acts, and how Laura’s does the same, so that took even more care and time.
Another issue was knowing too much about the characters, and wanting to show it off because they’re so important to us. That ended up making the book rather big, but… well, you get even more for the price of a regular book. I don’t really see a downside here. Nomi’s story isn’t super action-packed and fast-paced. It’s about relationships. In the end, we could write 30 books about her, but that’s just too many. So, in this very first arc, relationships will likely be the focus, despite everything else going on with the dragons, dragon hunters, godservants and other foes. Nomi’s story is one about healing from trauma and reconnecting family, which is… interesting, since she’s the person with the least trauma in the entire group.
So yeah, biggest issue was getting me to keep the word count down, but you have no idea what it feels like to have to cut a piece of banter between characters who have been on your mind 24/7 for the past 3 years.
All of your books are fantasy. What is your process when it comes to world-building? Is it difficult for you to build a new magical system for different books? Are you planning on writing a story into a world you've already created?
V: We sort of start out planning at the start, throwing in whatever we think is cool or interesting. And then usually, after letting the idea rest for a bit, we can streamline the things in it just very naturally, recognize what fits and what doesn’t, and connect some dots. Not all things in our worlds are immediately connected to the plot, or have a reason for being there that is initially brought up. It’s a big, big tapestry of things happening at sort of a global, sometimes cosmic scale, and some of those things will be important, some will show up later.
So far, after we’ve had the general ideas, we’ve just been building out from that, adding things on brick by brick. One good way to build a story or a world in general is to just come up with book titles based on vibes. And then you build something around that with the characters you already have. The title for the Crimson Tears’ series fifth book is already influencing things in the first.
M: Vaela usually does most of the world building, and the magic systems. And it’s very interesting how she thinks about magic. She thinks of reasons why things would work, how they would work, and the internal logic. And I like the side effects some of the magic has, like the druids having to train channeling it and facing physical drawbacks similar to exercise or exertion.
V: I am still getting used to being able to just do whatever I want with our books, so my brain is always still stuck on logic and how to make things make sense the way they would make sense to me. For instance if magic needs a fuel source, the things it can do, where the difference between magic and science is… It’s just fun to think about. I don’t really struggle with making new ones. I think I have more of an issue with not packing too many types of magic into a single setting. If I put in too many, I won’t get to show any of them to their full extent, and that’s no fun. I just wish I could write faster and get more and more of them out.
M: Regarding our plans for stories in worlds we’ve already created, both worlds we have created so far will have full series and a number of standalones and side series. And all of our worlds are somehow connected and may meet each other in some way. I think the only one that’s not connected is [Redacted].
V: That’s what you think.
M: HM. Never mind then.
V: I’m not gonna tell you about that yet. Still working on that… But yeah, they’re right, pretty much all our worlds are somehow connected, some more so than others. It’s not super important to read all of them to understand the connections, but if you do, it’ll be a fun little surprise whenever it comes up.
All of your projects are queer. Who are some of your favourite queer characters from other media, and is there any representation you’d like to see more of?
M: Some characters in RWBY have finally been confirmed to be queer, and we love them. Blake and Yang are old favourites. She-ra… *long pause* I like Catra.
V: You like the catgirls, huh?
M: I love the “catgirl with their big, blond nerd girlfriend who glows sometimes” trope, you know? It’s good. What else… Oh, Asami and Korra. They’re so good. I love Asami. I just do, she’s good.
V: You wanna tell us why?
M: She’s the non-bender of the party, she’s not weak or helpless, she could destroy anyone in seconds with just her bare hands, and she gets to marry the avatar, obviously.
V: All very good reasons. Any more?
M: Oh, I could keep going… This is gonna be all sapphic characters. Bubblegum and Marceline from Adventure Time have been my favourites for a long time. They had a rocky start and rocky relationship, but they slowly got closer and closer, and it wasn’t even explicitly shown to be a relationship, but you could tell. And also there’s a comic of them in the future, being married and queens together, and we love to see them. [Insert a whole string of sapphics, plus a retelling of a definitely sapphic manga with a girl that goes into a music shop, falls in love with someone there, doesn’t know its the girl who sits next her in class all day because she looks a bit different, and gushes about her all the time.]
V: Babe… When I said “Anything else?” I meant “Do you want to rattle off some more characters?”, not “Tell me about all of them in detail.” But I love you.
M: You married into this. There are A LOT MORE. But yeah…
I guess I’d like to see anything more. What I’d really love to see in sapphic media specifically is TV shows not getting cancelled after a single season. That’s something I’d really like to [fucking] see. But that’s just me, you know?
V: I think we’re allowed one fuck in this specific case. And yeah, same.
V: Okay, what characters do I know… Hey, you remember that memory thing I mentioned? Yeah, that’s relevant right now. So… I mean, the catgirls and their girlfriends are great. Silas and Delilah Briarwood in The Legend of Vox Machina are great, who doesn’t love threatening bisexual vampires?
M: Are they actually bisexual?
V: Babe, there is a non-homoerotic way to threaten to drain someone’s blood, and that wasn’t it. They’re bi, Matt Mercer told me so himself. [Citation needed]
I think… that’s it? I mean, I could rattle off all the sapphic representation I enjoyed, because that’s me. Part of the reason I really got excited about writing was because I could write some queer representation that appealed to me specifically and directly. I love all queer rep, generally, but there are few that really… stick with me, you know? The ones Micah mentioned are indeed favourites, of course, but they’re all from longer ago. OH, I guess I get to mention Nicole Haught and her wife Waverly from Wynonna Earp? Nicole gets a rough deal, constantly almost dying, but not in a bad way. It’s like the writers went “Hey, so we wanna really put the ‘bury the gay’ trope six feet under. How do we do that? Oh, I’ve got it, let’s put in this incredibly competent lesbian who just won’t go down.” Loved that. Also it’s pretty much her TV show, with how much time she spends saving and chaperoning a drunk Wynonna.
Oh, and since we’ve recently binged it again, Addy Carver from ZNation. ZNation is a zombie apocalypse show with 5 seasons. Like the Walking Dead if it wasn’t just completely miserable all the time. Yeah, people die, it’s a zombie apocalypse, but actually entertaining to watch. Addy is part of a group of survivors transporting a potential zombie cure. It’s not explicitly stated that she’s bi, but she has a boyfriend in the first season, and then in the second she has this massive gay energy episode with a survivor they meet… There was a kiss that was cut, so she enjoys the boys and the girls, love that for her. She also gets the gayest, bi-est haircut ever.
There’s one more. From something rather recent. Øka Hyen from TransplanarRPG’s Actual Play DnD Podcast, The Second Stranger. I’m not quite certain if Øka is nonbinary, their player is agender, but Øka reminds me so much of Micah. Gorgeous. They/Them. Kind of an asshole but in a lovable way. Way too good for this world.
Actually, that easily leads into something I’d like to see more in queer media. Among the ways TransplanarRPG handles their worlds, with anti-orientalism and non-colonialism, the setting is just fully queer. Gender is optional, queerness is the norm. It’s great. I want to see more settings like that. I want to see all manner of queer characters, whether they share an identity with me or not. I just want more. Queer people tell great stories, and they need to be allowed to tell more.
Aside from that, what I’d really love to see more is found family that explicitly uses the term found family. It’s such a big part of queer culture, it would be nice if it got more recognition in mainstream media.
What made you decide to self-publish rather than follow more traditional routes?
M: We didn’t have the time or money to wait.
V: The difference between trad pub and self pub, for those readers who might not know, is that in trad pub you query, you get an agent, you jump through a bunch of hoops and gatekeeping that is presented as a meritocracy where “good books will always find recognition” (it isn’t) and then, according to recent trends, you’ll be paid a pittance and most likely left to do your own marketing. And all you have to do to get there is plan for an average of like 10 years querying, and end up with your manuscript on the right agent’s desk at the right time when they’re in the right mood, and they repeat the process to convince some people who have never picked up a book in their lives that this story is worth selling.
In self pub, you publish everything yourself. Given the state of publishing right now, the only tangible difference we could see is that self pub allowed us to have full control over our stories.
M: We get to choose our own cover artists. We can choose to work with whoever we want, we can negotiate royalties with them directly, and we don’t give a huge cut of royalties to a business that profits off our stories.
V: We get to write our stories however we want. We can make them as queer as we want with nobody telling us not to—
M: As long as we want them…
V: Yes, as long or as short. Full creative control is more important to us than the vague chance at a publishing house’s support. I do think there’s some merit to trad pub still, though the system needs a full overhaul. So we might query some stories, but not any of those that are really near and dear to our hearts.
As Micah mentioned, we also just didn’t have the financial means to afford sitting around while hoping somebody might think our books are worth selling. I write full time. It’s not enough yet to make a living, but it’s simply put my only option. We got pretty close to getting to a semblance of financial stability until Musk took over twitter. Like many if not all creatives, his bumbling about has cost us a lot of reach. It’s a rough time for creatives, especially with the new Machine Learning/“AI” stuff going around.
If you could give any advice to authors set to make their debut, what would it be?
V: I’ll start. First of all, word count. If you’re like me, you might think writing a book is hard. Like, the actual writing words on the page stuff. Please, please check your word count! 40k words is enough! 60-80k is enough! 120k IS ENOUGH! 350k is waaaay too much!
Second, make friends in writer communities. People will be happy to give you advice and help you out, and help lift you up. And you can do the same for them. We certainly got a lot of help from the writing community we found, despite me being incredibly non-social and having a dislike for random smalltalk.
Third, if you’re gonna throw money at anything in the publishing process, throw it at the cover. Ever heard the phrase “Don’t judge a book by its cover”? Well, unhear it, because the cover is there to be judged. A nice cover that draws the eye is the best way to get people interested in your book. Everything else, you can make up for with personal effort. I am personally of the opinion that learning to write and edit a book yourself is not that hard. You can learn to do this by reading and writing yourself. (Don’t tell anybody I said this. A lot of writers are zealously opposed to the idea of anybody editing their own books. And I agree, editors and proofreaders are always gonna be a step above non-professionals, but they also deserve to be paid a fair wage. And writers aren’t exactly rich.) But the skill to make a cover is much harder to come by, whether you’re using character art or something stylized.
Fourth and lastly, research creative resources in your country/area. The US, for instance, will sell you a bulk of 10 ISBNs for a couple hundred dollars. Canada will give them to you for free. In the US, you have to file for copyright and pay for it. Where I live, anything you create is automatically protected, without pay. There are discount codes for formatting programs and distribution services. Search for them and use them. Don’t throw your money away for nothing.
God, I talk a lot. Anything you wanna say, Micah?
M: Um… I think we’re good. Yup.
We’d love a hint about any of your current projects! Are you working on anything that might please or even surprise your readers?
M: I guess the one we just finished and the next one are gonna surprise our readers because they’re gonna be short?
V: Wow. Thanks. You know, I’m really trying with the overwriting.
M: I love you!
V: I was gonna say the next one might surprise readers since it’s our first story not centering a sapphic relationship.
M: That is also something I was thinking about!
V: THEN WHY DIDN’T YOU SAY IT? SLANDER—
M: Haha, because I love you and I love torturing you!
V: … Our next project, as I pointedly ignore Micah, is a story called “How to Trap your Lovers and make them Fall for Each Other.” It centers around a trans guy who wants his boyfriend and girlfriend to like each other. Only issue is, they are sworn enemies.
M: Enemies to lovers, fuck yeah!
V, still ignoring Micah: The trans MC is pansexual, and the other two are bi. Both are gonna get other partners later in their lives, but in this one, they’ll be busy hunting a dragon that’s threatening their broken homeland more than each other. So no time to flirt with pretty girls.
The thing that might please our readers is that after that, we’re going back to our roots, writing gay vampires! Crimson Tears is going to get its second book, The Thrill of the Hunt, in which we develop the previous MC’s relationship with her slow burn lover, as well as expanding more on her queerplatonic partner’s story. There will be fights, there will be perils, and there will be Bloods!
M: And! The long awaited paperback for The Gift of Blood will be worked on.
V: Oh, yeah! We’re finally gonna fit 350k words into a single book!
M: It can happen, it can work!
V: … we’ll see.
Have any shows, movies, books, or games influenced your own work at all?
M: So many… I think every time we read or watch something, we wanna add something inspired by it into our books. Like making stories from series that we really like, like… we can make something like this, but more gay!
V: Should I give an example?
M: Yeah!
V: Okay, so one is “What if TLT, but the necromancers are fighting dragons, and they’re hunting vampires and undead in a sort of Bloodborne type scenario?” That one’s still a work in progress, these things always start out basically as fanfic and then evolve or devolve into their own thing.
The other one is “What if RWBY, but they spent more time at college, it’s polyamorous, they focus much more on monster hunting than world saving, maybe everybody rides a dragon, and also for some reason there’s this one hunter team that’s just all eldritch abominations, for no reason.”
M: Yeah, those are both still work in progress.
V: These are very early ideas. We likely won’t get to those in a while. OH! I actually just remembered one that we wanted to write: A queer coming of age story in the style of PJO, but all the kids are part monster… Micah loves PJO, so I’m waiting until I can steal their books and read them. We have plans for that, and they may change completely, but every story has a starting point.
If you could give any advice to authors set to make their debut, what would it be?
V: Advertise yourself. Within reason, obviously. Don’t write an add for your second chance romance under someone’s tweet about their pet being sick. But if you don’t tell people about your book, nobody will hear about it. Lean into the niche little things you love about your books. Ours was “Kickboxing lesbian vampire.” Be your own biggest fan. Other than that… I don’t really know.
I want to let everyone know, all this is stuff that worked for us, with little to no outside support. It worked well. We generally don’t follow market recommendations, but this has worked for us, and I think it’s fully okay to completely disregard any advice that just doesn’t work for you.
Our podcast focuses on media we’re currently loving. Are there any books, shows, movies, games, or podcasts you’re enjoying this Pride month? Any recommendations for our audience?
M: Any show that has been cancelled or has been taking off streaming sites because of homophobia, stream the shit out of them. Pirate them, watch them.
V: Oh, for sure. Remember ZNation that I talked about? Apparently the studio refused to pay the actors residuals, so it was taken off a buncha sites. And that’s kinda what’s happening nowadays. Studios don’t want to pay actors, so they’re just gonna erase whole shows from existence. Watch them while you can.
M: She-ra is good, if you wanna watch friends to enemies to lovers. It’s full of queer characters and made by a queer person. The Owl House too, another queer show by a queer person.
V: I’m not gonna go into books because there are SO MANY I want to read, it would be SO MUCH, and yet I don’t have the time for it… I guess I’m really enjoying the TransplanarRPG podcast. It’s an all transgender, POC-led podcast about their dnd game, but it’s more structured like an actual story, there’s all sorts of gender nonconforming characters, characters with neopronouns, and just generally a good time. Also, the podcast has content warnings before every episode, which is also great.
Vaela and Micah are a polyamorous trans and ace pan nonbinary author pair. They have been dating long distance for three years now, and this year, 2023, celebrated their first year as authors together on the 21st of March, the book birthday of their debut, THE GIFT OF BLOOD.
Most of their time together is spent writing books while sitting in voice chats, because they live in an endstage capitalist society, and "regular work" is literally socially accepted torture. Micah is the wealthy patron of the team, which means they encourage Vaela to write while she laments about living a total of 6400 kilometres away from the person she loves most dearly.
When they're not working, they voraciously consume queer media such as DnD podcasts, streams, TV shows, movies and the like. When they really have free time, which is once in a blue moon, they play videogames together.
Micah doesn't know this, but Vaela also spends half that time trying to come up with nice things to say to Micah or to write in the letters she composes despite being able to message them in seconds. What Vaela doesn't know is that Micah thinks she's a cute, and a nerd, and so very romantic.
Together they are attempting to build a two-person, one-author-pair bookfort to cuddle up and read stories in. Their works frequently contain elements of love in its various forms, queer supernaturals, found family, and gender nonconformity, and “are the perfect gift for any queer person of the sapphic variety.”
You can keep up with their work over their linktree and newsletter, which they usually remember exists right around the time they release a new book.
Crimson Tears
The Crimson Tears universe is a world much like ours, though with a gently altered history, strange cities built to hide the supernatural, and a community of the same hiding in the shadows. It focuses mainly on Ryann Ly, a kickboxer turned vampire against her will, whom the Bloods that turned her try to pressure into helping them fight their war.
Unfortunately for them, Ryann is incredibly good at what she does, stubborn as hell, and has a bit of an anger problem. Why would she join the war on the side of her killers, when she could instead hunt them down with the aid of their enemies?
As Ryann’s story progresses, she finds a family within her new community, begins to heal from past trauma, becomes a protector to those who need one, and realizes that her story has always been linked to the supernatural, one way or another.
Crimson Tears is a story about a lesbian fighter being really good at what she does, a slow burn romance, found family, and gay-ass vampires.
Stars, Hearts and Dreams
The world of Stars, Hearts and Dreams is a fantastical one, far in the future, where humanity has travelled the stars and settled on a new planet, where dragons hold dominion. Crystal technology and magic are commonplace, as are duels, humans touched and warped by the arcane, and great beasts in ancient forests. We focus here on Nomi, a young transgender druid who travels the world to learn from the other druid clans spread around the various continents, and the dragons she encounters.
Among those dragons are Laura and Calia, who have some history with each other that makes their feelings for one another difficult. Nomi provides a welcome distraction, a wonderful friend, and, in time, a cherished lover. The three of them, along with other members of their found family, begin to travel the world, healing from trauma, gaining power through knowledge, skill practice, and mending their relationships to each other.
Stars, Hearts and Dreams is a story about family, estrangement, trauma, healing, and giant, polyamorous dragons who have nothing better to do than to fight each other, collect treasure, kidnap a few princesses (consensually!), and be really fucking gay.
Standalones
Moonlight Love and Witchcraft
Moonlight Love is a prequel to the Crimson Tears series, a low stakes, no conflict polyamorous romance centering Kay, Logan and Nemo. It is nothing but cuddling, being close, and being soft with each other, while also sprinkling in a few little bits of new information about the characters.
Of Books and Paper Dragons
Paper Dragons is a standalone story set in a small part of Astraea, the world of Stars, Hearts and Dreams. As such, it has dragons, themes of starlight and beautiful places, cute animals, and fully queer societies. Paper Dragons takes place in a non-gendered society and follows the starship scavenger Voa, who lives in the lightless sea, a desert of black sands. They’re thirty-eight, they’ve been scavenging for twenty years, and they’ve had enough, so they decide to open a bookshop. Now, instead of the desert, they battle anxiety, paperwork, and the local archivists, who make her job much harder than it should be.
Available for free over https://linktr.ee/vaelaandmicah or https://dashboard.mailerlite.com/forms/221384/71692781170460465/share
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