Category: The Animals We Became

At the end of February, I submitted my line edits for The Animals We Became, my next book — a queertrans retelling of the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi (the story of Blodeuwedd) exploring gender, trauma, and compulsory heterosexuality through assorted nonconsensual animal transformations and all the other fascinating horrors of medieval Welsh literature.

Line edits are never a fast or easy process for me, but these took me five and a half months, which is considerably longer than I’ve ever spent on a similar edit — with my YA books, I don’t think I was ever given more than six weeks to turn around an edit, and sometimes it was closer to four. In hindsight, I don’t know how I ever managed that, save that I would put my entire life on hold while working on it; part of the problem this time was that due to health issues and academic deadlines, there were large chunks of time during that period when I was unable to work on my edits at all. When I did finally come to rewrite the book, it took me less than a month to do so… but it was getting there that was the hard part, as we’ll see.

I have an unconventional approach to editing, perhaps, and tend to tackle structural edits by opening a new document next to the old one and writing the book again, because to work within the same document feels stifling. I find myself too limited by what’s already there, unwilling to make radical changes, and the result is always worse. When I write in a new document, whole chunks of text will survive, but they’ll be retyped word by word, because if it’s not worth retyping then it’s not worth keeping. I’m sometimes quite aggressive in my edits, cutting whole chunks of the book and reworking major plot points, but eventually, I’ll wrangle things into shape. It’s labour intensive, but it works.

Still, by the time I get to line edits, I’ve usually set aside the separate document and embraced the world of tracked changes. My usual approach is to read the book aloud, checking for unintentional rhyme or repetition, refining the rhythm and style of each sentence, making sure that syllables fall where I want them to and alliteration is deployed where most effective or avoided where awkward. Line edits are a time for nitpicking and accuracy, so elements may get rewritten or reworked, but these are usually sentences rather than paragraphs, details rather than scenes.

I began like this in the autumn, but something was wrong. I could tweak and polish each sentence all I liked, but I wasn’t happy with The Animals We Became, and I couldn’t pin down why. It was a strange time to be working on it, with reviews coming in for The Wolf and His King before and after the UK publication in November, and I found myself experiencing a kind of Second Book Dread that I’d never experienced before. Although this will be my fifth published novel, it’s my first time having to write something that is both similar enough to a previous book to have some overlap of audience while also being very different in tone and not a direct follow-up, and the pressure of expectations and the knowledge that I would inevitably disappoint some of them started to get to me.

It was the positive reviews for The Wolf and His King that were troubling me the most, because many of the things that people seemed to like were things that were not in The Animals We Became. Some were never intended to be — this was never a romantic book, and I’d resigned myself to disappointing those who thought I was going to write romance from now on — but others nagged at me, because I didn’t quite like that they weren’t there, either. The depth of academic research and historical detail was far less visible in this book than in TWAHK, for example, and while that didn’t mean it hadn’t been part of my writing process, I began to feel increasingly less confident in the choices I’d made that were rendering it so much less obvious.

What I was missing, I realised eventually, was constraints to work within. Rules to push back against.

My books thrive on argument, little as I enjoy it at the time: I have problems with authority, and I need something to rebel against, a constraint to struggle within. With my YA books, these constraints were usually editorial: tight word limits, things I was told I couldn’t do in YA, requests to clarify more while somehow not adding any words, etc. My editors would give me a series of seemingly impossible and incompatible instructions and I would argue with the ones I disagreed with and then do what I could to reconcile the compromises with the text. Very often, suggestions I received weren’t directly actionable, but they revealed a problem that did need fixing somehow, and the compromise on how to do that would lead to a better result. The struggle to enact those changes within the word limits and while conforming to the expectations of category and genre would often produce scenes and details that were better than the version I created on my own.

With The Wolf and His King, the constraints were more self-imposed. One of the main constraints I imposed on myself was in the use of language, and my attempt to avoid anachronistic concepts in an attempt to immerse myself more fully in my characters’ worldviews and perspectives. In general, the historical setting provided most of the rules I found myself pushing back against: how could I make this work in the setting? What did this mean in the setting? What were the implications of this action, how would this emotion be expressed, what would characters fear or desire about this in the setting?

The rules weren’t so tight as to become stifling, because I knew that I could, at any point, escape. I’d promised myself that anachronisms were permissible for narrative reasons, and my author’s note at the beginning gave me a Get Out Of Jail Free card with regard to using them. If I did so, though, it would need to be with intention — I would need to genuinely think it was worthwhile, that it made the story better, rather than simply being easier. And I didn’t want to resort to them, because avoiding them was more useful.

A sidenote: my author’s notes always claim less fidelity to the rules than I actually aimed for while writing. I am actually much more precise and nitpicky than I pretend to be, but if I tell you that, you might nitpick me right back. But it’s also that the nitpicking at my end is, ultimately, a means to an end, not the end in itself. It’s not about whether the book is Historically Accurate For The Sake Of Being Historically Accurate; it’s about whether striving for historical accuracy helped me enter more fully into my characters’ minds and the world they lived in, in order to create something that rang true.

The real value of those constraints, I realised, was that they cut me off from the path of least resistance. They closed the door to cliché and to generic choices. They forced me to act with intention, rather than out of convention; they made me interrogate what I was doing, and decide what I valued about it. Arguing with editors or myself about whether to keep a detail that didn’t follow the Rules helped me realise if that detail mattered — or if there was one I could come up with that would satisfy me and follow the rules, potentially forcing me to do something more original and more creative in order to make it work.

These were not constraints that could be imposed at the start of writing. They worked because they happened at the editorial stage — and more, because they happened late in the editorial process, when tearing it all up and starting again from scratch wasn’t an option. The struggle to improve a scene became the effort to reconcile what was on the page with the rules I wanted to follow, and it was in the reconciliation that I would usually find a better version of the scene, one that felt fresher and more interesting than the more generic option that preceded it.

And the trouble with The Animals We Became was that I didn’t have any constraints.

Editorially, the book had had far less intervention than anything else I’d written. I drafted it in February 2023 and it was this first draft that my editor read, with no earlier beta readers, feedback, or redrafts before it entered the publishing process. Structural edits were reasonably light, at which point I sought out some beta readers, because I realised I needed more perspectives to wrestle with, more questions to answer, more misinterpretations to help me realise when I’d been unclear. I needed readers who didn’t know the story it was based on, too, so I could tell whether it made sense without context.

My first attempt at line edits, following this beta reader feedback, resulted in more than twenty thousand words being added to the book, so I asked for a second round. This I got, but I fear my editor likes my writing too much: she left 83 revisions on the document, promising me that it only needed some fine tuning. But something was wrong, and the more I tried to fine-tune it, the more I thought I might have strung it with completely the wrong strings.

The problem, I realised, was that there were no rules. I had added thirty thousand words to the book since the first draft, and it hadn’t been a problem; I wasn’t frantically trying to cut them. My editor’s 83 revisions did not provide a great deal of significant resistance to grapple with. I hadn’t set myself linguistic restrictions — I had deliberately chosen not to — so I didn’t have the same vocabulary constraints. And I’d set the story in a semi fantasy world (geographically Wales, chronologically non-specific, as in the original tale, and culturally fictional) which meant there were no rules there either: I didn’t have to worry about historical accuracy. I even had magic to help me escape any overly difficult questions about technology.

I could do whatever I wanted. And I had. But without anything to fight against, without resistance, with no specific paths along which to channel my creativity, it had began to slip along the well-worn tracks of easy answers.

Left to myself, I had created something generic. Not entirely generic, nor entirely without value, but something that lapsed more often than I liked into conventional patterns and ideas. Everything from architecture to household structure was just a little bit… uninterrogated, owing as much to modern pop culture ideas of The Past to any genuine world. And it was not, to my mind, anywhere near as Welsh as I’d wanted it to be, despite having known since I set out that this was a priority. (I’m not taking eight hours a week of Welsh lessons for no reason!)

I’ve been haunted throughout the writing process by the thought of my academic colleagues reading this book: several of them have been kind enough to read The Wolf and His King, but, well, if I’m honest with you, my main anxiety is that there’s considerably more sex in The Animals We Became and I have to go to conferences with these people. 💀 I realised, though, that my prudishness was fading beneath a greater and far more important concern about how this book would read as an interpretation of the text, and as a way of engaging with medieval Welsh literature, and as the latest instalment of English-language textual reception of the Mabinogi, etc.

And, okay, you can’t think about this too much. You’ll go mad. A novel is not an academic thesis; my narrative interpretations are not necessarily my academic ones; what makes a good modern fantasy novel is not necessarily what I think a medieval author intended; the themes I am using the Fourth Branch to explore are not necessarily ones I think are present in the same way in the original text, and so on. While I do find fiction a valuable way of exploring and understanding medieval literature, I am ultimately writing my story using an older narrative, not analysing the one that exists. Moreover, this is a queertrans book about gender and trauma and there are going to be those who are hostile to that because the field of Celtic Studies can, at times, be fairly conservative; these are not people it is worth trying to please.

But. It wasn’t that I wanted to please them. It was just that I wanted to be able to stand behind my own work. To say, yes, I did that on purpose. Yes, this was an interpretative choice I made. Yes, I had to decide how to handle that and this is what I decided to do. I found myself reaching for author’s notes, justifications, lists of Further Reading, as though this might prove I’d done my research. It was, I realised, insecurity, because I didn’t feel those things were visible in the text, and I wanted to prove I knew them anyway.

By the time I’d completed my first pass of these line edits, reading aloud and tweaking individual sentences — which took much longer than planned — I’d realised that I was academically unhappy with the setting and the choices I’d made. I didn’t want an author’s note to be the only place my expertise was visible! And I especially didn’t want the setting to be Generic Fantasy World Superimposed On North Wales — I’d never wanted it to be that, but I’d somehow failed to avoid it, because when I decided against certain constraints (a particular century in the real historical past, for example), I hadn’t imposed enough others in their place.

It was a perfectly good fantasy novel, I guess, but it wasn’t the story I was trying to tell, because it wasn’t engaging with the Fourth Branch on the level that I wanted it to.

Too late, I realised the constraints that were missing, the rules I should have been following, the research I needed to incorporate. Too late, I could see what the book needed to rescue it from sliding into a pit of Uninterrogated Genre Conventions. Perhaps, if the book had had years to stew (as I always prefer), I would have figured this out before I got this stage; perhaps if I’d had more beta readers; perhaps if I hadn’t been suffering from migraine-related brain fog that left me unable to maintain complex thought for months on end… But the circumstances were what they were, and there I was, with a book I suddenly knew how to fix but didn’t have time to.

In my second pass, I rewrote certain scenes and chapters, frantically burying myself in research materials. But it needed more than that, and having finally glimpsed what the book needed to be a decent retelling of the Fourth Branch, rather than merely a decent fantasy novel, I wasn’t prepared to let it go. So despite the knock-on effect this would have on academic deadlines, I found myself asking for an extension. My editor, though she reassured me that she thought the book was in good shape already, granted me the extra time, and then I rewrote the book properly, this time with a much better understanding of my own personal rules for how the narrative and its world worked.

When I finally gave it back at the end of February, there were more like 8,300 revisions in the document than 83, and it crashed my laptop every time you tried to interact with one of those tracked changes. (I’d rewritten it in a separate document, and used “compare changes” to produce a version tracking them — it was the only way it was viable.)

It’s… better. I’m academically much happier with it. I think it’s doing something more interesting; I think it’s engaging more meaningfully with its setting; I think engaging with the setting is more than just interesting background noise but actively contributes to the main themes; I think pulling it apart like this enabled me to see certain other flaws and fix them. There are choices that some people will disagree with, but which I made because they suited my themes, or because they were interesting to me, or because there was simply no Right Answer to a particularly thorny question of interpretation and I chose this one as being the one I could live with. I think I can stand behind them now, because I have thought about why I did them, and I’ve done them on purpose.

It would, however, have been nice if I’d realised two years earlier that this was what I needed to do — or perhaps two months earlier.

Because, as I’m realising, it’s the process of trying to wrestle existing material into shape that often makes imposing rules on one’s world and narrative valuable, far more than trying to write something that fits within them in the first place. It’s the push and pull of having to make it work within an existing structure, when you can’t simply extend the scene indefinitely or completely alter the setup. It’s the way it forces you to question what you value enough to keep, and what can easily be overwritten with something new.

The book isn’t finished yet. We have copyedits yet to go, and I’ve asked that the copyeditor errs on the side of too many comments rather than too few, because I’ve realised I need to be put in a position of defending my narrative choices if I’m going to stand by them. And while I am quite good at challenging myself — I hold myself to high standards, and always have done — I almost failed this time. Not because I couldn’t see that there was a problem, but because both figuring out the problem and how to fix it turned out to be almost too much for me, and I didn’t know what rules I was trying to follow until it was nearly too late.

Too few rules, it turns out, makes it too easy to take the path of least resistance and write the less interesting version of your book. You need something to wrestle with to force creativity, whether that’s a tight word limit or an editorial argument or a strict conformity to historical accuracy or never using the letter E or making every paragraph start with a certain letter of the alphabet or a rhyme scheme or metrical rule or incorporating a particular series of medieval laws or whatever set of constraints you ultimately impose. Yes, in some ways, it’s about making life harder for yourself — but that’s because cutting off the “easy” options is what cuts off clichés and generic choices.

Perhaps, now that I’ve articulated this to myself, it will be easier in future to realise that I need to identify my constraints earlier in the line edits process. But perhaps they’re something that can only be determined through wrestling with the book in the first place, trying to understand why it isn’t clicking.

I don’t know. All I know is that eventually, I hope, I got there. It has been a difficult five and a half months, and I’m quite burned out, for all that I feel I have little to show for it, but while some days produced no words or visible progress, maybe they too were part of the process of wrestling with the book.

Or maybe I was simply wrestling with my brainfog, and should cut myself some slack, because it’s hard enough writing books and doing a PhD while chronically ill as it is.

The Animals We Became will be published by Gollancz on 26 November 2026, and you can pre-order it now (more links to follow as they filter through to other retailers).

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February 29, 2024

Queer Werewolves, Traumatic Shapeshifting, and Doomed Heroes

I have been waiting a very long time to write this post. Months at the very least, but really it feels like the culmination of several years of work and waiting and more work and more waiting, and now — now at last the news is here:

Gollancz snaps up three-book deal from Finn Longman in six-figure pre-empt — The Bookseller, 29th Feb 2024

That’s right. I’ve got more books coming. Adult books, specifically, and fantasy, which makes a change! Not just one, not even two, but three medieval retellings being published by Gollancz over the next few years, and I am SO EXCITED to be able to tell you about them at last.

First up is The Wolf and His King, coming in 2025. This is a queer retelling of Bisclavret that, yes, is focused on the homoerotic possibilities of the relationship between Bisclavret and the king, but is also about chronic pain and illness, the mortifying ordeal of being known, and being an exile in your own home. There is a lot of yearning, and some of that yearning is romantic, and some of it is about desperately wanting to be something your body seems determined not to let you become.

I’ve talked before on this blog about how this book uses werewolfism as a metaphor to explore chronic pain, and that’s definitely at the heart of the story — but there’s a lot more than just that in there. It’s about love and feudal interdependence and needing to be understood and trying to build peace. It’s partially in second person and partially in verse; it’s the weird medieval book of my heart, and it felt at times like it would never sell, but it did. And next year, you’ll be able to read it. In fact, you can even pre-order it right now… [edit: or imminently, the links don’t seem to be up yet, but REALLY SOON]

In 2026, I’m bringing you The Animals We Became [working title], which is a queertrans retelling of the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi, looking at gender, compulsory heterosexuality, and trauma, via nonconsensual shapeshifting. The Fourth Branch is not a nice story, nor a kind one, but it’s been one I’ve been wanting to retell since my first unfinished attempts at doing so back in 2012. It’s a tale that I think has a lot to say about our modern anxieties about gender, autonomy, and category crisis — as well as about the difference between justice and punishment, something I keep finding myself coming back to in my writing.

This book is a newer one, because I sort of sold it on proposal, except that I got carried away writing the sample chapters for Gollancz last year and ended up drafting the entire book. I wrote a post last year about how this process helped me develop new academic ideas about the story as well as new ways of understanding it as a narrative. I’m excited to get back to it and turn that first draft into something more polished and nuanced, but if nothing else, I can promise you that my tagline of “t4t shapeshifting and trauma” remains… very accurate.

And finally, in 2027, I get to share with you To Run With The Hound [working title]. Long-term readers will know that I wrote a book with this title way back in 2018. The book I’ve sold isn’t exactly that book — it’s a proposal for how I intend to completely rewrite that book from the ground up. But yes, this is it: my Cú Chulainn novel, which is sort of a Cú Chulainn/Fer Diad novel with vague Song of Achilles vibes, except it’s also so much more than that. I haven’t written the new version yet, but the plan is to use a nonlinear narrative to explore why Táin Bó Cúailnge is actually a tragedy, and what it means to be doomed by the narrative (but not in the way you thought you were). It will feature a great many feelings about Fer Diad, Láeg, and Cú Chulainn himself.

Obviously, all of these books draw very heavily on my academic background as a medievalist, but TRWTH is the most directly related to my PhD research. Which is just as well, because yes, I am juggling writing and editing these books with a full-time PhD, and I’m not entirely sure I’d recommend that as a state of affairs, but at least the overlap means I can research them both simultaneously.

In the spirit of providing as much information about these books as I can at this point of time, I have anticipated some possible FAQs, and will endeavour to answer them:

How long have you been keeping this secret?

FOREVER. Or, more specifically, since May 19th 2023, which has been killing me. I have not been particularly good at it. I think everyone who knows me IRL has heard the news at this point. But they’ve been strictly instructed to pretend they’re surprised on social media.

When do these books come out?

The Wolf and His King is scheduled for “Spring 2025”, with a holding date of March on the pre-order pages. As soon as that’s actually pinned down, I’ll let you know. The others should follow in 2026 and 2027, as long as there are no hurdles along the way, but I can’t promise there will be no PhD-related delays 🙈

Are these adult books or YA?

Adult. Definitely. I feel this is worth emphasising, especially when we come to Animals, because honestly, Gwydion is awful. I mean, he is the ultimate poor little meow meow, and he is terrible. The Wolf and His King would probably be fine for most teenage readers, but since it’s not aimed at teens, they might not vibe with it so much. The others (especially Animals) are heavier, and deal with darker themes in ways that aren’t particularly suitable for younger readers. (Full content warnings closer to the time, although I recommend googling the Fourth Branch for the general vibes…!) But, you know, I’m not the book police, so use your own discretion.

What genre label would you put on these books?

I think I would describe them as literary fantasy. I don’t know if this is how they would be “officially” labelled. Their fantastical elements — werewolves and shapeshifting and whatever is going on with Cú Chulainn — are crucial parts of the story, but I’m not interested in explaining them, or particularly in developing a magic system for them to exist within. The focus is on the themes and the ways that the stories are told, often with experimental POVs and stylistic choices. Hence the literary part, I guess. But some would probably describe them just as fantasy. That makes sense, too. Historical fantasy almost fits, except that the history we’re dealing with is pseudohistory, and deliberately ambiguous in its exact dates.

Does this mean you’re only going to write adult books now, or will you write more YA?

I don’t have any more YA books contracted once Moth to a Flame comes out in May. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to write any more. I think I’m probably going to take a little break from it, though (juggling these + the full-time PhD is more than enough, honestly), so it might be a couple of years before I have something else lined up on that side of things. I’ve got a couple of ideas I might pursue: a contemporary novel set in a secondary school orchestra, featuring the world’s most codependent string quartet, or a queer pacifist sci-fi Robin Hood retelling that might well be summed up as ‘be gay, do crimes’. Or I might write something else entirely. But we’ll see.

What formats will they be published in?

I believe it’s hardback first, with simultaneous e- and audiobook, and then paperback later. I’ve never had a hardback before, so that will be a novelty.

Will they be available in [x] language?

I have no say over translation rights but I very much hope these books will be picked up and translated into as many languages as possible! If you are a publisher and you want foreign rights, I guess now is the time to talk to Gollancz — hit them up at London Book Fair or something. Especially if you want to translate them into Celtic languages. I would absolutely love to see Animals in Welsh or TRWTH in Irish… listen, I know the market’s small, but it’s worth it. Let’s do it. I believe in us.

How much romance/sex is there in these books?

[ETA: A brief explanatory note, because the response to this book announcement has been fabulous and this post has spread much further than I expected, and therefore beyond my usual readers — The Butterfly Assassin trilogy contains zero romance, and this has been something I’ve been keen to emphasise in my publicity, not least because it’s unusual in YA. So existing readers might be curious whether I’m continuing in the same direction on that front, and that’s why I picked out this question to answer. (Not because I think it is the most important piece of information about any book in general, or anything like that!)]

The Wolf and His King is significantly focused on yearning, although mostly of the unfulfilled variety for the majority of the book. There are some sex scenes, largely poetic rather than explicit. I have told my mum that she’s allowed to read this book, if that helps. I don’t think you could describe it as capital R Romance, or really as romantasy, but it does technically have a HEA, so I guess if you really wanted to stretch your definitions, you could.

The Animals We Became has some sex, and very little romance. It’s a bit more explicit than The Wolf and His King, and I haven’t decided if my mum’s allowed to read it yet. Given the plot of the Fourth Branch, issues surrounding assault, consent, and bodily autonomy are quite central. It’s not what I would call a romantic book.

I really can’t tell you much about To Run With The Hound at this point, because I haven’t written it. I think it will deal a lot with the blurred boundaries of friendship/sworn brotherhood/attraction/enmity. I don’t think romance in the modern sense will be a focus, but it is substantially about complicated relationships between people, and, yeah, also about heroic masculinity and combat/war as a form of intricate ritual.

How much murder is in these books?

Substantially less than is in The Butterfly Assassin trilogy, with the possible exception of To Run With The Hound.

How much am I going to suffer as a reader?

The Wolf and His King is the least angsty, and has a happy ending. The Animals We Became is somewhat more angsty; it has a hopeful but complicated ending. To Run With The Hound is a tragedy, and you’re going to suffer. In other words, it’s a steady run downhill from here to 2027.

How do I get an ARC?

Absolutely no idea, it’s still early days, more edits to do before that’s on the cards, but I imagine you go and ask Gollancz very nicely. When I know more, you will know more.

Do I need to know the original stories to enjoy these books?

No, I have been meticulously testing them on beta readers who are unfamiliar with the original stories, mostly to watch them yell at me when something terrible happens that was absolutely not my idea. However, if you want to do background reading, I’m happy to provide a bibliography.

The Bookseller says it was a 6-figure deal. Does that mean you’re rich now?

Tragically not. There are a lot of misconceptions about how much money authors make, and a lot of assumptions get made based on flashy headlines. Turns out when you spread low six figures over around five years, and pay taxes and agent commissions and things like that, you still end up earning less than minimum wage. On the flip side, though, it’s a very nice supplement to my PhD stipend, and the combination of the two means I can almost afford to have the heating on for more than five hours per day in winter. Almost.

For real, I am extremely grateful for this opportunity and it’s more than I’ve ever earned for my writing before. I don’t want to belittle that fact: I know how it feels to be the writer with a substantially-less-than-six-figure deal watching more financially successful authors complain about how it’s hardly anything and wishing they’d catch themselves on, lol. But writing is still definitely not the business to go into if you want a living wage, so unfortunately I won’t be buying a house any time soon, and I will continue to wince whenever my bike needs yet another pricey repair.

How’s it going, balancing this with the PhD?

It’s going. Sometimes it’s fine. Sometimes I’m very stressed. I think balancing these and also Moth to a Flame was not ideal, but that will all be wrapped up soon, so then I’ll only have two jobs. It helps that these books overlap so much (in content and also thematically) with my PhD research, so everything I learn as part of the PhD helps add depth and colour to the books themselves. The hard part will be holding myself back from adding a bibliography at the back of each book…

Can you tell me more about medieval werewolves?

Yes. Start here.

But what about the accidental vampire novel you were talking about?

The accidental vampire novel is not contracted. Yet. Paranormal romance publishers, hit me up if you’re into incredibly niche romance novels about desperate postgrads and the things they’ll do to a) get PhD funding and b) convince their vampire housemate to suck their blood.

When can I preorder?

For The Wolf and His King: right now! At least in the UK! Still waiting on more retailers, including more who ship internationally, but I highly recommend you go bug them to make it available because I think theoretically they can do that. All the links I’ve got so far are on this page.

For the others, ask me again in a year or so. If that’s too long to wait, remember that Moth to a Flame comes out this May, so you should go grab that in the meantime, and the first two if you haven’t already read them.

I think that is everything, but if I have not answered your question, then please ask it in the comments and I will endeavour to do so!

In general I am just really excited to share this news with you, extremely grateful to my agent Jessica Hare for being willing to take on my weird queer literary adult fantasy novels even though she signed me for The Butterfly Assassin which is really not that, and very glad to have found an editor like Bethan Morgan who is willing to spend three days going back and forth with me about the nuances of words like ‘myth’ and ‘folklore’ when dealing with medieval literature. The future is ahead of us and it is a queer medieval future — and isn’t that glorious?