August 2025 Newsletter: Time for the Deepening and Quieting of the Spirit

Big news month, guys, but make sure you keep reading—there’s a short story in here for you down after the first photo.

I had a great time at the Middleton Book Fair, which coincided with the National Mustard Museum’s celebration of National Mustard Day. It was exciting to see people walking around in costume; I did not realize there was such fandom for mustard. Also, welcome to all the new subscribers! 

I’m writing this early on a rainy morning in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where I have come for a vacation. There’s a hint of autumn in the air that feels out of step with the bright bleached yellow-white of August. But the mornings are getting darker, and I’m excited that someday soon, it will be fall.

Itch Dot Io

If you’re chronically online, or just follow a lot of writers, you may have heard there was a kerfuffle with itch.io that led to the website de-listing a lot of books and other media that had been marked “adult,” as well as other stuff that was marked “LGBTQ,” even when that content was not marked as adult. This is related to decisions by credit card companies—primarily MasterCard, I think, although Stripe is also a big problem—about what they were and weren’t going to pay for, itself the result of a surprisingly small number of calls by a conservative Australian group that objected to a (fairly heinous) video game. As it stands, my work, which is marked as LGBTQ but not adult, was not de-listed (although a lot of writers with the same tags were!). Nevertheless as someone who believes in freedom of speech, I have been disturbed by this turn of events. 

I appreciate that in order for itch to remain as a platform, it needs people to use the site for buying and selling, and it needs to be able to collect payments. Those feel like very basic things a platform that facilitates transactions should be able to do. But I also resent the fact that so many works were rapidly deplatformed simply because they were marked LGBTQ. I don’t trust anyone that automatically assumes anything under that tag must be in some way pornographic. I also find it both fascinating and frustrating that payment processing companies like Stripe and MasterCard have so much power—they are able to say they refuse to pay for things that fall into an extremely broad category, and suddenly that market is no longer viable.

As of right now, itch has announced they are reindexing adult content and looking for a new payment processor. As far as I have heard, the deindexed LGBTQ works are also available again. For the time being, my work is still up on itch, but I have changed the cut of sales the site gets to 0%. This will not prevent them from making money on me, I don’t think—there’s a period after someone buys a story that itch holds the payment (ostensibly in case of returns), and my suspicion is that they receive interest on that which is not then paid out to the writer. But I also didn’t want to just take the stories down, since I think there are people who bought my ebooks but haven’t yet download them. For now, if you want a signed paperback, I suggest emailing me directly rather than going through there. 

To read more about this issue and find a script for calling major payment processors with your displeasure, click here. MasterCard’s updated statement disclaiming any responsibility (i.e., bullshit) is here.

The Short Story

This month is Pride in Madison, and thus as teased last month, I have a new short for you all: “Sparking Something.” It’s an AU scene from chapter 2 of Dionysus in Wisconsin. In the original novel, we get this bit:

(p. 26)

I want to stress that this chapter was always written this way! This short is not an outtake, it is something new that I wrote some time after I’d written the original chapter (after I’d published the entire book, in fact) because I was a bad combination of bored and stuck. A few warnings: first, it is basically an excuse to have a relatively long sex scene, so if you read my works only for the plot, it may not be for you. It isn’t queernorm—there’s a couple brief acknowledgements that homophobia exists, although no one’s day gets ruined by it. And it does spoil a lot of the plot revelations that happen in chapter 8, so if you haven’t gotten that far, you might want to wait.

It is available at my website (epub and pdf). Circumstances being what they are, I haven’t put either up on itch yet. Eventually I will put it together with “Dous” and various other shorts and make a whole print book, but for now you will have to do things the old fashioned way, by printing this out on a printer if you want a print copy.

Bookstores!

I visited the excellent Tropes and Trifles in Minneapolis, MN, a romance-only independent bookstore that stocks all of the Wisconsin Gothic series. I signed everything they have in stock and drew hedgehogs on them, and left a bunch of Wisconsin Gothic stickers too. If you’re in the Cities, go over there and pick something cool up!

Yolo with Kobo

Finally, I’m again participating in the Yolo with Kobo promotion. If you have Kobo+, or if you have Kindle Unlimited but are looking for a change, you may be excited to know that all of my books are available on Kobo+! For those not in the know, Kobo+ is a service that allows you to pay a monthly fee and check out as many participating books as you can; writers get paid a certain slice of the subscription fees based on what you read. Find all the participating authors on Kobo’s website here, with a few additional ones (plus translations and audiobooks) here.

Upcoming Appearances

I’ll be at Booked Eau Claire on 12/13 September! I’ll be appearing on two panels (one on open vs close door romance and one on indie publishing), and selling/signing books from 12-5pm Friday and 10am-5pm Saturday. We will have free postcards and stickers, a limited supply of tarot card decks available, and tarot readings too! It should be a good time, with over sixty authors present and Abby Jimenez speaking. Check out the details here.

I’ll be at the Waunakee Public Library’s Local Author Showcase from 10-12pm on September 27th! Check it out here.

Books I’ve Read

I have been through a lot of books this year in a bunch of disparate subjects, which is as much a reflection of what my local public library has to offer (especially in the audiobook section) as it is my own variegated tastes. To date, I’ve read forty-four books (more than I read all of last year!), including 18 romances (8 M/M, 1 trans M/trans M, 9 M/F), 8 scifi, 1 horror, 4 YA (read aloud to one or both of my kids), 6 non-fiction/memoir, 2 mysteries, 4 plays (including two versions of The Bacchae), and 1 humorous travelogue (abridged). Some July favorites:

All Systems Red, by Martha Wells. I have reentered the world of Murderbot, partly because of the excitement around the TV series getting released (haven’t watched it yet), and partly because the audiobook was available with no wait and read by the inimitable Kevin R. Free. The books are so good. Also I accidentally played the audiobook of Artificial Condition in the car while driving my kids somewhere and now I am stuck reading All Systems Red aloud to my 7yo, so I am getting a very close look at how Murderbot’s narrative is constructed. I thought it was pretty flat the first time I read this. It is definitely not flat; I was wrong. Also it is very good and you should go read it.

A Caribbean Heiress in Paris, by Adriana Herrera (cis M/F). A strong, driven, intelligent woman from Hispaniola meets a Scottish earl (courtesy title) at the 1889 World’s Fair. He’s immediately smitten, she’s interested but too busy until he proposes a marriage of convenience for plot reasons. I love a romance that uses actual history instead of making stuff up for the purposes of feminism, and 1889 is an excellent time for the nascent women’s liberation movement! The book also features at least five explicitly LGBTQ side characters and an excellent deconstruction of the slavery and related economies that made all those British lords so wealthy in the first place. Said would be proud.

Mr. Collins in Love, by Lee Welch (cis M/M, maybe one character is demi). I had an ARC of this one! Under Welch’s ministrations, a somewhat sanctimonious side character becomes a tightly wound, anxious guy under a lot of pressure to make right and take care of those he loves. The language is perfect, and the love story is nontraditional and functions entirely within the bounds of regency society (as opposed to some other queer regency romances I’ve read that tend to chuck the rules in the last ten yards or so). Delightful!