Hello, readers!
New author selfie! I ditched the beard and look years younger as a result, because my beard is naturally white but my mustache is naturally black (as of right now). I'm writing a new novel while I wait to hear back from literary agents on my epic fantasy series starter novel I blogged about before. I'm working on a YA magical realism literary-leaning fantasy novel-in-stories. For a long time I've wanted to write a novel using the fantasy tropes from genre fantasy which I love and read a lot of but with the intellectual rigor and literary quality of literary fiction (and a lot of literary fiction in reality lacks such quality and is horrible, but they aspire to it in theory in a way genre authors do not), so I am going for it in this new YA magical realism novel I'm writing. You wouldn't necessarily expect magical realism to be YA, but the plot idea I had which I really like has a kid protagonist and an obviously YA type of plot, so it has ended up being real, authentic YA magical realism. I've written 30,000 words of a word count target of 100,000 and hope to finish it by end of summer 2026. It's going to be a one-off standalone novel. I'm not sure what the market is for YA magical realism, but we'll see.
