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Stories are there for us through good times and bad times. They can comfort us, perplex us, or connect us. Follow along in author Rich Larson’s Big Idea for his newest book, Changelog, where he seeks to connect us all to his grandmother.
RICH LARSON:
What’s the point?
That’s the only Big Idea that comes to mind as I watch my grandma gasping in her sleep. What’s the point of writing an essay to promote a book full of stories barely anyone will read? What was the point of me writing all those stories in the first place? What’s the point of writing anything?
Changelog doesn’t matter much today, so I’ll tell you about my grandma: not the shrunken, angular version of her on the hospital bed, but the earlier iterations.
She was born in a Mennonite village in Ukraine in 1927. She survived the Holodomor, the artificial famine imposed by the USSR – this bit of history is repeating itself today, both in the Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine and the Israeli government’s starvation of Gaza.
Her sister Mary died of fever, her brother Fritz from tuberculosis of the bone. Her father was arrested for writing religious poetry, and put in a cell so crowded that if one man rolled over, everyone had to roll over. He was released when the Soviets needed more mechanics, but came back white-haired and gaunt.
Her village was liberated by German soldiers, because things are always more complicated than we would like them to be – this is a fact she pared away when she immigrated to Canada. Her journey west was long and dangerous, full of loss and reunion and wild coincidence that would never pass in fiction. The day she mentions most often is the day she swam for her life:
She was seventeen, and a Russian officer, drunken, victorious, was picking girls from the crowd of refugees trying to cross the Elbe River. Her brother John saw a boat close to shore, and whispered for her to swim. She threw herself into the icy water; the officer staggered after her but dropped his pistol in the river. She reached the edge of the boat. Some hands pushed her away, fearing the Russians would fire on them. Stronger hands pulled her in.
A year later she came to Halifax on a cruise ship full of Displaced Persons. The train ride that followed was so long she feared it would carry her all the way around the back of the world and leave her in Siberia. She arrived in Chilliwack instead, on Christmas morning. She remembers twinkling lights and supermarket stalls overflowing with oranges.
She lived with distant relatives and set herself to learning English, falling asleep with th and wh on her tongue. She cleaned houses in Vancouver, where two old British women gave her cold mutton for lunch. Her stomach was unaccustomed, so she wrapped it in a napkin and hid it in the garbage – but then their great big dog came sniffing around, so she had to stealthily transfer it to her bag.
She became a nurse, and years later forgot her nurse’s watch at a relative’s wedding. The young crooked-faced farmer who returned it became her husband. She wrote poetry; he quoted her Shakespeare. They homesteaded twice in rural Manitoba, and paid off the farm just one year before he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. They had three children, one of whom was my mother.
Knowing facts and anecdotes about my grandma is not the same as knowing her. Knowing her is more like this:
You stumble in from playing in the snow, and she yanks off your mittens and claps your ruddy hands to her warm cheeks and yelps in mock-pain and says oh! icicles!
You sleep over at her house and wear your dead grandpa’s pajamas, white with pale blue stripes, and she makes thin pancakes and watches Spider-Man cartoons with you.
You trek to her house in summertime and she meets you halfway, and when you arrive there’s ginger ale – she mixes hers with cranberry juice – and fresh buns, or cinnamon rolls, or the chocolate-chip brownies you now bake whenever you need to befriend new neighbors.
You have your first heartbreak, already in a different city, and she listens, then quietly asks what did she look like, because she knows that’s important, that a person is more than a name and a decision.
You stay with her for what you don’t realize is the last time, and every day you walk around the pond, using momentum – der Schwung – to get down the grassy ditch and up the other side. She teaches you Scrabble and regrets it because it’s then the only game you want to play. In the evenings you watch Jeopardy or Murder She Wrote.
You call her from dozens of different cities, and every time she says Richie! Where in the world are you now? When your mom says her memory is starting to go, you don’t believe it. Your grandma is warm and sharp and funny as ever.
You surprise her with a visit, make plans to see her the next day. When you buzz her door from outside the apartment, she says Richie! Where in the world are you now? and she is not joking. You begin to pre-mourn her.
You pre-mourn her for years, and it still rips your heart out to see her lying here. Her bed is tilted nineteen degrees. Two wild roses sit in a jar of water beside her.
That’s not knowing her either.
Her voice is faint now, and she doesn’t have her teeth in, and she slips between English, German, Plautdietsch, sometimes Ukrainian or Russian. More and more often, her eyes look confused. I try to cherish every last spark – like yesterday, when I said I wish I could see what’s going on inside your head, and she puffed a laugh and said so do I.
And I guess that’s the point.
I’ve been writing stories all my life, and they’ve served me in a variety of ways. When I was a kid, they let me escape sad rooms like this one. As I got older, they became anchors in time, each story reminding me of where I was, who I was, who I was with when I wrote it. They let me try, over and over, to understand things that will never make sense and put endings on things that don’t end.
But the biggest reason I write is this: you’ll never know my grandma, and you’ll likely never know me, but writing stories – whether hewn whole from life or filtered through imagination – feels like closing the gap just a little. I’ve always wanted so badly for someone to see what’s going on in here.
Changelog: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
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You can also do the pi dogs, but then you lose business from the tau people.
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I was reminded via a recent Metafilter post that this year marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and consequently, the 20th anniversary of me writing my “Being Poor” post about it, which was my way of answering the question, sometimes asked sincerely and sometimes less so, why some of New Orleans’ poorest citizens did not leave the city when a massive storm was bearing down on it. The piece was written in anger and sorrow and frustration, and was in many ways was a life-changing piece of writing for me. It remains one of the best things I’ve ever written.
Ten years ago I wrote a long retrospective on the piece, why I wrote it and what it’s meant to me and others. Nearly all of what I wrote there still stands, so I’m not going to repeat the content of that post here.
What I am going to add today is just the observation that the horrors that caused me to write “Being Poor” twenty years ago have not been avoided in the current day; if anything, things are now worse. Most prominently at the moment, we have a government that neither cares about the poor among us, nor is much interested in helping those of us who need help, whatever help that might be. It is an intentionally cruel and contemptuous government, which is echoed down on state and local levels in many places. It’s harder now to climb out of poverty than it was twenty years ago, and easier to slide into it.
The cruel and contemptuous, in government and out of it, will tell you that poverty is about the choices you make, and I am here to tell you, from experience, that far more than that, it is about the choices we make. We have chosen, in the aggregate, to make things difficult, well beyond that ability of most individuals in poverty to make useful choices much of the time, or to make those choices stick without luck or other outside intervention. You can’t tell people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps when we’ve designed a world where boots cost more than what they have, are hard to find, and will fall apart when they use them. You can’t harangue them for not climbing the social ladder when the ladder we’ve provided is greased and the rungs are broken or missing. You can’t blame them for not improving their lot when we’ve given them so few tools to do so, and are working to take away what tools they manage to have. You can’t sell them the American Dream when we’ve put that dream behind a wall, for the pleasure of the few.
The cruel and contemptuous know this, and it doesn’t matter to them. At all. And they are in power.
And so, we will have more poverty and more disasters and more people wondering, some sincerely and some rather less so, why people just didn’t leave whatever it is that will need leaving. We know the answer to that. We’ve known now for decades. But we refuse to change. And so here we are, again, and still.
— JS
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Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with ladydragona, who volunteers as a Tag Wrangler.
How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?
As a Tag Wrangler my job is to make sure the tags users use on their works are connected (‘synned’ or made a synonym) to the Canonical (Official) tag they most closely relate to, which allows users browsing the Archive to filter for and search for these tags! I also create new Canonical tags when specific concepts have been tagged repeatedly enough and move tags that can’t be synned anywhere, either because too many concepts are in one tag or there just isn’t one to syn it to, to their appropriate fandom.
What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?
I work a lot of hours at my irl job so most of my volunteer work has to happen around that. I try to wrangle tags for at least an hour every day after work while Wrangling parties are hosted some weekends so I'll usually try to attend those which means I'll spend more time wrangling then.
What made you decide to volunteer?
I've always loved fanfiction and, having experienced a handful of archive purges, I wanted to be involved and help maintain this site that I love so much. When I saw a Wrangler Q&A on Tumblr I realized it was possible for normal fans like myself to volunteer and help and that Q&A really made wrangling seem to be a fun thing to do.
What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?
My biggest challenge would probably be time-management. I'm prone to getting very focused on what I'm doing and not realizing just how much time has passed, as well as wanting to do more than I realistically have the time for. I often have to set timers to remind myself to go eat or go do something else.
What fannish things do you like to do?
My main fannish activity is writing fic! In fact, I've posted over two million words on the archive in the last 6 years and don't see myself stopping any time soon! When not writing fic or volunteering I also share fanart and metas on social media as well as help my fellow fans brainstorm their own fics in various discord servers. I like being involved in my fandom's community and have made some of my bestest friends that way.
Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out previous Five Things posts.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
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Now that the 2025 election is over, we're happy to share with you our voter turnout statistics!
For the 2025 Election, we had 15138 total eligible voters. Of those, 2197 voters cast a ballot, which represents 14.5% of the potential voters.
Our voter turnout is lower than that of last year, which had a turnout of 22.8%.
We also saw a decrease in the number of ballots cast, from 3415 to 2197, which represents a 35.6% decrease.
Elections is committed to continuing to reach out to our eligible members to encourage them to vote in elections. Whoever is elected to the Board of Directors can have an important influence on the long-term health of the OTW's projects, and we want our members to have a say in that.
For those who might be interested in the number of votes each candidate received, please note that our election process is designed to elect an equal cohort of Board members in order to allow them to work well together, so we do not release that information. As a general rule, we also won’t disclose which of our unsuccessful candidates received the fewest votes, since we don’t want to discourage them from running again in the future when circumstances and member interest might be different. However, as there were only 3 candidates this year, revealing that information is unavoidable.
Once again, a big thank you to everyone who participated at every stage of the election! We hope to see you at the virtual polls again next year.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
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Faerie, a Tolkien fanfiction archive, is being imported to the Archive of Our Own (AO3).
In this post:
Faerie: Tolkien fanfiction was an archive founded by Esteliel in 2011 and run with the help of mods Narya and Spiced_Wine. The site welcomed all sorts of stories, poetry and non-fiction writing, regardless of genre, rating or pairing. Due to unforeseen circumstances the site owner could no longer maintain it and the site was taken offline sometime in 2021. As a result and in order to keep the stories available to the fandom, the mods Narya and Spiced_Wine decided to move the archive to the AO3 as part of the Open Doors project.
The purpose of the Open Doors Committee’s Online Archive Rescue Project is to assist moderators of archives to incorporate the fanworks from those archives into the Archive of Our Own. Open Doors works with moderators to import their archives when the moderators lack the funds, time, or other resources to continue to maintain their archives independently. It is extremely important to Open Doors that we work in collaboration with moderators who want to import their archives and that we fully credit creators, giving them as much control as possible over their fanworks. Open Doors will be working with Narya and Spiced_Wine to import Faerie into a separate, searchable collection on the Archive of Our Own. As part of preserving the archive in its entirety, all fanfictions currently in Faerie will be hosted on the OTW's servers, and embedded in their own AO3 work pages.
We will begin importing works from Faerie to the AO3 after September 2025. However, the import may not take place for several months or even years, depending on the size and complexity of the archive. Creators are always welcome to import their own works and add them to the collection in the meantime.
We will send an import notification to the email address we have for each creator. We'll do our best to check for an existing copy of any works before importing. If we find a copy already on the AO3, we will add it to the collection instead of importing it. All works archived on behalf of a creator will include their name in the byline or the summary of the work.
All imported works will be set to be viewable only by logged-in AO3 users. Once you claim your works, you can make them publicly-viewable if you choose. After 30 days, all unclaimed imported works will be made visible to all visitors. We will then permanently close down the site.
Please contact Open Doors with your Faerie pseud(s) and email address(es), if:
Please include the name of the archive in the subject heading of your email. If you no longer have access to the email account associated with your Faerie account, please contact Open Doors and we'll help you out. (If you've posted the works elsewhere, or have an easy way to verify that they're yours, that's great; if not, we will work with the Faerie mods to confirm your claims.)
Please see the Open Doors Website for instructions on:
If you have further questions, visit the Open Doors FAQ, or contact the Open Doors committee.
We'd also love it if fans could help us preserve the story of Faerie on Fanlore. If you're new to wiki editing, no worries! Check out the new visitor portal, or ask the Fanlore Gardeners for tips.
We're excited to be able to help preserve Faerie!
- The Open Doors team, Narya and Spiced_Wine
Commenting on this post will be disabled in 14 days. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments regarding this import after that date, please contact Open Doors.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
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We are pleased to publish the OTW's 2024 Annual Report, available in PDF and HTML formats. The report provides a letter from our Board of Directors, a summary of our activities during the past year, and our financial statements for 2024. Some highlights from 2024 include finishing the update to AO3's Terms of Service, creating a new committee (and 2 new subcommittees!), as well as starting work on the OTW Organizational Culture Roadmap.
You can access the 2024 report, and all earlier years, on the Reports and Governing Documents page of the OTW website. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
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What is better than having eight million passionate, dedicated users? Having nine million, of course! That's right, the Archive of Our Own (AO3) has recently reached nine million registered users! Thanks a million (or rather, nine million!) to every member of our community for making this success possible.
Some of you have likely noticed that AO3 is occasionally—and temporarily— unavailable due to site maintenance. However, if you prepare yourself in advance, you don't need to be deprived of content!
The best way to prepare yourself for maintenance (both scheduled and unscheduled) is to download works in advance to tide you over until the site is accessible again. You can find instructions on how to download content from AO3 in our FAQs! Works are downloadable in several formats — AZW3, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, and HTML — letting you enjoy reading across devices: desktop, mobile devices, or even eReaders. Whether the site is temporarily down or you're offline, having works downloaded means that you can always enjoy your favorite works!
Once again, thank you for your continued support of AO3 and for helping us grow each and every day. We look forward to celebrating many more achievements with you in the future!
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
yuletidemods posting in yuletide_adminscalziwhatever_feed
First the M4 Mac Air and then the Pixel 10 Pro, because, I don’t know, we’re going from largest to smallest.
M4 Mac Air: The first thing I note is that I think I forgot how much I enjoy this particular form factor for a laptop. Don’t get me wrong, I really am happy with my MacBook Pro, but it is an actual beast of a machine, big and heavy and kind of a pain in the ass to take places. Again, I bought it more or less as a desktop replacement, so I’m not faulting it for these facts; it’s doing what I intended it to do. But it is a lug to carry, and not a computer you can comfortably one hand as you move about the house.
The Mac Air, on the other hand, I’m happily carrying around all over the place, and I’m genuinely looking forward to traveling with it when I head out to Portland this weekend and on tour later in the month. It is literally no problem just to pick up and move around. It’s a pleasure to type on (which is what it has over my iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard), and everything else about it just works: The screen is pretty nice, it’s loud enough when I play something through its speakers, and the battery efficiency is such that I’ve been running it unplugged for a couple of days, writing, scrolling social media and watching YouTube, and haven’t gotten close to draining the thing. It’s basically a perfect portable computer, or at least a close to perfect one for me.
This is not entirely surprising as the various reviews I’ve read and watched have pretty much said the same thing; the general consensus is that for the non-power user (which is nearly everyone who is not a coder, a serious PC gamer and/or someone working with tons of video), the M4 Mac Air is probably as much computer as you need. I’m inclined to agree with this. My use case of writing, browsing and some light photoediting does not come close to maxing out the capabilities of this chip, and while I chipped out a little bit extra for more RAM and SSD space (which also got me a slightly better-specced processor), the base model with 16 gigs of RAM would not exactly be hurting doing what I’m doing, either. Spec snobs will note that the screen on the Air is not OLED and only refreshes 60 times a second (unlike iPad Pro, which has the OLED, or the screen on the MacBook Pro, which has variable refresh rates up to 120 times a second). However, having a recent Mac Pro to compare, allow me to say: I literally don’t care. The screen is perfectly good. I don’t notice the lack of OLED or high refresh rates when I’m using it, and I’m not running it next to the MacBook Pro to notice the supposed deficiency. It’s fine.
In the real world, the drawbacks I’ve noticed on this Mac Air are thus: Having both USB-C/Thunderbolt ports on the same side of the computer is a very minor annoyance, and the small size of the computer means that when I am sitting in my office Eames Chair, the cats choose to pretend they don’t see me working on the Air and want to sit in my lap. Which is cute! But makes it hard to work. I would also say, with respect to the Sky Blue color of my particular laptop, that what Marques Brownlee said about it is correct: This is homeopathic blue, like Apple made a silver laptop and then whispered “blue” to it as it was being put into its packaging. Dear Apple: Don’t be afraid of actual color.
(Oh, and: apparently this M4 is optimized for “AI” but nothing I use it for needs it to run AI, and if the computer or the programs I use offer to run AI, I usually just shut off that capability because I already have a work flow established, so, meh?)
But, yeah. Great little computer, it’s doing everything I wanted it to, and can do considerably more than that if I ever need it to. Good purchase, A+++, would buy again.
Pixel 10 Pro: So far, I’m using this almost exactly like I used the Pixel 9 Pro before it and the Pixel 8 Pro before that; honestly, on a day-to-day basis the way I know that I actually switched phones is that this new one has a slightly different color. Now, Google just downloaded Material Design 3 into my phone so all my on-screen buttons and some of my apps look different, so I guess there is that. But that doesn’t really change how I use the phone all that much.
But what about all the new “AI “stuff they packed in the latest Pixels, that are supposed to be the big market differentiators to everything else out there? I hear you ask. Well, I already talked about the most prominent example of that, being the “Pro-Res Zoom” AI which kicks in when you zoom the camera above 30x, and you may recall I was not hugely impressed with that. I am more impressed with the “AI Enhance” photo function, which does not redraw your entire photo but rather adjusts color/brightness/etc automatically. I’m not sure it really qualifies as “AI,” it’s just applying tweaks, but it’s generally pretty good at it. There’s now also a function where you can edit a picture by talking to your phone rather than moving sliders around and such; you can ask the Pixel 10 to remove someone from a photo, or brighten the sky, or, say, remove the background entirely and replace it with an “AI” generated image. The former is cool, I suppose; the latter once again gets us to the point where your photo is no longer a photo and is instead just an image based on a photo you once took. Whether this is something you want, I leave you to consider. I don’t have much use for it personally.
The other “AI” stuff I haven’t really encountered yet, mostly because none of it is really useful for someone staying at home and doing not a whole lot of nothing. I’m not speaking to people who don’t share my language, so an auto-translate that speaks a different language in a voice similar to my own is not a priority, and when I’m spending time in my home office I’m not needing my phone to surface my flight information while I’m texting. I’m traveling this week so maybe it’ll come in handy then. But right now? Yeah, it’s not doing much for me. For the moment, at least, none of the new “AI” features of the Pixel 10 Pro are ones that I have much use for.
Which is not to say I don’t like this phone. I do; as a smartphone, doing all the things I want it to do, it’s great. The cameras are very good just as cameras, the phone is snappy enough opening apps and doing the stuff I need it to do, and I still very much appreciate having the stock Android experience on the Pixel, without all the crap other manufacturers or carriers add on to their phones. Pixel still has the best iteration of Android, if you ask me.
I don’t regret getting the Pixel 10 Pro (especially as my old phone was showing real wifi connectivity issues). It’s an excellent phone I would highly recommend to any Android phone user, if they are in the market for a new phone. But if you already have a phone you’re happy with, and you’re not someone who cares about “AI” to any great extent, there’s nothing here that would make you want to exchange the phone you already have. It’s a good phone! Just not necessarily in the ways Google is selling it as.
— JS
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scalziwhatever_feedAnd what, you ask, is “California Sober”? Two things: One, it’s slang for the sort of person who doesn’t drink alcohol or use other drugs but might partake of weed. Two, it’s a comedy short written by Yamini Nambimadom and Isabella Zanobini, and directed by Juliette Strangio, that I was an executive producer for, which is now available on YouTube for general viewing. The plot: “After an unexpected drug test puts their blowoff mall jobs at risk, best friends Lola and Tyler spend an afternoon on the hunt for clean pee with the help of an eccentric crew of mall employees.” Zany!
How did I become an executive producer on this short? Basically, I gave the filmmakers money. I knew Isabella Zanobini via a production company that had optioned one of my properties; that option didn’t get off the ground but when I saw that she and her friends were crowdfunding a short, I thought it would be nice to pitch in. I had no other responsibilities on the project other than tossing some cash their way, but they were nice enough to give me an EP credit anyway. Hollywood, baby!
Whether this short leads to anything more for any of the people involved remains to be seen, but if it does, I suppose I will get the satisfaction of knowing I helped them a tiny bit along the way. In the meantime: Look! A comedy short! Enjoy.
— JS
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Sometimes, books require a lot of planning and outlining, and sometimes you just need to start and it ends up revealing itself along the way. Such was the case for author Charlie N. Holmberg, much to her type-A dismay. Follow along in her Big Idea to see how she skipped the outline entirely for her newest novel, The Shattered King.
CHARLIE N. HOLMBERG:
I literally wrote the book on magic systems.
Okay, I wrote a book on magic systems. Charlie N. Holmberg’s Book of Magic, to be precise.
But this isn’t about that book. It’s about the book that came from that book.
Almost all my novels start with a magic system. Some element, some power, some spark from which plot, character, and setting bloom. I wanted to guide others in finding this spark, so in this Book of Magic, I included a handful of appendices to help people jumpstart their magic systems. One of these appendices is a list of commonly used magic systems in fantasy novels. This list allows the writer to do one of three things: 1) use one of these systems to keep their learning curve shallow, 2) avoid these systems to find something more original, or 3) take one of these systems and put their own spin on it (you know, like Stephanie Meyer did with Twilight).
I was mulling over this while playing Final Fantasy XVI with my husband and thought, okay, Charlie, take your own advice. How would you make something incredibly common new and exciting?
I picked healing from the list. Started playing around with it.
And then I sparked.
What if healing wasn’t done directly to the body, but via a representation of the body? In some sort of dreamlike, liminal space created by magic and accessed only by those who could wield it. Like a dream, this liminal space could take on all sorts of visuals: a painting, a garden, a castle wall. Any sickness or injury would appear as something off or broken—tears in canvas, wilting flowers, cracks in stones. I call this space a “lumis” (because it sounds pretty), and no two are exactly alike.
Cue the video game I’m playing, Final Fantasy XVI. I really liked one of the main characters: Joshua. Joshua, a prince, was born powerful, but also sickly, and nothing seemed to be able to heal him. So what does a monarchy do when none of their doctors can’t heal one of their own? They force the task upon the magical peasants, of course.
And that is where The Shattered King starts. Against the backdrop of war, a healer is forced to leave her family and journey across the country to the capital to try her hand at healing the unhealable prince. She has every intention of failing. The sooner she disappoints the nobility, the sooner she can go home.
But what Nym Tallowax considers to be low-effort magic ends up doing more for Prince Renn than any healer before her. Now if she wants to go home, she’ll have to cure the ailing prince first.
But for whatever reason, Prince Renn’s lumis refuses to be healed.
This idea really took me by the horns—so much so that I started writing it before I had an outline. I’m a type-A personality. All my novels have notebooks, storyboards, and thorough outlines. But the need to make this one happen usurped everything else.
It made me [insert choking noise] discovery write.
I started it in the middle of a family vacation and finished it in fifteen days, an all-time record for me. For kicks and giggles, I asked my editor if she wanted to see it (and let’s be honest, this was mostly because I wanted a reason for her to pay attention to me). Shortly after, my publisher informed me that they wanted to completely rearrange my release schedule to put this book first. Whatever spell this story put me under apparently worked some sort of magic on them, too. And while I know there’s a few readers out there who are getting tired of the romantasy trend, romantic fantasy is my JAM, and I’m happy to butter readers’ biscuits with a little bit of my own.
The Shattered King: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
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There was a fairly intricate debate on an early version of this posted to bluesky, the contention being over whether OR was sufficient. I think the ORs have it, but XOR is a funnier word, so there.
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Meet (again) Saja. The name is Korean for “lion,” and also, of course, fans of K-Pop Demon Hunters will catch the reference to Saja Boys, the demonic-but-terribly-cute boy band from the film who sing fizzy ditties about wanting to consume your soul:
In this regard the name is doubly fitting because a few days ago, when we decided to keep the kitten, I spontaneously started singing to him, to the tune of “Soda Pop”: You’re my little kitty/So furry and so pretty/You’re my fuzzy butt/My little fuzzy butt! So perhaps it was just fate.
The name was suggested in yesterday’s comment thread by “godotislate,” so thank you for that, G, you did us a solid. Now our cat has a name!
— JS
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Now that the 2025 election is over, we're happy to share with you our voter turnout statistics!
For the 2025 Election, we had 15138 total eligible voters. Of those, 2197 voters cast a ballot, which represents 14.5% of the potential voters.
Our voter turnout is lower than that of last year, which had a turnout of 22.8%.
We also saw a decrease in the number of ballots cast, from 3415 to 2197, which represents a 35.6% decrease.
Elections is committed to continuing to reach out to our eligible members to encourage them to vote in elections. Whoever is elected to the Board of Directors can have an important influence on the long-term health of the OTW's projects, and we want our members to have a say in that.
For those who might be interested in the number of votes each candidate received, please note that our election process is designed to elect an equal cohort of Board members in order to allow them to work well together, so we do not release that information. As a general rule, we also won’t disclose which of our unsuccessful candidates received the fewest votes, since we don’t want to discourage them from running again in the future when circumstances and member interest might be different. However, as there were only 3 candidates this year, revealing that information is unavoidable.
Once again, a big thank you to everyone who participated at every stage of the election! We hope to see you at the virtual polls again next year.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
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