My new book, DESTINY’S EDGE is available for FREE!

My new Sapphic martial arts fantasy, Destiny’s Edge, is available to read for free via my newsletter.

If you’re already a newsletter subscriber, you can download here.

The most powerful warlord in the steppe sends a convoy consisting of his ten best men and his fourth wife, Chi, to escort his newest bride home—an easy journey. At least, it was supposed to be.

Since losing her family and her right eye to cursed fire, Chi has been adrift, struggling to find her place within the Champion’s household. Unable to bear children due to her family’s blood curse, she has spent most of her married years training the Champion’s sons in the sword techniques she inherited from her father. When an undead monster attacks the bride’s party on the road, killing all ten of the Champion’s men, Chi’s sword skills barely keep her alive, leaving her as the last line of defense for the young bride, Sangya.

The problem with Sangya: after a lifetime cloistered in a remote temple, she is maddeningly inquisitive about everything around her, including Chi. While Chi scrambles to guide the chirpy nun through the wilderness, Sangya slowly pries her way through the walls Chi has built around her soul and wakes something forbidden.

With enemies closing in, Chi realizes that the thing she wants most from life might be the one thing she can’t have. And in the dark of foreign woods, she decides that the best thing she can do for the world is die protecting the Champion’s bride. Better that than face a desire so dangerous.

The cover illustration is by Nyx Aurelia, who you might know from the artwork she did for Blood Over Bright Haven.

You might like Destiny’s Edge if you enjoyed:

• The martial arts, magic weapons, and family drama in The Sword of Kaigen
• The gendered angst in Blood Over Bright Haven
• The Sapphic subplots in The Volta Academy books
• General action, adventure, and romance in a fantasy setting

If you’re interested in a physical copy of Destiny’s Edge, I’ll be hand-selling early paperback copies exclusively at Gen Con and Gamehole Con. For those unable to visit me there, not to worry. I’ll be making physical copies available for purchase online some time in late 2026 or early 2027.

Some more about this book

Destiny’s Edge came about within a surprise gap in my writing schedule, during which my other projects were tied up in contract negotiations. While I didn’t have my main project to work on, I sat down to draft a progression fantasy that’s been on my schedule for a couple years now.

Shortly after beginning that draft, I realized I was getting a little too interested in the foundations of the main character’s romantic relationship. So, instead of trying to messily graft a romance arc onto the front of a progression story, I decided to separate the romance into its own book.

Initially, I thought this romance/adventure might fit into a novella. To nobody’s surprise, that ended up expanding into a full novel. If you’re not in on the joke here, Attempted Novella was the origin story for both The Sword of Kaigen (2019) and Blood Over Bright Haven (2023). But I would like to point out that I’m getting better. Kaigen was just under 200,000 words, Bright Haven was under 150,000 words, and Destiny’s Edge is under 80,000. This is what progress looks like!

Editing was a bit of a scramble, but given that I have to pivot back to the main project at some point, I thought it would be fun to have it available for Pride Month.

Whenever I release a book, I like to look back at what was new for me, how those experiments went, and what I learned from them. While Destiny’s Edge is just a short book that may yet undergo further editing for a relaunch, it represents a lot of firsts for me, so I wanted to reflect on some of those, starting with…

Romance

This is the first time I’ve ever successfully finished writing a romance story! That is, a story that doesn’t just include a romantic subplot but adheres to the romance beats for its structure. As someone who’s written almost exclusively action/adventure, I can’t say this journey through the romance beats always felt smooth; at times, it pulled against my impulse to prioritize big fight scenes.

Then I’d remind myself “The progression book is the next one, buddy. Lock in.”

If I have one misgiving about Destiny’s Edge, it’s that it doesn’t sit perfectly in its primary genre of romance or its secondary genres of action, adventure, and martial arts. It felt weird to sideline action fantasy essentials in favor of the romance essentials. And simultaneously, since I’m not a seasoned romance writer, I’m not sure how well I hit the romance requirements either. 

Regardless of how it turned out, I’m rarely sorry to have tried something new. And even where this one tripped me up, I never stopped having fun.

A Shared Universe

As we get into the progression sequel to Destiny’s Edge, the story will loosely tie into another author’s universe. (Which author and universe? I don’t know, maybe you can guess based on breadcrumbs. I’m not sure what all is out there). A couple years ago, I agreed to this project because I thought it might be a good way to see how well I deal with collaboration and, by extension, whether or not I’d ever want to write IP. In the time since, I’ve determined that I could never cope with the restrictions of most IP writing. But this particular tie-in is so flexible that I’m not too worried. Mostly, it affects the features and functions of the magic system, but that’s all I’ll say on the matter for now.

Going Up

Another first was, for lack of a better term, going uphill. By this, I mean the mandatory HEA/HFN rule of romance but also the uphill nature of progression fantasy (which we’ll get to in the sequel). Romance and progression have in common that they are both fundamentally uphill genres. Both come with a promise that, wherever the protagonist starts the story or whatever setbacks she faces, her condition will improve along the relevant axes as the story unfolds.

Mandatory upward motion is utterly alien to me, at least where adult fantasy is concerned. Not to spoil my other books, but all the other stories I’ve written for adults have contained a lot of downhill for main characters, many of whom don’t make their way back up the hill by the end.

Something I noted when I posted the first rough chapter to my Patreon is that Destiny’s Edge and its planned sequel start in a similar place to The Sword of Kaigen. You’ll just have to take my word that this story is going somewhere very different. Obviously, I can’t tell you where without massive spoilers for the sequel, but a huge part of that difference will the uphill.

I like to be honest about the world’s darkness, and I often find it insulting when stories force happy endings onto scenarios where they don’t occur in real life. But creatively, it has to be healthy to make room for optimism
—or maybe just wish fulfillment—in speculative fiction, even when it’s for adults. Destiny’s Edge was a start up that hill, and it’s been fun so far. Here’s hoping I can keep that going for myself and all of you!

As mentioned above, members of my newsletter can download their free copy of Destiny’s Edge here, and if you’re not a subscriber yet, you can sign up here.