The anthology Sword & Sonnet, a badass collection of stories about female & non-binary battle-poets (yes, battle-poets!) has emerged into the world! My story “And The Ghosts Sang With Her” graces these lovely pages, along with a ton of other amazing stories by writers including Cassandra Khaw, Alex Acks, Merc Rustad, Matt Dovey, SL Huang, Khaalidah Muhammed-Ali, and a bunch of others.

When I got the prompt for “female or nonbinary battle-poet,” I really had… no idea what to do with that. I can write other genders, I can write poets, and I can write battles… but putting them together?

Plus, I’d been writing the Starfire novels, and I hadn’t really tried a short story in… uh, *checks watch* two years. Eeeesh.

In desperation, I turned to my enormous and neverending corpus of stories set in a Crusades-ish Arabian-Nights-ish world. (The Crusades, but the Muslims are telepaths and the Christians are shapeshifters.) About five different failed novel drafts came out of this world, but they gave me this story and this story as well. And I wrote… and wrote… and wrote. I wrote a massive story, almost a novella, chronicling Laila the battle-poet and the three times she tricked Death out of her lyre.

Yay!

It was too long.

In desperation, I tried some other stories about Laila the battle-poet. According to the original story, she had forty children. How’d she feed them? That became a story. Why did she make a song for a lame horse?

And then, of course, I had to know what happened with the ghost firebird in the ghost city. Or why a rat owed Laila a great debt.

You get the idea. It’s a fantastic anthology getting a lot of love on Twitter, but we’re still a little poor on Amazon & Goodreads reviews, so do drop a review if you enjoy it.