Kia ora friends,

It has been... a frustrating month. Many little and not-so-little things have happened to make it feel like an uphill fight. But I forge on, defiant.

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The actual writing:

• Things picked up a little over in my gothic horror novella The Villa Delacroix [https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/102948/the-villa-delacroix]. Heads have rolled, and I'm on more of a roll than I was last month. I don't think I'm going to miss writing this story once it's over, to be perfectly honest. It's more grim and moody than my usual fare. Delving deep into the darker sides of the psyche, while fun at times, was perhaps a bit heavy given the hard month I've had. But I am glad I'm doing it and getting it out of my system. (Is this shadow work? I hear that term but I've never really understood it). I'm anticipating that it will be done by the end of April, or at the very latest, halfway through May.
• I got through my dialogue-focussed revision run of Peregrine Pax // My Best Friend is an Interdimensional Shape-shifting Time Traveller in record time - 3 days, actually. This was really good because my life got very convoluted for the later two thirds of the month. I settled in for the long haul with a nitpicking grammar run which took a while. I finished that a week ago! I'm in the middle of my final run now, a mini-run before my final proofreading early next month. It was unplanned, but I got inspired, because I finally got around to watching She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. Omigosh, the characters are so quirky and fun! It was like a masterclass in making every single character really pop in terms of personality. So I've gone back over my characters and made sure they are each standing out on their own in the best way possible. A little more work to do on that before I'm happy with it.
• I drafted a couple of pieces of short fiction as the mood struck me. More on those if anything comes of them.

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The Bad News:

I'm a bad news person first. Sorry if you're not.

My cat died this month. Her life was so entwined with ours that it still hasn't sunk in that she's gone.

James and I adopted Nimue on July 13th 2014. She was part of our whole whirlwind romance where we speed-ran all the checkpoints: I'd moved in only a month before that, and we'd only been dating since March (we'd be married less than 2 years later). It wasn't actually the first day we saw her: we had to wait over a week for the SPCA to let us have her. Goodness knows why it had to be the sickly neurotic runt of a cat that we fell in love with. We had to wait all that time for them to figure out why she kept having loose stools. (Spoilers - her digestive issues continued throughout her life, and are ultimately what led to the end.) She was approx 1 year old, she'd had cat flu at some point, and she was just an average moggy who the shelter had named 'Minty' for her beautiful mint green eyes. But we were head over heels, because the little dumbass started chasing her tail in front of us, and when she was allowed out to meet us, her first instinct was to run away.

She quickly grew into a major fixture in our lives, the subject of worship, songs, in-jokes, and whole imaginary worlds. Nim was our nurse when we were sick, insisted on drinking water from a glass like a human, and had a most diverting little greeting chirp. She had many admirers, being quite the flirty kitty. After the first couple of years we never let her outside again: mostly to protect her from eating things that would upset her delicate stomach. But the other reason was the local birds - not their safety, but hers. She was terrified of them, and had no hunter instinct (except for that one time she proudly caught a leaf). Which was a small blessing I suppose.

Nim (or in full, Doctor Nimue Fiddlesticks Dunning) put up with our boisterous first child begrudgingly, and was beginning to rather enjoy the second child. My baby daughter absolutely loves small animals, and would point and squeal whenever she saw Nim. Nim was starting to get comfortable with getting closer to the small sticky human; able, I think, to appreciate that she was being offered worship in the only way this tiny person could currently manage. The last I saw of Nim was when I was waiting at the bottom of the stairs with her, after I'd put her in her carry box, letting my youngest chatter to her, Nim gently nosing the baby's fingers through the bars.

We'd been aware of Nim having more severe issues with her digestive system for the last few months, and were monitoring the situation with the vet. It had come to the point of her needing some ultrasound imaging to figure out the problem, and that was scheduled for the 18th. But it was the 13th, and not only had Nim not eaten much in 24 hours, but more telling: she barely reacted when the 5yo kept grabbing her tail and rearranging it in different shapes. It was a rapid deterioration for a cat who would usually run than suffer the curiosity of the older child. James came home in a hurry from work and took her off to the vet, and that was it. I am glad she's not suffering, but I wish we could have had so much more time.

Years ago, in that halcyon other life we once lived before children, James had a dream. (He has these very narrative dreams, I'm most envious. Mine are always a random jumble of pure vibes.) In the dream, he was on a bus, and Nim was there. The bus stopped, and Nim sauntered off. James felt great sorrow. The bus moved on. In time, it was James's turn to exit the bus. He got off at a beautiful beach, and lo and behold, there was Nim.

Honestly, what a stupidly saccharine metaphor of a dream, right? XD And yet it's a little piece of comfort for James. As for me, I know she's looking down on me somewhere. Which was her preferred physical and emotional state: looking down at me. Here is a poem I wrote for her:

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I wrote that the day she died, because weirdly, it's like she was already becoming a ghost that same day. I kept looking over my shoulder at sounds or shadows thinking it was her, only to find it wasn't. This was before I even realised she wasn't eating, and thought everything was normal. This haunting has, of course, only continued since her passing. She makes an excellent ghost. I suppose, with cats being so bonded to territory, it only makes sense that the house remembers her.

Well damn, didn't mean to write so much about my cat. If you made it through all that, appreciate you <3

As for other bad news, there were a bunch of other things that happened too, a bunch of small rejections and setbacks, family medical stuff both major and minor, but everything is okay now. I say that. I'm feeling emotionally fine, but my brain feels a bit fried, cognitively. I actually played video games for the first time in months over the weekend because brain just said no, we're done. It has been an exhausting month. Oh well. That's the bad news done.

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The Good News:

On the 1st of March at the workshop (which I will recount below), someone asked how I'd found the experience of shopping around my short stories to international markets. Specifically, did I struggle to get them interested in Kiwi stuff at all? It sparked an interesting discussion, where I realised the only one which had so far been accepted outside of the Antipodes was a more generically-situated cyberpunk story. I mentioned how a little queer + Māori spec fic short I had been reiterating over for a year and a half had gotten absolutely no love yet, even from magazines which were actively seeking queer and marginalized culture content.

The very next day, I got an email of acceptance! And from Headland Journal too, which feels very good, because they are usually more literary in taste rather than speculative. (Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they are a NZ journal.)

All going well with the editors over there, the issue will be out next month, and the world will finally be introduced to Liliflora, my light sci-fi romance short story which was inspired by Katherine Mansfield and Star Trek, of all things. I am actually really glad it took this long for it to find its home, because I didn't land on my favourite version of it until January of this year. So in that sense I have to be grateful for every rejection pushing me to do better!

They got me to do a promo video for it. I didn't want to talk to camera so I got a bit pretentious about it haha... they'll be sharing this on the Headland socials around the publication date but you all get a sneak peek: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1l2JZUKxJmUC4uliYaaKJekMIuujkG_NE/view?usp=sharing]

(Here's a bit of meta for you which I haven't really discussed elsewhere: it's the first part in a connected universe of stories which I've nicknamed Floraverse. I have a number of entries planned in various forms [novellas, verse novels, shorts]. My main thing with it, differentiating it from the work I'm doing to submit to publishers, is that I intend to always publish Floraverse in various freely-available forms e.g. online journals, serial publishing. But most importantly what I want you to be aware of is: part of the wider world is already publicly available, and that is my space noir novella Inheritance / Whakarerenga from last year [https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/97339/inheritance-whakarerenga or email me if you'd like an unofficial EPUB copy] . They are tonally a bit different though, the novella's a bit grittier than Liliflora, which is sweet and poignant. So there you go, there's a bit of newsletter-exclusive goss for you!)

Another little related piece of fun: kinda random but, my spouse has been writing a blog all this month, making roleplaying characters in different RPG systems. He made the POV character of Liliflora, Doctor Aroha Pearl, in the Star Trek Adventures system [https://calarionscharacters.blogspot.com/2025/03/day-twenty-star-trek-adventures.html] and also my two main characters from my sapphic pirate romantasy which I am not supposed to be talking about here because this is secret pseudonym stuff whoops ahaha [https://calarionscharacters.blogspot.com/2025/03/day-sixteen-thirsty-sword-lesbians.html]

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Some more good news

Just wanted to shout out my mentor Lauren Keenan who has had some amazing stuff happen lately. Her NZ history book Toitū Te Whenua: Places and People of the New Zealand Wars came out earlier this month. And then her historical novel The Space Between (which I thoroughly enjoyed!) won the NZ Booklovers Fiction Award! I am so honoured that I got to be mentored by her through Te Papa Tupu, and in such an exciting year for her career.

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Also in good news: the Queer Writers Workshop!

It feels like so long ago now, because this has been such a tough month. As I wrote in the previous installment, on the 1st I ran a Queer Writers workshop in conjunction with Jade du Preez and Jamie Sands. Let me tell you, we had one of those rare working relationships where everything just worked, no dramas.

The overarching topic was 'Pathways to Publishing'. We each presented on our specialist topics: Jade on traditional and small press, Jamie on self-publishing, and I flitted through a quick overview of why you should submit short stories to journals, the good and bad of serial web publishing, playwriting in NZ, and I briefly touched on game writing and publishing with one interested person during the coffee break because we were running so short on time! We honestly could have talked all day, but we only had three hours. Really, we could probably run a whole weekend. Maybe we will some time in the future!

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What's coming next month:

• Finish the quirkifying revision run of Peregrine Pax Draft Two, do one last proofread/sanity check, and hand it over to my mentor halfway through April for one last critique before Draft Three (due June 30!)
• Continue with The Villa Delacroix... (maybe even finish it? I'd like to get back to happier fare!)
• Working on a short story (one of those I mentioned earlier) as a potential entry to Pikihuia Awards [https://mlt.org.nz/programmes/pikihuia/2025-pikihuia-awards/]. Might enter the poetry side too, I've got a couple of things waiting in the wings which might work.
• #pretendpanel continues over on bluesky, with a focus on craft and critique for the month of April. If you're a writer too, come join us for community and knowledge sharing!

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That's all for now. May April bring all of us, me included, a bit of a reprieve!

Arohanui,

Claire Hiria

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