Kia ora friends,

You're reading an email from someone who just achieved a major milestone and is feeling quite... cat-like, is what I want to say. Like I'm curled up in a little ball on the inside, snug and contented and a bit self-satisfied. (Well, I would feel more so if I wasn't also down with Covid...)

Today, some 14 months after coming up with the idea, I handed in my final submission draft of Peregrine Pax // My Best Friend is an Interdimensional Shape-shifting Time Traveller.

It was a gosh darn haul in the end there. I started the month feeling quite drained, and struggled to make many moves at all given that I was 1) recovering from me and my youngest being ill and 2) starting full-time (non-writing) work again after maternity leave. These things are not conducive to writing, let alone revising! But I did one good thing to set myself up for success, by handing over the reins of #pretendpanel to my friend Emily Klotz for the month of June.

So the first week was a bit of a non-starter. But in the second week of the month, I hauled butt to get to the next milestone. I laid down the groundwork for that major change I mentioned last month by pulling a few very late nights. Then I re-read the whole manuscript and marked up all the smaller changes that were needed to support the bigger ones. I worked in a bunch of smaller changes as per my mentor's suggestions.

In the middle of the month, I handed the working draft to my spouse for him to sanity check it. WIth his notes - thankfully no major structural changes required! - I continued on, making a few scene-level edits following on from his suggestions, then editing the prose. My mentor Lauren Keenan had sent me back a marked-up copy of my manuscript (WAY more detail than I had anticipated receiving from her!) and I was able to implement the prose-level critiques (including some I hadn't considered before. Turns out I might overuse the word 'then'? Also did you know, apparently some people HATE it when you use -ing verbs to start off a sentence? And yes, it's true, I overuse '!'. [....!!!]) I also had some feedback from my spouse's colleague Anita to incorporate - one small thing I could change easily, and one big structural note which, with only a week to go by the time I got the note, will have to wait for a further draft to be tackled.

I caught up with my fellow kaituhi wāhine from my cohort, Taryn Baker, Steph Julian, and Toni Wi, over video chat. We helped each other get over the line, hyping each other up and ferreting out solutions to last-minute problems. We've agreed to read each others' submissions next month, and I cannot wait!

Finally in my revision, I turned to that tool which the theatre kid in me loves to overindulge: the voice. I read the whole book out not once, but twice, with a few days' break in between to let my mind clear. That helped me to hear problems with my prose which my eyes would otherwise skim over. I managed to read all but the final nine chapters by the time Covid got me, and I waded through those slowly to preserve my voice as much as possible. Thankfully I'd built enough spare time into my revision schedule to be able to do so, right before I lost my voice.

At long last, on June 30th, I packaged it up and sent it away to Huia Publishers.

...

aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh D:

No. I'm OK. Not freaking out. In fact I should probably be freaking out a little more than I am. The good thing about my busy life is I probably won't be able to spend too much time anxiously refreshing my inbox (especially given they'll probably take a few months to review my cohort's submissions). I'm probably not going to have the same amount of chill I had while waiting to hear whether I even got into Te Papa Tupu, where after I submitted I just kinda forgot I had. This time, I won't have giving birth and looking after a newborn baby to distract me. And this time, they have my hard-won book baby with them D: ... so the pressure is on.

​

The *other* actual writing, apart from that big one:

• I got a bit naughty... well, no, actually, maybe I'm being too harsh on myself. It was probably really good for my sanity to have the occassional mental break away from Peregrine to indulge in my secret pseudonym fantasy romance world. I outlined future projects, but then I also started dabbling in writing the bare bones of scenes for the prequel and interquel of my pirate ladies book. Yes, both at once, because with Peregrine taking up so much of my brain space, working in a much less structured fashion for everything else just made sense.
• I also dabbled in a bit of poetry here and there.
• And I drafted a little something for the next thing I'm going to talk about...

​

The Auckland Queer Writers Anthology Kicks Off!

On June 14th, Jade and I (Jamie was sick that day :( ) met with twelve lovely people in Auckland to kick off our anthology process. We broke the ice, then got down to brass tacks of what we wanted from them and what the timeline would be. We also dove into the critique/workshopping process, and the reason why we were doing this - to provide a safe, collegial and encouraging environment to bring out the best in our fellow queer writers at whatever level of experience they arrive with. I'm really looking forward to seeing what they all come up with throughout this process.

The timeline:

• 14th June kickoff - DONE!
• Two critique workshops, one in July, one in August
• Hand in final submissions 31st August
• In September, Jade, Jamie and I knuckle down to look at the submissions and decide what makes the cut (honestly, hopefully all of them! I reckon the numbers might be just about right)
• October onwards, we get down to business with the editors, formatters, artists etc that we'll contract to beautify and finish the book
• February 2026 (Pride Month here in NZ) we have a big launch event with PRINTED copies - but also digital copies available worldwide - raising money for Outline.

It's going to be fab <3
​

A little promo:

So there's this fiction I've been following since January over on Royal Road, and I've gotten to know the author, LJ Amber, to the point where I'm a moderator over on their discord server. The fic in question is The Elf Who Would Become a Dragon. It is quite honestly like nothing I've ever read before. First of all, and ok, I'm going to be a bit shady here... there's a lot of rubbish on that website. Now look, people are absolutely allowed their corner of the internet where they post their very niche fiction for a limited audience. I should know, I've posted some niche stuff there myself. But I'm not ragging on anyone's niche genre interests here; what I am being shady about is the attention to craft. In many pieces on that site, it's non-existent. Long rambling fictions which go on forever, with little to no characterization, plot beats cribbed from Saturday morning cartoons and delivered in a lazier fashion... Royal Road has it all, and more, and without any exposure to better craft, a lot of this rot is just getting regurgitated (oh and now with AI adding to the mix? Even worse). I say all of this to highlight that when I found TEWWBAD, it was like a breath of fresh air. Something actually crafted, on this site?! Impossible.

But if it were just that, I wouldn't be paying so much attention to it and promoting it on my socials. No, I'm highlighting it here because it is a truly remarkable piece of fiction that deserves attention. It is slow by design, thoroughly immersing the reader in the world and more importantly in the psychology of the main character Saphienne. It engages with the tropes of a lot of Royal Road fiction, but is very clever with them: e.g. undercutting the "Mary-Sue/Gary-Stu" trope, and delving very deep into what a magical education would actually mean for a person, for a society, for history. We are presented with an idyllic world of elves and magic, and told from the get-go: this is not going to end well. This is a tragedy. There is a rot at the very heart of this world, and in the end this will all come tumbling down. Furthermore, it's told in a voice that really appeals to me specifically: a little bit old-school, harking back not only to earlier fantasy but beyond to the cadences of classic Modern English literature (in the best possible way).

But even that is not why I wanted to point it out, because the fact is I've been pointing it out heaps, every now and again for months of my bluesky and Instagram. The reason why I wanted to specifically promote it right now is that LJ Amber is pulling off the impossible. TEWWBAD is rocketing up the ratings charts on Royal Road, after months of building up good reviews and engagement. LJ has messaged me every couple of days to show me the fic jumping up by 100s, or as we get to the pointy end of things, in 50s, and now as they have surpassed the top 100, in 10s or even less than. This is so exciting, to see this unique and deserving fiction speeding past a lot of frankly boring dross which panders to lazy tropes. Currently TEWWBAD sits at #70 out of 50K+ fictions on the site, and is officially as of today Best in Tragedy!!

So that's the reason why I wanted to tell you about it: just in case you feel like checking it out, and leaving comments or a review. You could contribute to one very talented indie author getting seen above the crowd for a bit, and I think that's pretty cool.

You can find LJ's main site here: https://ljamberfantasy.com/#tewwbad

​

What's next for me:

• I mentioned a little while ago how I had a bit of a rocky experience with beta reading for others a while back. I just wanted to report in and say that I have recently beta read three novel-length works for others in the last couple of months, and I have been absolutely blown away by the standard of work. I'm so happy I got back into the swing of it and got over my initial bad experience. It's been such a privilege to be trusted with these very precious pieces. Turns out, when you find a good group of like-minded people with a similar attitude to craft and self-improvement, it's relatively painless to go out on a limb and help out! May everyone be blessed to find such a group, who needs it. I'm really looking forward to promoting these friends of mine in the future when these works come out for public consumption.
• I'll be working on my submission for the AQW Anthology, and workshopping with the other participants to get our works as good as we can get them.
• I will be planning, outlining, and working with a greater degree of structure on those things I've been loosely drafting during June.
• I'm looking at lining up another anthology-type thing in time... more on that when it's a concrete thing :)
• After a short break post-Peregrine, getting back into revision by tackling a third draft of (omg I almost forgot to tell you, it FINALLY has a title now thanks to my friend Lizzie Blackwood) A Prayer for the Pirate Queen (not that you know about that secret pseudonym stuff... I really should make a separate newsletter for that stuff eventually!)
  ​

Arohanui,

Claire Hiria Dunning

​