My second book is coming out next week. And as of right now, it only has five Goodreads reviews. Turns out having a Big Five publisher doesn’t stop you from feeling invisible.
Nevertheless, I’m extremely proud of what I’ve created.
I’d spent five years revising Galaxy Grifter (book 1 of the Blackjack Interstellar duology), before I was ready to query. It came out last year and it’s everything I wanted it to be.
Writing this book was a self-indulgent affair. It’s stuffed to the brim with my favourite tropes—faster than light travel, space pirates, a melting-pot universe and ceaseless adventure. It also departs from conventions in all the ways I wanted to see in fiction.
Most notably, it features a psychologically plausible con artist whose very flawed personality isn’t explained away with one traumatic event. Nor is he magically “fixed” for the readers’ comfort. His traits are underpinned by years of primary and secondary research, as well as firsthand, lived experience of being “wired all wrong.”
It also has an FMC who’s smart enough to know better and still chooses worse because of desperation and being so goddamn tired.
It has a world full of contradictions and injustices, and a narrative that stubbornly refuses to tell you how to feel about it.
Star Swindler builds on all of that and keeps raising the bar.
There are so, so many stories about love, healing, and redemption. This is not one of them.
To me, the Blackjack Interstellar duology is primarily about unmasking, gradually and reluctantly, and embracing who you really are. Most of us don’t really want to be fixed. We want to feel seen in our brokenness, be allowed to live without hiding it for others’ comfort, and find reasons to survive despite feeling disempowered and hopeless
I’m also told the books are funny—this wasn’t intended. But apparently that’s what trauma does to your narrative voice.
Anyways, Blackjack is a love letter to no one but myself. It helped me survive some of the lowest lows. And for someone who’s spent most of her life doing things because she has to, not because she wants to, this is a BIG deal.
I also know these books have given a few hours’ escape to others, similarly stuck… and that’s enough.
You can get Star Swindler here.
