Category: General

Not a Short Story

Hope ZaneGeneral

So the Illness that I mentioned last week continued. Woof. Somewhere in all that fever-brained mess, I decided to write a short story. It’s… not really turning out to be a short story.

Well, I have my hopes, but it seems to be turning into a novel, like all things tend to do. Fairytale started as ostensibly a short story, and now I’m 100k in the thick of it. It’s funny, this was supposed to be a quick smut fic, but as I started writing the characters, there was just so much more to them. I think I tend to write long because I get curious. Curious about who these people are, what happened to them, and what’s going to happen to them. You know how it goes.

Anyway, it’s interesting because I don’t think this is a story I could have started except when I was so sick that I couldn’t possibly give a fuck about anything besides clawing onto my continued existence. Talking about art school is kind of funny that way, and it is about art school—about two painters.

Here’s a little snippet of it. I’m thinking of putting it up on my Patreon for patrons to read, and that might be the only place it lives until I have enough short stories to put together a collection.

Heechul wakes in the night with his heart pounding. He doesn’t know what time it is. Kaoru’s room is an unfamiliar place, and there are no clocks. He could have been sleeping for a few minutes or a few hours.

He startles a little when he feels a warm, heavy body beside him, its heat leaching into his own.

Of course it’s Kaoru. Who else would it be? Even so, it takes a while for Heechul’s heart to calm down.

He doesn’t have nightmares, that he knows of. Or at least, not nightmares in the way anyone else can talk about them. Since he was little, he’s often woken feeling frightened. And how do you talk about that?

With a sickness

Hope ZaneGeneral

It’s been a hell of a year so far. I started 2024, like I’m sure everyone did, with the best of intentions of Getting Shit Done. Instead, I mostly got very sick and spent the last two weeks resting and trying to feel a little less like death.

Fortunately, I think I’m starting to feel better now, but getting back to normal has still been a slow and careful crawl.

Onto publishing news, I started posting my WIPs on Patreon, and I think I’ll continue for the foreseeable future. The format might change as I figure out what works for me and for my readers, but I really like the idea of letting people read along as I go.

Since I was feeling a little better today, I finished uploading the last few chapters of Fairytale, bringing the Patreon up to date and the total chapter count up to 30. The first four chapters are free for anyone who’d like to check them out.

This story started as a little whim that grew and grew. I didn’t have any intention of turning it into a full-length book when I started, but before I knew it, I’d looked up and 3 months had passed, and I’d written almost 100k words. Charis and Mouse now have a special place in my heart next to all my other characters. I hope you’ll grow to love them, too.


Signing up for $5/month will give you access to extras and WIPs where you can read along with stories in The Witchblood Heir verse and more as I write them.

close up photograph of two person holding sparklers

Happy New Year

Hope ZaneGeneral

I’m thinking of a song I can never find on the internet, a kind of lost track by Stars, whose music sort of defined my youth. Anyway, it’s a song called London Fields. Particularly, I’m thinking of this line that goes, “I dream that you’ll seal my fate, save me just a little late, that in the yard you’ll kiss me hard and tell me you’ve been waiting.”

It just seems fitting to carry with me into the new year for some reason.

I don’t have any big, definitive new year’s resolutions for this year. Of course, there are things that I want and things I hope to achieve, but it feels good to keep them to myself for now. Small seeds need darkness and warm care to grow.

But something I can share… I’m thinking of something Felix (from Stray Kids) said in one Bubble voice message. I think about it off and on these days. It was something along the lines of, “I hope we can keep walking slowly in the direction of our dreams this year,” and yes. That’s what I want for all of us.

I’m feeling nervous, tentative, but hopeful about the year ahead. However the first day of 2024 finds you, I hope we can all face the year ahead with courage and openness.

I hope good things come our way.

Health, wellness, and ink, oh man

Hope ZaneGeneral

(scroll down if you just want to see the earliest publication schedule for 2024)

I’m trying to give myself more credit, especially when it feels like I’ve accomplished nothing for long stretches of time, and then I look back and it turns out I actually have been doing and working on a whole lot. That feels like my life right now. I got back on asthma medication for the first time since I was 17, and lo and behold, a lot of the fatigue issues that I thought were just an intrinsic part of me lifted, and I was suddenly very excited to try and do every single physical activity possible. I went wild with that for about a month or so, to some hilarious (and sometimes injurious) results.

The shortest possible TL;DR of that entire state of affairs is that I’m now back in physical therapy for my knees and just had an occupational therapy appointment for my hands. Since I was in my early 20s, I’ve had issues with my joints. Current best guess is hypermobility, so I’m very tentatively and very carefully trying to strengthen my body enough that it can do the things I want it to do. It takes time, but I think I’m more patient now than I have been ever before.

I’ve also been studying Korean, which takes up my entire brain for days at a time. Learning languages seems like a good way to learn more about yourself—what your brain likes, what you love about the entire endeavor of words and collecting them. Writing my Korean notes out by hand in pencil has been very satisfying. I think my handwriting is getting a bit better, too.

Ask me how much time I’ve spent with the word 행복 stuck in my head.

I got a covid shot yesterday and have spent the majority of today feeling achy and sick but overall pretty satisfied about my body’s fomenting immunity and the whole doing my civic duty thing. I’ve been trying to take good care of myself lately. I’ll get my flu shot in a couple weeks and do the achy sickness thing all over again.

I did A Project and hilariously started fighting with my printer for like three hours yesterday as the delirium set in.


All of these new things have been taking up space that used to be solely inhabited by my writing. I didn’t write very much at all for a month or so, but I’m finding my way back to my former pace. It takes more willpower than it used to, but I don’t love it any less.

And a writing update

I wrote out a tentative publication schedule for 2024 that I’ll share once I have a few more things nailed down. I’d like to publish the fourth Fragile Tender book on Valentine’s Day, February 2024. I’d also like to do a big Kickstarter with fun merch for The Witchblood Heir series in the summer, and I have a new standalone book for the spring and something special for the fall. I hope you’re excited. I plan to work really hard in 2024, maybe harder than I ever have before. The prospects are really exciting to me, and I hope you’ll enjoy the results.