Happy Canada Day! A year and a half since my last update, I am finally slowly coming out of the woodwork to try and re-establish a presence here again.

Happy New Year, fellows! At least, I hope that this new year will indeed be a little happier than the last, for all of us just hanging on.

Hey everyone! If you subscribe to my newsletter, you would have received a notice this past Monday that The King's Eyes is now live on my website and available for download through Bookfunnel! I'm so excited to be able to share this story with everyone. Dalon and Kari, and the challenges they face, are quite different from any I've written before. But I'm hoping that their story resonates with you.

Hey folks! This year I had the opportunity to participate in the Inkling's Challenge over on Tumblr. If you don't know what this is, it's an annual challenge to write a Christian fantasy story. Participants get split into three teams, and based on those teams, they have a choice of two pre-assigned genres. I got sorted into Team Chesterton, and I decided to write an Intrustive Fantasy.

Sometimes going back to the Philippines can feel very wistful to me. Life is so different in Canada, and having spent two-thirds of my life here, sometimes returning home can feel like discovering an old pair of beloved shoes and finding that they don't quite fit you anymore. It makes me want to work harder to keep my connections with the country alive.

This post is the first of a two-part account of my trip to the Philippines. In this post, I'll outline where I went and what we did, and in the second post, I will do a deeper dive on some of my thoughts about the culture there and how I perceive it as someone who's spent the majority of her life in the diaspora.

I rarely read books that are squarely in the romance genre, so the tropes that I will be talking about today are ones that typically appear in fantasy books with romantic subplots. Even though the books I pick up usually don't have that much romance, the way the romance is executed has a pretty big impact on my reading experience. If the romance is good, I enjoy the book a lot more; but if the romance is poorly done, my entire reading experience kind of suffers.

This post is so overdue! Earlier this year, I wrote about five tropes, or common elements, or regularly occurring things in general within the fantasy genre that I didn't like. I always meant to follow it up with a companion post about the ones I do like, but it turns out this post was harder to write than the first.

I've encountered quite a few posts on diversity and representation on social media lately, and I find myself coming away with a few opinions of my own as a response. This post is a loose collection of those responses. I don't think I'll ever have a definite, set-in-stone Thoughts™, because I'm still at the point in my journey where my understanding of good representation is still evolving, and I'm still trying to make sense of my own personal experiences, and the world is also constantly in flux so what I may need one day may not be what I need the next. Basically, take these with a grain of salt, and know that these are just my thoughts at this current point in time. I don't want to box myself in and never give myself an opportunity to change my mind. That said, hopefully there's enough coherence here that shows that my thoughts and feelings are rooted in something consistent.

This is a bit of a hot-take, because I know there's this unspoken chasm between those in creative fields and those in technical fields. But today I'm going to propose that software developers and engineers are creators too.