My spouse and I really wanted gryphon pride shirts to wear this year, so we reached out to Fleeks a while back and she was happy to put some together for us. I’m sporting the intersectional pride and pan shirts, but ever since getting that RedBubble store up and running, we decided to make some of the others available, too, in case anyone else wants one! (And if your pride colors aren’t available, use the contact form to let me know and we’ll make it happen for you.) Almost all of the designs look great on black, but RedBubble lets you change the fabric color if you want something else. Just make sure the background color doesn’t hide the pride colors.
Also, Shep, who does the Telegram stickers, decided that pride flags should have dragons or gryphons on them like the flag of Wales, and I’m all for it:
In other news, I’m so late to Pride Month because my air conditioning died and we had a week of 99F weather right afterwards. My temperature tolerance has gotten a little better since the higher infusion dose, but that was still too warm for me. Everyone’s AC dies around this time of year, so we had to wait a few weeks. (It really died back in April, to give you an idea of the wait.) My spouse traded in some old travel points from his previous job, and we spent the hottest days in a hotel, where I got a lot of reading done. I finished up the Tensorate series by Neon Yang (excellent novellas of varying length and form) and Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon. Orange Tree actually makes me a little mad because the description, cover, and title all made me think this was going to be a long, boring book. And while it’s long (264k word count, standalone novel), this book is about dragons. Dragons of every type. Good dragons, bad dragons, western dragons, eastern dragons. It’s essentially the Reign of Fire of the epic fantasy world, and I enjoyed it a lot. I just wish they’d marketed it that way!
I brought a laptop with me to the hotel and nearly finished a short novel set in the world of my next series. This will go out for free to the newsletter and Patreon next year, around when the series shows up for preorder. (Side note: thank you so much to my patrons! I’ve named my AC unit after all of you.) That free novel is essentially a fantasy version of Animal Search & Rescue with a vulpegryph (fox gryphon) who enjoys baked goods, multiheaded goose hydras as an invasive species, and dryads who hate grass.
But you’re probably here for the gryphon books, and I have good news there, too. My developmental editor is finishing up Crackling Sea (#6) and should have it back to me before the end of the month. And now that I’m back in my house, I’m finishing up Opinicus (#7) to send to him. 2020 and 2021 have been crazy years, so I’m not going to make any promises until the preorder page is up, but let’s just say it’s very likely both will be out this year.
That’s all the news for now. I’m looking forward to spending all of July editing in the air conditioning. I hope you have a cool summer (or, for my southern hemisphere readers, a pleasant winter)! And don’t hesitate to shout if there’s a gryphon pride shirt design that you’d like to see added. We’re happy to oblige =]