Estella Mirai

Hey there folks, looks like it’s time for another video game review because... WOW, I really need to shout about this one to the world. Tiny bit of background first: I had actually never heard of Sally Face before, as far as I remember, although I LOVE point-and-click adventures (which this is), and obviously have a very special place in my heart for blue-haired, mask-wearing, disfigured musicians. That’s actually HOW I learned of this game, when my good friend and fellow writer Adam Wing (his books are amazing, please check them out here !) @-ed me in an RT of a gorgeous drawing of a blue-haired guitarist that looked almost, but not quite, like my Rei. (I’m not sure if the artist would be cool with me screenshotting the tweet, so please check it out here .) And it was hashtagged #SallyFace.   So of course I clicked the hashtag, because I had to find out who this character was... and the game he was from sounded EXACTLY LIKE MY THING.   (By the way, if you somehow found this ...

So. This was sort of   immediately  inspired by a random tweet about how not all M/M is erotica.   But it’s something that I’ve been facing ever since I first started trying to get  The Stars May Rise and Fall  published, and it’s something that authors of queer fiction have been facing for even longer: this weird assumption that just because a book is M/M (or F/F), it must be sexually explicit.   My book is not. That’s not a spoiler, as far as I’m concerned—it’s fade to black, please use that as you wish to help you decide whether you’d like to read it or not. I know that fade to black is a negative for some readers and a positive for others. And that others read all heat levels and don’t really care.   And to honest, the choice to do that—to fade to black, rather than writing the sex scene—was one of the ones I agonized the most over. But in the end, I think it was the best choice for THIS particular book. And here’s why.   So first, the points ...

  Let’s try something a little different today: a game review! Since “ Night in the Unpleasant House ” is interactive fiction, it’s not THAT far off from what I usually write about, but still. First game review! I found this game by googling “iPhone games like Edith Finch,” for what it’s worth, and the two games are not entirely dissimilar. They both take place in weird, creepy houses, both involve Dark Secrets of the Past… but the gameplay in Unpleasant House wasn’t entirely like anything I’ve played before. You play an unnamed, genderless (as far as I can tell) narrator, whose father disappeared ten years ago in the mysterious Mayor’s house. As one of the earliest choices in the game indicates, you’re either there for revenge or answers (maybe both). As you explore the house, you learn more about the mayor snd what happened to your father. Good stuff! This is basically a text adventure, and I’ve played quite a few of those back in the day, but the game here gives you actions with...

  As you probably know by now, at least if you follow me on social media, the world lost an amazing songwriter and storyteller on April 19. Jim Steinman was best known for writing all of the music and lyrics for Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell (the best selling album EVER with all music and lyrics written by a single person), as well as hits like “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now.” He also wrote Tanz der Vampire , Bat Out of Hell the Musical , and lyrics for Whistle Down the Wind . He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and won a Grammy and the BMI Song of the Year (you want to Google that speech, by the way). It’s very hard to explain how much more to me he was than that. There are millions of stories out there by people who were blown away the first time they heard Bat Out of Hell . I’m not going to bore you with mine, except to say that it was one of those formative things for me, one of those things that I think we all have that just… mak...

  (FYI, this particular post doesn’t really contain any spoilers—there’s nothing here that I particularly WANT my readers NOT to know before they read my book, or that would typically go under a spoiler cut in a review. However, if you really really want to know NOTHING but what’s in the official blurb, maybe read the book first and then come back. <3 )   So, all of my characters are demi.   Well, maybe not  all  of them. Just the really important ones.   I’ve talked about this a lot on Twitter, but learning what the term “demisexual” meant a few years ago was like a puzzle piece clicking into place for me. When I was a teenager, I just thought I was too young. I legitimately did not understand how people accidentally got pregnant—why not just NOT HAVE SEX if you weren’t ready for the possible consequences? I understood how the act worked and wasn’t  repulsed  by it, but I also had zero interest in doing it myself. And even though I was like 1...