Callista Black

It’s March now and that means we’ve entered False Spring here in New England. We had a few days of warm rainy weather and now it’s going to get cold again. Which suits me fine; I love my cold weather.

I finished the first draft of Oyezida last month (a working title) and currently it’s in the first round of edits, which consists of actually fleshing out the language and cultures of the world it’s in. The tricky part about this is that the main group of people are a nomadic desert people. Desert survival is obviously extremely difficult and requires serious knowledge, and I’m trying to learn as much as I can about nomadic desert tribes in our own world, namely the Amazigh peoples of northern Africa. (These people are more commonly known as the “Berber” tribes, but this is an exonym and therefore disliked.) But not a lot of publicly accessible research exists, so it’s been tricky. (Side note: if you know of anyone who might be able to talk with me about that, please contact me!)

In the meantime, my brain has sort of switched gears and I’m currently (today and yesterday) in a Romance sort of mood, but my current Romance WIP was annoying me so I skipped ahead in that series to the book I’m most excited about, which happens to be the final book in the series. That’s turning out to be a spicy age-gap romance, but I’m loving the characters!

Today my writers’ Discord server celebrates our one-year birthday! I posted on Threads a year ago asking if anyone needed a writing buddy and I had an overwhelming response so I say well hey I guess we can just start a Discord server. We had I think maybe 20 or 30 people to start with? We’re 50 now and it’s the best group of people I could have asked for. I definitely would not have published People We’d Rather Forget without them and I have endless, endless gratitude and love for them.

Anyway, happy International Women’s Day (belated) to all women including trans women, Black women and women of color, disabled women, and queer women, but excluding any and all who voted for a certain orange man who’s currently trying to take our rights away! Love y’all!

Callista