maybe fantasy should draw from medieval romances instead of real medieval history. We have been brainstorming a fake better version of the middle ages for hundreds of years and it is a shame to throw it all away.

this is such a source of anger for me in particular because so many restrictive policies are justified as being about "protecting children". oh we'll ban them from social media but we won't ban them from the fucking military. absolutely not they can't be trusted to consent to transition healthcare but yes let's have them in the goddamn army!!

i'm like. i will not believe a SINGLE WORD YOU SAY about protecting children until you listen to what human rights and children's rights campaigners have been saying for decades and stop recruiting children into the fucking army. why do you listen to the people trying to ban them from instagram and not the ones wanting you to raise the military recruitment age to 18, huh?? worried about running out of naive cannon fodder?

it's also just weirdly invisible as a problem! so normal to us that we don't realise it's weird and completely hidden to non-brits! when i lived in ireland i remember talking to irish quakers about it and i was astonished at how many of them, who were active in peace movements and demilitarisation movements, did not even know that their next-door neighbours were recruiting that young. like ???? it makes me feel insane that this is just so hidden away

Fifteen years and seven months, for the non-Brits. That's how old you have to be to start the application process, which is just so timed so that you can then go to Assessment at 15 years and 9 months, so that you can start Army Foundation College bang on your sixteenth birthday. My brother-in-law went that route and now in his 40s it feels really obvious that his whole adult self has been defined by what the military made him into, he's never had a chance to be anything that wasn't first and foremost someone's dog.

taking this out of the replies bc it feels important that people know it:

the standard contract you sign when you join up is 12 years. 12 years' dedicated service in the Armed Forces. if you join up at not-quite-16, you will be legally tied to serve in the Armed Forces until you are twenty-eight years old.

you can get out of that service contract, with difficulty, from four years. you have to have been in active service for at least three years. you may owe them money in lieu of service. this still cannot happen until you are already in your 20s.

a child who is 15 years and 7 months old cannot legally have sex, vote, drink, drive (they can get a provisional licence at 15 years and 9 months but can't sit the driving test until they turn 17), smoke, or buy paracetamol. they will not be able to use social media after spring next year (thanks, kier). they cannot open a bank account or sign any other legal paperwork without a responsible adult cosignatory. they cannot leave school, because they are not viewed as capable of deciding their future responsibly at 15.

except, apparently, if that future is a binding legal contract to serve in the armed forces for nearly as long as they've been alive.

I don't think enough people realise just how insidious the child recruitment in this country is. and while we're making all this handwringing fuss about how we can't let the youth have mobile phones or Twitter or access to adult content in case they're traumatised by it, there's a hell of a loud silence around sending them into a system designed to traumatise the conscience and individuality out of you.

It's always gratifying to learn new things while researching a novel, and deepening my knowledge of the natural world is great and all, but I am learning way too much about the mating habits of various animals and to be honest, I'm not sure I want to know.

#me every time i learn additional information which colours my reading of gwydion and gilfaethwy: oh no

ME REMEMBERING THAT THEIR THIRD FORM WAS WOLF FORM

This is the closest an emoji has ever got to expressing my feelings, @good--merits-accumulated. The most accurate tag.

COVER REVEAL!

“You exist because of a crime, because of a curse, and because of a trick...”

Blodeuedd never asked to be made.

Created from flowers of oak, broom, and meadowsweet to marry a man cursed never to have a human wife, Blodeuedd has no knowledge of the world, no family outside the marriage, and no power to choose. But a caged animal still has claws, and Blodeuedd will find a way to be free, whatever the cost.

Gwydion knows what it is to be unmade.

Haunted by the years he served in animal form as punishment for his brother's crimes, Gwydion has turned his tricks to his nephew's happiness – and the creation of Blodeuedd is the greatest trick of them all. But his creation asks questions he cannot answer and drags from the depths of the forest the past he has been trying so hard to forget.

Now they both must face their unmaking.

From the author of The Wolf and His King comes a spellbinding new novel retelling the medieval Welsh story of Blodeuwedd in a profound exploration of cyclical trauma and transformation.

THE ANIMALS WE BECAME is coming this November from @gollancz, and next year from Erewhon Books for North American readers. I am excited (and a little nervous!) to bring you all this book about gender, trauma, and compulsory heterosexuality, as expressed through nonconsensual animal transformations and deeply unreliable narrators. Also a fair smattering of medieval Welsh law, to be honest.

It is both like TWAHK (it's medieval, it's about bodies in crisis, I got carried away with the historical thesaurus while editing it) and entirely unlike it (there's no romance, the sex is slightly more explicit, and I would describe the mood as less melancholy but angrier and certainly not *happier*). It also has more women in it, though the gender of the protagonists is a bit of a shrug and a noncommittal hand gesture situation. It is a very trans book. They're all having an absolute time of it with gender in this one.

More details and preorder links are on my website! Why not pre-order while you're buying TWAHK in paperback? ;)

Cover art once again by the wonderful Tom Roberts, who also did the art for TWAHK :)

Did you know, for the first time a French translation of my books is available as an audiobook? In French? It was released in audio yesterday! I... didn't know until I just saw it on Amazon.fr! Anyway, if you're French-speaking and like audiobooks, go and check that out.

I can't copy and paste tags on mobile @loubatas but yes, French hardback and ebook came out in early July :) Please do ask your bookshop if they'll stock it!

Thanks for confirming! The bookshop didn't have it in stock so they ordered a copy, I should have it by next wednesday!

The bookseller actually recognised the title, she told me she wanted to have it in stock when it came out, but the team had to do sacrifices (it's soon the "rentrée littéraire" and they're having pretty big financial issues at the moment so they can't stock a lot of books if they aren't sure they will sell), and TWAHK was unfortunately part of the sacrificed titles T_T She looked pretty sad they couldn't have it in stock, and also very happy that one of their regulars asked for it

Thank you for asking for it, anyway! The more people do so, hopefully the more booksellers will be able to make a case to their bosses that it SHOULD be one of the books that gets to squeeze into the selection. This is such a good illustration of why asking booksellers about things is so important, too – if they know there is genuine demand they will stock something, but if they can't be sure of it, they won't.

And many readers don't realise that the power lies with them to a large extent. Before I worked in the industry, as a reader I used to go around multiple shops looking for certain books and being frustrated when I couldn't find them, and it never occurred to me to ask them to order them in. Only when I worked in a bookshop did I learn how important it was to ask for things! Now as an author, I often have conversations with people: "I've been in my local shop five times and they never have it!" "Have you asked them to get it?" "... No." "Then they probably won't :/" And this is brand new information for so many. But as a bookseller, if multiple people asked me for a book we didn't stock? We would probably start stocking it – especially as a few people would inevitably not want to come back another day for an order, so those were customers we were losing. Readers can get books on shelves more easily than authors can.

The French translation was originally due to come out in February, so maybe it would have had an easier time of it then, but they wanted to take the extra time to get the translation right as they weren't happy with it at first. I'm not sure on what grounds. So it's been somewhat delayed. I hope it will still find its audience, though. It's hard for me to promote it as my French is extremely limited, so I just have to trust the publisher and other French readers to spread the word.

Did you know, for the first time a French translation of my books is available as an audiobook? In French? It was released in audio yesterday! I... didn't know until I just saw it on Amazon.fr! Anyway, if you're French-speaking and like audiobooks, go and check that out.

I can't copy and paste tags on mobile @loubatas but yes, French hardback and ebook came out in early July :) Please do ask your bookshop if they'll stock it!

My other medieval Irish adaptation take, other than that Táin Bó Cúailnge should be a stage musical, is that Oidheadh Con Culainn is infinitely more suited to adaptation (especially film). The Táin is deeply repetitive, it's full of endless single combats, the end is anticlimactic, and frankly, it just doesn't work that well outside the medium of medieval literature, especially in something as constrained, structurally, as film.

But Oidheadh Con Culainn? You have a coalition of enemies gathering weapons and skills to kill Cú Chulainn – you have the doomed efforts of the Ulaid to keep him out of the battle – you have the gradually broken geasa and the gathering sense of doom – you have the set piece battles and desperate outnumbered fight – you have the emotional death against the standing stone – you have Conall coming home from overseas and bring told the news – you have Conall going scorched earth in vengeance – you have the reclamation of Cú Chulainn's head – you have the final duel against Lugaid – you end with the digging of Cú Chulainn's grave, finally laying him to rest. Structurally, it just WORKS.

(And you get banger Láeg content at several key points.)

Plus, so many people think that Cú Chulainn dies in the Táin and don't realise it's sixteen years later in an entirely different text. Adapt OCC and you actually get to do the standing stone bit, instead of awkwardly shoving it on the end like various comic adaptations do.

I mean, is this all just part of my endless quest to make people care about OCC? Yes. Hire me to talk about OCC. I'll tell you more about it than you ever wanted to know. But also it's a really good text, so

Other advantages:

I've talked myself into thinking this would actually be a good film to be honest. I've always been fundamentally unconvinced about the idea of adapting TBC but now I realise it's not the project of adapting the Ulster Cycle that I'm unconvinced by, it's just that text in particular. It is not the best candidate! There's a much better one! It has so many of the same themes and ideas and Dramatic Moments but it's way friendlier to a cinematic medium!

The biggest PROBLEM with Oidheadh Con Culainn, other than the textual tradition itself, is the ableism re: Clann Cailitín, because if you stick with the text as it is then you have a group of people who have limb and facial differences who are intensely Othered because of that, and also the bad guys. And that is already enough of a trope in films to be a problem. So you would have to figure out some way of handling that. Medb is the one who mutilated them, so it's on her, but it doesn't change what it's saying as a narrative, or the fact it falls into the Disabled Bond Villain dynamic that is so often the only role people with these kinds of disabilities get to play in films. The fact it did it hundreds of years ago doesn't let it off the hook.

But in nearly every other regard it's less Problematic™ than the Táin, as well as better suited to modern storytelling sensibilities on structural levels. Which tracks, because, you know, fifteenth century text in seventeenth-nineteenth century manuscripts with late variants. It IS more modern.

Anyway, tell me who you'd cast as Conall Cearnach on his big murder rampage.