Happy New Year, Inklings! This is Lizzie Blackwood coming to you with our January newsletter. 

The changing of the year is often a favorite time for introspection. That pesky Dickens would have us relegating the ghosts of Past, Present, and Future to Christmas alone, but I invite you to follow me on a somewhat more secular haunting this first day of 2026. And since we’ve already denied Dickens his monopoly on spirits, let’s also abandon their order and dive straight into the Present. The spirit awaits, beckoning with an incandescent smile. Come in, and know us better, friends!

The Ghost of New Year’s Present:

As of this very day, our launch title—Bludeye Beach by Eliwood S. Gheist—is available in ebook form from your retailer of choice! You can find purchase links on our Book Page. Print proofing is also underway for the paperback release, and we will be announcing preorders for that soon. This is an incredibly exciting time for Eliwood and all of us here at Hook & Quill Press: the birthday of our first book-child, a tangible transition from dream to reality as a publishing house.

I had the extreme privilege of reading an ARC of Bludeye Beach, and I can’t say enough good things about it. In a year where reading for pleasure had become a challenge, Bludeye Beach drew me in effortlessly. I connected deeply with Edie and quickly came to love the full cast for their humor and their flaws, their struggles and joys. I hungered for the dangers and mysteries just out of reach, reveled in the revelation that horrors howling in the night weren’t half so perilous as those smiling in the light of day. It’s a fun and compelling read with emotional depth that makes it something special, and I can’t wait for you all to read it too!

We’re also in the process of curating our selections for our new zine! The zine has been an exciting project, especially for the times we’re living in. There’s a rawness, honesty, and personal touch to zines, born of queer, artsy, and counter-culture communities sharing ideas and stories outside the typical confines of capitalism. The endless creativity and freedom of expression; the abandoning of arbitrary limitations in order to just create, share, and connect; this is the energy inspiring us in a lot of what we do, and we’re excited to run feral with it here.

Finally, we just wrapped our month of #Smutcember on Bluesky, a hashtag prompt game where members of the writing community shared their thoughts, experiences, and current works in the oft-maligned arena of spice. In a time when anything remotely sexual (or even just queer or trans) is under attack from censorship and harassment, it was really encouraging to see so many people being open and supportive with each other over writing smut. Participants ranged from seasoned veterans of niche, kinky porn to brand new writers who’d scarcely attempted a kiss, but they all shared an infectious earnestness and enthusiasm. It was such a delight reading about everyone’s spicy stories and their beloved character relationships, sharing our insecurities, our breakthroughs, all the things that make us light up inside. There were some truly moving insights and anecdotes, and it served as a beautiful reminder of how writing sex in fiction is first and foremost an exercise in empathy and compassion, and those who undertake it are often some of the most open-hearted and fun people you’ll ever know. Sex is inherently complicated, but it doesn’t need to be divisive. There is room in fiction for everyone to like what they like, to leave others to savor what might not be their cup of tea, to expand their horizons until they learn surprising new things about themselves and others.

As for me personally, I’m sitting in a new apartment in a new city in a new state, my inbox full of beta reader notes to fuel the next edit pass of The Stars Will Be Our Ocean, my future uncertain but my heart full of love and hope. A surreal, harrowing, impossible year lays behind me, and there are times when I feel like I’ve been caught daydreaming.

And just like that, the vision fades, the spirit of the Present passes on as it must with each new day, and its familiar but ethereal sibling takes its place to draw us through the remembrances of what once was.

The Ghost of New Years’ Past:

The last time my life went through a major upheaval was about a decade ago. Like this past year, most of the driving forces behind it were beyond my control, but unlike this year where I was proactive in redirecting my life, that year I was simply left behind, struggling to adapt. One tradition I began, however, was that of my New Year’s intention-setting ritual. I would get some little candles associated with different goals, light them while reflecting on the meaning I’d assigned them, and let them burn down to nothingness after midnight. A simple ritual, but one that gave me agency in a complicated time, a tiny habit that helped bring courage and intentionality to the ways I faced the world.

And it’s been such a world. Bigots and despots in power, genocides subtle and blatant, pandemics ravaging the population, climate disasters increasing dramatically, injustice and cruelty everywhere. It’s been easy to feel hopeless, angry, lost.

And yet, in all this time, I came out as queer, started writing again after a long and painful hiatus, learned to open my heart again after it had been slashed and discarded, and began to believe there was a better path for me than the one common expectations had put me on. I fell in love with rewilding, learned everything I could about native plants, finally found my favorite authors among the queer community, re-learned how to read for myself, write for myself. I found my people, one at a time.

I met the other members of Hook & Quill Press by chance, playing a hashtag prompt game on Bluesky known as #WIPSnips. Bluesky was smaller then, admittedly, but there was a magic to it all the same. The connections forged there turned into blossoming friendships. I had already determined to become a self-published author, acknowledging I had neither the stamina nor the fortitude of heart left to weather the querying trenches in search of approval for my book to exist. The thing I regretted most about that choice was giving up what I saw as a stable support network, a team of professionals dedicated to my work.

When the idea of a co-op came around among these new friends, it was the perfect solution. I would still have my team of professionals, my dedicated support network (in addition to my other wonderful friends and editor), and more than that, I would be actively providing support in return.

Because the most important thing I learned when cultivating courage and intentionality was that the courage I needed wasn’t the heroic kind drilled into my American brain, it was the courage to connect, to be vulnerable, to ask for help and offer it. It was the courage to become part of something, part of an ecosystem.

Much wiser voices than mine have said for generations, community is how we survive. It’s as true for creatives as it is for society. And just as the powerful in society push the narrative of individualism in order to hold power, so too do the forces of capitalism push the narrative of competition. But the longer I spent among the writing community, the clearer it became that we are not each other’s competition, we are our most powerful supporters. The executives will never love us, hoarding the wealth won off artists’ backs, forcing them to fight over the remaining scraps. But every time we talk about our favorite books online, every time we offer hours of our lives to read and give feedback to each other, every time we choose to push back against the poison of AI and stand in solidarity with visual artists and voice artists and graphic designers, we show how much love the community can foster. Politics and censorship cannot silence us if we refuse to allow anyone to be silenced.

No one can do it all alone. We can’t all buy every book, use every library, back every crowdfund or subscribe to every Patreon. But we are a vast web, and together we are powerful. There are forces for good that emerge every day supporting the arts and the marginalized voices within them: Discord community organizers, convention organizers, book reviewers, small presses, non-profits, co-ops. Look at Authors Against Book Bans, or Dream Foundry, or the Queer Liberation Library. Look at Otherside, or Neon Hemlock, or the Read Indie Fantasy. Where human creativity survives, it will be because of people working together to keep it and each other alive in love and solidarity.

This here is our little corner of that effort, a seed I helped to germinate even as the rest of my life was uprooted. One of many small collectives born of kindred spirits, seemingly insignificant on its own, but a vital part of a healthy ecosystem nonetheless. In months to come, I hope to interview folks from some of these other efforts, other voices working to support fellow writers and artists in otherwise inhospitable times, but that takes us toward the realm of the Future…

And so the ethereal spirit fades too, guiding us gently toward another cloaked in mystery, a spirit imposing in its inevitability yet tantalizing in its promise. With the spirit of the Future at our backs, we gaze outward through the ever-changing mists of time to glimpse what could be.

The Ghost of New Years’ Future:

The world remains a cruel and unpredictable place, but far from leading us into despair, I see it only hardening our resolve. We will snatch joy and love back from the maw of greedy callousness with every bite it takes. So to that end, I will not dwell on the stormclouds, but the sunlight breaking through them.

Before you sits our first book, but there are three more coming this year alone, each of them so vibrantly different and captivating we can’t wait to share them. Four zines as well, and many episodes of the From Tree to Book Writer’s Group Podcast, the next of which is coming to you January 13th. There’s even more brewing that we can’t share yet, but it’s going to be exciting. Launching Hook & Quill Press is a massive undertaking, something we’re all learning one step at a time, but it’s the fruit of our whole hearts, grown with love and enthusiasm. We hope the yield is ever bountiful, and the flavor sweet!

Community and solidarity will continue to be more important than ever, and we’re going to strive to support that any way we can. We are and will always be staunchly opposed to AI in all creative sectors, producing human-written words and using human-made art. In addition to our Discord community, our members will keep engaging with the Bluesky writing community through more prompt games and events. We are each committed to shouting out our favorite books and artists whenever possible and doing what we can to encourage and celebrate our peers. We hope to embody and pass along that one great lesson we’ve all learned, that community is survival, community is joy.

So with that in mind, let your takeaway be this: Find your people. Make weird shit with your own hands and hearts and souls. Save the world.

Because beneath the dire robes of the Future spirit there are rainbow fishnets and six inch platform heels encrusted with glitter ready to somersault into a dead drop, and you want to be around to see that.

Thank you for indulging me on my haunt this month! Now, let’s see what Quillbert has been up to …

Where In The World is Quillbert?

Quillbert joined me on a writing retreat to central Pennsylvania back in November where we worked on the nascent sequel to The Stars Will Be Our Ocean, enjoyed the gorgeous autumn weather, and told our friends stories by firelight. In the many trips preparing for my move from Virginia to New York, I’d driven through the region many times, but rarely stopped. However, as a few of us had moved since our last gathering, the region had suddenly become central to all our scattered selves, and it was a delight getting to enjoy the mountains, the golden foliage, the dense, plush moss and ferns.

Welcome to Bludeye Beach!

Haven’t purchased your copy yet? Get the ebook now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Other Ebook Retailers. Physical preorders coming soon!