Shadows fade. Illusions break. The dawn returns.

Min Suhwa has always longed to see the greater world outside the small, cloistered convent in which she was raised. Hidden there for her safety when she was a small child, Suhwa has learned to keep her unusual illusion magic to herself, but when the Bangtan Brothers come to town to perform, she can’t resist the chance to go see them for herself. But the world outside her convent is dangerous — the Morning Realms have fallen to civil war, and Huntsmen prowl the land in search of magicians and the fabled Guardians of Dawn, legendary elemental warriors with incredible powers. When Suhwa’s illusion magic brings her afoul of one of the Huntsmen, she must flee for her life.

When the world is out of balance, the Guardians of Dawn are reborn.

Meanwhile, the Guardians of Dawn and their allies are fighting a war on two fronts — against the northern insurrection seeking to claim the Sunburst Throne and destroy all magicians, and against the rising threat of the Mother of Ten Thousand Demons. Zhara, Ami, and Yuli must travel to the Azure Isles to seek the Guardian of Water and save the Morning Realms from annihilation, restoring balance to order and chaos once and for all.

Guardian of Water, there you are.

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I don’t have favorites (obviously), but I will say that writing SUHWA was both a challenge and a delight in a way that I haven’t experienced in a long time. It was a challenge because, oh my god, why did I write a multi-POV epic fantasy series, but it was also a delight because the story just poured out of me. Suhwa herself is also perhaps the Guardian most like me (although each of the girls contains an aspect of me)—sociable, playful, but also a little aloof. Also her celestial companion is a dragon. Who has a dog for a brother. Both of them may or may not be inspired by Castor and Pollux. Several friends from previous books make reappearances in SUHWA as well!

It’s always bittersweet saying goodbye to a story, but I hope that I have wrought a satisfying conclusion. Can’t wait for y’all to meet Min Suhwa, the Guardian of Water!

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I have to say, while all of my Guardians of Dawn covers have been beautiful, I think…I think Yuli is the prettiest. (Shh, don’t tell the other girls.) As with the others, the artwork is by the incredible Sija Hong, with cover design by Kerri Resnick!

Preorder links are coming soon, but in the mean time, here is a sneak peak at what the book is about!

Fates collide. Darkness hides. A new day will rise.

Princess Yulana has a few problems. Her late grandfather has died without naming an heir, civil war threatens to tear the Morning Realms apart, a strange waking dreamer sickness is sweeping through the land, and a plague of hungry ghosts roam the steppes. On top of all of that, Kho, her former best friend turned rival, is getting under her skin. A struggle for power divides the north, and the outcome rests on the winner of the Grand Game―a competition that will determine not just the future of her people, but the course of the entire empire.

When the world is out of balance, the Guardians of Dawn are reborn.

As the Guardian of Wind, it is Yuli’s responsibility to bring order to chaos, along with the Guardian of Fire and the Guardian of Wood. But can she restore balance to the Morning Realms when she can’t even win the political games being played at home? The fate of the Morning Realms depends on the Guardians of Dawn, and whether Yuli can manage both the demonic and political chaos at once.

Guardian of Wind, there you are…

Most of you will be familiar with Yuli already from the previous books, but I loved getting to delve a bit more into her character, especially her romance. I’m not actually someone who’s very comfortable writing romance, but there is something delicious about best-friends-to-rivals-to-lovers…

As many of you probably know, one of the biggest inspirations for the Guardians of Dawn series are the shoujo manga of my youth, including but not limited to: Sailor Moon, Magic Knight Rayearth, Fushigi Yuugi, and Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne. But what some of you probably don’t know is that for a very, very brief period of time in high school, I wanted to be a mangaka.1

Alas, I went with storytelling via words instead of images, although I still periodically dabble in visual art, especially when I’m procrastinating from drafting (cough, not that this has any, uh, relevance right now or anything). When I draw, I don’t really think of the figures I’m sketching to be a 1:1 representation of the characters in my head; what I try to capture are things…

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I have, if nothing else, a very good sense of direction.

I can attribute this to many things—the fact that I started driving before the invention of GPS probably being the most formative—but I like to think it’s the hours I used to spend in the back seat of my parents’ car when I was a child, poring over Thomas Guides. I was always a voracious reader, but reading words in a moving car made me motion sick, so for the lack of anything else to spare my undiagnosed ADHD brain from the endless tedium of driving around LA’s freeways, I read the Thomas Guide.

I’ve always loved maps. Every summer and Thanksgiving, my father would pile us up in our 1995 Mazda MPV and drive us up from Pasadena to Sacramento to visit my grandparents, and one of our pre-trip rituals was plotting a course on a fresh new map of California purchased from the grocery store. There were always a couple of options for this eight-hour drive. We could take the 5,1 which was a major thoroughfare and we could stop to eat at Ha…

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If there’s anything I am most proud about in Guardians of Dawn: Zhara, it’s that hardly anyone seems to have taken note of the queerest thing I have ever done in a book: introduce the concept of ungendered third person pronouns casually and seamlessly in a secondary fantasy world.

And yes, that was all part of my agenda.

Because I have an agenda.

I wanted to normalize, but not politicize, the use of ungendered third person pronouns.

Normalization is something I think about a lot when it comes to my ideologies. Perhaps it’s because I have spent so much of my life being askew from normal, but my fantasy is never having to explain myself again. I am always explaining, always living in fear of being misunderstood, of being lost in translation. Norm…

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Isn’t she gorgeous? Once again I stay winning with Sija Hong’s amazing artwork and Kerri Resnick’s incredible design!

Preorder links are coming soon, but in the mean time, here is a sneak peak at what the book is about!

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This month’s issue of The Guardians Gazette is about WORLDBUILDING! One of my favorite things to do honestly, and there is a lot of stuff I’ve written for the series that just won’t make it into the books themselves. But if you, like me, were a Tolkien’s appendices girlie, then this month, I’m sharing the creation story of the cosmos in the Morning Realms.

Before the creation of the cosmos, there was consciousness. When consciousness awoke, it gave itself a name, and in doing so, it gave itself life. It called itself Do, or the place of beginnings and endings. As Do developed a greater understanding of itself, it understood that it was lonely, and so created Light and Dark as a way to better study itself. Do gifted the light and the dark with thought and consciousness, and so they became Jun and Yan, the god of Order and the god of Chaos.

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I meant to send this month’s Morning Realms Dispatch out yesterday, but once again, we are day late and a buck short. *shakes fist* ADHD burnout!

This past JJubilee, I shared some ideas of what I thought perfumes inspired by Wintersong would be (taking my cues from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab), and ever since then I was sort of obsessed with the idea of trying my hand at my perfumery myself. As the way of ADHD hyperfixations go, I actually spent quite a bit of time and money understanding how scents mingled and mixed together and decided to come up with a signature perfume for Zhara!

zhara

A warm base with a rich, sensual heart, topped with bits of optimism. Sandalwood and cardamon, with a base of jasmine, ylang-ylang, neroli, and a touch of ginger, with lemongrass and tangerine.

Honestly, I love the way this perfume smells. Pers…

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I’ve been working on something cool for the past couple of weeks, which is annotating Guardians of Dawn: Zhara for my 절친! Skip below the paywall for links to download the PDF and the EPUB!

Also! ! Over on my Instagram I’m hosting a giveaway for a signed, annotated hardcover of the book, as well as a physical copy of the annotations PLUS swag! I’m giving away a sunburst enamel pin, a bookmark, and an art print! Like, comment, and follow, and you can be eligible for the entire set! I’m also giving away three other signed copies.

Not a 절친? Not a problem! I’m running a 20% discount on a yearly subscription all the way through September 1!

Get 20% off for 1 year

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One thing you should know about me is that I am not a visual writer. I joke, but am not entirely joking, when I say all first drafts of my books should be titled Bodiless Voices in Featureless Rooms. If there is one thing I dislike more than anything, it’s physically describing the way anything looks, which…makes writing kind of tough, let me tell you.

Although I am a visual person, I am not a visual writer; in fact, the majority of writing starts with a voice for me. The process of writing might be like the process of painting—thumbnail, sketch, inking, painting—but the actual act of writing is a bit like watching a play more than a movie. There is darkness, a voice, and a spotlight. I can only see what exists in the spotlight.

So every once in a while, during the process of writing, I have to take myse…

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I have finally done it. I have FINALLY received that one-star review I was waiting for:

ALT TEXT: Another qualm I had with this book is the use of “they”—the author gives us some background albeit could’ve been more clear, but the story is contrary to the author’s note. And this confused me SO much. When the MC’s love interest is introduced, “they” is used, but should be clear that the MC is talking to a male when his physical features are described (which the vast majority of pubescent males have)? Or is this world where everyone looks the same? Another instance is a female character, even after we learn she’s female, “they” is still used whenever she talks. This is SUPER annoying because it breaks the flow of the story and confuses the reader as to there being multiple characters in the scene. Also loathed the forced letters cult’s ideologies in this story. Why is every YA book bullied into including this??? Books were fine without this degeneracy.

🏆 ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: Degeneracy

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We are LESS THAN ONE MONTH AWAY from the release of Zhara. What the fuck. I mean what the actual fuck. Anyway, for this month’s Morning Realms Dispatch, I am reproducing the author’s note at the beginning of the book so that it may be more widely shared. I tried to be as thoughtful as I could about the choices I made, and hope they will make readers linger just a little longer on imagining how people of other cultures may relate to the world.

Also, if you’ve preordered the book, thank you, thank you, thank you. As a reminder, you can upload your receipts at the link below and receive a cool swag pack! Open to US/CAN and while supplies last.

Submit your receipts here!

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It’s weird being a Geriatric Millennial sometimes.

I’m part of a cusp generation that was old enough to have had a formative childhood without the internet, but also young enough to be considered a digital native.1 I’ll put it this way, I’m old enough to have had to memorize phone numbers when I wanted to call my friends, but young enough to have taught myself HTML and CSS in elementary school. Old enough to have to take computer classes to learn MS-DOS, but young enough to have never needed it. Slightly too old for Pokémon, too old for Avatar: The Last Airbender, too old for Percy Jackson, but young enough have to been Harry’s age when I first started reading the Series That Will No Longer Be Named.

In fact, I’m so old that I remember a time before YA.

I’ve been a fairly avid reader since I was young; in my fact, I would say my most formative reading years were probably between the ages …

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*Professor Farnsworth voice* Good news, everyone! My publisher, Wednesday Books, is hosting a pre-order campaign for Guardians of Dawn: Zhara! If you pre-order a copy of my first book, save your receipt and upload it here!

🔥some things of note

1. Any preorder, from any retailer, qualifies for the art print, enamel pin, bookmark, and signed bookplate! Just be sure to submit the form by July 31st at 11:59pm ET.1

2. The art print was done by yours truly!

3. The enamel pin is based off a sunburst token that has significance in the book!

I have so much more fun stuff coming down the pike in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned!

사랑해,

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This is the free monthly edition of The Morning Realms Dispatch, in which I share with my lovely readers some behind-the-scenes content and teasers for GUARDIANS OF DAWN: ZHARA, the first book in the Guardians of Dawnseries, forthcoming AUGUST 2023. If you would like even more secrets, why don’t you consider becoming one of my 절친?

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Naveen is my favorite Disney prince.

I’m not a huge fan of the Disney Princess™ brand for multiple reasons — including, but not limited to, the gross capitalization of and rebranding of traditional feminine values into a sort of "girlboss feminism” — mostly because I’m not a big fan of romance as a genre. Which is weird, because I love romances in stories. I suppose it’s because the tropes and fantasies contained within the vast majority of popular romances are just not my cup of tea.

But it’s probably because I usually don’t find the heroes attractive.

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This is the free monthly edition of The Morning Realms Dispatch, in which I share with my lovely readers some behind-the-scenes content and teasers for GUARDIANS OF DAWN: ZHARA, the first book in the Guardians of Dawn series, forthcoming AUGUST 2023. If you would like even more secrets, why don’t you consider becoming one of my 절친?

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I have a weird relationship with Asian media.1

Well, weird is probably not the right word. Complicated is more correct, but doesn’t quite encompass the...awkward? uncomfortable? proud? possessive? feeling of, well, gatekeeping I want to do.

Because the minute I let the mainstream in on my secret stash of awesome, it will no longer be cool.

First things first: I am currently in the downswing of my bipolar mood cycle, so everything is harder to accomplish than it should be, including writing this essay. The thing about bipolar depression is that it’s not that I feel “sad” or “low” so much as I’m playing on Nightmare mode. It takes approximately 8000x more effort to take a goddamned shower than it should! I’m tired!

Anyway, all this to say that if this essay is less cohesive than my others have been, I apologize in advance.

So. Let’s talk about cultural appropriation.

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This is the free monthly edition of The Morning Realms Dispatch, in which I share with my lovely readers some behind-the-scenes content and teasers for GUARDIANS OF DAWN: ZHARA, the first book in the Guardians of Dawn series, forthcoming AUGUST 29, 2023. If you would like even more secrets, why don’t you consider becoming one of my 절친?

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Y’all will have to forgive me this month as my brain is currently leaking out my ears due to me trying to get this draft of GUARDIANS 2 in shape before I leave for vacation. (Will I make it? WHO KNOWS.)

However, I’m going to take a bit of a break from fixing bad words by writing some bad words in a short essay.

And I want to talk about unlikeable girls.

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