Our Friend is Here: An Author Interview with RoAnna Sylver, Author of Stake Stake – On ‘Dys-hope-ia’, How Hope and Horror are Intertwined, and Honouring Corey Alexander

Our Friend is Here! is a guest feature at The Quiet Pond, where authors, creatives, and fellow readers, are invited to ‘visit’ the Pond! In Our Friend is Here! guest posts, our visitors (as their very own unique character!) have a friendly conversation about anything related to books or being a reader — and become friends with Xiaolong and friends.

If you love the idea of fantasy stories that are about holdingonto and fighting for hope, despite being in the darkest and grimmest of places, gorgeously queer and disabled characters of colour, then I’d like to introduce you to RoAnna Sylver.

RoAnna’s books are difficult to define – and by that, I mean that their stories push the fringes of genre. For instance, Chameleon Moon is a dystopian story with superhuman characters (that are delightfully queer and polyamorous) that fight against an oppressive, all-seeing police force with love, hope, and resistance. Their other series, Stake Sauce, which you’ll learn more about today, is a supernatural story wherein a punk-rock vampire and disabled cop-turned-security-guard team up to fight a great evil – and maybe fall in love and heal each other too.

The Pond’s Most Anticipated Reads of 2019, Part IV. – Eight Self-Published & Indie Books To Support in 2019

Welcome back, friends! I hope you all have had a lovely week and that you are ready for my final post of The Pond’s Most Anticipated Reads series for 2019!

A goal of mine for 2019, and something that I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, is to do more to support self-published and indie books. As someone who was initially invested in mainstream books, I genuinely did not know that self-published books were a thing and I was naive to the challenges that all authors went through, especially authors who self-publish. I’ve had the pleasure of reading some spectacular self-published books in the past (shout out to Soft on Soft!), and I now know and strongly believe that self-published books and their authors deserve all the love and support.