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Personal Essay · July 12, 2026
The Series Just Grew Two Books (And I Am Not Sorry)
So. Funny story.
A while back, I sent A Song of Tree and Sky out into the world — or at least out to a small handful of trusted readers — and waited for the verdict. What came back wasn't "this is bad." It was something trickier. Something closer to: I want to be here, but I don't know how I arrived.
And the more I sat with that, the more I knew they were right. Imani's story didn't begin the day she became Noba. It began long before — in the hunger, in the hearth, in the years that made her someone capable of surviving what Tree and Sky asks of her. I had been starting the race at the finish line's warm-up lap and calling it a sprint.
So I did the only reasonable thing a person with a full outline, a toddler, and no functioning sense of scope would do.
I wrote two more books.
A Song of Hunger and Hearth comes first now — Imani before the prophecy knew her name, carrying a life inside her in a world that has already decided what she's worth. It's colder, hungrier, and closer to the bone than anything I've written. It is, frankly, a little feral, and I loved every second of writing it.
A Song of Myth and Mercy comes second — the found family, the cabin, the years that turn survival into something that looks, almost dangerously, like peace. It's the book where I let myself believe, for a while, that these people might get to keep something. (Reader, you know better than to trust me on that. But let them have it for now.)
Which means the series now runs:
1. A Song of Hunger and Hearth
2. A Song of Myth and Mercy
3. A Song of Tree and Sky
4. A Song of Wind and Wandering
5. A Song of Silk and Sorrow — coming soon
I know what some of you are thinking, because I thought it too: isn't this the same series just... bigger? Yes. Obstinately, unrepentantly yes. But it's the version of the story that actually holds together — the running jump before the true action begins, instead of asking you to trust a woman you'd only just met with a prophecy she'd already half-survived off the page.
I'll be updating the site and shop over the next little while to reflect where the story actually lives now, cover art and all. If you've already read Tree and Sky as a standalone opening — thank you for trusting it, and for trusting me enough to tell you it needed two more chapters before it was whole.
Aurelia just got bigger. So did the cost of loving the people in it.
More soon.
— R.
Personal Essay · May 20, 2026
Finishing Book Two, Beginning Book Three, and Falling Hopelessly in Love With a Fictional Man I Made Up
Last night, I finished Book Two.
Which is a sentence I have dreamed of writing for so long that now, seeing it there on the page, I almost don't know what to do with it.
Book Two is finished.
A Song of Wind and Wandering has reached its shore. The boat has come in. The characters have survived storms, grief, hunger, fear, longing, and the terrible business of becoming. They have crossed water. They have carried old wounds into new lands. They have been broken open by the journey, and somehow, somehow, they are still standing.
And then, because apparently I do not know how to be normal about anything, I went straight into Book Three.
No rest. No dramatic fainting couch. No sensible little break where I light a candle and stare into the middle distance like a Victorian widow.
Just me, sitting there, typing:
Chapter One.
And suddenly it felt real.
Not "someday" real. Not "one day when I get there" real. Not "this is a beautiful future problem" real.
Real real.
Book Three has been the book waiting for me like a locked palace at the end of a long road. I have been dying to reach it. Dreaming of it. Plotting it. Whispering its name to myself like a spell.
And then I arrived.
And immediately panicked.
Because that is the secret no one tells you about getting what you've worked for: sometimes the door opens and your first instinct is to run screaming into the nearest shrubbery.
I thought I would feel powerful. Triumphant. Crowned in golden light.
Instead, I felt terrified.
Can I do this again?
Can I carry another book?
Can I make this one worthy of everything that came before it?
Can I step into this story I have been waiting to tell and not fumble the sacred thing at the threshold?
That fear sat on my chest for a little while. Heavy and rude. Wearing boots.
And then I reached my first Rasheed chapter.
And I remembered.
Oh.
That's why.
That's why I'm here.
That man walked onto the page and I, the alleged author, the supposed authority, the woman in charge of this entire fictional universe, immediately lost all composure.
I swooned. I admit it. I swooned like a maiden on a balcony. Like a daisy craving sunlight. Like a woman who has absolutely no business being this emotionally compromised by a man she literally made up.
But what can I say?
I love him.
I love him so much I can't stand it.
There is something wild and wonderful about the moment a character stops feeling like an idea and starts feeling like a presence. Rasheed is not just a plot point to me. He is grief in white robes. He is restraint and longing. He is a man shaped by duty, sharpened by sorrow, and still somehow capable of tenderness. He carries silence like a crown. He loves like someone who knows the cost of losing.
And maybe that is why writing him feels less like invention and more like discovery.
I think that is one of the strangest parts of being a writer. We create these people, and then they turn around and haunt us. They make demands. They withhold secrets. They say things we didn't plan. They walk into rooms we built for them and somehow know the furniture better than we do.
And sometimes, yes, we fall in love with them.
Not always romantically, though let's be honest, sometimes very romantically. Sometimes we fall in love with their courage. Their wounds. Their impossible tenderness. Their stubbornness. Their terrible decisions. Their capacity to survive what should have ended them.
We fall in love because, in some secret way, they are carrying pieces of us.
Maybe not the obvious pieces. Maybe not the neat, pretty, explainable pieces. But the buried ones. The aching ones. The ones that needed somewhere to live.
Book Three scares me because it matters to me.
It scares me because I know what waits inside it.
It scares me because I have spent so long dreaming toward this door, and now I have to walk through it.
But tonight, after finding Rasheed again on the page, I feel something shift.
The fear is still there.
But so is the hunger.
So is the wonder.
So is the strange, shining madness that makes a writer look at a blank page and think, yes, actually. I will build an entire world here. I will raise cities. I will break hearts. I will resurrect hope from the ashes. I will make people who never existed feel real enough to miss.
Book Two is finished.
Book Three has begun.
And apparently, I am once again in love with a fictional man of my own making.
Which means the story is alive.
And so am I.