Dear Reader,
I write to you from the very near past, where I am reading headlines about an authoritarian regime trying to rewrite our national history in order to justify its current atrocities. I hope you enjoy my new fantasy book, which is about an authoritarian regime trying to rewrite national history in order to justify its current atrocities (unrelated).
Which is a pretty grim intro for a book with dragons and time travel and kissing in it. Sorry! I used to think of fantasy as an intrinsically escapist genre, and this is in some ways the most classically fantasy book I’ve ever written—there’s a map in the front, for god’s sake!—but writing it didn’t feel very much like an escape. It felt like work, mostly (which all art should, if you’re doing it right).
But it also, sometimes, briefly, felt like hope.
Time travel is an inherently hopeful device, I think. It’s a promise that wrongs can be righted, that nothing is permanent. That the future isn’t set in stone. Maybe that’s why so many time travel books are also romances—every romance is also fundamentally, almost deliriously, hopeful. How else could you promise a happily ever after, in such a brutal world?
Thank you for reading The Everlasting, and for hoping along with me—
Alix
