The Consoling Divide – Serialised

After I wrote The Audacity Gambit I started writing a sequel. I started it in 2016 and finished the first draft, after stops and starts, in 2021. Somewhere along the way of editing, I realised it works as well on its own. It doesn’t matter what happened before, the manufactured chosen one, the mess, the magic. What matters is what has to happen next.

The cover for The Consoling Divide. Shadowy layered trees circle the edges, and a light brown arm holding a sword thrusts up from the bottom of the image, slicing the word "Divide" in half.

Here’s the blurb:

Five years ago, Emily Anderson of Royal Oak Court Trailer Park was declared the Chosen One and sent on a quest to the Sidhe realm to end the exile of the adults who raised her. She succeeded, because that’s what Chosen Ones do, but the aftermath left her alone and in charge of the rest of the children in the trailer court.

Since her return, they’ve all found a kind of peace and stability, but nothing can stay the same forever. When Emily learns she has to plunge back into the fairy world she gladly left and reopen emotions she’d even more gladly bottled up, her reluctance is met by the one thing she knows is true: she can only rely on herself. One of the children Emily raised needs her, but first she needs to find them. The world she’s returning to is a different one than what she experienced as a hopeful teen, and even when it is familiar her place in it is no longer as clearly defined, the path not so easily followed.

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Have some comps

The story combines elements of portal fantasy with the particular kind of sanguine existential outlook found in books like Mickey7 and California Bones. It’s a fit for the jumbled bookshelves and bedstands of people who stack up copies of The Twisted Ones, Not So Stories, Get In Trouble, and their battered old editions of Tamora Pierce’s Circle of Magic series.

Some story tags for you

Portal fantasy, canon lesbian relationship, past trauma, swords, fae and fairies, monsters.

And some content warnings

Genre-typical violence, smoking, death, abandonment, light horror elements including body horror.

The archive will auto-fill below as the chapters post at 11am PST every Sunday, beginning on June 21, 2026. There will be 45 parts and it will end April 25, 2027. Each section is between 900 and 2,000 words long.