Songbird Elegies: Frequently Asked Questions
Q. What is Songbird Elegies About?
A. Songbird Elegies is a massive urban fantasy series where magic is complicated, and yet fairly normalized and rather mundane. To some it is an occasional comorbidity with disability. For others, it is a brute-force status symbol. The narrative focus is less on the magic itself and more on the people surrounding it. The comparisons of cultures and the overlapping of histories. The amount people say they know about how we go there, versus the amount that people actually know.
Q. What is Songbird Elegies About?
A. Two people are born under extraordinary circumstances that should've caused them to lose their fledgling identities in favor of forming one collective existence. Outside forces stepped in and kept this from happening. Two halves of one whole were forced to adapt and each become their own person. And despite the existential horror of what could've been, one half-made-whole refused to allow his first best friend to be lost to the Void forever.
Q. What is Songbird Elegies About?
A. Magic is a place, and it is alive, and it hates you.
Q. What is Songbird Elegies About?
A. It's a love story. Not just romantic, but platonic. Familial. Personal. Spiritual. Conceptual. It is a love story.
Q. What is Songbird Elegies About?
A. Sometimes you end up as a grown adult, with all the things you've been told a grown adult is supposed to have. And yet you're still terrified and confused all the time. The world is so unfathomably big and confusing that if you think about it too hard it actually makes far less since than the concept of a disability-based magic system.
Q. What is Songbird Elegies About?
A. Sometimes you act with zero thought or plan, fueled mostly by desperation and thinly-veiled panic, and you call it "helping". It's technically a lie, but it's the kind of lie that's needed to keep from crumbling entirely.
Q. What is Songbird Elegies About?
A. Magic is alive, and it's afraid of you.
Q. What is Songbird Elegies About?
A. Magic is alive, and it just wants you to love it.
Q. What is Songbird Elegies About?
A. Magic is dying, and it's our fault.
What is Songbird Elegies About?
Turns out the worst thing that's ever happened to you never actually goes away. And it's rough now - it might get rougher later on, too. But it'll be all right at the end. I promise.
Book One: Blind Trust (Published June 2024, Currently in Reformatting)
Edgar Gallows left his old life at the Shreveport Academy, abandoning his heavily-structured upbringing and hiding out in New Orleans. Years later, he's scraped together a new existence for himself, staying guarded and distanced enough for no one to notice how badly he struggles. His one goal was to avoid magic of any kind - be it the threat of Academic witchcraft, or the inexplicably painful enigma of birthrights.
But when Edgar stumbles upon an exhausted man hiding in the walk-in pantry of a New Orleans bar and grill, he feels a long-stifled part of himself suddenly spring to life. Scott Skylark Kaufner stirs a startling familiarity in him, and Edgar is surprised by his willingness to leap into an entirely new kind of romance.
The odd meet cute doesn't last long. And once Edgar learns the full extent of what drove Scott to wander the country alone for years with little actual direction, he makes an uncharacteristically bold maneuver in the hopes of buying them both a little more time. And once he does, the two begin unraveling the tangled knots of things they made themselves forget, and the gaps in their timelines cleaved by outside forces.
Book Two: Migration Patterns
Scott Skylark Kaufner returns to his hometown of Bluerose, Oregon for the first time after three years. He comes with the success of completing what he set out to do - a goal objectively impossible, but he's trying not to think about that. His time in New Orleans has brought him back to reality, but the cost of losing self-control now is higher than it's ever been before.
It's hard to stay calm, though, when coming back to a home Scott barely remembers. It's even harder to see that the years have left him in a state of physical sickness stark enough for even many birthrights to avoid facing directly. And while focusing on the medicinal ritual that could bring him and Edgar closer to answers, it's easy to observe the tides changing for Scott and the people he loves the most.
To know what that actually means, however - to sit and feel the shifting of the poison that's haunted him for so much of his life - is another thing entirely. Continuing, recovering, making amends and plans for the future is all Scott knows matters now. And yet the things that have changed can't go back. And the parts of himself that are still as visceral as ever might only be waiting for the right time to tear his reality down at the foundation.
Coming Out Fall 2025 (Hopefully)
Book Three: The Smallest Infinity: Summer in Bluerose
A collection of three novellas taking place between the events of Migration Patterns and Free Solo. Better synopsis and actual cover to come.
Book Four: Free Solo
Full synopsis to be announced.
(You have lost your nature. You are losing your foundation. ESCAPE SYMBIOSIS.)
Book Five: Resting Place
Full synopsis to be announced.
(i'm sorry tenzin i'm sorry tenzin i'm sorry tenzin i'm sorry tenzin i'm)
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