#also like . illness and disability are not mutually exclusive? several disabilities are or involve chronic illness

[mars-ipan]

i do love my family very dearly but the internalized ableism the men in here struggle with is. so much

[goodluckclove]

Okay Clove. I've seen a lot of little snippets from Blind Trust and I rock with your writing style a ton. But what's the book actually about?? Something with magic in a contemporary setting ? Hot dogs are somehow involved ??

Geets, it's me, the person who never learned how to properly pitch their own writing! I'll give it a shot anyway. I have a pinned post on my blog that has the fancy synopsis I'll probably put on the back of the book, but I'm fresh from a nap and on my phone and Feeling Frisky so I'll try and take it a different way.

What is Blind Trust about?

Blind Trust is book one of the Songbird Elegies, and it takes place in a contemporary world where magic exists but isn't great. It's not bad in a cool, The Witcher sort of way. Most people only know about magic through The Academy, where anyone can enlist and learn how to tap into the source of magic itself. Which sounds cool until you consider the physical strain of even a minor spell, the fact that major spells can take massive amounts for studying and practice and still aren't that powerful, and how carrying a wand on your person at all times is not easy to do without looking and feeling like a dipshit. Essentially, the average Academic Witch is like an arrogant MFA student or so someone really into craft beer.

But then there is a certain, little-studied medical anomaly that creates birthrights, which are individuals born already tapped into the source of magic by design. They each have a single ability that they can do without a wand (or wand-shaped proxy), but it's nothing innately combative and is mainly used to help interact with society at large. This is because the Birthright Gene is seen exclusively in individuals who are either born with a severe hereditary, genetic, or developmental disability, or will develop one over the course of their life but I'm not supposed to talk about that yet.

Birthrights are often found in a few scattered witch towns, where they use their abilities to focus on social work and community outreach. People also call them genetic witches, but you'd be hard-pressed to get a birthright to call themselves a witch at all. They don't value magic at all in the same way Academics do, and primarily see their "gift" as a chronic illness to manage and accommodate for.

Birthrights and Academics have varying relationships depending on where you are and who you ask but I can't really get into that because in Blind Trust no one knows anything so you don't get to either.

Well, that's not true. There's a mutual understanding of the concept of soul bonds, which are lifelong connections formed between individuals born in the source of magic - though how much people actually retained about this varies. A soul bond is not unlike a karass in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, in that the people involved are cosmically entangled with each other in a very profound way.

They might be born to be companions, family, enemies, or lovers. The last possibility, called a Lover's Knot, is the rarest and is reserved as a way to contain birthrights who would otherwise be capable of reality-shattering degrees of power. Which nobody wants. Especially not a birthright.

Meet Edgar Gallows and Scott Skylark Kaufner. Scott is a birthright from a witch town and Edgar was born into an Academy in Louisiana, despite also being birthright.

At the start of Blind Trust Edgar has escaped his Academy for the time being and has established a ramshackle and pretty lonely life for himself in New Orleans. He never wants to touch a wand for the rest of his life, and his only hope is to be boring and safe and left alone forever.

Meanwhile, Scott has been having a real rough time. He's been wandering the country nonstop for years with an unfathomable cosmic horror feeding on his sanity and gradually eroding reality around him. Birthrights don't use their abilities often, but for some reason Scott can't turn his off, and they've been warped to the degree where he's been forced to manipulate everyone around him. He can't stop, though. The only thing that can make this stop is if he finds the other half of his Lover's Knot, who he now only remembers as a ghostly vision named Eddie.

Scott and Edgar meet in a dirty walk-in of a mid-tier, overpriced bar and restaurant. Stuff changes and continues to change. Magic is involved but it's not really about the magic.

It's asexual and romantic and soft and confused and frightening and frightened and tender and in book two Edgar eats a hot dog for four pages. It's a great book about love and devotion that's sensual but not at all sexual, because the Clove Gardener Pledge is that there is no sex depicted at any point in the series. It's a great series if you're coping with parental neglect and trauma and want to read a depiction of self-love through an unconventional romantic pairing.

Blind Trust. Buy it in June in paperback or ebook, or just ask me for it and I'll probably give it to you.