My next novel is out in July 2025, and you can download a preview here!
New Novel: The Turning
Arilin Thorferra
So, a few years ago I started one of my little vignette series, which I’d dubbed “Grumpy Bunny,” which was just what it said on the tin—an over-powered, irascible bunny woman who tended to react to annoyances in wildly extreme ways. Eating rude people at bars, stomping cars that parked in handicapped spaces without a permit, that sort of thing.
But the strangest thing happened: see, in the first vignette, someone asked the bunny, “What are you?” after she terrorized a couple idiots, and she answered, “I’m a retired goddess.” It was meant as a throwaway line, but it stuck with me. And a couple vignettes in, it was as if she’d basically sat me down and said, “Okay, look. I have a real story to tell.”
That real story became a Patreon serial named after the main character, Moira. Then, after a rewrite that involved beta readers, a residential writing workshop, and even some input from a Nebula-winning author unaware of what ill use her advice is being put to, we have a novel.
This is my third published novel after Saida & Autumn and Goddess. (Okay, technically Goddess is a novella, shut up.) Like the others, it’s being released by FurPlanet Productions, and it’s going to premiere in print at Anthrocon 2025.
“I’m not a rabbit. I’m a hare. Hares are bigger.”
Moira, the goddess of love and war, has lived as a drifter in mortal lands for a thousand years, exiled for a failed rebellion, then abandoned by her own kind. The hare’s power remains, but her purpose is lost…until she accidentally creates a new goddess. And then another.
The ensuing chaos is the most fun she’s had in centuries—until she attracts the attention of the secretive Celestial Capital, corporate gods working to impose an ever more restrictive “natural order” on global society. The more Moira’s new queer pantheon learns about Celestial’s true goals and the lengths the corporation will go to, the more their purpose becomes clear. Taking down Celestial, though, might just bring about the end of the world.
But maybe the world could use a little apocalypse.
A reader in my writing group said that they “appreciated a lot of the anger [they] felt in it,” a comment that I admit tickled me, but I also think there’s a lot of action, romance, and even humor here. And, yes, me being me, there are elements of giants and predators/prey woven throughout—but this isn’t a story just for macrophiles. If you like modern fantasy with queer antifascist politics, you’re probably going to like this. I can’t wait for you to meet (or revisit) the characters—not just the short-tempered hare, Moira, but Diana the sheep, Hazel the pika and her roommate Rhiannon the squirrel, the coyote Stetson, and more. (I love a couple of the villains, too!)
And, there’s a free preview of the first five chapters available for downloading!
When the book’s available for purchase, I’ll include links here (and, of course, on the books page).