August 2025: 35 things i have thought about in the last 35 days of my 35th year

Howdy, everyone,

I hope you're all doing well. We are basically two months out from the release of The Sovereign and Fate's Bane on September 30. If you'd like to give me a birthday present, pre-ordering or bullying your friends and enemies into pre-ordering would be a great one.

An even better one would be donating 35$£€ to one of the Palestinian fundraisers within this Writers against the War in Gaza bulletin.

Before we get into these thoughts upon my aging, reminders:

• Don't forget to sign up for the preorder reward for The Sovereign. It's a bunch of deleted scenes and exercises that didn't make it into the trilogy. At the link, you will also find a list of bookshops that will include signed bookplates for both The Sovereign AND Fate's Bane.
  • I've been sharing a few of these scenes for subscribers, including a Baby Touraine prologue and a scene from Cantic's POV. In a couple weeks, you’ll get your girl Djasha!
• The Raven Bookstore in particular is making limited edition broadsides to go with each Fate's Bane and The Sovereign pre-order. I helped pick out the designs and the quotes, and they're going to be awesome.
• I've got one event officially on the books for this autumn--with Hannah Kaner at Toppings Edinburgh on Nov 4! Tickets are on sale now. We're working on others, and I'll let you know as soon as they're finalized.

35 things i have thought about in the last 35 days of my 35th year

1. I have always wanted to be a good man. No, that's not a typo. I never wanted to be what everyone told me was a good woman. I would say to you, "make what you will of that," but that has been the work of a lifetime.
2. In the x-ray of my right shoulder, between the white and the white of the ball of my humerus and the glenoid cavity of my scapula, there should be the gray of flesh, translucent and distinct. There is not. There is only a mineral scrape and grind.
3. I wanted to do handstands. I wanted to do a dragon flag. I wanted to climb the sheer faces of cliff walls along the river and then jump off of them. So I had surgery in August 2018.
4. My grandmother who is my father's mother had surgery to manage the pain in her spine in 2011. Or maybe it was 2012. I know the range but not the year because I know the woman I was dating, and that relationship lasted about the length of a university academic senior year.
5. In December 2018, I went a on a date with a runner. I started running willingly in January 2019. If I could run up to four miles at one go, I knew I could run with her to breakfast. I could run with her to the coffee shop. I could run with her to her flat. So that I could run with her, I ran alone, up and down Avenue Abderrahim Bouabid in Rabat, Morocco after Arabic class three times a week.
6. The runner I have a crush on taught me about BDS. BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) is a movement to apply pressure against the corporations and institutions that show social or financial support to the Israeli apartheid regime occupying Palestine.
7. On August 11, 2025, I will have my first MRI since I complained to the surgeon in 2018 that "it's just not working right." There appeared to be nothing wrong.
8. Born on August 13, 1975, the spoken word poet Andrea Gibson died on July 14, 2025, four years after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer. In their poem, "Birthday, for Jenn," they wrote, "I could never make dying beautiful," but the day they died, the internet was alive with gratitude, and poem after poem, and their voice on records, and interviews, and films, and all the lives they had inspired.
9. According to Al-Jazeera, on August 2, 2025 at least 72 more Palestinians were killed while seeking food aid, in the famine that has taken hold in Gaza in the wake of two years of bombardments and destroyed infrastructure, and aid denied.
10. In "Birthday, for Jenn," Andrea Gibson also wrote, "We were all born on days when/too many people died in terrible ways,/but you still have to call it a birthday."
11. From September 16 to September 18, 1982, up to 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were killed by an Israeli proxy militia in the Sabra neighborhood of Beirut, near the Shatila refugee camp. They were mostly women, children, and the elderly. The UN pronounced this occasion "an act of genocide."
12. My birthday is August 10.
13. When you pick up refrigerated food in the grocery store and put it in an unrefrigerated aisle because you don't want it anymore, it has to get thrown out. The risk of food poisoning is too high.
14. Some days, running is the only thing that makes me leave the house.
15. Some days, running is the only way I say hello to my neighbors.
16. I started running willingly because I had surgery on my shoulder.
17. As per the StrongFirst kettlebell community guidelines, to become an Iron Maiden, a woman must be able to perform a single-arm press with a 24kg kettlebell; perform a single-leg or pistol squat while holding a 24kg kettlebell; and perform a pull-up while loaded with a 24kg kettlebell. It is the "women's version" of the Beast Tamer challenge, which is performed with a 48kg kettlebell. Each exercise requires an enormous amount of strength, stability, and mobility in the shoulder joint.
18. In 2024, a runner and I bought a place together in a borough called Haringey. At 25% of its surface area, Haringey has the most green space among all the London boroughs. This includes Finsbury Park and Ally Pally and Lordship Recreation Grounds, which have 5k parkruns at 9 am every Saturday morning and Christmas and New Years.
19. Running is the only way I know what it feels like to touch the wind with my skin. To confuse my own sweat for sweet rain.
20. I ran with my shirt off for the first time in public. I twisted the moisture from the patented moisture-wicking fabric until the moisture puddled moistly at my feet. The wind wicked the moisture from my skin, instead.
21. One of my first spoken word poems I ever wrote had a really sterling and unique title, like boy-girl or birl-goy or gorly-biy. I never performed it.
22. "Experience is the overcoming of perils." Yi-Fu Tuan, geographer. He reminds us to see also: Experiment. Expert. Perilous.
23. In 2011, when Andrea Gibson was 35, they wrote the words "PLAY LOUD" for me on a torn-loose piece of wide-ruled notebook paper, the permanent black marker bleeding over the blue veins.

24. In 2010, my undergraduate capstone class was on the literature of social justice. I wrote my final paper on the spoken word poetry of Andrea Gibson, analyzing the poems "Blue Blanket," "When the Bough Breaks," and "Say Yes."
25. Sabra Hummus is owned by an Israeli company that funds the Israeli Occupation Force, more widely known as the "IDF."
26. Fewer than 1% of people regret gender affirming surgery. Other surgeries, like knee replacement, clock in at 30%.
27. In the latest picture of me and my grandmother, taken in July 2025, I am wheeling her in a wheel chair down the hallway of her nursing home the day before I leave the country again.

28. I have three scars on my right shoulder: three narrow slits, triangulated, piercing neatly through an arrowhead and a river of wheat.
29. In an interview before they died, Andrea Gibson acknowledges that they probably would not have gotten ovarian cancer if they had physically transitioned.
30. If I don't have to wear a sports bra when I run, will I need to use tape so my expensive nipples don't chafe?
31. I scored 9/9 in the hypermobility exam the shoulder doctor gave me. Thumbs kissing wrists. Pinkies cocked in backward salutes. Knees and elbows bowing recurve and snap. Palms flat against the cold tile. He tells me that hyper-mobile people often view "average" mobility as restriction.
32. Today, I ran 15 miles. The longest I have ever run. 25 kilometers. 25,000 meters. That will change, inshallah. Within a matter of weeks.
33. At the end of my runs, my shoulder is stiff and swollen. I heat it in the shower, that blessed little Anodyne.
34. Yesterday, my aunt sent a picture of my grandmother cruising down the hallway of her nursing home in an electric wheel chair.
35. In October 2024, I ran a night race through dark woods surrounding a ruined castle. A line of us, bobbing headlights glowing like deer's eyes in the dark, calling out the perils underfoot, so that a stranger might be forewarned. Root. Step. Over here. Mud. Step. This way. Mud. Root. We are almost there.

Stay sharp, my friends.