What I'm Reading When I Need to Remember Why I Write

There's a specific kind of day every world-builder knows. The page goes flat. The galaxy you're building stops feeling vast and starts feeling like a spreadsheet. On those days, I don't push through. I read — specifically, I read the books that remind me what this genre is capable of when it's working at full power.

Here's what's been doing that work for me lately.

1.  Black Sun — Rebecca Roanhorse

Indigenous-inspired epic fantasy with prophecy, political intrigue, and a sun god's vengeance running through every page. Roanhorse builds a world that feels ancient and entirely her own at once — exactly the kind of ownership I'm chasing.

2.  The Spear Cuts Through Water — Simon Jimenez

Structurally fearless — myth told like a bedtime story, grief and rebellion braided through prose that refuses to sit still. This is the book I reread when I forget that form itself can be an act of world-building.

3. A Psalm for the Wild-Built — Becky Chambers

A cozy sci-fi novella about a monk and a robot wandering a gentle, healed world, asking the only question that matters: what do you need? It reminds me that scale isn't the only way to make a story feel vast. Sometimes stillness does it.

4.  Legendborn — Tracy Deonn

Arthurian myth rebuilt around a grieving Black teenage girl and the found family she didn't ask for. This is the book that reminds me grief and magic are allowed to share the same page without canceling each other out.

5.  A Master of Djinn — P. Djèlí Clark

Alt-history Cairo, steam and magic tangled together, a mystery with real teeth. Clark builds a world so specific you can hear it — that specificity is the whole craft, and I study it every time I reread this one.

These are the books I return to when the work feels too big to hold. They remind me that the genre I'm building toward — vast, BIPOC-centered, unapologetically epic — already has a lineage. I'm not starting from nothing. I'm adding a room to a house that's already standing.

My first book arrives June 2027. Until then, you can find me building this world in real time — and if you want to be the first to know when that book launches, The Stardust Frequency sign-up is always open.

~ Indigo