Improbable Press Blog

By Kaitee Yaeko Tredway Seeing Jessie Mei Li as Alina Starkov in the Netflix adaptation of Shadow & Bone was hugely important to me. I had never seen a biracial (and Asian!) main character in mainstream fantasy before. In the wake of the show, there was a lot of backlash against the microaggressions Alina experiences and the level of racism portrayed, especially among the bookstagram community. This essay was born from my need to say something, to advocate for this kind of representation. When the teaser for S&B dropped and I saw Jessie Mei Li for the first time, all...

Seeing young, twenty-something white men dressed in army fatigues and carrying a duffle bag isn’t a rarity of itself, but there’s something about this one that stands out. Not only is he broad in the shoulders with thighs that fill out those camo trousers perfectly, but he has the gentlest eyes of anyone Huan has ever seen. He’s in love. Never shy about making the first move, Huan walks right up to him on the bus and says, “Is this seat taken?” He tries to be flirty with it, but on a scale of one to ten, where one is...

By Ali Coyle I love to meet nonbinary characters in fiction. I love nonbinary protagonists, nonbinary antagonists, and nonbinary side characters hanging around in the background, waiting for their fleeting chance to exist and prod the plot along while the main characters catch a break. What I love even more is nonbinary characters who are sensitively written. But what does that mean to me? Below are my three favourite things about well-written, fictional, nonbinary characters. Disclaimer: this is my personal view as a nonbinary human and you are free to agree or disagree to whatever extent is comfortable for you....

By Cheryl Sonnier I didn’t know I had breast cancer when I wrote Investigating the Sea-Hag Menace, in April this year. I didn’t have the routine mammogram until mid-June, a month and a half after Improbable Press accepted the story for Dark Cheer: Cryptids Emerging (Volume Blue). A couple of weeks after that, I was called back for more tests, and on 2nd August I had a mastectomy on my right side. I know, however, that people who know about the breast cancer, when they read the story, they are going to think the line below from the story’s narrator...

By Julie Ann Rees Are there fairies at the bottom of your garden, or something a little…darker? I've always rescued things. I say things because they could be anything, animal, bird, insect, plant. Like having to put two peas into the food waste bin as a child if I'd dropped one to the floor, because then they could go on an adventure together, whereas one would just be lonely. Now our climate is changing it breaks my heart that all these things are suffering and the little bit I'm doing to help isn't enough on a global scale. It's not...