Today on the site I’m delighted to welcome H.L. Moore to walk us through her Colorful Catalog!

Hi! I’m H. L. Moore, a writer of science fiction and fantasy stories for about as long as I can remember, and my stories just get queerer and queerer by the year. I tend to write in two flavours – deeply serious fantasy, and dark comedy science-fiction, and always with a queer angle. Without further ado, I would be thrilled to introduce you to my works…

Heart of Dust & Soul of Ash (Books #1 and #2 of the Death’s Embrace series, slow burn m/m fantasy)

Okay, so I might be cheating a little by grouping these two books together, but they are essentially two halves of the same whole! Death’s Embrace is a queer fantasy romance series following Doran Ó Seanáin, leader of the Black Lung Gang, is almost at a breaking point in his ongoing conflict with the city’s tyrannical ruler. Just when things are getting out of control, Doran crosses paths with Nathaniel Morgenstern, an apotheker with a mysterious past. As their relationship develops against the backdrop of the ongoing social turmoil, the secrets Nathaniel is keeping might threaten to destroy them all.

I wrote Heart of Dust (2018) and Soul of Ash (2020) back-to-back, starting from a desire I had to experience a slow-burn, devastatingly tense and fraught m/m romance. But nothing I was reading at the time was managing to scratch that itch, so I thought – why not write it myself? And so began the slowest of slow burn romances between Doran and Nathaniel, which continues in…

Throne of Lies (Book #3 of the Death’s Embrace series, established m/m that becomes slow burn m/m/f)

It took me four years to write this book. I did write a few novellas in the interim years, so I wasn’t idle! But getting the story right between 2020 and 2024 took a pandemic, a baby, and the complete and utter deletion of my first draft. 40,000 words – GONE! I started writing Throne of Lies from scratch, and in doing so, I ended up shifting the POVs quite a lot. Doran and Nathaniel are still front and centre, but the bulk of the story is told from the perspective of Doran’s daughter, Grace, who has been the Dowager Archon of Arajon for a year following the death of her husband on her wedding night. While Doran’s and Nathaniel’s relationship with Doran’s best friend, Tsa Lien, deepens (that’s right – this series took a surprise M/M/F turn!), Grace is dealing with a scheming upper class who are trying to remove her from her throne, and she’s running out of people to trust.

I truly couldn’t be prouder of this novel. I poured a lot of myself into Grace, more than I realised I would when I first conceived of the series – almost as much as I saw myself in Doran, Nathaniel and Lien.

Valley of Secrets (Book #4 of the Death’s Embrace series, wlw relationship between a he/him butch lesbian and a she/her femme lesbian)

Valley of Secrets picks up immediately where Throne of Lies ends – seconds after THAT ending (those who have read the book know exactly what I mean!). Grace is fleeing for her life, and the only person she can trust is the person she hates most in the world, the former assassin Nathaniel Morgenstern. Nathaniel, meanwhile, is reeling from the events at the end of Throne of Lies, and throws himself into protecting the daughter of the man he loved, even if it costs him everything. Grace’s only hope to reclaim her throne is to travel to the valley of Arajon and seek aid from the High Druid, Eamon Tadhg.

I first named the High Druid of Arajon back in Soul of Ash, but otherwise didn’t develop him at all. Upon finally getting to the drafting of Valley of Secrets, I realised that Eamon, despite having already been assigned he/him pronouns in the text in previous novels, was not actually a man; rather, Eamon is a he/him lesbian! Upon writing Grace’s meeting with Eamon, in some ways I was able to relive my own lesbian awakening, in a way I wish I’d been able to read when I was younger and craving representation.

This was my far my favourite book of the Death’s Embrace series to write… so far. Valley of Secrets is due for release on 16 January 2025!

The Courier (A Tale from the Jovian Empire, nonbinary novella)

In between the long wait between Soul of Ash and Throne of Lies, I turned my attention towards my sci-fi novella series, Tales from the Jovian Empire. Set in a hilariously awful capitalist dystopia where Jupiter’s moons were colonised, this particular novella follows a day in the life of Chen, a smuggler – sorry, a courier – who has been contracted to collect a package and deliver it to the heart of the Jovian Empire within two days’ time, no questions asked. But the job, of course, turns out to be anything but simple!

Originally in drafting this novella, I conceived of Chen as “Charlotte” Chen, but upon writing, I realised that Chen wasn’t a woman. Chen wasn’t a man, either! Chen was nonbinary. And thus began one of the hardest self-set challenges of my life: to write a 10,000 word novella in which I never identify the character by gender – and I couldn’t “cheat” with a first person POV either! Oh, the sentences I had to twist to avoid using pronouns! The ways of writing I never realised I was capable of! In many ways, this was a gift to a best friend of mine, who had come out to me as nonbinary a year or so earlier, and I’m delighted to say that disaster enby Chen is, to this day, one of their favourite characters.

Ship of Fools (A Tale from the Jovian Empire, gay and transfem rep)

This was another novella I wrote before I was able to complete Throne of Lies. Another story set in the comedically hellish capitalist dystopia of the Jovian Empire, this story follows Special Agent Evelyn Carlisle of the Jovian Bureau of Investigations. Evelyn is determined to bring down corrupt corporation Qanta Corp Mining, and the crucial piece of information she needs is with the crew of the Galilean Moons Forensic Cleaning Company… if only she can get the stubborn crew members to talk!

This novella was conceived of as a space-horror-comedy, inspired by classics in the space horror genre such as Event Horizon and Dead Space, but with a comedic twist. The ridiculous Urhines Jones is the leader of the Galilean Moons Forensic Cleaning Company (the Number #1 forensic cleaning company in the Jovian Empire!). I decided early on that he was gay, divorced, and terribly stupid. Also on the crew is the darkly compelling, highly intelligent, tight-lipped Amanda Grey, a trans woman who was a political activist when she was a younger person. But the real focus of the story is on the mystery of the Ploutos, a mining vessel that vanished without a trace twelve years prior.

I had a blast writing Ship of Fools, not just because of the colourful cast but because it touches on so many incidental worldbuilding aspects of the comically awful Jovian Empire which we’ll get to see closer-up in future instalments of the Tales.

And that’s it from me! Next on my writing schedule is a short story focusing on Grace and Eamon from Death’s Embrace, another Tale from the Jovian Empire, Book 5 of Death’s Embrace… and a secret sci-fi project with lesbians. Lots and lots of lesbians. But I’ll save that post for another day

H. L. Moore is a writer of queer speculative fiction. She is the author of the Death’s Embrace queer fantasy series and the Tales from the Jovian Empire queer sci-fi novella series.