My most recent novel (formerly known as The Cuttlefish, current working title Flight of the Sunsparrow) is soon to be out on submission. That book—epic fantasy with heavy themes and a gothic feel—pretty much took the sauce out of me for three years. I began writing it in response to what I thought was the world on fire: What is the responsibility of the individual? What to sacrifice? What to hold close? What I've learned in the past year is that my concerns at the time were only the long smolderings of something about to truly catch flame.

While I settle in for the long wait on that first fantasy book and whether or not we're going to survive this timeline, I'm distracting myself with something new: a cozy romantasy to calm my frayed nerves. Every morning, I open my laptop to a choice—my draft of The Confluence (current word count: 8,000 chaotic words and an outline written in chalk) or the news. One features magical mishaps in an enchanted Midwest bookstore, while the other features the deliberate self-immolation of my country's social and democratic norms.

The cognitive dissonance is real.

But here's what I've learned after years fiction writing for a few hours every day. It's not just escape. It's a shamanic descent into the mystical cave where the healing waters can be collected for the good of the tribe. Those of us who hold the world in dead seriousness simply need a break from time to time—the experience of another life, another's navigation of a separate world on fire, to help us traverse our own.

In The Confluence, my main character is Iris, an out-of-work Seattle web designer, who must deal with the tenants and magical goings on in a converted granary inherited from a missing, presumed great aunt. In WISCONSIN. (And yes, as a PNW transplant to the Midwest, I am drawing heavily on personal experience.) Is this going to solve climate change or bring ethics back to the Supreme Court? No. But when my activist friend stopped by, completely frazzed about the state of the world, I read her a few pages. She laughed. Then she slept.

Imagining a softer world is not nothing.

Writing a cozy romantasy/mystery smash up is its own act of resistance. While it's certainly not my only political act, I can assure you that imagining a softer world and better future requires an act of will just as strong as carrying a sign in the local protests.

Moving from the Pacific Northwest to Wisconsin six years ago has been an education: assumptions about others, community, the value of "Midwest nice," the importance of grace in human interactions. What do I value, and why? I'm hoping to bring some of these lessons to bear for Iris, when her life goes off the rails.

I'm not saying my romantasy novel about a woman in a magical bookstore is going to save the world. But I am saying that writing about people falling in love while solving mysteries with magic is my way of saying that joy still matters. That sometimes the revolution looks like Friday Fish Fry with good friends.

So yes, I'm writing cozy romantasy while the world burns. My characters are dealing with cursed plumbing, capricious mirrors, and books that won't stay sorted, not with the Apocalypse. And if you need me, I'll be here, carrying my signs, calling my representatives, but also writing about magical mishaps and romance, and keeping the doom scrolling to a strict time limit.

Because someone has to imagine the soft futures. Might as well be me.

What's your favorite escapist fantasy that still somehow makes you feel more equipped to deal with reality? Drop your recs below!