Let’s get the ball rolling.
Welcome to This Pigeon Isn’t Giving Up! Today’s update is a kickoff, so I’ll lead with an introduction. My name is Emily Skrutskie, and I’ve been a professional speculative fiction author for the past decade. My works are as follows:
The Abyss Surrounds Us (2016): A YA sci-fi novel about a girl who raises sea monsters to fight pirates—until the day she’s kidnapped by pirates and forced to rear a monster that will turn the tables on the Pacific of the future
The Edge of The Abyss (2017): Sequel to the above
Hullmetal Girls (2018): A YA sci-fi novel about two girls from opposite ends of a generation fleet who give up their bodies to become augmented cyborg warriors and become embroiled in a conspiracy to keep the fleet from its ultimate destination
Bonds of Brass (2020): A sci-fi novel about a young man who’s forced to go on the run when he discovers his best friend and roommate is the heir to a brutal galactic empire
Oaths of Legacy (2021): Sequel to the above
Vows of Empire (2022): Sequel to the above
The Salvation Gambit (2023): A sci-fi novel about a team of con artists that must figure out their greatest escape when they’re caught on a job and sentenced to a rogue warship whose diabolical AI has turned it into a prison colony
A Legionnaire’s Guide to Love and Peace (2025): A romantic fantasy novel about two soldiers who hook up on the eve of a battle that they expect will kill them—then reckon with the consequences when a plucky band of heroes comes out of nowhere and saves the world the next day.
Ten years and eight books is a lot to keep up with, and if you’ve read even one of them, I’m eternally in your debt.
A bit more about me: While moonlighting in strange new worlds, I spend my daylight hours working as a software engineer in the VFX world on projects ranging from commercials to theme park attractions to a couple movies you might have heard of.
this guy but blue and nine feet tall
Any free time I have remaining is spent scrambling up and down plastic rocks, giggling over anime, scheming in Obsidian, and enjoying my tax dollars at work aboard the Los Angeles Metro.
I’ve been thinking about creating a newsletter for a while. I’ve got ten years of experience as a professional creative under my belt, and surely that means I have a few valuable insights in me between the occasional updates on new projects that may or may not be coming down the pipe. I was trying to articulate what, exactly, that value is when I remembered this image that lodged in my brain ten years ago:
everyone say thank you netflix daredevil fandom
That picture is what ten years in publishing as a mid-list (and let’s be real, “mid” is generous) author is like. And that tenacity is why I’ve got eight books under my belt and no intention of stopping. I’ve been through the wringer, from publishing in a notoriously under-appreciated genre to having a publisher collapse underneath me mid-series to releasing a book on April 7th, 2020. I don’t have anything under contract at the moment, and with the current trends in publishing, it’s going to be a hard fight to change that.
But this pigeon isn’t giving up. And I’m really excited to share this journey with you. In this newsletter, I’ll be sharing everything from notes on my creative process to updates on my work to what I’m enjoying at the moment. Mailings will be infrequent, but I hope they’ll be high-value.
More soon!
Emily