Danai's Dispatch: June 2026, Pride is a promise

Welcome to Danai's Dispatch, where I pop into your inbox once a month whenever something exciting happens, bearing gifts: VILE LADY VILLAINS updates, writing resources, short story and book roundups, and exclusive giveaways! Thank you for reading. If you haven’t subscribed already, please consider signing up below.

This June is different

Greetings, fellow villain. I’m writing to you during the longest day of the year, where the Sun lingers until midnight and the grass holds heat you can feel if you walk barefoot (I do, at least until September). I’ve always struggled with the sun and its rays, especially during the first 33 years of my life that I spent in Greece, but I’ve learned to appreciate it more in the Swedish forest where it stays for such a limited visit you learn to be grateful for every single second of it. There’s something in this relentless light, in the way Nature buzzes and blooms and ripens and almost bursts from it that I’ve always found just as eerie as the winter nights that inspire most horror settings traditionally. Sun-drenched islands can be just as scary as gothic castles, if you know where to look.

I may be writing a book about that. Or to be more accurate: I may be procrastinating from writing a book about that by sending you this newsletter. But I couldn’t not to.

See, this is the first June of my life that I have a book out during Pride. A very queer book, that pulls no punches about its queerness and its sapphic-ness. A book that’s imperfect, for sure, but that’s given me great joy and freedom to write and I hope a bit of that joy and freedom trickles toward you when you read it. (It might appear like a silk ribbon, hungry for a new story. It might wrap itself around your wrist. Let it.)

I wish I could go back in time, to Danai going on their first Pride Parade as an “ally”, wondering why they felt more at home than anywhere else.

“I know why,” I would whisper, then give them a copy of Vile Lady Villains.

One of the wildest experiences of having my book out during Pride, is being tagged into posts, by bookstores or readers, in so many parts of the world. Seeing my book included in stacks of sapphic books among the books of authors I adore.

My experience with debuting, as I think I’ve told you before, has been weird and in many ways atypical. My physical distance from the places where my book can be found is like seeing events unfold through water, or a pane of colored glass. Dreamlike, distant. Often disappointing. People I thought would be by my side in this experience, supporting me, cheering me on, are not. Yet people I’ve never met, in places I’ve never been and bookstores I’ve never entered, are showing up, sending pictures, choosing my book to stock on their tables, their shelves, even their shop windows! (I’ve seen that twice now, once in Prismatic Pages in Oslo and once in the UK, and both times I thought I was hallucinating. Thank you to the friends who sent me those pictures.) I’m in awe.

There’s a lot of conversation lately about book preorders, book sales, and how all this affects an author’s future. Things are bleak for so many of us. Personally my book sales are much better in the UK than they are in the US, for several reasons I won’t get into. But I still hope that as more and more people discover Vile Lady Villains and talk about it, it can keep selling and finding its audience in different territories. There is also the Greek edition to still look forward to: it was supposed to come out this month, but had to be delayed, possibly for September. And something else, something extremely cool and exclusive is happening in September, that I can’t wait to share with all of you!

I hope you’ll take a chance on VLV if you haven’t already. And if you spot it in the wild, please snap a picture. Let me know. It matters more than you can imagine.

Read queer books all year long

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of queer books to read in June — and all year long. Most of them are from my 2026 debuts cohort, such a talented bunch!

Thank you for summer solstice-ing with me

When shall we two meet again, in thunder, lightning or in rain? Perhaps, in the next instalment of this dispatch. So I hope you’ll subscribe, if you haven't already! And maybe help my ravens spread the word by sharing it on your social media?

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