August 13, 2023: New administrative update on this sequel! As many of you are aware, I've been working towards posting Rocks Can Dance since I wrapped up White Crystal Butterflies in early 2021. It's been a hot minute. But I finally have a few announcements to make on that front, and a concrete posting timeline.
The first thing I need to say is that I've decided to post Rocks Can Dance as a Patreon exclusive rather than bringing it to Wattpad. Why? There are a few reasons, but one of my top considerations is Wattpad's recent steps towards dabbling with AI. As things stand, I have no way of directly protecting my work from this except paywalling it, which I have no desire to do on Wattpad. I'm not pulling down my current Wattpad books (yet), but I'm taking precautions with future ones, and this is one of them.
Another consideration is the way my current exclusivity contract with Wattpad works. I can't post this book anywhere off Wattpad until July 2024, but if I post it on Wattpad in that time, they get certain rights to it that I don't want to be locked down for. So I'm waiting out my contract anyway, which means I might as well switch platforms while I'm at it.
The end result is that Rocks Can Dance will be launching on my Patreon on August 2nd, 2024. That's another year out, I know. But it'll give me time to finish and polish the book, whose momentum has suffered from my being in grad school until last December, then working two jobs since then. I've dropped my Patreon link in the comments, if you're interested in subscribing early!
Thanks for your understanding, and for bearing with me on this. My writing journey is a long one, and hasn't always left space for all the things I'd like to be working on. And sometimes WTF-ery like AI gets in the way. I'm figuring things out as I go, which I guess is the best any of us can do, really.
Stay awesome, y'all.
August
White Crystal Butterflies is complete, but finishing it left me with a feeling that there was another story to be told, both in this world and with these characters. I saw more questions to ask, more questions to answer, more places to explore, and of course, many interpersonal dynamics to give life to on the page. As such, I finished this book and then immediately started planning another that does all of that and much, much more.
That book is Rocks Can Dance. While technically a sequel to this one, it can also be read alone, with White Crystal Butterflies as a backstory. It's a much deeper dive into the sociopolitical implications of the findings made in this book, and if you're a romance fan, well... let's just say that you might not be disappointed ;)
Here is a sneak peek:
The shatter of glassware jerks my attention up from my laptop faster than Iraj's accompanying shriek. He's somewhere in the lab section of the camp; last I checked, he was messing with microscope slides, but this sounded like a beaker. I slide my overheating laptop onto the nearest side table. A stream of what I can only imagine are unflattering descriptors in at least three languages leads me to the room with our soon-to-be plant tanks. I find Iraj gripping a coil of tubing like a weapon and facing down a dusty-orange moth the size of my hand.
I squint to make out its finer details. "Is that a real one, or a demighost?"
"Hit it and find out," says Iraj dryly. "Whatever it is, it's drunk."
"It won't hurt you."
"It came for my head."
I have to fight down a laugh. For someone both earth-born and earth-raised, who spent both his graduate degrees studying drought-resistant fungi in Panama, Iraj is still hilariously easily startled by the rock moths out here. I needled him about it once. His indignation hinted that it's far from a new joke on his own team.
"I can't tell if it's real," I say. "Pass me that container—no, the clear one."
"I need that one."
"Iraj, I swear to god, do you want to me to deal with this or not?"
He moans and empties a variety of pens, pencils, and rolls of differently-coloured labeling tape from the plastic box. I take it, step carefully over the broken glass on the floor, and begin to stalk the moth. Iraj moves to the opposite end of the room. That doesn't put much more distance between him and the offending insect, but he's probably hoping to dive out the door if it comes for him again.
The moth fans its wings, drawing my attention back. It's perched on the rim of one of the empty fish tanks. I'm going to need to get it onto a flatter surface to trap it beneath my makeshift bug catcher.
"Don't," says Iraj as I lower the container and reach for the cardboard lid of the microscope slide box. "Lingmei, I swear, if you make that thing fly again—"
Too late. I take a deft swipe at the moth. Rather than take flight, though, it explodes into a cloud of dust, making Iraj and I both leap back.
I fan the orange fog away with the lid. "Demighost."
"And now it's shat dust all over my tank," grumbles Iraj. "Do you have any idea how long I spent cleaning that one?"
"Longer than someone spent cleaning the entryway, clearly."
"That—" He breaks off mid-sentence, a guilty look replacing his brief flare of protest. When I raise an eyebrow at him, he reaches under the nearest table and drags out a bucket of rocks. A bucket of very dusty rocks. Without a lid.
I point the plastic container at him. "Next time I hear you complaining that anyone else doesn't do as thorough a job of the entryway as you do..."
"Okay, fine. I deserved that." He caps the bucket. "Thank you for disposing of the intruder."
"You'll want to wipe that up before it regathers."
He accepts the plastic container back and heads to the kitchen to grab water. I keep a close eye on the dusty patch as Iraj bemoans our less than expeditious water-recycling system. The container fills slowly; I can hear it from here. Iraj has just turned off the tap when the dust on the side of the tank shifts visibly.
"Iraj, hurry!" I call, grabbing the microscope slide-box lid again. I take a swipe at the dust. It scatters, and I notice too late that the real culprit wasn't anywhere near the top of the tank. A nearly-formed moth wing flaps about behind a box on the table. I whack at it, but it tumbles off the table's edge and flares back to full form in a shower of dust. The demighost rock moth makes a break for the ceiling.
"Fuck." Iraj arrives with the water, drops on a table, and twists the wet cloth floating in it into a rat-tail that I don't doubt he knows how to use. He takes a lightning-fast whip at the moth as it nears him, exploding one of its wings. It regathers before it hits the ground. Iraj shrieks as it whizzes for his face. I double over laughing at the panic in his eyes as he trips backwards over the rock-bucket and goes sprawling.
"Quick, quick, it's headed for the kitchen!" I give him a hand up fast enough to make him stumble again, grab another container and take off in hot pursuit. The moth jinks furiously back and forth like it's trying to shake me. It's persistent, even for this species. Is the host outside looking for food or shelter, or is it just drunk like Iraj suspected?
I manage to get ahead of it just before it reaches the kitchen. It swoops wildly and zigzags back into the middle of the common room. Iraj makes another attack, striking again. Red dust peppers a side table.
"Don't make a mess!" I ready the container as the moth makes tracks for me, but it shoots sideways, its mangled wing throwing its flight awry. If it won't stop on its own, we can wear it down like this until it can't fly anymore, but that requires scattering its dust over half the camp. Zuri will kill us.
My eyes fall on a broom leaning against the wall in the entryway. Scattering dust everywhere isn't an option, but if we can bring the moth down in a single blow, the resulting dust-splatter will be easy enough to clean. I snatch the broom and run back to the lab behind Iraj, who's now leaping about the couch-bedecked side of the common room like a possessed lemur. His container of water is still perched on the lab table. The broom handle knocks the lid of one tank askew as I swing it around in the close quarters to dunk its head in the water. Wielding it like a poleaxe, I dash back out. The moth is flying dangerously close to the rubbery, blow-up wall of the camp, and I can't let it get away.
Iraj catches onto my plan immediately. We close in from opposite sides, cornering the moth against the wall. Iraj waves his arms high, cloth rat-tail smacking his wrist on each swing. Confused or alarmed by the feed it's getting from its dusty puppet, whatever live moth is messing with us from outside lands its double on the camp wall. I bring my wet broom down in a mighty swing.
"What the fuck is going on out here?" says a voice behind us, accompanied by the sound of a zipper. Iraj and I step back from the wet, streaked, rust-red splatter, panting and triumphant.
Tiana pokes her head from our shared tent. "Jesus," she says, upon seeing the gore on the wall. She flicks her braids over her shoulder and settles right back down, going back to her book as her hand closes the zipper behind her. "Have fun. Make sure you clean up."
"Thanks for helping!" shouts Iraj.
"You're welcome!" comes an answering call, muffled through the thick rubber of the tent door.
"In fairness," I say, leveling my dust-bloodied broom at Iraj, "this was technically your fault."
"I know, I know," he moans. He mopes back to the lab to retrieve his water-bucket. I hold a hand under the broom to catch drips as I carry it gingerly to the kitchen and the safety of the sink. Water runs rust-orange the moment it picks up the slightest bit of Jenu's dust, and a week here has been more than enough to teach us all how badly this stuff stains.
"Can you fix the tank?" says Iraj, emerging from the lab room again.
I finish rinsing the broom and give him a nod. My nose wrinkles involuntarily as I step back into the lab. Something reeks like pond bottom, and not in a good way. I sidle up to the largest aquarium and push its knocked-askew lid back a little further to peek inside. I wrench back immediately. I'm not quite sure what a fish tank set up to grow aquatic plants harvested from a sentient planet is supposed to smell like, but I'm pretty sure it's not this.
The stench is too potent to not merit an investigation, so I slide the cover back a few more inches and flick on my phone for a flashlight. The tank is black-wrapped in an attempt to keep out ambient light. There's nothing in it yet except water and a handful of rocks, but the rocks look suspiciously fuzzy.
I backtrack and poke my head out the door. "Iraj? Are your tanks here supposed to be growing algae?"
There's a moan from across the common room. "Don't say that."
His tone sends a pang of worry through me. I've only superficially had a hand in preparing these tanks, but seeing them off to a bad start makes me uneasy. This was supposed to be the easy part of his team's experiments. "Are they still cycling? The water quality might not have settled yet, so it might not be an issue."
"Could also be the species from down in the tunnels." Iraj returns with water and a rag, and starts wiping down the dust on the empty tank with a grimace.
I push the tank cover further back to get a look at its other side.
Iraj recoils as the smell hits him. He lifts one elbow over his nose and mouth in a futile attempt to block it. "Oh gross, that's from the tunnels alright. How? Those rocks were from the middle of the desert—and sanitized."
"Is that going to mess up your experiment?"
He shrugs helplessly.
"Did Yahvi warn about this?" She's the head scientist on his team. If anyone has the answer to this, it's her.
"Kind of? It was a potential variable." Iraj finishes wiping away the dust and grabs paper and a marker to leave a note on the tank. He and the rest of our plant team hope to control the amount of outside material that gets into some of these, and a dust-burst like that means this tank is going to need a more thorough cleaning again before it gets used. Iraj now looks resigned to it.
I go back to the big tank and shine my light around it long enough to confirm that every carefully weighed and placed rock at its bottom is covered in a coat of red-brown scum. I step aside to let Iraj see.
He grimaces, then gingerly lifts the cover and settles it back on top. "I'm going to let Bersa handle this one."
I bite my tongue to keep from commenting that it really should be Yahvi. I'm not on that team, so it's not my place to say. My only consolation is that all our astrobiologists are in the van that's on its way to camp right now, so they'll all arrive together. We'll have plenty of people here soon enough who'll be able to apply their expertise to the puzzle of moldy rocks.
As if on cue, my phone buzzes.
"Is that them?" says Iraj hopefully. He's been the only member of his team here for almost a week, and he's getting adorably lonely.
I check. It's Tobias.
Please save me from this vehicle, his text reads.
Where are you guys? I text back.
Good question.
There's a pause.
They wish to inform you that we are two minutes out from the turd-shaped rock, and coming up on the one that looks like a bread loaf that someone tried to poke before it was done baking.
I can't repeat that with a straight face, so I show the text to Iraj.
It rips a laugh out of him unbidden. "Sounds like Yahvi's in a good mood. Darn it, they're almost making me miss that car ride."
The "almost" is noteworthy. Iraj spent most of our group's trip out here grey-faced and retching into a paper bag. I couldn't blame him.
My phone buzzes again.
Alex says we're about an hour out.
"Bless Alex," says Iraj when I show him the update. "I stand reassured that at least someone is keeping that circus moving in the right direction this time around."
There's subtext there, and I already know it's going to be funny. "This sounds like a story."
"Oh, believe me." He caps the newly wiped tank, too. "If anyone worked under Yahvi and didn't have stories, I'd question their sanity. Not that the rest of us are particularly sane, either, but you get my point."
"I still want to hear the story," I say, on my way out the door. "I'll be right back."
The camp is about to go from one leader to four, and that one will probably appreciate knowing how long she has before her second-in-command and two rivals show up. When the van arrives, we'll have all of two research groups here. We'll be living in close quarters for as long it takes us to figure out what's happening with this planet, but at least everyone below the head-scientist level gets along.
I have to admit, though, that I don't care if things get tense. Setting up camp with only four people—and only one leader—is one experience I'll be glad to put behind me. Not that it's been terrible. But just this morning, I was put in charge of making sure the front-door airlock worked, and that's been par for the course since we arrived. I'm ready to pass that level of responsibility to someone more qualified and go back to being the unrivaled expert at catching rock moths.
I also just want the people in the other van to arrive.
I check the window for any sign of the vehicle's approaching dust cloud—not that they're anywhere near enough for it to be visible yet—then resign myself to finding my boss. She's on her computer at the table in our working room, typing with a speed that hints she doesn't want to be interrupted. "Van's arriving in an hour," I say, and get a thumbs up in return. I want to tell her about the demighost and our new tank experiment setback, but she doesn't take well to being interrupted, and Yahvi is the biological expert. If we want this complicated study and situation to go as smoothly as a study can, I won't be the one crossing the two teams' wires.
Keep an eye out for Rocks Can Dance on my Patreon (link in the comments) in mid-2024!