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August, 2025

Skin-Singer: Tales of the Kaltaoven

A Book of Skinsinger

Laaki and Ashóli are skin-singers--byal-dónen--who can craft cloaks of fur and feathers to let their people wear the shapes of beasts. These are the stories of how they traveled through an often-hostile world and came at last to find a home where their people could gather, then thrive in safety. The tales of these people--the Kaltaoven--originally appeared in the Sword and Sorceress anthology series. Now for the first time they are collected together, finished off with a brand new novelette.

Latest Blog Entry

Lucian's Courtesan-Philosophers

As this article points out, historians of sexuality put a lot of weight on the depiction of women-loving-women in Lucian's Dialogues of the Courtesans #5, simply because of the scarcity of references to female homoeroticism in the classical era. But Lucian's fictional episode can't be read as a realistic description of anything and must be interpreted through multiple layers of context, symbolism, and cross-reference. These can make it even more valuable as a piece of data, but much more difficult to read as a mirror of historic f/f sexuality.

Meet the author

Heather Rose Jones

Heather Rose Jones writes fantasy, historic fantasy, and historical fiction, including the Alpennia series with swordswomen and magic in an alternate Regency setting, and The Language of Roses an aromantic Beauty and the Beast story. Her novel Mother of Souls won the Gaylactic Spectrum award for Best Novel in 2017, and she was a Hugo Award finalist in 2025 for Best Related Work. She blogs about research into lesbian-like motifs in history and literature at the Lesbian Historic Motif Project which provides inspiration for her fiction. She has a PhD in linguistics, studying metaphor theory and the semantics of Medieval Welsh prepositions, and is a retired industrial failure investigator in biotech.