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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

An Overview of the 2026 Best Related Work Finalists in the Context of The Theory of Related-ivity

Time for the Hugo finalist hot takes, so here is a structural assessment of this year's Best Related Work finalists within the context of my study The Theory of Related-ivity: A History and Analysis of the Best Relate Work Hugo Category. (I won’t be updating the data in the study with this data, since the study is focused on nomination dynamics, for which we really need the full long list. But I may append these comments as a footnote or something.)

The 6 finalists and available nomination data (with thanks to File770) are:

BEST RELATED WORK

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.