iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 04/10/2025

I have 3 chapters left to draft in my manuscript, but I couldn’t resist picking up ALIEN OCEANS to begin research for the new novel trying to coax my attention away. (Thank goodness both MSS & my Clarion NWW cohort are prepared to yell at me to FINISH THE DRAFT. I need you guys to keep me honest.)

The book ALIEN OCEANS by Kevin Peter Hand rests on a worn-down blue picnic table.

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 21/08/2025

Proof of life! I had a wonderful time at #WorldCon2025 last week, met a great many of you, sang sea shanties about spaceships (yes, really!), composed two new poems in the fantastic SF Poetry workshop, worked on my novel with Clarion friends, and will resurrect sometime next year probably. 😴❤️‍🔥✨

A very sleepy me, in a red scarf and a “Cawboy” crow shirt, holding up my WorldCon badge with its many ribbons.

View out some floor-to-cooling windows across the buildings of downtown Seattle from the 5th floor of the convention center, where I was working on a new novel with my Clarion friends.

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 15/05/2025

Fun things about making books for a living: picking the colors of the case stamp, drawing lil plants for chapter head designs

PMS ink swatches in shades of brown rest over foil samples in various rainbow colors and a pale tan case paper sample.

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 26/04/2025

Will never be over them. 🥺 SINNERS was phenomenal, the horror threaded through with love.

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 06/04/2025

Sometimes when I'm rereading the pages of my current tip, I ask myself, "Is this manuscript just an elaborate fanfic of THE SWORD IN THE STONE?"

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 06/04/2025

I’m not hugely religious but I believe in the holy trinity

Dr. Westphalen, Lucas, and Captain Bridger from SeaQuest DSV

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 02/04/2025

📚 My latest SFF #Bookstack! I loved every single one of these recent reads, which I quite literally flew through over the past couple of weeks. My soul was in need of some new speculative fiction, that’s all I can say!

Six books stacked horizontally on a comfy chair with a striped blanket: NAVOLA by Paolo Bacigalupi, CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, HYMN TO DIONYSUS by Natasha Pulley, MOTHEATER by Linda H. Codega, RUNNING CLOSE TO THE WIND by Alexandra Rowland, and THE RELENTLESS LEGION by J.S. Dewes

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 07/03/2025

Goodbye, my sweet dopey ginger cat, whose favorite place to cuddle with me was flopped over my writing notebook with your chin on my hand, claws wrapped around my wrist. You lived the laziest, sunshine-filled existence you deserved, but at 9 years old I still wish you’d had many more. ☀️💛

Gingey with his chin propped on my hand next to my writing notebook.

A very silly and totally typical Gingey flopping backwards toward my son, about to fall off the chair and doesn’t even know it.

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 21/02/2025

What books have you read recently that really sucked you in and immersed you? I finished revisions, and now all I can do is stare into space. I need to find something to jolt my brain out of writing mode for a while!! #bookrecs #whatareyoureading

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 16/02/2025

How a goblin says, “I love you.” 🪶👑

When he says, “I love you,” but His Royal Goblin Majesty says . . .

I like that sun-warmed laugh of yours too well to be borne. I cannae even hide it, crooning too readily and keeping you close for too long.

John Falconer, you’re the glooming prey!

If the Hunter, having wrapped a red thread round that poet’s throat, comes slinking along next for you with his slurred compliments and clever insinuations, will you sulk at him and court death, or will you innocently ask after his hounds, the very ones that scarred my wrists with their gouging teeth? Will you also forget my warning that these beasts cannae be tamed? Which outcome do I fear more?

What trouble you are, that is so hapless with fellow humans yet so quick to find sympathy with wilder souls!

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 06/02/2025

Circling back to say HAMMAJANG LUCK by @makana-yama.bsky.social was fantastic, and anybody who needs an anti-billionaire heist IN SPACE with a HECK of a queer love story built in, you know where to look now. 🥺🍏🌸🦾💫 Hand this to anyone who loves Becky Chambers & Mary Robinette Kowal!

A copy of a holographic-foiled special edition of HAMMAJANG LUCK by Makana Yamamoto rests on a desktop

The deep blue hardcover case of HAMMAJANG LUCK, printed with a gold foil-stamped schematic showing the various tech items involved in the heist.

THE HEIST CREW aka the designed endpapers with character art of all my favorite troublemakers

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 01/02/2025

Vibes my very goblin project PRINCE DARLING brings to the function. 🪶👑😏 Finally wrapped up a big round of revisions, so I celebrated by having wayyyyy too much fun making this.

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 10/12/2024

So fun! Why yes, I *am* a process-loving, hands-on creative. What about you? 🧐 Love how well these drawings capture the little quirks of the signs in all these positions!!

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 07/12/2024

The chapter I'm revising rn is a long one broken into 2-3 page scenes in rapid shifts of POV. It's challenging to revise because readers won't have a lot of time to drop into the emotions of each character before a big turn happens and then we jump to the next character. #amrevising #bookannotation

Close-up of me (😆) in my colorful Lake District scarf in the new coffee shop that just opened downtown after we had NOTHING within an hour’s drive. The pure happiness of a writer-friendly space!!

My family gifted me a new ipad to write on, look how pretty it is alongside the coffee shop Christmas tree!

“I can do better (or delete)” handwritten on a manuscript page with highlighting and cross-outs.

“LOVE ALL THIS” handwritten in the margins of a manuscript—proof that I am nice to Past Cassandra too!

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 05/12/2024

Reviewing metallic inks for an upcoming @erewhonbooks.bsky.social title. 👀 Fun book production fact: Metallic inks tend to be more shimmery than shiny. Foil tends to be brighter but more expensive, because you have pay by how much it takes to cover the full area you need, and it is stamped on.

Swatches of metallic inks in golds and bronze, mostly, with a few pastel colors, rest on a wooden secretary desk.

Swatches of metallic inks rest on a bullet journal with three lines of highlighting and a few tasks written in.

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 30/11/2024

Another chapter revision down, on to the next one. 🥺 I’m at 110/400 pages! This round is a sequence of super short scenes, little POV pivots among 3 different characters over a single night, so it should feel quick unless I hit a problem that is hard to solve. 🏷️ #amrevising #sff

Moo Deng looking wistfully around a tree

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 23/11/2024

Oh John, you are in trouble, my friend, you are in so much trouble rn and don’t even know it #amrevising #sff

A close-up of a bound manuscript with the highlighted phrase, “But I never was content to accept Father’s notion of lost causes.”

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 16/11/2024

Book 3 of the Divide series by J. S. Dewes is in my hands!!! 🤩 I love these books SO MUCH and cannot recommend them enough for fans of Ann Leckie and Martha Wells/Murderbot!

The Divide series books stacked on a bookshelf with other SFF novels in the background (and a bit of a sneak view of a mix of some nonfiction books for research on my own projects, I suppose 😅).

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 16/11/2024

Revision time! I have my edit letter, I’ve marked up my manuscript and let myself confront a few thought-gremlins that resist change for fear of “breaking” something, and now I’m mostly asking myself what would make this the fullest possible experience of a story I already love. #sff

The three images shared with this post are close-up photos of a bound manuscript with highlighting and notes in the margins of various colors.

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 12/11/2024

This is writing but it is also momming 🫣

Meme that reads, “Pick your battles. Pick… pick fewer battles than that. put some battles back. that’s too many“

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 09/11/2024

cassacassacassa #bookannotations for SHALE VOICES by Alistair Findlay, research for a novel. I'm mining for linguistic references but never tire of the labor history that so often comes with it.

The book Shale Voices by Alistair Findlay lies on a wooden table with an array of pens in red, golden-yellow, and grey.

“Darling would HATE this one,” reads a handwritten note on a story about rats and mice in the different shale mines.

A poem about “the bings” of Scotland, “colossal heaps of layered husks.”

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 07/11/2024

Starting this gorgeous work of poetry and history about the shale oil miners of Scotland and their families. Expect some #bookannotations on this one to be forthcoming, because I’m VERY interested in this topic for reasons related to a well-loved #writing project of mine.

Shale Voices: A Creative Memoir of Scotland’s Shale Oil Communities by Alistair Findlay rests on top of a journal with highlighters and pens in red, grey, and gold.

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 30/10/2024

Sometimes, I just want to smack Sunai upside the head, but I GET IT, I DO. Perhaps Veyadi is the one who should be smacked here. (NO SPOILERS, I’m still reading 😆 but I am complaining as someone who is further into the book than this moment.) #bookannotation 📚💙 #booksky #speclit

A page from THE ARCHIVE UNDYING, in which Sunai unfairly assumes his occasional lover on this disastrous expedition, Veyadi, is about to hand him off to the bad guys.

Of course, Veyadi urges Sunai to leave instead. “Brave and sweet,” in Sunai’s words—but Veyadi is also kinda sus, so how will this play out?

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 22/10/2024

Keep the chain, post a favorite character Still chasing that feeling in my stories, of blending technology (and it’s earlier iteration, magic) with compassion 💙📚

Lucas Wolanczek from SeaQuest, crouched alongside the equipment he used to communicate with the submarine’s resident dolphin, Darwin

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 21/10/2024

Annotating books was something my philosophy professor taught me to do (& marginalia spidering along the pages of Heidegger's Being and Time tell you a lot about university-era Cass 🧐). Fitting, then, to test out annotating fiction with Allison Saft's A DARK AND DROWNING TIDE! 💙📚 #annotatedbooks

A copy of A DARK AND DROWNING TIDE on a table alongside packages of highlighters and gel pens in earthy tones.

Marked-up page from an scene in ADADT where Sylvia’s post-war struggle to overcome her ghosts is aided by observation of magical beasts (“wildeleute”) called kornhunds, which can summon lightning. The marginalia reads, “To me, Saft’s fantastical elements are to the story what beasts are to illuminated manuscripts—almost…frivolous? Yet I’m glad to encounter them.”

Mark-up continues onto a second page, with marginalia notes that read, “Loss of humanity here = a good thing. (Rejection of cruelty.) The point is WONDER.”

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Cassandra Jeanne Farrin @cassandrafarrin.com · 12/10/2024

Okay, so I thought I would be fine with just Instagram, but it turns out that I miss the pace of BlueSky. So here I am again, looking forward to socials that are a little more word-based rather than strictly image-based . . . And this time, I’ve arrived with some wonderful #amwriting news!

I AM AGENTED! 12 notebooks, 5 novels, 8 years, and more than 750,000 words later, I am now represented by Jen Azantian and Thais Afonso!

Books I read & loved recently: The Half-Life of Valery K by Natasha Pulley, Black Water Sister by Zen Cho (& others). Tropes I love to write: “My boyfriends sucks and I love him,” “Oh no, I transformed into a [fill in the blank]” (& others). Arrows pointing at a self-portrait of me inside a barn at a spooky season corn maze say, “Makes books for a living yet somehow still isn’t tired of reading & writing them” and “Biggest writer bucket list items: fan art and special editions.”

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