Bryn Hammond
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brynhammond.bsky.social
Bryn Hammond
@brynhammond.bsky.social
2.4K followers 2.2K following 1.7K posts
| Writer. S&S: New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine; Goatskin novellas Waste Flowers, What Rough Beast? Historical fiction: Amgalant on Tchingis Khan & 12thC Mongols
| She/her 🌈Queer. Australia
| https://amgalant.com / buy direct https://payhip.com/Amgalant
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brynhammond.bsky.social
A cover of its time
Book cover. Kindred Spirits: an anthology of gay and lesbian science fiction stories. Jeffrey M. Elliot, editor. Cover art is purple and golden with two spacey couples, lesbian and gay.
November 23, 2025 at 11:44 PM
brynhammond.bsky.social
I think this story is quietly spectacular on how
*first* you have to face them down in an existential way on gender (your own side)
and *then* you have to do the hero work
Story title page: The Prodigal Daughter by Jessica Amanda Salmonson.
November 23, 2025 at 11:27 PM
brynhammond.bsky.social
Helen Mirren as Ganymede was a pivotal event.
Young Helen Mirren in casual boy's clothes as the shepherd Ganymede, from BBC's As You Like It, 1978. Front view, chin on fist which holds bluebells. Young Helen Mirren in jerkin, loose shirt and cute cap as the shepherd Ganymede, from BBC's As You Like It, 1978. Black & white, waist up; he looks over his shoulder with flowers in hand.
November 23, 2025 at 7:07 AM
brynhammond.bsky.social
OMG I love this book.
The first scene might be Waste Flowers, if you'll excuse me, with a derelict wall, nomads who eschew it, and phantom bells of camels.
Then we reach the town of Proof Rock which, being KJ Bishop, you know at once is Prufrock.
No wonder I wanted to write this book when I met it.
The second page of KJ Bishop's The Etched City, on a Kobo screen.
November 19, 2025 at 4:45 AM
brynhammond.bsky.social
'Daughter of the writer who signed herself Madame Mathilde de Saint-Vidal (1849-1911), Blanc was said to have born a striking resemblance to a portrait of Lord Wharton by Van Dyck.'

{wriggles eyebrows} This one?
Visual description from the NGA: Shown from about the hips up, a young, pale-skinned man with curly brown hair stands facing and looking at us, wearing a plum-purple coat under a golden yellow cape in this vertical portrait painting. The man’s oval face is angled a little to our left so he looks out from the corners of his gray eyes. His left eyebrow, on our right, is slightly arched. His skin is smooth and his cheeks lightly flushed. He has a long, straight nose, his pink lips are closed, and there is a faintly painted suggestion of a goatee. Wavy bangs fall across his forehead, and he has curly, chin-length hair. He stands with his right hand, on our left, on his hip, and in his other arm, he holds a wooden staff with a pewter-gray, metal, scoop-like hook at the top. White lace trims the high neck of his garment and the cuffs of his sleeves. Light reflecting off the plum-purple coat suggests a soft material, possibly velvet. Crisp reflections on the deep, butter-yellow cape fastened over one shoulder suggest satin. An emerald-green cloth hanging from the top right corner of the painting falls behind the man’s shoulder. Behind the cloth and to our left, a craggy, rocky outcropping opens to a view of a landscape with a green valley and topaz-blue mountains in the distance. Bands of golden light illuminate the cloudy sky above. The work is inscribed with yellow lettering in the lower right corner to read, “Philip Lord Wharton 1632 about ye age of 19.” The artist’s name is painted in the lower left: “P. Sr Ant: vandike.”
November 12, 2025 at 10:00 AM
brynhammond.bsky.social
Yup that was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Distracted by the sheer oil-painting beauty of the first stages
THE version
The creature, naked and scarred, with mossy skull, contemplating Hamlet-style
November 9, 2025 at 11:21 AM
brynhammond.bsky.social
Putting together A Visit from the Scythians: Four Shaman Stories. Two reprints, two unpublished. Only on my Payhip. Soon.
Book cover: A Visit From the Scythians. Four Shaman Stories. Bryn Hammond. Black and white drawing of a frowning-browed woman in animal headdress and a drape around her loins, with spear and shield, on a horse in a leopardskin: no saddle, simple bridle.
October 28, 2025 at 6:38 AM
brynhammond.bsky.social
Illustrated by Mags Kulbicka ... wonderful black & whites here seen as fridge magnets (get them on Redbubble)
A steel grey fridge with a row of three fridge magnets: Writ In Blood in bloody Western-style typeface, pencil drawings of Johnny Ringo slumped on a bed, Johnny with Kate Elder, and Doc Holliday in his hat sitting beside Wyatt Earp in moody conversation.
October 19, 2025 at 4:49 AM
brynhammond.bsky.social
Ah, the title and subtitle. A short book devoted to a single Icelandic saga, and titled to invoke Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. I love that claim to complexity, psychological and other, for the medieval work. I'd like to write on Grettir in this fashion (but can't).
Book cover. In the upper third, a firey, steamy volcano; below, lower slopes in darkness, against which is seen the title: Hrafnkel or the Ambiguities: Hard Cases, Hard Choices by William Ian Miller. Oxford.
October 14, 2025 at 5:04 AM
brynhammond.bsky.social
most intriguing book title found today
(actually I'm reading the author's other, The Human-Animal Relationship in Pre-Modern Turkish Literature)
Book cover. A thicket of leafy green vines hangs over a white space with the title: Human-Plant Entanglement and Vegetal Agency in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath by Dilek Bulut Sarikaya.
October 14, 2025 at 4:20 AM
brynhammond.bsky.social
Struggling to do anything else than gobble the second half of this book today. I only began because it has pears on the cover (my Sister Chaos, with her ripe pear tattoos, looks on with understanding).
Cover of The Safekeep: A Novel by Yael Van Der Wouden. The illustration is of two plump pears sitting close together, touching at the belly; a drop of water runs down one, which is slightly riper than the other. It's a sensual image for what is a sizzling, let me tell you scorching, portrayal of lesbian desire.
October 7, 2025 at 12:58 AM
brynhammond.bsky.social
It's Seven of Nine Day
AND #SapphicSeptember
Seven and Raffi, from Picard Season 2, getting up close and smiling at each other Raffi and Seven, from Picard Season 2, sitting casual on a couch together
September 7, 2025 at 8:16 AM
brynhammond.bsky.social
This one for sure. I have every detail by heart.
Jimmy Cauty. What, he was seventeen? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_C...
A Lord of the Rings wall poster. In sepia tones. Central is Gandalf with his arm around Frodo who leans on his sword, and a haggard Sam with pipe, over dead orcs. Below, a windblown Legolas with big features (huge eyes) and pointy chin, a Gimli muffled in his beard, and a glum Gollem paddling a crude boat.
June 23, 2025 at 1:02 AM
brynhammond.bsky.social
Hi my Sword & Sorcery with lesbians came out this month. Novella Waste Flowers, one of a back-to-back Double of two Mongol-themed S&S novellas, my steppe brother being Dariel Quiogue. This is the first ever book from Brackenbury Books!
@newedgeswordmag.bsky.social
newedgeswordandsorcery.com/shop/
Two covers of our Double-Edged Sword & Sorcery book: Walls of Shira Yulun by Dariel Quiogue with a siege scene by Artyom Trakhanov, red billows of fire, a Chinese-style city, a Mongol figure with sword; and Waste Flowers by Bryn Hammond, art by Goran Gligović of Goatskin in her outfit of skins and Sister Chaos with her spear, heading a camel caravan in the sands under a moody night sky.
May 23, 2025 at 12:42 PM
brynhammond.bsky.social
I own an unfeasible amount of Brill books. Selected titles from my shelves:
Bright blue books with period art insets white titles: Tang China and the Collapse of the Uighur Empire; The Secret History of the Mongols; Mongols, Turks and Others; Turko-Mongol Rulers, Cities and City Life.
May 17, 2025 at 12:59 PM
brynhammond.bsky.social
I have only one. The story humanised her, yes, and besides she was a woman at the head of the military, and she wore brief white dresses without a bra. Jacqueline Pearce was a force, and still gorgeous in her age.
Servalan from Blakes 7, with inch-short black hair, in a neck piece of netting and white dress, holding an artificial red flower. She is played by Jacqueline Pearce and she is gorgeous. Jacqueline Peace, actor of Servalan, still with ultra-short hair, greying now, looking much the same with her big eyes and elegance. At a con.
April 28, 2025 at 8:52 AM
brynhammond.bsky.social
When Bowie turns up in my Jean Genet biography, auditioning for a part in drag.
page on a Kobo screen.. Reads: About this time Genet had a fleeting contact with another English rock star, David Bowie. David Bowie wanted to star as Divine in a film version of Our Lady of the Flowers. Genet and Bowie agreed to meet at a particular restaurant in London. The others in Genet's group looked around for Bowie in vain, but sharp-eyed Genet spotted an attractive woman sitting by herself and went up to her table and said, 'Mr Bowie, I presume.' His presumption was accurate. Although Genet was never attracted to transvestites like the character Divine, he admired them. (In Greece he befriended a transvestite known as Betty, and when Betty was arrested in Athens, he mounted a campaign in Paris to free her.) In Prisoner of Love he would rank transsexuals as among the real heroes of modern life.
April 27, 2025 at 9:35 AM
brynhammond.bsky.social
Lined up to read. That feeling when a sentence plucks at me within the first few (it's the fish). Jirel and Thevin beside the Sea of Beasts was where the writing most wooed me in 'Jirel and the Mirror of Truth' (New Edge Sword & Sorcery #3). I like seas, yes.

Sword & Sorcery, people.
The City of Tears By Molly Tanzer Issue #429, April 3, 2025 1. What lies beyond the Sea of Beasts is known to few, for few are foolish enough to try and cross it. This is not because of the beasts, which all died so long ago their bones have turned to stone, but because it is ghastly. Most of the fish are spiny and vile, and those species with more succulent flesh have unsettlingly human faces. During the grim winters the water is cold enough to kill a sailor in seconds, and that is when the vampire seals are most active. The summers are miserably stormy.
April 3, 2025 at 9:15 PM
brynhammond.bsky.social
I'm re-reading my sister's pro-wrestling novel. It's so smart. Narrative structure, anyone? 'Identity, genre and gender'?
juliebozza.com/book/homosap...
book cover: Homosapien ... a fantasy about pro-wrestling. Julie Bozza. 'highly stylized, radically casual... done with a deft, comedic touch' cover art has a guy in t-shirt, shorts and four limbs of tatts, sitting on a narrow set of concrete stairs between walls with graffiti, leading up to the barred glass of a shut door. He has a drink bottle in hand and looks aside.
March 18, 2025 at 5:55 AM
brynhammond.bsky.social
Sword & Sorcery, an outsiders' genre. I still like this answer I gave in a Just the Axe, Ma'am interview.

Find the rest here: amgalant.com/a-few-interv...
Q. Why should people care about Sword & Sorcery? A. You don’t have to care, but there’s an opportunity here for a type of fantasy you may want in your life. I especially call out to folk who are marginalized in their lives, because S&S is shaped as a fantasy of outsiders. You don’t win kingdoms here, you don’t commonly win enough to change your life or change the world – who does? Not that we have to be pessimistic in S&S, but we like to stay real. It doesn’t support legitimacy or lineage, it can’t be on the side of the patriarchy though ye olde examples often didn’t see an illogic in that. It’s anti-power in its axioms, it’s yours to come and play.
March 15, 2025 at 12:34 AM
brynhammond.bsky.social
Amgalant tells the less-heard story of Temujin before he became the conqueror Tchingis Khan, his beginnings as an outcast, his struggle to unite the peoples of the steppe.

‘Total and instant immersion – thoroughly compelling and powerful.’ — Asian Review of Books

www.smashwords.com/books/view/1...
50% off Amgalant One: Against Walls by Bryn Hammond, A novel in homage to The Secret History of the Mongols. Book cover has detail from a Delacroix painting of a tiger attacking a blue-black horse.
March 2, 2025 at 9:43 AM
brynhammond.bsky.social
Post a picture of you that’s not actually a picture of you
Painting called Girl with Book on Head by Joy Hester. In sepias, a cross-legged barefoot girl with hands underneath an open book tent-wise over her head. Big shadowy eyes, minimal features otherwise. She looks possessed, fraught with book. I totally identify with her.
March 2, 2025 at 7:32 AM
brynhammond.bsky.social
A couple of days ago I asked, What if the pineapple *is* the pizza?
A homemade pizza starring a whole can of pineapple rounds on top.
February 15, 2025 at 2:00 AM
brynhammond.bsky.social
A couple of changes. I abandoned matte and went glossy. Exited Amazon's Extended Distribution which did nobody any good and hiked prices; both books should be a few $ cheaper
My novel Amglant One: Against Walls in a box of author copies. Cover has a Delacroix painting of a bluish-black horse attacked by a tiger. Book laid open. Amgalant Two: Imaginary Kings. Bottom of page has section name, The Sheep from the Goats, chapter title Toghrul's Old Age.
February 7, 2025 at 5:29 PM
brynhammond.bsky.social
Here's this year's issues, to see how pretty
Two hardback issues of New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, one white and red with Jirel of Joiry in her red hair, billowy red cloak and chainmail; the other has two dudes with swords confronting a leopard god in the shadow of a cave/shrine.
January 28, 2025 at 10:43 PM