Emily Sinclair
LightNews LightNews
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
Emily Sinclair
@butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
470 followers 59 following 950 posts
Author of Butterfly on a Wheel, now available on eBook, in paperback, and in hardcover!

https://books2read.com/u/mqxJJQ

Website: https://flowersofdeath.net/

Cover art by Kai Schüttler: https://kaischuettler.com/
Posts Replies Media Videos
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
#WIPSnips | dominant

Went with "dominate," which is close enough. From The Stardust of Failure, Chapter 5, wherein the members of Sigma S Star are experimenting with (gasp!) solo albums.
Luna Pier beat out Mumford and Sons and Jason Aldean to land in the year’s Top 5, which was enough satisfaction for me. I hated Mumford and Sons before their banjo player went full whackjob. As for Rob, his solo album just cracked the Top 20, which would’ve been humiliating if he hadn’t been so committed to self-actualizing in all kinds of ways not related to the charts. Rob had a sound body, sound mind, and sound bank account, and he could afford not to dominate sales this time around.
December 3, 2025 at 5:32 PM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
#WIPSnips | percent

From The Stardust of Failure, Chapter 11. Modern bands need to be on the road to make money, but COVID came along and blasted a crater in everyone's plans. What's a band to do?
Rob again asked us about rescheduling the tour—maybe when the Delta variant ebbed, maybe when 70 percent of the population had gotten the vaccine, maybe when the under-twelves could get the shot. The actual Rolling Stones were going out there, or at least the three that were still performing. The two remaining Monkees were hitting the road one last time. Nick Mason of Pink Floyd had his traveling show ready to roll. If these old, tottering men could, why couldn’t we?
December 2, 2025 at 3:14 PM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
#WIPSnips | belong

From The Stardust of Failure, Chapter 1: "belonged"
Lake Huron at the close of summer is warm as it ever gets. I armored up for public gaze in a swimsuit designed to flatter the asymmetry of my body and walked through the meadow and down to the shore. I need not have bothered. The only eyes belonged to a tern making its swoops and dives in search of an afternoon snack. I stepped into the browny-green water past a line of dead weeds. Still cold, yes, but tolerable. I got used to it after several steps. I waded out toward the boulder that marked the boundary between the coastal shallows and the deep blue-water beyond. Water up to my calves, my knees, my waist, my chest. I clambered up onto the small fraction of the boulder above the water’s surface and sat there amid the algae and guano, an ungainly sort of sea cow with bobbed hair and slippered feet instead of long tresses and shimmering tail. Don’t go swimming past the drop-off, I reminded myself.
December 1, 2025 at 3:08 PM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
#WIPSnips | number

From The Stardust of Failure, Chapter 7, in which Sigma S Star are grappling with how to sustain their big comeback.
“Oughta put something on here,” Nicky said of his newest guitar, a customized purple Telecaster meant to replace the one that met its end at Reading in 2007. “Y’know, like ‘This Machine Kills Fascists.’” “It’s been done,” I said. “How about ‘This Axe Belongs to a Dying Nation?’” Nicky, to his credit, ran with my suggestion. Sigma S Star kept busy that spring, doing two short-burst tours plus a single and video. The song “’74-’75” by the Connells had haunted the back of my mind for years now, as it was one of those tunes whose DNA included the Byrds, R.E.M., and Big Star…just like many an early Sigma S Star number. Since the rest of the band was of a mind to indulge me, we did a cover with David singing lead. Lyrically it’s a song about fading relationships and the passage of time. David noted it could be about a band whose moment has gone as much as it is about a love affair on the rocks, and with that mind-set he entered the studio. The video, a moody gray-scale depiction of our recording process, ran with that interpretation a bit, showing us as an aging, weary, melancholic group just grinding it out.
November 30, 2025 at 2:58 PM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
#WIPSnips | system

From The Stardust of Failure, chapter 3, in which the narrator adjusts to the reality of her marriage to a fellow pop star.
There’s having enough money to be secure, comfortable, to make things easier. One can make a down payment on a little house in the Berkeley Hills, buy a new car with good sound system, book an impromptu trip to Hawaii without a second thought. My life as lead guitarist of Sigma S Star, housemate of David Stuart, sometime student at UC Berkeley, had been comfortable. The world Allie and his wealth created didn’t make life comfortable, it made life frictionless. It was someone else’s job to maintain my car, to trim the hedges, to decide what I was having for dinner. It was someone else’s full-time job to maintain my schedule and let me know where and when I needed to be. Multiple people existed on the payroll to make my wishes reality, whether that wish was for a new winter coat or to have front-row tickets to a show or just to have marzipan sweets with tea. With the stroke of a pen, I’d shot past being well-off to having entirely too much money to fathom, money that allows one to simply glide through an existence that is no longer one’s own problem.
November 25, 2025 at 5:46 PM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
#WIPSnips | debut

From Chapter 3 of The Stardust of Failure:
The long-delayed film of our final show, Vancouver in Transit, got a holiday release that year after a debut at TIFF in September. Rob went to Toronto for the festival, where he smiled a lot and dodged questions with his ever-more-polished diplomacy, but Allie cajoled me into attending the actual premiere at the Castro Theater. Part of the frictionless life of a pop princess was that I didn’t actually have to acknowledge anyone, much less answer questions from them. Smile and wave. Smile and wave. Allie had it down. I practiced smiling and worked on my royal wave. Elbow, elbow, wrist-wrist-wrist.
November 24, 2025 at 4:45 PM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
#WIPSnips | global

Gotta go with "worldwide" instead, from The Stardust of Failure Chapter 12:
Nicky looked at the moon through the bottom of his rocks glass. “So many times I’ve asked myself, ‘Is this what everything was gonna lead to, all along?’ and now that I know, the answer is…as bad as any wrong assumption I ever had. What the hell was all of this even for?” “Whatever you want to make it become, Nicky. There’s no ‘what for’ to a worldwide plague.”
November 23, 2025 at 9:34 AM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
I’m happy to announce my book, Butterfly on a Wheel, will be promoted on @Smashwords as part of their End of Year Sale 2025 starting on December 8! Stay tuned for more updates and links to the promotion! #EoYSale25 #Smashwords #indiebooks
#BookSky
November 22, 2025 at 9:26 AM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
#WIPSnips | direction

From The Stardust of Failure chapter 3, in which Nicky asks perennial antagonist Molly DeSanti for a favor and quickly wishes he hadn't.
“There’s one thing that’ll make your twin flame happy, and that’s in your control and not mine.” “What do you mean?” “Sometimes, you set the thing you love free by opening the cage.” She flung one of her bejeweled hands in the direction of Allie Roberts. “Sometimes, freedom requires other, sharper tools. And sometimes, you just need to give the selkie its skin back.” “I don’t have any patience for your goddamned riddles.”
November 21, 2025 at 4:18 PM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
#WIPSnips | special

From Chapter 1 of The Stardust of Failure:
On our return to the mainland, we and the rest of Sigma S Star decamped to the Marin County ranch Nicky was building with Jamie to get started on the Infrastructure Album, which now had the working title of The Engine Room. David needed assistance getting off the plane when we landed in SFO; he then spent our first few days at the ranch sprawled out on the couch in the back den, too fatigued to hold an instrument, eating Jamie’s home-baked cookies and little else. He even tried one of the “special” cookies to see if those did have any therapeutic value, but all it did was make him agitated. Kava remained David’s substance of choice to get through the low moments; we soon ran out of it. And then, as though a spell had lifted, David got up, dusted himself off, and went back to work playing bass. For a brief, lovely moment, he seemed to be holding it together—sleeping on a regular enough cycle for a musician, eating meals with the rest of us, jamming and doodling out sketches of how The Engine Room might flow once we’d assembled its raw components. Everyone seemed into the concept. Nicky had some good riffs that suited some of my lyrical efforts. Rob, relieved to have our cylinders firing, declared himself ready to sing anything. Peter didn’t have any songs to contribute but had not one, not two, but three submissions for the cover art already drawn up. So far, so good.
November 20, 2025 at 11:53 PM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
#WIPSnips | third

From The Stardust of Failure, Chapter 10:
“I was thinking about what we should do for a cover on this one,” Jeanette said on day ten, because they always did a cover, except on Down Poplar and Mercury. “Shoot,” Nicky replied. God damn, she still was cute, though, with her short hair curving around her chin like that. “‘Back in the High Life Again.’” “By Steve Winwood?” Nicky adjusted his glasses while he thought it over. “Oh right, Zevon did that on his last album.” “Third to last,” she corrected him. “He did half his discography like he was dying.” “Huh.” That hit close to home. “It resonates,” she said. “Actually, I’ve been revisiting a lot of Winwood’s hits and they’re more nuanced and melancholy than I remember. ‘Higher Love’ is perfectly in keeping with the genre of ‘the Eighties are a dystopian nightmare.’” “Don’t remember. Show me.” She started to sing, her voice rough and smoky, and Nicky played along until she converted him to her vision.
November 19, 2025 at 2:42 PM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
From my WIP Nice Things, a meditation on life in Detroit in the Aughts. (Coming to a platform near you in spring of 2027!)

#BookSky #WriteSky
Chapter 1 the fire The corner house burned to the ground on a Tuesday morning. Fire engines still formed a barricade at the corner when Mark needed to head out to Wayne State, and he had to back his car the wrong way down the street to get to McGraw and get out of there. The fire took out the phone service to Mrs. Klotchko’s, and it was three days after that before the phone company disconnected the “party line” they’d accidentally created while restoring service. Mark was a little sorry when the party line ended; he’d enjoyed practicing his terrible Spanish on the callers who were looking for the family two houses over. The next two weeks after that passed without event, unless the breaking of the driver-side mirror on Mark’s car counted as an event. Otherwise, it was back to normal on the block of Springwells that lay between Priest School and McGraw. Mrs. Klotchko’s house sat at the dead center of that block; it dominated the street with its three stories of yellow brick and elaborate front porch. Mark had liked the look of the place— or rather, it had relieved him greatly that a tip on cheap rent had brought him to 5674 Springwells and the Romanesque fancy of its arched windows. He’d expected to end up in a place like the boarding-house across the street, a more squalid affair with off-white asbestos siding, a roof in need of new shingles, and a clientele consisting of young
November 18, 2025 at 3:04 PM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
#WIPSnips | retrograde

No "retrograde" itself, which is surprising given my astronomical obsession. I did have a single use of "backward" in this excerpt from an interview with Jeanette where she discusses trolling and fan theories:
Q: There’s rumors that you and [David] lurked on Reddit toying with the fanbase for years. JH: We absolutely were, and before Usenet imploded we were messing around there, all the way back in high school. We’d heard about a very weird fan conspiracy thing involving Pink Floyd sending messages to fans when they toured in the ’90s, and we had a blast going down a rabbit hole on that and reading all these mad, mad things the fans assembled. Some fan theories are entertaining! I liked one about how the albums match up to the old elemental theme we used in early promotional material, and there’s something to that. It makes the most sense if you work backward, so you take Transit of Mercury and that one’s Light, David’s album. Blood Diamond Harmony is Rob’s album and gets assigned Wood, and Rapture is Nicky’s Fire album. Down Poplar is Water for Eric, and Conspiracy is Earth because it was the first album where we were really grounded. And the two before that are rubbish and don’t count. So you know…yeah, roll with it. That’s fine. Q: So which one’s Metal? That was your element under the system, wasn’t it? JH: Yes, Metal. That’s the one we never got to make.
November 18, 2025 at 1:38 PM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
#WIPSnips | spend

From Chapter 2 of The Stardust of Failure, in which our narrator is being courted and has some Feelings about it.
November 17, 2025 at 3:50 PM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
#queerwriters | remark

Exactly one use of "remark" in The Stardust of Failure, and it comes when the Narrator is having a VERY bad time overall and is about at the end of her rope. CW for language.
Anthea was the only one I tried to breastfeed because I wanted to give Anthea something extra of me to make up for not being able to hold onto her. Then Anthea couldn’t latch on to my lone breast, and when some Marin County bitch made a remark about me bottle-feeding her in the public square, I told her I hoped her house burned down with her partner, children, and dog inside.
November 16, 2025 at 3:24 PM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
#WIPSnips | run

From an interview with David and Jeanette as excerpted in The Stardust of Failure, Chapter Eight. History is penned by the victors.
NY Mag, “Running With the Boys,” October 21, 2017 David: I never set out to be the primary songwriter. For the first three albums, I was the bass player, and I was set on being a damned good one. You can hear me improve in leaps and bounds across those initial albums. Jeanette: We approached songwriting as a collaborative project rather than a competitive one. On the early albums, we even used joint credits for most of the songs and split the money six ways. David: And by Three Times a Conspiracy, we didn’t. Whatever happened to that? Jeanette: Sometimes things that start spontaneously end that way. David: At any rate, if it hadn’t been for a run of bad luck in my nineteenth summer, I might have merely stayed the bass player, contributing a vocal here and a deep cut there. Life threw something at me, and I responded with Down Poplar and that was that. I was the songwriter. Jeanette: Well, that’s one way of looking at it.
November 16, 2025 at 3:15 PM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
#WIPSnips | progress

From Chapter 11 of The Stardust of Failure:
Something about the shit that’d gone down since February sapped Nicky’s creative willpower. All the ideas he’d brought to Detroit sounded dusty, music for a time and headspace that didn’t exist anymore. He might as well seal them all off like the concepts were buried on the Titanic. Jeanette’s slow and steady output since lockdown looked to be the bulk of whatever these sessions produced. She had “Glass Ceiling,” which she’d been sitting on since the end of 2016, but she also had five new songs in progress. Dark stuff, too—even the catchy one sounded jaunty and menacing at the same time. “Hold the line,” went its refrain. “It’s inspired by the QAnons,” she said, because hating them was her most recent quarantine hobby.
November 15, 2025 at 6:30 PM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
#WIPSnips | week

From The Stardust of Failure, as Sigma S Star's eternal antagonist Molly DeSanti drops her first solo album.
And then, on April 17, 2012, Molly DeSanti unleashed her debut solo album, The Relaxing Jar, and it proved terrifying. I interpreted the first half, “Useless Things” through “Antarctica,” as her take on David’s career arc, concluding with a what-if meditation supposing that he’d decided to join the orcas for a swim at Ka Lae. The second half, a metaphysical hall of mirrors, served as a quasi-scientific exploration of some kind of afterlife, possibly on the quantum level. It impressed me too much to bother me as it should have. The Relaxing Jar sold a jaw-dropping three million copies in its first week, proving the public still hungered for their Childlike Empress even when she was being scary as shit.
November 14, 2025 at 2:58 PM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
#WIPSnips | built

No "build" but 8 uses of "built" in The Stardust of Failure. Here's one from Chapter 6:
We built out the demo, telling ourselves with tongues planted firmly in cheek that this was merely an experiment, that we had neither illusions nor expectations for this collaboration. But once we’d constructed it, with Nicky’s guitar leading Peter’s drums, and Nicky harmonizing with Rob, and my guitar solo over the top, we knew it was a Sigma S Star song even before Nicky added a bass line in a fair imitation of David.
November 13, 2025 at 3:11 PM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
#WIPSnips | shirt

From Chapter 10 of The Stardust of Failure:
Fans getting unsanctioned ideas bothered me on multiple levels. While standing on the 7 line platform in NYC, I spied a young person (boy or girl, I couldn’t tell and it didn’t matter) in a black T-shirt with white writing across its back. “When your existence is an affront to fascists, every day you draw breath is a political act—David Stuart.” Not what he actually said, and the omissions and elisions seemed too…notable.
November 13, 2025 at 12:51 AM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
From Butterfly on a Wheel!

Convincing you to read my novel by the first sentence. Share yours if you want!
chapter one: making friends and other plans Boston-Edison, 2021 I found Nicky in a corner of the Green Room, cradling his ancient sunburst Les Paul, playing some aimless D-modal drone beneath the dark shimmer of the lead glass windows.
November 11, 2025 at 7:08 PM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
#WIPSnips | burger

One use of "burger" in the whole of The Stardust of Failure, in which the band is grappling with the prescriptions of their tour wellness director:
Guess I’ll have the quinoa salad. Caila’s on my ass again,” Jeanette said. “I wish I could go back to being ignored.” Caila Chapman wanted Jeanette eating vegetarian and organic, swearing off beer and caffeine, limiting sugar, doing daily meditation, and basically living how Rob lived. Jeanette complied with some of the orders some of the time. Caila tried it with Dave too, and got nowhere fast. “I did not survive all that to be denied a fucking cup of coffee,” Dave said, and that was the end of that. Nicky ordered a burger, medium rare, with all the fixings and double fries. It was good to not be on Caila’s radar. Jeanette ate her quinoa like a sport and washed it down with tea-flavored mineral water.
November 11, 2025 at 5:39 PM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
#WIPSnips | local

From The Stardust of Failure:
The touchdown jolted Nicky awake. He opened his eyes to a cluster of drab, pathetic buildings that looked an awful lot like the ones he’d fallen asleep to. “What cornfield did we land in this time?” “Moline,” said Jeanette, who remained on the ball when it came to locations, time zones, local currency, and so on. “Moline.” It ran a dim bell in his memory. “That’s where John Fogerty’s flying saucer touched down. Where is Moline?” “Illinois.”
November 10, 2025 at 5:10 PM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
#WIPSnips I picture

One of my favorite uses of "picture" from The Stardust of Failure:
David invited me to spend winter break with him on the Big Island, ten days in paradise in late January, when whale-song filled the sea and snow dusted the top of Mauna Kea. We stargazed and snorkeled, rode horses in the grasslands and hiked to remote pools and waterfalls. We even debated making another try at the Green Sand Beach, but David’s old leg injury flared up, and we decided to spend that afternoon drinking our way through Kailua-Kona instead. I snapped a picture of him at a trashy mai tai bar, a raven in paradise in his favorite all-black ensemble, holding aloft a glass overflowing with orchids and fruit. He looks tipsy, happy, and perfectly androgynous in that way that disconcerts people so. He sent it out on social media a few months later when a rumor went made the rounds (again) that he was dead. Enjoying my afterlife, said the caption.
November 9, 2025 at 7:30 PM
butterflyonawheel.bsky.social
#WIPSnips | little

I used "little" 172 times in The Stardust of Failure, which is a few times too many! Anyway, here's a couple from Chapter 5:
When we hit the road, we toured not as a pop princess and her entourage, but as a band of the Acme Wrecking Crew’s status: vans and buses, not chartered planes and customized semi-trucks. Clubs, not stadia. Okay, I merited a little better, a little more comfortable, than the Acme Wrecking Crew got on its own, but it wasn’t that comfortable. It was work, honest work, and I threw myself into it with zeal because I was having fun again.
November 8, 2025 at 9:26 PM