But I have updated the website with links to two publications: Bioluminescent: A Lunarpunk Anthology, which contains “Neptune’s Due”, and the online version of Underland Arcana’s publication of “From or Belonging to the Spring People”.
For those who are familiar with Elise Matthesen’s Hugo-winning jewelry, “From or Belonging to the Spring People” is one of those stories that is based on, in this case, one of her necklaces, of eponymous name; for those who are not, this is the tweet that made it happen. For all your “fairies in a museum, to mutual incomprehension” needs.
Right then! A couple of announcements because I missed one and then I had two land near simultaneously and thus I have achieved three things make a post and am ready to roll. In chronological order!
First of all, my story “Seventh Page of the Heartwell Gazette” has come out in the second issue of Archive of the Odd, “A Supernatural History”. This is an ebook magazine and can be hunted down and dragged back to your lair for your own savage consumption from one of the links here, according to your preference. People tell me my monster story is very sweet, and I say I was trying to balance off appropriate amounts of “sweet” and “oh. oh no. oh no.”
Secondly! The Kickstarter/preorder for Bioluminescent is live and, as of this post, about half funded. (Neil Gaiman hasn’t tweeted about it yet.) My story in here involves an earnest autistic postdoc with a special interest in phosphorus reclamation from agricultural runoff, who is more than a little anxious about fitting in at his new job in the base on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.
And thirdly! Queer Sci Fi‘s latest yearly flash contest book has been released! Somewhere in there is my “The Satyr and the Wishing Pond”, which manages in fewer than 300 words to pull off a transition story and an MLM supernatural romance. Here is a compilation of sources for the epub version, and hardcopies are available via Amazon.
When I saw the announcement for this book I really, really, really wanted to get something into it. I have some solarpunk stories written, and I like the idea of writing in ecologically sustainable futures, but the lunarpunk inclusion of the more mystical side of life is 100% absolutely my jam.
So I wrote “Neptune’s Due” — a chill little story about an autistic postdoc trying to figure out if he’s going to mesh with the culture of an ocean floor research base — and submitted it. And was absolutely delighted when they accepted it.
Recently Bioluminescent released the names of the authors I’m sharing a TOC with, and it includes not only some folks I know from Recognize Fascism but also Starhawk and Neil Gaiman. So I have a sort of amiable shy wave at folks I’ve seen before and also a whole heap of whoa that happened.
Yeah yeah I haven’t had a lot to say for a bit, I am tired and bad at updates but anyway. The wonderful nonbinary author interview I participated in way back when has been reposted at Reads Rainbow.
This was a great experience and I’m glad it’s available again.
My last sale of 2021 is now live at Escape Pod, “A Dragon In Two Parts”, narrated by Lalana Dara.
That brings me to four things out this year, three short stories and one poem:
“Of Winter and Other Seasons”, in Climbing Lightly Through Forests: A Poetry Anthology Honoring Ursula K. Le Guin
and
“Drain On Society”, in the We Cryptids anthology
“Like a Cat Needs a Bicycle”, in the C.A.T.S: Cycling Across Time and Space anthology
and “A Dragon In Two Parts”, in Escape Pod.
I should probably have mentioned this before halfway through the con but I am not equipped with that quantity of executive function and I am very tired because this has sure been a decade or two, this past year. I am commuter-conning Worldcon in DC. (In practical terms this means that I am not around for evening events and my arrival time is Variable depending on consciousness and the vagaries of the Metro, but I can be seen wandering around.)
I also did not have the executive function to fill out the “do you want to be on a panel” form so I am merely attending and being cautiously sociable and going to things. I have encountered a number of old friends from rasfc and other such places, chatted with folks at the Zombies Need Brains table, and briefly made gleeful blaseball noises with Mur Lafferty. (I was wearing my Flowers jersey today.)
On the off chance that anyone wants to find me I have a Recognizable Hat. It looks something like this.
Coming soon from Microcosm Publishing, CATS: Cycling Across Time and Space, now on Kickstarter and already 2/5 funded on day one!
I have a story in this book, set in my Fog and Brass universe; the main (human) character is a minor character in the first book of the F&B duology. Audrey is a seamstress and a suffragette in the steampunky/gaslamp fantasy city of Camlon; she has a cat named Grimalkin, and Grimalkin really wants to go on a bicycle ride….
The various female-dominated political movements of the late nineteenth century (the Fog and Brass world is an alternate history version of the 1890s) were actually intertwined with the politics of bicycling. Women in possession of improved prospects for mobility could imagine taking part in public life, after all, and that was dangerous to the status quo. The clothes suitable to riding a bicycle – split skirts and the like – loop into the rational dress movement and other sorts of clothing modernization and reform. The moral conformist sorts got all wound up about it – scandalized by the idea that a woman might have a machine between her legs and all, putting out articles about the terrible risks of “bicycle face” ruining a woman’s beauty.
None of this bothers Audrey at all, with her bicycle commute and her activist friends.
And of course Grimalkin does not actually care about politics. Grimalkin has other needs…
My short story, “Drain on Society”, will be appearing in the We Cryptids anthology that releases this autumn and I wanted to say a few things about it.
First of all, this story would not exist without the influence of original World of Darkness writer Bruce Baugh. Their take on the effects of vampirism in the WoD are heavily influenced by disability, and we had a wonderful conversation on Twitter about it a while back that went into the deep stew in my brain. They talked about how much time and effort a WoD vampire spends on just maintaining unlife, how much orbits around seeing basic needs for food and security met.
When I saw the call for We Cryptids, with its comments about how marginalized people often see themselves in the monsters and the creatures that exist around the edges of folklore, I eventually settled on writing about a vampire.
Because one of the things that people with various disabilities have to deal with routinely is being told that our existence is a drain on society, that we take up more than our fair share of resources, that we demand too much of others. And that’s the sort of thing that’s easy to allegorize into an actual, literal vampire.
A vampire like my character Pat.
I gave Pat my symptoms.
In me, those symptoms are of a couple of different things, but they add up rather nicely to a plausible vampirism: the light sensitivity, the off-kilter sleep cycle, the way my brain shuts down if I don’t get enough rare red meat, weird food sensitivities, the fatigue, the sensory issues, the cognitive dysfunction and brain fog.
What’s it like being a vampire who takes pills instead of risking being a ‘drain on society’ by actually biting people?
Pat’s symptoms (medicated) are my symptoms (unmedicated).
And then I threw in a bit of the cultural rhetoric about strong painkillers and attached it to blood feeding, just to add a cherry on top.
“Drain on Society” is the story of a cranky vampire finding someone who is willing to laugh at their vampire jokes and even make some back, and maybe learning that their existence isn’t, intrinsically, a drag on everyone around them.
Woops I’m running a week late, but the Recognize Fascism authors did a roundtable interview at Nerds of a Feather, so anyone who wants to know a bit more about everyone and our stories should go check that out.
When I heard that this anthology was going to happen, I sat down and tried to write something about what Ursula K. Le Guin was to me, and the whole process of becoming who I am and the groundwork laid for my sense of self. I cannot really claim her as a literary ancestor, I don’t think; I cannot see her touch in my prose. But I cannot escape my sense of her as being essential to my understanding of myself as a human.
The result of that introspection was my poem, “Of Winter and Other Seasons”, which is a meditation on gender, neurodivergence, and identity, which is deeply engaged with a number of Le Guin’s works for the cadence of its imagery. As you might guess it owes a great deal to The Left Hand of Darkness, but that is only where it starts.
Anyway. Poetry. As of today I’m a published poet; how startling that is.
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