Monthly Archives: November 2016

Award Eligibility

I guess I’ll hop on the bandwagon to note the things my works are eligible for at this point.  Please only nominate if you have read the book(s) and honestly think they should be considered.

Technically, Wonder City Stories should qualify for the Campbell new writer award, but it’s self-published and they haven’t opened that up yet.  So I guess my first qualifying work there will be the short story in the Northwest Press anthology, but I’m not sure when that will be released.

Seize Your Joy

asset-2

Last Wednesday, we woke up to a nightmare. One of those nightmares where you keep hoping you’ll wake up again and find that you really were asleep.

We woke up to a country that has elected a domestic terrorist and his terrorist cronies to run our government.

These are the worst sort of terrorists: ones who have the official sanction of a vocal minority, and therefore provide a reciprocal sanction to the most deplorable members of that minority for their violence du jour. Ones who have made a variety of shortsighted, supposedly-well-meaning individuals complicit in their many and varied crimes, past, present, and future. Ones who are hiding in plain sight, visible to those of us with the perspective and will to see through to the center of the poisoned tootsie-pop.

This visibility is part and parcel of their terrorism. They want us to be terrified. They want our spirits crushed under the weight of knowing that the people who voted for them value their illusions over our actual lives. They want us to do their work for them.

Organizing, agitating, and resisting is enormous emotional labor, placed on us by people who, in voting for this administration, chose to reject the emotional labor of caring about other people.

I refuse to do the emotional labor of crushing myself for the terrorists who will soon be in the White House and Congress.

Resistance is also living as fiercely as we can.
Agitation is also loving as wildly as we can.
Organization is also partying as ferociously as we can.

We are the sharptoothed hissing goddamn opossums in this world machine, and we will fuck them up when they corner us.

Be fierce. Be wild. Be ferocious.

Seize your joy with all your claws and teeth and don’t fucking let go.