Category Archives: Uncategorized

Story in a new anthology!

Hey, if you didn’t have a chance to back our Kickstarter (for the book formerly titled Dangerous Women), your chance is here to get an amazing anthology of queer women supervillains, Absolute Power!

Absolute Power is in discounted preorders now!

Also in the TOC with me are:

  • Erica Friedman (also our editor)
  • Tristan J. Tarwater
  • Missouri Vaun
  • Barbara Ann Wright
  • Audrey Chase
  • JD Glass
  • Emily Kay Singer
  • A. Merc Rustad
  • Claire M. Jackson
  • Leia Weathington
  • Susan Smith
  • Mari Kurisato

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

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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.

Happy Hallowe’en! Ephemera is here!

Hi, all!

From the pit of my fall cold, I fling this at thee: Ephemera is NOW AVAILABLE.

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Megan Amazon has a world of problems, and the fact that her girlfriend is possessed by the ghost of a wannabe superhero is at least 90% of them. Nereid’s girlfriend’s soul has gone on walkabout to Faerie. Simon Canis has joined the cast of It’s a Wonderful House, and it wouldn’t be reality TV without a boatload of roommate drama. There’s also a serial killer stalking Wonder City, and Suzanne and Ira Feldstein are just a few steps behind him.

And then there’s Renata Scott: the most powerful telepath in the world, who lives in a bunker a mile beneath Wonder City for her own sanity. Yet somehow she’s now in the center of this messy Venn diagram: ghost stories and fairy tales and serial killers and an addictive trainwreck of a reality TV show.

Love, lies, murder, and a long con collide with a band of reluctant heroes in an explosive battle to save the world, Wonder City-style.
***
Ephemera deals frankly with sexual consent, homophobia, transphobia, racism, death and injury, and graphic onscreen death.

Kickstarter for Dangerous Women

I have a short story — set in the Wonder City universe — in the upcoming anthology Dangerous Women from Northwest Press.  The Kickstarter launched this past weekend and we’re already 20% funded!

Please back this Kickstarter: if you do, the world gets 13 amazing stories about queer women who are supervillains!  As I say in the video, you’ll never get stories like this in the mainstream.  If we exceed our goal, the writers get bonuses!

Come help us out!

Cover Reveal!

Ephemera is running a little behind on its production schedule (mostly because I’ve had a rough summer), but here is the cover, at last!  More awesome cover art from the amazing Alex Heberling, spotlighting Nereid, new POV character Renata, and everyone’s favorite, Simon!

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Just an observation

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This is Judy Bernly, played by Jane Fonda, in the movie “9 to 5” (1980).  She is our original POV character, walking into the company with the supertoxic boss, and she joins forces with Violet Newstead (Lily Tomlin) and Doralee Rhodes (Dolly Parton) to overthrow the Patriarchy.

Meanwhile, Judy has some issues with sporting the huge bow style of the era:

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Until, of course, she hits her Empowering Fantasy Sequence:

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Of course, in “real life” in the movie, things don’t go quite so picturesquely, but they do overthrow the Patriarchy (in part) and get the promotions Dolly sings about so eloquently in the title song.

I believe that Judy Bernly is the spiritual grandmother of Erin Gilbert of Ghostbusters 2016 and the world’s tiniest bowtie.  (For a variety of reasons, not least that the characters’ presentation and roles are similar, but mostly I’m just presenting this for your consideration, not wanting to argue at all.)

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Disjointed thoughts

The shock is wearing off from the news about the Pulse, and I’m having to get through a workday without the convenient dissociation of Dragon Age.  I’m still not particularly coherent on the subject — I’ve been using Twitter for a lot of my thought bursts, and otherwise retweeting/reblogging things.

  1. On June 28, 1969, drag queens and trans people of color said ENOUGH at Stonewall and fought back against police.  It is no accident that the people targeted in this attack were queers and trans folk of color, with drag queens of color and trans women of color headlining the event that was attacked.  Our queer family of color has always been in the bloody vanguard of the fight to get the American public to recognize our basic humanity.
  2. This is not the deadliest mass shooting in US history.  This is the deadliest mass shooting in modern times, certainly in the 21st century.  To state that sweeping “in US history” ignores the state-sanctioned mass murders of Native Americans and blacks and other people of color.  At Wounded Knee, for instance, something between 150 and 300 civilians (women, children, elderly people) were murdered by the US Army.
  3. Politicians and mainstream media are trying to make this about Islam.  It’s not. It’s about the morass of homophobia and transphobia and racism and toxic masculinity that our culture is soaking in.

My writing is almost entirely a love letter to my queer family and our straight allies.  I love you all.  I don’t say it enough, I sometimes say it badly, but I love you all.

Please exercise self-care around all media and social media.  Pamper yourselves.  We all deserve treats.  This grief is real.

Please keep being fabulous and amazing and marvelous, because you all are.

Please don’t stop celebrating and being who you are.

Please keep living.

A few very quick updates

  1. I attended Wiscon 40 and it was GREAT.  The three Guest of Honor speeches — Justine Larbalestier, Sofia Samatar, and Nalo Hopkinson —  were amazing.  I described (elseweb) the experience of listening to them  as, “They not only knocked it out of the park, but blew down the bleachers, turned the park into a real green-space park, and renovated the neighborhood without gentrification.”
  2. Also Wiscon 40: My two panels went really well, and I am grateful to my copanelists and our audiences (SRO for the QueerQuisitor panel) for such a lovely experience.  The Broad Universe reading was a little sparse, but only to be expected when we were opposite Nalo Hopkinson’s reading.  Still, it was great to meet my fellow Broads.
  3. This past Monday, I attended the Lambda Literary Award Gala.  Wonder City Stories did not win the Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror category, but it was an honor to be listed among such amazing people.  Next time, perhaps!
  4. I have the complete cover art for Ephemera in hand, and Alex Heberling has, as usual, done an amazing job of reading my mind in terms of what the characters look like.  Now to plan out the final schedule for the book’s release with my book designer, so I can tell everyone! 🙂

Wonder City Stories short story!

One of my Wonder City Stories short stories, shined up and edited and all, is available for Kindle:

Truth, Lady Justice, and the American Way

TLadyJaAW cover