In the coming weeks and months, I’ll be hard at work on a new novel: a pastoral about trauma and how to heal when the world you’re living in refuses to turn over into a new season that allows you to easily leave anger and hurt and triggers behind you. How do you heal when there’s always a war on the periphery of your existence? I’ve written about 40,000 words so far, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever written. I’m also revising a literary novel that I wrote years ago about a neurodivergent protagonist and her family. This has made finding an agent interesting—I’ve had offers from several people just interested in one book but not the other. I hold onto the hope that someone out there will want to represent the entirety of stories I tell, regardless of whether there are dragons or the unmagical reality of dysfunctional families. If you’re writing deep, the setting shouldn’t matter, and in fact, for many disabled and neurodivergent authors, speculative lit—or I should go more boldly—fantasy and science fiction particularly allow us to talk about things in ways we’re not allowed to talk about in mainstream literary circles.
To demonstrate my commitment to being difficult to pigeonholed at the onset of my writing career, the next two stories that are coming out are good ol’ fashioned science fiction.
I’m joking, of course.
These are two of my earliest stories that I’d written after I returned to writing after finishing Promised Land. It’s dumb luck that they’re coming out now, and even rarer luck still that they’re the only two stories I’ve written that occupy a shared universe.
On March 1, my story “Experiment Ninety-Four” reappears in Luna Station Quarterly. Caspian is one of my most beloved characters and it meant so much when he found a home last year in Collective Realms Magazine. Unfortunately, the editor-in-chief shuttered the magazine and deleted the site so after only two months, the story and my character were once again without a home. I’m thrilled LSQ has taken it in for their March 2022 issue, and I can’t wait for readers to get to know Caspian again.
Then in May, Uncharted Magazine will publish my story '“Our Memories Are What We Fear the Most” in two parts. It’s their first serialized story, and I’m honored that they made a word count exception for this novelette. It’s a story is about a mother and daughter separated by ableism and societal stigma against neurodivergence and disabilities. It looks at the role that memories have in our personal narratives, especially when it comes to holding family accountable. Its most outlandish feature is that this takes place in a future where gene editing has granted humanity longevity that borders on immortality. Gene editing, discrimination against autistic individuals, and spaceships are all in existence today. That I’m imagining a conversation between a mother and daughter who have been hurt and kept apart by ableist culture happening centuries from now should be dismissed as genre and not held in conversation with literature because these characters fly faster spaceships than our current ones makes me grumpy. But at the end of the day, there are so many brilliant authors having these conversations in (L)iterature, genre fiction, and the spaces in between. I just want my stories read, and you can call it what you want, but if the story works for you, then I’m happy.
Finally, we’re finishing up our first fiction script. Vasant is hard at work adapting one of my stories into a script and once he’s reached the end of the second draft, we’ll be going in to work on it together. This is different from our usual approach—simultaneous creation—but I’ve already had my chance with these characters since my imagination, strange enough to say, is where this script originated. I’m keeping my distance so that he can meet these characters and make them live inside his own head for a while before we start revising and figuring out the best visual way to make these people live and breath for audiences.
We always meant to make fiction films—documentaries were never a goal. But then Promised Land happened (and it’s still screening five years later) and we’re currently in production and pre-production on two new documentaries. We are excited and nervous to finally be coming back to the path we originally set out on: making up stories and telling them together. I am beyond excited to get into that.
I’ve been reading and watching a lot of media on creative process from people I respect—there will be a post tomorrow on my Patreon for subscribers about the books, articles, and movies I’m gleaning wisdom from and how it’s influencing the stories I’m telling this year, and the stories Vasant and I are telling together.
There is big news that I’ll be announcing later this week, but for now, this is a long enough update and I appreciate whoever took the time to read all of this, and/or any stories that may have brought you to my site. And again, if you want more and would like to help support me carving out time to write, away from website and film work, you can support me on Patreon and get recipes, art, and more frequent newsletters about what I’m thinking and what stories are our or in the works.