It’s the end of February, and despite a constant brush of snow that’s moved through the region, temporarily frosting the woods around my house white until the next day’s light thaws it, spring feels near. I’m feeling the shifting of light. The slant of sun coming in through my window, turning the empty trunks of trees in the woods a gold-grey-green, waking up my jade plants so they stand a bit straighter, glow a bit more audaciously emerald, and the beginnings of buds are breaking through the bark on bare branches, daring to emerge despite the continued threat of snow. A few weeks ago, the light was so empty and thin, like most winter light is, but there’s a warmth returning in the hue of the sun, and while it’s still casting tilted noontime shadows through my moss-pocked yard, the promise of spring—of impending blossoms, of birds rioting in choruses hidden by a mass of unfurled maple leaves—is drawing near. And with the light, like always, my spirits lift.
Photo by Sarah Salcedo
I haven’t been on the blog much lately because my Patreon has been my main source of updating the world on what I’m doing. It will continue to be for the future: a place where I send out newsletters and posts, because for whatever reason, a few people in my life think me writing stories is something worth supporting. I’m so grateful for this at times baffling encouragement. I don’t even know some of the people who are supporting me, and that’s even stranger. I want to tell them new things first, because that faith they show in me has kept me going when the submission/revision process that writers have to go through has been too difficult.
If you’re here and not there, that’s fine. I’m posting here now for you, my sporadic reader. I’m grateful for you too, so here is some news that you may have missed.
In January, I had two stories come out: “The Sum of Two People” in Hobart After Dark, and “Offside, Otherside” in Words & Sports Quarterly.
These two pieces of flash fiction were unlike anything I’ve written, especially “The Sum of Two People”, a story I wrote after I was making fun of math problems to my sister. I’ve unfortunately had to defend my dislike of math after people have accused this piece of being a stealthy bit of pro-math propaganda, and I can assure you, that was never my intention. I would never intentionally try and make anyone learn or appreciate math. And, while it shouldn’t have to be said, I feel it must: no numbers were harmed in the fictionalized summations of this story.
In February, I attended my first juried workshop: Tin House Winter Workshop. This was a wonderful experience, even though COVID restrictions reshaped the structure of the event. It’s normally held in Portland, Oregon, but I got to sit at my desk, which I flipped to face my bed so I could attend this much-lauded workshop without showing the world a mountain of unfolded laundry. I aspire to many more classy literary experiences like these, staring at rumpled blankets and a disapproving cat who refuses to understand why I am not waving her feather toy for her and doesn’t appreciate the fact that, in all earnestness, I loved the workshop and felt immensely inspired by the lectures I virtually attended and the workshopping I did with my cohort.
Photo by Sarah Salcedo
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.
Thoughts to leave you with:
The world is a frightening place right now and positive actions, while maybe just a drop in the bucket at times, help me feel like I’m doing something other than pointlessly doom-scrolling. Here is a list of organizations you can donate to in order to help those suffering in Ukraine, and another list of organizations you can donate to in order to support trans youth in Texas.