Names

 It’s hard being autistic, especially in the old west. Sensory issues, uninformed attitudes, the fact that you can’t defeat a skin walker without looking in the eyes…

Beck Benally is peculiar.  She does not like to make eye contact, she hates to be touched, and she refuses to say anyone’s real name, choosing instead to give them nicknames whether they like it or not.  Most of the town wants her to change, but she doesn’t really care… That is, until a mysterious creature kills someone she knows. You see, Beck might just be the only person in town who knows how to defeat a skin-walker...

Unfortunately, the trick is that you have to look them in the eye. And say their real name.

 Names is a story about being different and still being awesome, about accepting yourself, and about finding the people who aren’t annoyed by your peculiarities.

Beck is basically me when I was thirteen.  Write down to my weird fear of saying names. I loved fantasy fiction and mythology, but the way you defeat most monsters wouldn’t work for me. I thought you had to be physically strong, which I am not because I’m disabled, or you have to look someone in the eye or say their name or any other thousand other things my disability and autism wouldn’t let me do.  Were people like me not allowed to save the day?

On the rare occasion that a character would share my peculiarities, they always defeated the monster by overcoming them. But autism isn’t a thing to overcome.  Sure, there are a lot of annoying things about autism that get in my way every day, but I can’t have a magical cure and I wouldn’t want one anyway because… It isn’t something to cure. It’s me. So I decided I needed to write about a character who finds a way to work with her autism, not overcome it, to defeat the monster.

 I wrote the story before I moved into the group home where I live, so the uncomfortable friendship between Beck and Blue wasn’t based on anyone in particular.  In fact, when I wrote it, it felt like pure fiction to me. I did not think anyone could really be OK with all the weird parts of me that everyone else hates. And then I met the people who work at my group home. A few in particular. They don’t always “understand“ why I am the way I am or why I’m acting a certain way, but they accept it and love me anyway.

So I am deciding that Blue is retroactively based on my favorite people here. :)

 Names is available in Nothing Without Us, an anthology edited by Cait Gordon and Talia C. Johnson which features  disabled characters, neurodivergent characters, spoonie characters, and characters who live with mental illnesses, written by authors who also fall into those categories.

(Cait is also one of our Space Opera Libretti authors!  Expect an update about that project soon!)

 Read more about the book and find out where you can purchase it here: https://nothingwithoutusanthology.wordpress.com/2019/09/30/nothing-without-us-is-now-available