Boy howdy. The world is a mess and it's terrifying and we're all just doing what we can to survive. Personally, I have decided to start saying "Boy howdy" a lot more often, and boy howdy is it fun.
It might not be the ideal time to be promoting books, when money is tight and everything feels like the beginning of a Twilight Zone episode, but art is always important. Science will get us through physically, but art is what makes survival life. Art is what keeps us going.
Disabled Voices is a collection of fiction, memoirs, and poems about, by, and for disabled people. And it's probably out of print everywhere because *gestures vaguely at the world* but if you can, I would encourage you to order it. Disabled people are getting the worst treatment in this apocalypse. We are more susceptible to illness, usually, but we are also more susceptible to people being (excuse the cursing please; I try not to swear much on my blog because that's what Twitter is for, but sometimes you just have to) assholes. We are seen as less deserving of treatment and resources because we are a drain on society, or our lives have no purpose, or we are not productive.
Well look at this. This book is full of disabled people contributing to society, giving our lives purpose, producing art. We matter.
My contribution to this book is The Falling Marionette. It is a story about a girl with spinal muscular atrophy who finds out that a high tech "cure" doesn't solve all her problems.
This is the third time this story has been published, and I don't link to the first two anymore. Not because of anything the publishers did, they were all lovely people, but because I am not proud of the way I wrote the story. Ableism and ableist ideas are so ingrained in our society, so internalized in the minds of disabled people, that we don't realize all the time when we are speaking about one person's disability in such a way that accidentally perpetuates another person's stereotypes. There wasn't anything very bad in my story, but it has been a few years since I wrote it, and part of it made me less than proud. I don't know if it is perfect now, I don't know if it can ever be perfect, but right now I am pretty damn proud of it.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Disabled_Voices_Anthology.html?id=ji5eyQEACAAJ