This story is important to me. Yeah, on the surface it's just a silly dinosaur story. But it's so much more than that to me.
In August of 2018, I got an email inviting me to write for an anthology about dinosaurs. I did not know the people. They literally just saw that I was an author who tweeted about dinosaurs constantly, and they took a chance on me. A big chance. They asked me to sign a contract before the story was even written, a contract for a not small amount of money.
This was around the time things were getting bad with me and my mom. So this story has been in the works during a very significant chunk of time for me. Realizing it was abuse, getting up the courage to actually leave, leaving everything I knew behind for the chance of something better. And now I'm here, just an hour away from where I used to live but it might as well be another world.
Part of the contract was giving the story a title. I could change it afterward, but they wanted something. So I took a title that had been living in my head for a while. At first I thought it needed to be a novel, but I have several first chapters where that didn't work out, so I guess it always wanted to be a short story.
"Joan of Archaeopteryx". Like Joan of Arc… but with dinosaurs.
And that's what the story is. It's the story of a person with mental illnesses, someone who hears voices and sees things and doesn't believe she will ever amount to anything. But while she's in the psych ward on a 72 hour hold, she sees a hallucination that isn't a hallucination at all.
It's a woman riding a dinosaur, and she wants Joan to come back to her world–a world where humans and prehistoric animals coexist–and pretend to be the savior her people need.
I am a dinosaur nerd. That should surprise absolutely no one. Last count, I think I have something like 15 Jurassic Park references in this story? But I'm also a huge history nerd and I absolutely love Joan of Arc. Whether she actually saw saints, or they were just hallucinations, or she made the whole thing up so people would put faith in her, she was a teenager and she led her country to victory.
So there are also a lot of historical references in the story. I think the more you know about Joan of Arc, the more you will appreciate a couple of the plot points. I just love Joan so much.
And in this story, Joan is non-binary. She uses she/her pronouns and she presents mostly feminine, but the opportunity to dress as a man is very appealing to her because she isn't totally comfortable being a woman.
And when I wrote that two years ago, I didn't realize how much of myself I was putting into Joan. I've never been extremely comfortable with my gender. I'm fine with it for the most part, but I've never understood the idea of being comfortable as a woman.
This story is also the reason I’ve been able to watch Camp Cretaceous and write about it for Den of Geek; the editor of this book is the one who put me in touch with them. And Robert J Sawyer has a story in this anthology as well. I am in a book with the person who wrote the book one of my favorite short-lived TV shows Flashforward was based on.
In August of 2018, I got an email inviting me to write for an anthology about dinosaurs. I did not know the people. They literally just saw that I was an author who tweeted about dinosaurs constantly, and they took a chance on me. A big chance. They asked me to sign a contract before the story was even written, a contract for a not small amount of money.
This was around the time things were getting bad with me and my mom. So this story has been in the works during a very significant chunk of time for me. Realizing it was abuse, getting up the courage to actually leave, leaving everything I knew behind for the chance of something better. And now I'm here, just an hour away from where I used to live but it might as well be another world.
Part of the contract was giving the story a title. I could change it afterward, but they wanted something. So I took a title that had been living in my head for a while. At first I thought it needed to be a novel, but I have several first chapters where that didn't work out, so I guess it always wanted to be a short story.
"Joan of Archaeopteryx". Like Joan of Arc… but with dinosaurs.
And that's what the story is. It's the story of a person with mental illnesses, someone who hears voices and sees things and doesn't believe she will ever amount to anything. But while she's in the psych ward on a 72 hour hold, she sees a hallucination that isn't a hallucination at all.
It's a woman riding a dinosaur, and she wants Joan to come back to her world–a world where humans and prehistoric animals coexist–and pretend to be the savior her people need.
I am a dinosaur nerd. That should surprise absolutely no one. Last count, I think I have something like 15 Jurassic Park references in this story? But I'm also a huge history nerd and I absolutely love Joan of Arc. Whether she actually saw saints, or they were just hallucinations, or she made the whole thing up so people would put faith in her, she was a teenager and she led her country to victory.
So there are also a lot of historical references in the story. I think the more you know about Joan of Arc, the more you will appreciate a couple of the plot points. I just love Joan so much.
And in this story, Joan is non-binary. She uses she/her pronouns and she presents mostly feminine, but the opportunity to dress as a man is very appealing to her because she isn't totally comfortable being a woman.
And when I wrote that two years ago, I didn't realize how much of myself I was putting into Joan. I've never been extremely comfortable with my gender. I'm fine with it for the most part, but I've never understood the idea of being comfortable as a woman.
This story is also the reason I’ve been able to watch Camp Cretaceous and write about it for Den of Geek; the editor of this book is the one who put me in touch with them. And Robert J Sawyer has a story in this anthology as well. I am in a book with the person who wrote the book one of my favorite short-lived TV shows Flashforward was based on.
Fun fact: Joan of Archaeopteryx takes place in the same world as The Good, The Bad, And The Utahraptor. I've got more another story in the universe coming out soon, as well.
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