Spider Horse

Spider horse, spider horse,

mythological and Norse,

many legs, many feets,

mom is Loki, that is neat,

Look out, here comes spider horse!

Last year, I tweeted that silly little song, which is a reference to one of the Norse trickster god Loki's children, Sleipnir the eight legged horse. And then hundreds of people retweeted it, and somehow that led to me being able to say…

My latest short story "Spider Horse" is now available in Untethered, an anthology edited by Rhonda Parrish!

As far as I could tell, the original mythology only deals with Loki shape shifting into a horse to conceive Sleipnir, making no mention of whether she stayed to raise him. So I took a few creative liberties.

"Spider Horse" shows Sleipnir being raised by his unsympathetic father, who often mocks his extra legs. So he decides to go find his mother who he decides must be a spider.

The Princess and the P. Sativum

 My transgender plant witch story "The Princess and the P. Sativum" is now available in Xenocultivars: Stories Of Queer Growth!

This is one of those stories that I 100% wrote just because I loved the title.

When I saw the call for submissions, I was considering writing an autistic take on The Princess And The Pea. That story has always felt autistic coded to me. Exactly where queerness was going to fit in, I wasn't sure yet. But I would figure it out.

And because I'm me, I can’t write about anything without researching the heck out of all associated topics. So that led me to learning about the pea plant. Or Pisum sativum, to use the Latin name—

And that's when it hit me. Pisum sativum. P. sativum. I could make a pun!

I'm pretty sure my main character is still autistic, but the story is more about her being transgender and what it means to finally be able to decide for yourself what you are and what you aren’t.