The Twinkle Of A Fading Star

 My very short story The Twinkle Of A Fading Star is now available in the June 2022 issue of The Quiet Ones!

The theme of this issue (available for free on the website) was post-apocalyptic pride. The magazine also said in the submission guidelines that they like "Quiet horror." Somehow, the juxtaposition of those ideas led me to The Hollow Men by TS Eliot.

Even if you don't know the poem, you've probably heard the ending:

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper

That kind of exemplified the idea of a quiet apocalypse to me, and while I enjoy the imagery and metaphors TS Eliot used to describe the bleak hopelessness of war (or his marriage, according to some people), I don't really interact with poetry on a metaphorical level. That isn't the way my brain works. I take things very literally.

So I… Took the poem very literally, and somehow I ended up with a world where people die and come back as destructive ghosts unless you build a scarecrow for them to inhabit, and a dying transgender woman trying to build gender affirming scarecrows before it's too late.

It's dark, and it touches on the terrifying idea of what happens when you're trans and your unsupportive family is left in charge of your funeral and remains. But I think it's hopeful, too. I hope it is.

How Do You Do, Fellow Chosen Ones?

 Sometimes my stories are meaningful and deep and inspirational. Sometimes they are just delightful nonsense. "How Do You Do, Fellow Chosen Ones?" available in audio and text from Tall Tale TV, is definitely in the delightful nonsense category.

I don't remember exactly why I decided I needed to write a fantasy story based on the How do you do, fellow kids? meme in which Steve Buscemi spectacularly fails at pretending to be a young person. I just know I found a couple paragraphs of a story with the title "How Do You Do, Fellow Chosen Ones?" I had written a couple years before, and I decided I needed to finish it.

So there's this prophecy, right? And this modern day questing party has been tasked with finding the boy mentioned in the prophecy, triggering his innate Chosen One Powers, and defeating the bad guy. No problem, right?

Well, one problem. The witch who was supposed to trigger his powers… she kind of… gave herself the powers by mistake and decided that instead of admitting to this failure, she would just pretend to be the chosen one.

She is not convincing, as he is a teenage boy and she is a middle aged woman, and no one is fooled. But she's the only option they have right now, so they might as well try it.

The Moon Rabbit

 The original file name of the story that became The Moon Rabbit—now available in Prismatic Dreams—was ET The Extra Transgender, so that should give you an idea of what you're in for with this story.

When I was watching ET for the first time in years, I noticed it could be seen as a transgender narrative. (Read my live tweet here.)

Somehow, that idea evolved into a story where magic is gendered and a young person on the cusp of puberty fears they’ll get the feminine magic because they were assigned female at birth. But then they meet the moon rabbit…

(I acknowledge that this is not my culture and I may have gotten some details wrong when talking about the myth. I am not claiming it is incredibly accurate, and neither is my character. The story is set a little ways into the future and they admit the details may have been changed in translation or amalgamated with other myths passed down from their Chinese and Vietnamese side of the family.)

I use some of the plot points from ET, but a lot of it is meant as a metaphor for gender dysphoria and being afraid of having to go through the wrong puberty.

I don't think I ever say whether the main character is a binary trans boy or nonbinary. They refer to themselves as a boy, but also express interest in having bits of magic from both sides.

Gender is weird and confusing, especially if you're just figuring it out. I don't think my main character really knows what they identity as quite yet, and that’s okay. They’re sure they aren’t a girl, at least not completely, but other than that, labels aren't as important to them as feeling comfortable in their body is.

Maiasaura Deifaeria

 Hey, do you want to cry about dinosaurs!? Then do I have a story for you! Maiasaura Deifaeria is now available in Luna Station Quarterly!

So, full disclosure: this story breaks my rule about not killing off animal characters. I am comfortable breaking that rule in this instance for two reasons:

*While she is a dinosaur, the story depicts her and her godmother as having very human like intelligence and emotions. They may have different views of the world and their place in it because they are dinosaurs, but in a story sense, they serve the same purpose as human characters. It isn't like I am killing off a character's pet just for shock value, I am writing about the death of a character who happens to also be a dinosaur.

*Her death is not a surprise, nor is it used just to make another character sad. This is a story about grief and moving on, and while Asha is alive in flashbacks and her death is not described on the page, we know she is dead before we ever meet her.

Maiasaura Deifaeria (that’s "dinosaur fairy godmother" in Latin, at least to the best of my abilities) is about a fairy godmother triceratops who never got a chance to grant her last hatchling's wish before they went extinct, and she has not been able to move on from her grief for 65 million years.

It's sad and it's hopeful, and it references the real life Bone Wars, which led to some amazing discoveries and also undoubtedly caused the destruction of invaluable fossil specimens.

Because that's the way life is, isn't it? Nothing is ever all good or all bad, and bad people do good things and good people make bad decision sometimes. But you can't wait around for something to magically change, you just have to do your best with what you have and hope it's enough.

This is one of my favorite stories I've ever written and it has a ridiculous concept and serious emotions and I just… I love it, and I hope you will, too.