Several "Mighty" Announcements

 With great powerchair comes great responsibility…

Or something like that.

Anyway, announcement time!

This Friday at 5 PM eastern, I will be part of a panel with other authors, reading from and talking about our stories in the Pirating Pups anthology at When Worlds Collide! (it came out today, I will have another proper announcement after [gestures at the chaos] is over)

And then on Sunday at 1 PM eastern, please join me and some friends as we talk about disability in superhero media on a panel Tyche Books has graciously helped me put together.

For more information about the con, and to register for free for these and many more panels, click here!

Finally, and I will be talking about this a lot more during the submission window and editing process, but…

Along with my co-editor Emily Gillespie, I am going to be editing MIGHTY: AN ANTHOLOGY OF DISABLED SUPERHEROES for Renaissance Press! We will be opening for submissions in September, but you can check out our submission call here.

I'll be talking a lot more about the importance of disabled superheroes in particular in the coming months, but I wanted to talk a little bit about my connection to superheroes in general.

I didn't grow up a sci-fi nerd. Neither of my parents were really into it. I'd watch The Twilight Zone marathons on every holiday, and it was drilled into my head from a young age that Michael Keaton is the only Batman we recognize in my family, but that was about it.

The few superhero movies I watched when I was little, I couldn't really get into them.

But as I grew up, I realized that the world saw me as different no matter how much I tried to convince them I was just like them. I realized my parents, the only people I could trust, weren't people I could trust. And this coincided with a couple things that changed everything:

My mom randomly said "Hey, you've never seen Star Wars" while flipping through channels one day, and I was instantly in love with science fiction. And we started hanging out with her friends who had a ton of superhero movies on DVD and would let me watch whatever I wanted.

And suddenly, superheroes made sense. Because sometimes your mentor, the one person you think you can trust, is secretly trying to take control of the things that are important to you. And sometimes just being different is reason enough for people to want to take away your rights or even your life.

(Yeah, I started with the first Iron Man and the X-Men movies.)

My love for these movies has spiraled from there. More than half my T-shirts feature some super powered character (I'm wearing one of my Iron Man shirts as we speak), I've seen every MCU movie in theaters that has come out in the last three years, and the very first time I cried at a movie was at the end of Avengers Endgame because, as my friend teased me, they killed off my "first love."

So yeah. These movies bring me comfort. Inspiration. The last time I had to stay in the hospital overnight, I snuggled up under my blankets and watched Thor while I waited to hear if I would be OK.

Being able to be part of bringing disabled representation into the world of superhero media is just a dream come true for me. I can't wait to see what new heroes I’m going to be cheering for in this book.