Handwritten Recipes: Excerpts From A Post-Apocalyptic Cookbook

 Have you ever looked for a recipe online, only to find yourself scrolling past a long personal story about the origin and meaning of the recipe before you even get to the ingredients? Handwritten Recipes: Excerpts From A Post-Apocalyptic Cookbook is a story told through those recipe introductions.

Available in the absolutely massive anthology Grandpa's Deep-Space Diner (seriously y'all, it's over 600 pages long), Handwritten Recipes weaves together stories about the main character's family with her own apocalyptic journey to see her grandmother and finally learned how to make all of the recipes that have been passed down over the generations.

The entire idea of the story is about how surviving isn't enough. Sometimes you need to thrive, sometimes you need to treat yourself even though you're struggling to make ends meet. It's about how putting in a little extra work to make a good meal instead of getting something cheap and premade and easy can make a difference in the way you feel.

That theme came easy to me. I come from several generations of people who pride themselves on being cheap, and even when I have money, it's a struggle to splurge on something nice for myself. But it is important and it does make all the difference sometimes. It's the difference between feeding the stomach and feeding the soul, to quote my main character's grandmother.

I don't have a lot of personal stories about family recipes and traditions. The one recipe that does have a story, it's not even the entire recipe:

My uncle Bob made an amazing pot roast. Everyone loved it. So my mom asked for his recipe and she made it, and apparently it was good but it was not Bob's Pot Roast. She asked him what she did wrong, and went over how she made it, and he remembered another ingredient that he forgot to tell her last time.

She tried again. Still not right. Every time she asked him about it, he remembered more ingredients. She was convinced he was doing it on purpose to avoid giving out his recipe, and she isn't sure she ever got the full list of ingredients during his lifetime. She still calls it Bob's Pot Roast, but it's not.

There are no actual recipes in Handwritten Recipes, just stories and advice about surviving and thriving and feeding the soul.

Contains mentions of death, and the end of the world.

Pick up your copy of Grandpa's Deep-Space Diner here.

Darken The Corners Of My Mind

 Darken The Corners Of My Mind, a very short and odd story, is now available at The Arcanist!

I don't want to say much about the story because there's not much to say without spoiling it, so I will tell you about the dream that inspired it.

There was a person with no memories of their own. They had plenty of memories, just… stolen memories. Every time they touched someone, they would take away a memory and it would become their own.

Their life was a mosaic of pieced together glimpses of lives that were not their own. They didn't know who they were or where they were or even know what they were doing at any given time.

They could look at a building, but by the time their brain interpreted what they saw, the information taken in by their eyes was technically a memory from a few milliseconds ago. So instead of the building they were actually looking at, their brain supplied stolen memories of similar buildings.

Even walking down the street, their steps were not their own. They could look at their feet, but they would see sneakers one step, high heels the next. They would only know they were cold because they remembered the chilly wind of a blizzard a decade ago, or the feeling of putting a hand in the refrigerator in another country.

The dream was not dark. In fact, the big conflict involved accidentally stealing the memory of how to make a really good grilled cheese sandwich.

… that's where my story differs. My story is dark. It mentions death, nonconsensual medical tests, and being held against their will in a government facility.

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.

The Kraken Heist

Do you like adventures on the high seas? What about awkward trans boys? Adorable sea monsters named Timothy?

Than I would like to introduce you to my story "The Kraken Heist," now available in Runs Like Clockwork!

This very queer steampunk love story/heist stars Dax, who used to think he was a gay girl growing up in fancy high society but now he’s run away on a boat to start a new life because he's pretty sure he’s a man who likes to kiss girls and other not-men people. He’s also pretty sure he’s not very good at being a man, but it’s only been a few days so give him a break okay.

Dax is my precious little awkward queer baby.

He’s also got prosthetic legs that have not adjusted to life on a boat, giving him one more reason to hate boats.

Oh yeah, and he is… dun dun dunnn… a thief! At least, he will be, once he tricks the very pretty Sandrine into giving him the key to the tank containing his target: a baby kraken.

Sure would be real inconvenient if he were to get a crush on Sandrine, eh? (hint hint)

The Kraken Heist is genuinely one of my favorite stories I’ve ever written. It deals with queer identity and exploring nontoxic masculinity, and the idea that a woman doesn’t have to be "feminine" to be a woman, but I don't think any of my characters actually label their sexuality or gender identity other than Dax wondering if he is still gay now that he is a man who likes women.

There’s a parallel to be made about labels and words in the way Dax talks about boats. It was totally unintentional, in fact I only really noticed it today, but just because it is not intentional doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about it:

Dax hates boats. There are a lot of reasons, but one of them is the fact that boats have a whole separate, seemingly unnecessary and made up vocabulary for things. Why does left suddenly need to be called port just because you’re on a boat?

So he doesn’t make that much of an effort to learn boat words. He just says what he means: boat luggage, boat driveway, boat porch. Just like he describes himself: a man who has breasts (manly ones, he points out), someone who likes to kiss people who aren't men.

It’s simple to him, not something that needs to be explained or necessarily given a name. It's just a part of who he is, and that should be enough.

Nesting — Free Poetry Reprint

 Nesting originally appeared in Multiverse, an anthology of science fiction poetry.

Nesting

I didn't say anything when you started hoarding marbles

when I found Christmas baubles in my shoes

or glass eyes in the silverware drawer.

I know you have a need to decorate our home like a bower bird

That's how your species says

"I love you"

I kept my mouth shut when you escalated to beach balls

and filling the bathroom with balloons

Earth boys show their love with candy and flowers

You put a human hamster ball in the kitchen

I was okay with that because

I love you

But this has simply gone too far

What will the neighbors say?

I will not have the dwarf planet Pluto in my backyard

Put it back where you found it

Bring chocolate instead

I love you

Personal Reflections On Bloody Mary

My story Personal Reflections On Bloody Mary is now available to read for free in Trembling With Fear, on The Horror Tree.

 For best results, please imagine this story being read by Owen Wilson.

I tried to write this story several times. I knew the basic plot and the twist at the end, I even knew I didn't really want to develop the characters much, I just wanted to have the story describe what is happening to them.

But it just wasn't working out… until I decided to write it as if it was narrated by Owen Wilson.

I have no idea why this idea even came into my head. I mean, I do. It's because I absolutely loved his character in Loki, and his unique way of talking just kind of found a place in my heart. But I have no idea why I decided I needed to write a horror story in his voice.

But I did anyway. And it was so much easier to write in a really colloquial and folksy style (my phone tried to dictate that as foxy, and… I mean, that's not wrong I guess) if I stopped thinking about "how should I write this" and started thinking about "if Owen Wilson was sitting on a porch in a rocking chair, telling a spooky story in his really casual, Southern way, how would he say this?"

So that's my writing advice for the day. If the story is good but writing it isn't working out, pick an actor with a unique way of speaking and pretend you are writing the story for them to narrate.

About the actual story:

It's atmospherically spooky but nothing too terrifying happens. Kind of a psychological horror more than anything. And Bloody Mary. But besides a sort of psychological and existential horror, I don't think I need to put any content warnings. Nothing bad happens to the dog, blood is mentioned hypothetically but not actually in the story.

I'm really excited to be published on The Horror Tree. I've been going to that site for years to find submission calls and it's been a great resource.

So I hope you enjoy Personal Reflections On Bloody Mary, and I especially hope you read it in the voice of Owen Wilson.