Peaches, Wishes, And Something Like Motherhood

 Before I get to announcing my most recent publication, I wanted to remind people that Mighty: An Anthology Of Disabled Superheroes is currently open for submissions! We've already gotten several submissions and it just makes me so happy that my weird little idea is actually happening, and more people like me are going to see themselves in superhero media.

Now. Today's story.

Peaches, Wishes, And Something Like Motherhood, available in Let's Get Weird, is my take on the Japanese folktale Momotaro.

It's about the difficulties of building a family when you're in a queer relationship. Especially when the fertility clinic is ground zero for the alien invasion and the world is ending.

But it's also about hope and making life find a way even if it doesn't seem possible. It's about holding on and letting go.

It's about lesbians raising a baby alien they found in the river.

The Endless Night at Promontory Summit

So there was a weird western anthology call, and my friend said “What if I wrote a story based on the Bon Jovi song Dead or Alive, but instead of a six string guitar, it was a six shooter gun?”

"And I could do the same thing with Summer of 69, but instead of 1969, it's 1869," I said, joking.

… I should know by now that when I joke about things like that, I'm not actually joking.

I wrote my story, he didn't write his, and I didn't get into the anthology anyway. But I’m proud to say "The Endless Night At Promontory Summit" has found a home in Queer Weird West Tales!

It's a little bit Twilight Zone, a little bit Supernatural, and a little bit coming of age romance, set during the summer the Transcontinental Railroad was finished.

I hope you enjoy it.

Davy Bones and the Domestication of the Dutchman

 Ahoy me hearties! I've got a pirating tail for you today. Yes, tail is spelled correctly, because my pirates are dogs. In fact, so are all the pirates in the recently published anthology Pirating Pups!

My story, Davy Bones and the Domestication of the Dutchman, takes place in a world where global warming has flooded the planet and humans are little more than a cultural memory passed down through each generation of pirate dogs.

It's a ghost story, a story about unfinished business, and a story about the importance of having a crew on those cold and lonely nights out at sea.

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.

Don't Cry For Me Argentinosaurus

 I am very happy to announce that my story "Don't Cry For Me Argentinosaurus" is now available in volume one of The Mesozoic Reader!

This story is part of what I am jokingly calling the Jennifer Lee Rossman Cinematic Universe, a shared universe where several of my stories take place in different time periods.

There are two other stories published in this universe: The Good, The Bad, And The Utahraptor, and Joan Of Archaeopteryx. And I am planning, in the very distant future, to put together these stories with a bunch of others to more completely tell the full story of this world.

Argentinosaurus is very loosely based on the musical Evita. Very very loosely. I want to stress that I have never seen Evita. Mostly I just based the story on the Madonna song and added dinosaurs.

Set The Night To Music

 Set The Night To Music, also known as the reason Spotify keeps suggesting I listen to Starship, is now available in Triangulation: Energy!

This is a cyberpunk story based on the song "We Built This City," which I listened to over and over again while writing it, to the point that I totally messed up my Spotify algorithm. But it's also a story that made me realize some common themes in my work.

Music.

Reluctant heroes.

The little people rising up to defeat the big corporations.

And it's hard to know where these recurring ideas come from, why they’re so important to us that they keep showing up. A lot of my work is directly inspired by the lessons about life and science that I absorbed from Jurassic Park. But that last one, little people rising up to defeat big corporations?

Well… as I was writing this story, I found myself humming a little tune. No, not We Built This City. I couldn't identify it at first, I only remember the words "You can't fight corporate America."

So I looked it up, and it was this song from Rocko’s Modern Life, a cartoon I watched when I was little. I can't say for sure that that song is the only reason the idea of getting together a big unruly mob and fighting against corporations has become such a big part of who I am, but it's definitely one of them.

Seven Things I Learned Traveling Through Space With A Genetically Engineered Lesbian Peahen

 I’m so honored to say that my story "Seven Things I Learned Traveling Through Space With A Genetically Engineered Lesbian Peahen" has been published alongside a shipload (wink wink) of other spaceship-set stories in Bridge To Elsewhere!

The story was inspired by Real Science! According to this article, peafowl can sense each other’s tail vibrations with the lil doodlebopper feathers on their heads.

So naturally, I'm using them as long range communication in space.

I do not understand how that would work, do not ask me.

Also do not ask my character.

I used one of my favorite literary techniques for this story: the main character who has no idea how the science works so I don't have to explain anything.

This character in particular is best imagined as Darcy Lewis, Kat Denning’s character from the Thor movies.