Archive

It's finally here! Dreams Bigger than Heartbreak, the second book in my young adult trilogy, is finally available to request on Netgalley. If you read it, please do post a review in all the places where reviews are posted --- it makes a huge awesome difference. (Side note: We decided to call the trilogy that begins with Victories Greater Than Death the Unstoppable trilogy, but i've started thinking of it in my own head as Victories, Dreams and Promises, after the three individual book titles. And yeah, the third title is subject to change, and not announced yet.) Oh, and because someone asked me online, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak is available to pre-order as well. And pre-orders are basically the greatest way to support an author, and the final evolution of a book nerd's beast form.

Anyway, I was realizing that I've never written an essay laying out how I created the supporting cast in Victories Greater Than Death and its sequels, though I've talked about it here and there. And this is a pretty interesting story—both as an origin story for these characters that I've come to love and as an exercise in showing how I sometimes make things way more challenging and complicated than they need to be. (Which I think is part of being a writer? We never take the straight path.)

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe. My first full-length short story collection, Even Greater Mistakes, is out today! It features some tales that won the Hugo, Sturgeon and Locus Awards. You can get it in any place that's not trapped in a time bubble where they constantly relive the same day in 1927. I also published two other books in 2021: my young adult space fantasy Victories Greater Than Death, and Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times By Making Up Stories. Also, check out the podcast I co-host, Our Opinions Are Correct.

1) I was a baby, and my parents had just gotten home from the store, with me in the car with them. They left me in the car while they unloaded all the bags of stuff from the trunk from the back of our brand new hatchback. While they were moving all their bags inside, the parking brake slipped and the station wagon rolled backwards down the steep grade of our driveway. The car picked up speed as it rolled about a quarter mile down to the road below, and then finally collided with a mailbox across the street. My parents later said that they were sure I would have been killed on impact, if they had not invested in what was then a fairly new technology: car seats.

I didn't know about this for years. But when I was nine or ten, I was in the car with my dad and we drove past someone who was driving with their baby perched on their lap in the driver's seat. My father --- who never lost his temper, especially at strangers --- became red-faced with anger that anyone would endanger a child this way. It was some time after that I learned that a car seat had saved my life.

2) My mom was doing graduate school in the UK, so my father took a mostly unpaid sabbatical and we moved the entire family there for a couple years or so. There was a ginormous lake near where we were living, and one day we went swimming there. This is one of my earliest memories: bobbing around happily in the water until some force grabbed a hold of my leg and swept me under the surface. I barely knew what was happening until it was too far gone: some undercurrent, some greedy lake spirit, had grabbed hold of me and was pulling me farther and deeper. My mother realized just in time that my head was no longer bobbing above the surface, and jumped in the lake. The next thing I knew, she was grabbing me and lifting me out of the water, then towing me back to dry land. My parents were freaked out, but I remember being sort of amused by the whole thing. There was a TV show and book series at the time called Lizzie Dripping, and I just kept repeating, I'm Lizzie Dripping, I'm Lizzie Dripping, as I trailed water all the way home.

One of my long-time dreams is about to come true next week. I'm about to have a real, proper collection of my best short stories, out from a major publisher. There's finally going to be a book that represents me and my writing, in all of their inappropriateness.

When I say "long-term dream," I'm talking like twenty years.

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe. I have two books coming out soon: on August 17, I’m publishing . And in November, I’m publishing , including tales that won the Hugo, Sturgeon and Locus Awards. Also, check out the podcast I co-host, .

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe. I have two books coming out soon: on August 17, I’m publishing Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times By Making Up Stories. And in November, I’m publishing , including tales that won the Hugo, Sturgeon and Locus Awards. Also, check out the podcast I co-host, .

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe. I have two books coming out soon: on August 17, I’m publishing Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times By Making Up Stories. It’s a writing-advice manual for the scary moment we’re living through. And in November, I’m publishing , including tales that won the Hugo, Sturgeon and Locus Awards. Also, check out the podcast I co-host, .

Hey everybody! My young adult space fantasy novel is just $2.99 in all of the ebook formats right now, which means it’s a great time to get it for the teen (or adult) in your life. To celebrate, I wanted to share a scene from the end of the book — very minor spoilers ahead — which got cut purely for length reasons.

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe. I have two books coming out soon: on August 17, I’m publishing Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times By Making Up Stories. It’s a writing-advice manual for the moment we’re living through, full of advice on being creative when the world is actually on fire. And then in November, I’m publishing , including tales that won the Hugo, Sturgeon and Locus Awards. Also, check out the podcast I co-host, .

There are a bunch of reasons I’m over-the-moon excited about The Suicide Squad, including the stacked cast and the hilarious trailers. And I’m always here for James Gunn. But one of the main reasons why I cannot wait for the latest outing of Task Force X is the way Gunn has gone out of his way to acknowledge the legacy of John Ostrander, one of my all-time favorite comics creators. Ostrander has a cameo in the film (as featured in the trailers), and Gunn has given him shout-outs whenever he’s been interviewed.

Marvel finally gave the trickster god Loki his own TV show, but with a major twist: there’s more than one Loki. In addition to Tom Hiddleston’s charmingly slippery version, we’ve met a lady Loki, named Sylvie. Plus an older Loki played by Richard E. Grant, a child Loki, and… an alligator Loki? If one Loki was entertaining, how much better is it to watch a whole crowd of them?

Welcome to the hottest trend in geek entertainment: watching beloved characters meet other versions of themselves. Ben Affleck’s Batman is set to appear in The Flash alongside Michael Keaton’s incarnation. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse won an Academy Award for throwing a party and inviting a host of spider-people. And that’s just scratching the surface: more than ever, our heroes are discovering new ways to be their own best friends (or, in some cases, frenemies.)

The other day, I was tweeting about my upcoming book of writing advice, Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories. And I described the book as being a mixture of writing advice, personal essay… and self-help book. I’d never thought about Never Say this way before, but as soon as I wrote that, it made total sense. Because there’s a huge overlap between helping people to be creative in the midst of horribilitude, and helping people to cope with life in general.

We are once again debating whether trans women are really women, becuase it’s a day ending in shrieks and blood-spattered mirrors and cries of damnation. What a delight, to be constantly having this same debate, to be forever encountering new patinas of rot on the same old rotten arguments.

We trans women live for this — or rather, we do this so that we may be allowed to continue living. Same difference, right?

One of the main arguments that’s often brought up to establish some fundamental, essential difference between trans women and our cis counterparts is that trans women were not socialized female as children. And thus, we missed out on all of the experiences of patriarchy and misogyny that cis women have internalized. Sure, you could argue that trans women have our own horrible experiences of abuse and mistreatment, often from a young age, that have left us traumatized at the knobbly hands of patriarchy.

But there’s no denying that all cis women have had certain important, unique experiences — regardless of culture, class, ability status, or other circumstances — that no trans woman has ever undergone:

Last week, everybody on the internet was freaking out about this Variety article on superhero TV shows — purely because Harley Quinn producer Justin Halpern said that season three of the HBO Max animated show was supposed to feature “Batman going down on Catwoman,” but this had to be cut because DC Comics said that this might hurt toy sales. Which is, indeed, ridiculous.

So sorry I’ve been so slow about posting newsletters lately — I’m hoping to put out a bunch in the next week or so, and then keep cranking ‘em out regularly. Usually I try to include shout-outs in every newsletter to stuff I’ve loved lately, but now I have a huge backlog of things to shout out. So here’s a special newsletter with just all the things I’ve adored recently.

Plan B, directed by Natalie Morales

reminds me of , another movie I loved — but I actually like (pictured above) even better. It’s the story of a teenage girl named Sunny, who has sex for the first time at a party that she throws and is told at her neighborhood drugstore that she can’t obtain the “morning after” pill, aka Plan B, because the pharmacist has moral objections. This launches one of your classic road trip adventures with Sunny and her best friend, Lupe.

Below is a somewhat revised version of a Twitter thread I posted a couple months ago. I was on a panel the other day and was citing some of the points I made here, and realized that my old thread is pretty inaccessible at this point, because of the way Twitter works. I’ve added a bit more stuff and links to some recent articles on related topics.

Ever had a story that you were dying to write, for years and years? And then you finally had an opportunity to write it, and… you couldn’t make it work at all. This happened to me a while back.

Back in the mid-2000s, I was writing a series of first-person short stories about queer and trans communities in San Francisco, many of which had a slight autobiographical element. Most of those stories took place in the present (which is now the past), but a few took place in the near-ish future, including a San Francisco that is being threatened with flooding and otherwise ravaged by climate change. (Though back in like 2005, I wasn’t thinking about wildfires yet.) And I wanted to end that story cycle with a story that took place further in the future, when San Francisco has become an archipelago, with most of the current city underwater.

I thought about that “drowned San Francisco” story for a long time, but never quite got around to writing it. And meanwhile, I abandoned that story cycle at some point, for a bunch of reasons. (Including that my writing had progressed a lot since I wrote most of the stories and it would have been a huge boondoggle to get them up to a good standard. I’d still love to do something with those pieces at some point.)

Marvel has announced approximately five billion TV shows, including long-awaited live-action incarnations of Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk. But there’s still one vitally important Marvel superhero who doesn’t have her own show: Doreen Green, aka Squirrel Girl. This is a terrible oversight that must be corrected immediately. A Squirrel Girl TV show could run for several seasons without even beginning to access the full potential of Marvel’s greatest hero, and her wonderful supporting cast.

True, Marvel tried to get a TV show, featuring Squirrel Girl, off the ground in 2017. But do we really want to see Doreen Green sharing the spotlight with… Speedball? (I thought he was called Penance now, probably because he fights crime by waving penants around? And they say things like “GO COUGARS” or something. You can do a lot of damage with a vigorously penant!) Anyway, I’m sure the show would have been great, especially if it was similar to Freeform’s show, but I would really way rather have a proper show. And anyone who has read the long-running series by Ryan North and Erica Henderson will probably agree with me. I want Squirrel Girl to have her own supporting cast, including Nancy Whitehead and Koi Boy, not so much Speedball or Pennants or whatever.

The other day I tweeted something about literary fiction that caused some, er, spirited discussion. People started asking me to define “literary fiction,” which is kind of a “know it when it you see it” thing. And people were also bringing up the ridiculousness of the ongoing division between “litfic” and science fiction and fantasy, which gets more absurd all the time — especially now that so much of what’s published as literary fiction these days contains fantastical, futuristic or post-apocalyptic elements.

In the fifth episode of the wonderful sitcom Rutherford Falls, Nathan and Regan help to judge people’s projects in their local History Fair, and end up getting sucked into a huge debate over whether you can separate the art from the artist. Can we still like the movies from that director who turned out to be a creep, or the books written by that dude who said something offensive? Are we still allowed to listen to music made by (alleged) abusers?

This is the kind of discussion I hear, or witness, constantly of late. So many of our favorite creators have turned out to be kind of gross and awful, making it hard to keep liking their stuff. And whenever this comes up, I can’t help thinking about Samuel Johnson, the famous eighteenth century critic, dictionarian and busybody.

It’s Star Wars Day for another few hours! I know, I’m super late, and everybody else already shot a womp rat, or whatever you do to celebrate this holiday, this morning. But I love Star Wars, and I’ve had plenty of weird thoughts about it lately. So in the spirit of , here are 10 hot takes about …

Lately I’ve been having, or witnessing, the same conversations again and again with fellow trans folk: people confess that they feel like imposters, or like they’re not properly trans, or like their feelings of transness are not valid. Call it trans imposter syndrome.

This is one reason —because it’s easy to doubt whether you’re “really” trans, or whether you “deserve” to call yourself trans. And in real life, there is no such thing as a Trans Card that will confirm or ratify your transness — you just have to trust your feelings, like Obi-Wan says.

Like many other booksellers, Margaret (not her real name) was forced to shut down her store a year ago. When she reopened, she mostly sold books online, allowing customers to come by and pick them up. But when the number of new covid-19 cases in her area started to decline, she decided to let in one household at a time for in-store browsing—and within two weeks, she had contracted covid-19.

This past year has been an unprecedented challenge for physical bookstores, which have had to find ways to keep their relationship with their communities alive during social distancing and lockdowns. It’s a heartbreaking paradox: more people than ever have been reading, and publishers reported record profits in 2020, but bookstores have . To survive, owners and staff have had to come up with new answers to the old question: What makes a great bookstore? But also: when things that seemed central to the bookselling experience, like browsing and hand-selling, become impossible, what’s left?

Image: Ted Eytan/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0

I was privileged to be able to write about the horrendous new wave of legislation that aims to punish trans kids in . For months now, I’ve been watching this latest coordinated assault with a growing sense of horror at the sheer malevolence of this drummed-up panic about kids and young adults who are just trying to live their own lives. The question I started the article with is: what kinds of conversations could we be having about trans kids if we weren’t having to spend all our time arguing against this legislative abuse and all of the misinformation behind it?

Back in 2019, in the before times, I was lucky enough to be guest of honor at Wiscon, the world’s first feminist science fiction convention, alongside the incredible G. Willow Wilson. I wore a vintage red brocadey dress (see pic below, with Annalee), and gave a guest-of-honor speech that I worked on for about a year. That guest-of-honor speech has been living on my old website, which is about to go away, and it also feels like it speaks to a lot of the same issues as last week’s newsletter, in a way that feels interesting to me. So I’m reprinting it below.

Lately, I keep having the same conversation with other trans artists and activists who were around in the early 2000s. I always tell them that their work inspired me and helped me to see trans life in all its complexity and weirdness—and often, they reply that they feel like their stuff has aged badly, or the terms of the debate have changed, or trans culture has moved on. The art they were making back then feels dated, or actually wrong or harmful, when you look at it now.

Our framework for thinking about trans identity has changed, and trans discourse has moved on in the past two decades, and that’s a very good thing. In many ways, we were ignorant back then and we hope we’ve learned better. And we’re so grateful for younger people who have been redefining what it means to be trans, non-binary, genderqueer and/or gender-nonconforming.

I feel this more keenly than most. I wrote tons and tons of trans fiction and personal essays and political essays, throughout most of George W. Bush’s presidency. I won a Lambda Literary Award for transgender writing, even.

Sometimes I wonder about the alternate reality where Star Trek introduced its first openly LGBTQ+ characters in 1987.

This definitely could have happened. David Gerrold, who wrote “The Trouble With Tribbles” and other episodes of the original Trek, for ’s first season featuring a gay couple. (Gerrold also wrote , one of the most wonderfully queer science fiction novels of all time.) Gerrold’s episode would have been an allegory for AIDS, a subject that mainstream TV shied away from in the 80s. And the episode would have introduced two male characters who casually mentioned they were in a relationship. Alas, the higher-ups weren’t okay with crossing that particular final frontier, so the episode was scrapped—though Gerrold rewrote it as a standalone novel, and it was finally adapted as of the fan-made series .

My father died last spring. We think he had covid, but we'll never know for sure. I didn't talk about it much at the time, because I didn't feel up to having to mourn publicly, or responding to everyone’s condolences. This has been a tough year for all of us, and I needed some space to grieve in my own way.

I used to talk to my father all the time, and he shaped me as a storyteller and as a person. We would geek out about the meaning of life, writing, religion, the nature of time and consciousness. My dad was a philosophy professor for 50 years, and his work ranged from moral philosophy (like Chidi on The Good Place) to questions about human nature and what it actually means to have a good life.

For the last several years of his life my father had severe dementia, and we couldn't really talk about much of anything at all.

Yes, I finally started a newsletter. I think I’m the very last person on the planet to do this, which means I’m probably like nine months too late. But this will be fun, I promise! There will be goofy essays about Batman, and about obscure British pop culture. And I’m going to write harmless personal essays about stuff that happened to me. I’m aiming for once a week, but life is weird.

Sign up now so you don’t miss the first issue.