My sword & sorcery story “Shades of Bruises and Blood” has moved out from behind the paywall!  You can read it now online in Trollbreath Magazine (although I encourage you to consider subscribing so you don’t have to wait for all the amazing fiction and poetry in each issue). 

I shared earlier about the origins of this story.  One thing I hadn’t mentioned is that, while doing research for it, I called up my dad, a retired geotechnical civil engineer, to ask him about the conditions for the opening scene.  It was great fun to try applying just a smidge of his knowledge of landslides and seismic activity to a fantasy setting. 

It’s official!  My chapbook of video game poetry, forthcoming from Manawaker Studio, will be called Extra Lives in Verse.  My publisher just sent me the proof of the interior yesterday, with the poems nicely formatted along with some extra visual touches he added here and there as a lovely surprise.  If I do say so myself, it looks gorgeous!  It doesn’t have a cover yet. That’s the next step. 

Once in a while I’ll have a writing project where I get a little emotional seeing it in the publisher’s format for the first time.  Especially when it comes to stories or poetry I’ve worked on for years and years (have I mentioned I’m a slow writer?).  This is one of those projects.  It’s a simple thing, seeing it in a new font, in a pdf, labeled as a proof, but after having written and read and re-read the words in my working document for so long, it makes it feel almost brand-new, and it’s so validating.  Then later, seeing my work released out into the wild, available to readers?  That’s just the best. 

If you’re in the Portland area on Tuesday, Oct. 6^th, I’ll be joining Brian U. Garrison and Haley Bossé for a reading hosted by Parallel Worlds Bookshop.  The event, Speculative Poetry: Weavings and Unweavings, begins at 6:30pm and is free to attend.  I’ll read an excerpt from The Inca Weaver’s Tales as well as from a forthcoming book of mine—or two…

I hope you can come, enjoy some cool poetry, and support the bookshop! 

From the event page: 

“Join us for an evening of speculative poetry featuring three local poets whose work explores imagined futures, fantastical worlds, identity, ecology, resistance, and everything that poetry can make strange and luminous.

Brian U. Garrison, Katherine Quevedo, and Haley Bossé will each take the floor for a featured reading, with their books available for purchase throughout the evening.

Come discover poetry from the speculative edges.”

My fantasy story “Shades of Bruises and Blood” is available now to subscribers of Trollbreath Magazine in Issue 9; it’ll be available to all on the Trollbreath website later on, but if you don’t want to wait, please consider subscribing. 

Yesterday I attended a panel at Worldcon about tropes.  They talked about how, if you’re going to draw upon tropes (including to subvert them), it helps if you actually have affection for that trope. 

“Shades of Bruises and Blood” is my love letter to my favorite trope of all time: the Enemy Mine.  Named after the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novella by Barry B. Longyear, this trope has stirred something deep within me since childhood.  I always loved the episodes of cartoon shows where the good guys and bad guys had to team up for whatever reason.  What kind of alliance would they forge?  How would the dynamics play out?  What about the status quo they’d so surprisingly disrupted?  I didn’t have the vocabulary to express my curiosity like this back in those days, but I felt it.  As Aristotle once wrote, “A common danger unites even the bitterest of enemies.” 

I went on to read Enemy Mine and watch the film adaptation, both of which made me weep.  Then came the novel The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff and the film adaptation The Eagle.  Yes, I even watched the movie Hell in the Pacific, which purportedly helped inspire Longyear’s novella. 

All that to say, I took my job very seriously when I finally felt ready to tackle this trope.  I’ve sort of flirted with it in my other work, but this was the first time I made it so overt.  I tried to pour a lot of myself into these characters and their predicament, even though they’re quite different from me at a surface glance.  We all carry depths.  We all carry the tools to connect, if we choose to wield them. 

Today was again full of stimulating and inspiring panels to attend.  I may have pushed it a bit far, especially after so many days, because my energy was flagging by the end.  Thankfully I had a lovely meetup with Rachel Unger to cap off the day.  And prior to that, I found some more of “my people” at a panel when we realized we all love to write hard-to-classify short stories.  And what a small world, it turns out one of them, Z.D. Dochterman, has a story coming out in the same issue as I do of Trollbreath Magazine! 

There’s a bit more tomorrow, but I think that’ll do it for my Worldcon recaps this year.  I really appreciate all the volunteers who worked hard to make this con happen.  I have lots of notes to revisit, recommendations to look up, and neglected emails to respond to. 

I’ll be back soon with an update on my latest story. 

Made it through my marathon day!  My sister hung out with me for a lot of it, which made it extra fun.  Besides my own panels today, I went to several others and also attended my friend Brian U. Garrison’s poetry reading. 

My sister noted how supportive the speculative writing community is.  I wholeheartedly agree. 

This morning’s Stroll with the Stars was fun, despite Anaheim being hotter and more humid than usual, according to the locals.  Our guide, Dr. Deb, even took us to see some dragons! 

My first panel, the Anti-genre Round Table, gave me lots to reflect on.  I also enjoyed attending my friend Rachel Unger’s reading, full of lovely and eerie descriptions. 

My big sis drove up from San Diego, and together we braved the Friday night crowd at Downtown Disney.  Another dragon sighting! 

All right, I’ve got three panels tomorrow, so I’m tapping out for tonight. 

I enjoyed filling today with attending panels and taking lots of notes.  And seriously, what better way to cap it off than a lunar eclipse?! 

I’ll leave you with an excerpt from my poem “The Night Our Mama Moon Fell Prey (Lunar Eclipse)”:

“…See

her crimsoning. See the hunter-bite

creeping across her flushed face,

the blush of dwindling stamina

and the glow of milky blood

from the midnight jaguar’s

hidden jaws…”

I have arrived in Anaheim, California, for LAcon V, this year’s Worldcon! 

Today was a day of travel, settling in, picking up my badge, and getting my bearings. 

I also attended the speculative poetry salon hosted by Camille Hernandez, Anaheim’s current Poet Laureate, and featuring amazing readings by Marie Brennan, Angela Liu, Somto Ihezue, and Christian Ivey.  They were all wonderful! 

We’ll see if I have the energy to keep up a daily summary while I’m here. 

We’re a month away from the next issue of Trollbreath Magazine coming out, which will include my story “Shades of Bruises and Blood.”  They just revealed the awesome cover, with art by Tobias Roetsch: