I spent a lot of my younger years feeling self-conscious about my hair.  It’s thick, coarse, wiry, and unruly, takes forever to dry, and sheds constantly.  In college I tried writing a poem about it to come to terms with it.  A few years afterward, I decided to devote an entire magic system to hair: human hair as a source of power, as a source of pain and vulnerability, as something to rid the body of, or as something sacred to protect.  I assembled the worldbuilding around that.  I cast my characters and put them in conflict with each other according to the magic.  It took me years to grow enough as a writer to bring the story to fruition.  And when “Desert Locks” was first published last year in GigaNotoSaurus, I celebrated by letting my hair air dry into its naturally thick, coarse, wiry, and unruly state. 

I’m thrilled that “Desert Locks” was selected for Volume IV of Best Indie Speculative Fiction and appears alongside so many wonderful stories.  Here’s the list: 

• “Pokey Potz, Come Out to Play” by Colleen Anderson
• “Sibyls” by Melissa Bobe
• “How to Find a Demon Eater” by Tara Campbell
• “The Collection” by Myna Chang
• “The Haunted Heart of Ebon Eidolon” by Matthew R. Davis
• “+30 Seconds” by Madison Estes
• “Maker Space” by Adele Gardner
• “Tempus Obscurum” by Brad Goldberg
• “Sid” by Andrew Jensen
• “Fireflies” by Zakariah Johnson
• “The Exhibit” by Mark Keane
• “Coin” by Matthew C. Lucas
• “The Sailor’s Salt, the Gaoler’s Rust” by L.P. Melling
• “Leaving Sedna” by Mike Morgan
• “Storm Spun” by Jennifer Quail
• “Desert Locks” by Katherine Quevedo
• “Deadbeat” by Susan Taitel
• “None So Blind as Those Unseen” by Richard Zwicker

The anthology is available now.  You can also find one of my stories, “Fellscorpe and the Wishing Well,” in Volume III.