She didn’t like being called white. It bothered her. She wasn’t white, she said. She was caucasian. She’d been born in Panama City, spoke fluent Spanish, and the culture was part of her life. Her Irish family immigrated there when she was a kid. Although she was American, because she lived in what was formerly called the Canal Zone, she was immersed in the Panamanian culture. America, for most of her life, looked like Florida, because that was where she vacationed when she visited.

She joined the Army when she was 18, to get away from her parents, and ended up seeing a lot of America. It was different than she expected, I guess. She was pretty liberal, for a lady who married a really conservative guy. She had a gay uncle. She had black friends.

I distinctly remember my mother hated Disney’s Pocohontas, when it came out in the 90’s. We weren’t allowed to see it. She sat me down and explained to me that the woman had been exploited by the white men who came here, taken to England, and died on soil that wasn’t her own. That really stuck with me, and I didn’t watch the movie until I was an adult and a bunch of my friends were doing a Disney marathon.

I pointed out the historical inaccuracies. They told me to shush. “Colors of the Wind” was playing.

My mother and I had a complicated relationship, which I wrote about in my 2024 essay A Map of the Welsh Coast As Seen By My Mother, published in the Hooghly Review. It was nominated for Best of the Net and remains one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever written.

I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about her a lot this week.

My hybrid piece “Chimera” will debut on 28 Aug 26 in Flash in the Court, and I hope you all love it.

It doesn’t meean much to you, probably. You pay a few bucks a month, and once in a while I drop a paid post, video, or links. I try to keep everything free because I like to make it accessible here.

But today I paid out my paid accounts, and it was enough to cover my phone bill. I’ve been out of work for a while since I got laid off, and it’s been a struggle out there. I’ve had a few interviews and between being ghosted by employers and being told I’m “overqualified”, I’m just feeling really disheartened.

Today made me feel really appreciated.

I know you might not feel like you’re doing much, but you really helped me out today. I know each of you by name, and I thank you for being there for me.

Here is a flash fiction I wrote this week. It’s for you. <3

Westfield Truck Stop

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It was during a routine TSA check. Apparently something in the monitor told them my groin was an issue and it needed checking. The male TSA agent pulled me aside, looked me up and down, paused, and asked for a female agent to check me. 

I know it's procedure for a female agent to check a female, but that pause, that way he looked me up and down, it made me really uncomfortable. Like if something about me had been different, he might not have.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it. I don't know.

The woman who checked me was professional, but it was gross to have that check done, to have someone with her hand on my crotch, checking me for—what? A knife up my hoo-ha? It was nine in the morning and I was tired. She turned me around and checked the other side. 

I went to my husband. He nodded sympathetically. “I got padded down the last time we flew,” he said. “I get you.”

Did he? Then why didn't he feel as violated as I did?

I recently watched Obsession, like much of the rest of the world. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's about a man named Bear who makes a wish: that his crush, Nikki, falls in love with him, and he forces her, through this wish, to be his girlfriend. She becomes obsessed with him, and he decides he doesn't like that. It's a twisted, upsetting movie for any woman to watch. 

I particularly liked the fact that the protagonist is named Bear, after the whole “man or bear” debate on Twitter. If you don't know what that is, it's the concept of “what would you rather be stuck alone in the woods with, a man, or a bear?” Men usually say the man. Women usually say the bear. After all, the worst a bear can do is kill you.

My husband was particularly upset watching Obsession. The male protagonist, he said, is his worst nightmare. “It's who I am afraid I could become,” he said to me. “Someone who doesn't care about others’ feelings at all. Someone who hurts women.”

He's nothing like that, I told him. It's why I married him, after dating so many people who hurt me.

It makes me think a lot about women and our role in society. I've been assaulted a few times in my life, and it's hard to reconcile that within my brain. The intimacy scene in Obsession bothered me immensely: the blank look on Nikki's face, the way Bear just takes what he wants, and the way the actor understands the assignment—Bear doesn't care that he's become the monster.

I've had boyfriends like that before.

Particularly when I was younger and thinner.

Since gaining weight due to a hormone imbalance, I've tried to lose it again, but part of me doesn't want to. When I was thinner, I was constantly harassed. I got DMs. I got bothered on the street. It didn't matter that I was married. It didn't matter if my husband was with me. Men saw me as an object to be possessed. I prefer to be an unwanted, fat thing that is left alone. My husband loves me and that's enough. 

I still get harassed, but not like it was before. Now, it's a few times a month as opposed to every day.

I wonder if anyone else feels like this. 

I imagine they do. 

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On July 18th, I will be leading a disability panel of accomplished authors in Gaithersburg, MD. There will be more information in an upcoming post.

Later this week, I'll be posting a how-to on writing speculative flash from my perspective for all my paid members. Remember, being a paid subscriber helps me, as I'm right now out of work and every dollar counts!

I had been grinding, chewing, non-stop suffering because of something that was happening in my mouth. I needed to know what was happening to me.

I went to the dentist for help, and he told me it was because of my lifestyle choices. Lose weight, he said, and wear a mouthguard full time. I felt insulted. I ate well, I took care of myself. Something was happening to me, but I wasn’t being taken seriously and I knew it. I bitched about it on the internet, as you do, and it went semi-viral on Threads.

Lots of people feel that way in the medical industry. They feel like they’re being pushed to buy things they don’t need—a full time mouth guard, seriously?---and that they’re not being listened to. I know I have extra body weight, but I also know that it had nothing to do with the grinding in my mouth.

The dentist didn’t care. Nobody seemed to.

There was no solution. The grinding got worse over the last year, turning into a problem where my jaw would sway to the right when I talked, noticeable in my online videos. I mentioned it briefly to my psychiatrist when talking about my mental health.

“Can you describe it?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I wrote a poem about it last year.”

“Really?”

I read it to him.

“Tardive Dyskenisia,” he said. “It’s a serious reaction to your medication. Because it’s been going on so long, it might be permanent.”

We lowered my medication and began plans to reverse the situation. Discussions of alternatives and meds to manage the symptoms. But until then, I’m still in pain.

But at least someone is taking me seriously.

I guess the moral of this story is, if you know something is wrong, don’t stop pushing. You know your body. You know when something isn’t right.

Here is a copy of that poem. Write to remember how things feel.

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Bad Teeth

My teeth are falling out.

My father had very impressive teeth. Big, like people in the movies. He was handsome. Charismatic. I was loud and opinionated, even as a child. His gaze hung sharp, angry. I was a problem and people agreed.

I had lots of opinions. The best after-school activities. Who the actors were in shows. When to start the VHS recorder. He thrust his opinions at me. He told me to chew. I couldn’t always have wrong opinions, I figured. I scrambled for facts on the emerging internet and threw data under his nose. “Chew on that,” I said. His teeth were big enough. I spent a lot of time with soap between my teeth.

My father talked about having bad enamel after he turned forty, so I wasn’t all that surprised when one fell out during dinner when I was nine. There, in the back: a cavern, a hole. It mirrored the maw where his heart should have been. His front tooth came out when he was sleeping, then the rest in a surgical poof.

He looked like a sock puppet, his mouth a wide, awful line across his shrunken face. He wasn’t handsome anymore. It made me smile inside.

He refused to use creams or glues to keep his dentures in place so they clacked and clicked in his mouth as he spoke like a hard piece of gum he wouldn’t spit out. He wasn’t embarrassed. He should have been.

click clack. “Using the word ‘but’ negates everything you say before the word, Martha Jane.”

click clack. “I love you but you drive me crazy.”

I would never be him, I promised myself. Never neglectful. Never mean.

Never missing teeth.

I never got cavities. My teeth were strong, and I brushed them twice a day. I was nice to everyone. People started to see that I was the good kid, the better kid. Better than Dad.

But things change. I left home. I forgot promises to myself. I moved into a mean neighborhood and got mean. People snapped at me and I snapped back. I took up smoking.

But my teeth never forgot. I forgot to brush but they remained white and straight. His dentures looked fake next to my teeth when I came to visit.

“I love your smile but—”

“No buts, Dad,” I said, the newfound nastiness settled like hardened plaque. “I have great teeth.”

He died without his dentures. I spat mouthwash into the sink of the funeral home to keep the taste of bile from my mouth.

Life moved on without him. Life does that.

I turned forty this year. My dentist told me my gums looked like they might be sensitive. I switched to a toothpaste I liked so I’d brush more.

click clack

“What’s that sound?” my husband asks as we drive down the road. His hearing aids are finicky and imperfect but he hears my teeth.

They wiggle as I chew on invisible gum. The bite feels wrong. I clamp my jaw shut.

“Sorry,” I say. I’ve been dealing with this for months now. I’ve searched the Internet, something I’m still good at. I know the problem.

“What’s going on?” he asks.

“It’s not a big deal,” I tell him. “But they call it ‘bruxism.’” Teeth grinding’s fancy medical name. My teeth are losing their grip. My gums are receding.

“So it is a big deal?” He’s learned my dad’s language well, and his phone is already in his hand.

I can feel them wobbling when I sleep, I tell him. They want to go, they want to run. I lock my jaw but my teeth want to move. Flee, they say. We’ve been in your mouth for exactly the right amount of time.

I think of my sock-puppet mouthed father. My own tiny mouth, slowly blooming little age lines, deflated and limp like his. My teeth. They’re mine, I watched them all stay perfect despite how raw and angry my life got.

But I abused them. I murmur to them through my closed mouth that I’ll stay good, I’ll brush them and drink milk and be good, oh so good, but they have to promise to stay.

They know what the ‘but’ means, and they wiggle more in protest.

I’m going to lose them the way my father lost me. Holes in my mouth for every hole in my heart.

I remember when I was fighting with a friend, she told me I was having a Beautiful Mind moment at her. At the time, I was telling her that one of our other friends, a very unstable person who had threatened me before, had, unsurprisingly, threatened me. However, they didn't want to believe it. I must have been crazy, like Nash in A Beautiful Mind. I must have been seeing things. 

I've never seen A Beautiful Mind, but I understood the reference, and I knew the implication when I was told that I was being crazy. I can't even watch a clip from the movie on Instagram without thinking about being insulted that day, being gaslit, and being told that I was clearly insane. It's happened to other people I know, too. One, I know, a gentle man, burst out in anger over a frustration and was told that he was having a Good Will Hunting moment, and now can't stand that movie. Ironically, that individual is in fact a genius who was horrifically abused as a child, but that wasn't what the individual insulting him was implying.

But I suppose that's all these people are to us now, really. Just that person who insulted us by a movie that we've never seen. They're not even real anymore. That argument is just a flicker of light behind the camera, the film we'll never see, that reference we won't get because the emotion isn't what the director intended. 

I don't know, I just find that interesting. 

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I will be hosting an SFWA sponsored Disabled Spotlight Panel in Gaithersburg MD on July 18 at Locally Crafted from 3-7pm featuring some amazing local authors including Camsyn Clair, Rachel Kitch, Jack LaRoche, Alexa Schriempf, and more. Stay tuned for more details.

“Now, ask someone to lunch,” the therapist asked.

“Have you had lunch?” the neurotypical person said.

“No, try again,” the therapist prompted.

“Do you like Thai food?”

“No, again.”

“Are you free this afternoon?”

“You're not asking me to lunch!”

This is where I, as an autistic person, am really frustrated by this video. I really excel at pattern recognition, it's one of the reasons I was diagnosed. No, the first few times I was asked to lunch in this fashion, I had to ask after the initial questions if we were going to lunch, but after that, I recognized that this was an invitation to lunch. Politeness in society–particularly American society—dictates recognizing that you should not ask someone who has already eaten, doesn't like the food you're going for, or is busy to lunch, so asking these questions would make sense before imposing a lunch date with them, particularly if you don't know them well. If the person was their close friend, they'd be like, “We're going to Bradzinnos, get in the car, bitch.”

Failure to recognize these basic patterns of something I struggle with in my fellow autistic adults. I've never really had a problem in society, doing well in my jobs (though often seen as the perky, weird girl) and excelling in management and school. I realize that although I don't know why society has rules, it does. These rules make people feel more comfortable and I'm okay with that, because they don't hurt me.

I feel the same way with pronouns. They're not something I fully understand, in society. They fit in a place in a sentence, to signify gender. People get very up in arms about them, but they're just a part of sentence structure, so I'm not really sure why they matter. A cis female person is a she. A trans female person is a she. A non-binary person is a they. And so on and so forth. This is a rule, and it doesn't affect me, so I'm okay with it. I've never really cared what someone called me, because it doesn't change who I am. I'm MJ, and that's really that. When my friend told me he had transitioned and used male pronouns, it really wasn't all that hard to switch over, because it was just a new rule. And it made him more comfortable, and doesn't affect me by learning a new pattern of speech.

I just think that everyone can learn a little by trying to make others more comfortable by trying to recognize that they need to be given some grace.

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You can find me wandering the halls at the Baltimore Oddities and Curiosities Expo tomorrow, and I'll have new work in the Hooghly Review this month!

My mother had long since stopped trying to hide her psoriasis. She had plamar-plantar psoriasis, which an estimated 3-16% of Americans have. It's a puscular type of dermatological disease, genetically passed, but neither of her parents presented it. It was kind of a surprise when she started showing the symptoms around 40 or so. In the 90’s, there wasn't much anyone could do for her, apart from ointments that made the skin soft so she could cut it off with a razor, and itching creams to make things more comfortable. She was often ashamed of her hands and feet.

At the time, I was a high maintenance teenager, getting my nails done, my hair curled. Lots of jewelry. She told me to enjoy it while I could. I did. I tried to get her to come along with me, but she was embarrassed.

“You should get your nails done,” I suggested to her. “You'd like that.”

The month before she died, I took her to her first professional manicure. She still had a little of that polish on her thick, chipped fingernails in the coffin.

It made my throat close up in pain. It was her only manicure ever. I've had so many.

When I turned 39, the first pustules appeared on my palms. Then, big flaking skin pieces fell from my feet. At first, I didn't want to go to the dermatologist. I didn't want to be told there was nothing they could do. I cancelled all my manicures. I cancelled all my pedicures. I didn't want to be seen that way.

My hands turned into thick, itchy crusts of white. My toenails fell off. When I went to the doctor, to get my meds paid for, insurance made us try creams, and then ointments, and finally biologics. New medicines. Some things worked, some things didn't.

My hands didn't look like mine. They looked like my mother's. They looked like her unhappiness.

“You should get your nails done,” my husband told me. “You used to love that.”

I found a salon not far from my house with great reviews. I informed them I was missing toenails and had plaque psoriasis. The owner, Nicole, said that was fine. She smiled brightly and looked over my hands and feet before restructuring my nails with a paste.

“This is more comfortable than a plastic nail,” she said. “It'll move with you.”

She didn't scrub off my extra skin, saying it was better I worked with a doctor on that, but did moisturize me and make me feel good. She painted my nails and, for the first time in years, my hands felt like my own.

She instructed me how to let my nails grow back while my doctor and I worked with my medicine and scheduled me follow up appointments. It didn't matter if my skin was smooth or flared up. She saw me. It was a day where I felt like my skin was normal, no matter what.

People complimented my hands. My crusty, broken hands.

People complimented my hands. My healing, raw hands.

People complimented my hands, my smooth—

Last week, I went in for my pedicure, and Nicole smiled at my feet. “You don't need the paste anymore,” she said. “This is all your own toenail.”

It had been a year of clipping and growing, but the dead, sad nail was gone. I had grown my own out. It was all mine.

“Other toe will be ready next time you're in here,” she added. “How does that make you feel?”

Like myself. Like I've succeeded. Like I've beaten something that took part of me away.

Thanks, Nicole.

I'll be on the Sako and the Moon Horror Podcast Friday (today) at 11am EST. Join me at this link!

Also, remember you can check out my upcoming hybrid poetry coming out in Flash in the Court in August, and my non-fiction coming out in Stanchion this winter.

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At the time, I was watching a video about men cutting off their girlfriend’s hair as a prank. No, not pretending. Actually cutting. The women were devastated. The men believed it was their right.

“This is fucking assault,” I said. “Can you believe this?

My husband emerged from the bathroom. He’d only just stepped in there a moment earlier, and had therefore heard my ranting. “No, I can’t. To pretend to cut their hair is bad enough, but to actually do it?”

He leaned against the doorframe, and I sensed the imminent shift in the conversation. As my husband and I have been together for thirteen years, coming up on our tenth wedding anniversary in a few months, I’ve grown accustomed to shifts in conversation, knowing when the end of one is coming and the beginning of one is nearing. It comes with being part of a unit, a friendship that has seen many conversations end and many begin over time. I was not, however, prepared for the direction of this conversation.

You see, he proceeded to describe what I, myself, can only tell you might only have been the most impressive poop that might ever have exited a human body.

“Wow,” I said. “But you were only gone a minute.”

“I know,” he replied. “My body was ready.”

Such a conversation warranted proof, I told him. Should I not have been summoned to the bathroom to witness this feat? Or at least a photograph? But, then again, who photographs these things? And who the hell shows such photographs to their wife?

I’m chronically ill, I mention this a lot on my social media, and one of my main issues is my guts. So, as I tease anyone who hangs out with me long enough, at some point in our friendship, my bodily functions come up. When privy to this private part of my life, I joke that you’re now close enough to me to be one of my “poop friends”. Rarely do I get into a descriptive tirade, but it’s more than I would get into with, say, my boss, or the guy at Starbucks. And I suppose that is how it goes, isn’t it? Our private, medical things are shared with medical professionals and with our close friends.

But photography? Like a picture of our poop? When I jokingly mentioned that to my husband, we realized that people do that kind of thing, anonymously. To google, for expert opinions. To chatbots, for advice. On reddit, for clout. I remember a few years ago a man posted all over Reddit that he hadn’t pooped all of September and then posted picture after picture of his progress after laxatives. Instead of closeness, as long as someone doesn’t know you, you’re willing to share your gross, private self.

And I don’t know, maybe people are into that, too. That’s not my thing.

Anyway, this is kind of a long-winded discussion to say that when you’re poop friends with someone and you break up with them, you sometimes wonder if they think about your poop. The first time it happened, I scaled up my decision of when I would talk about that part of my chronic illness dramatically. Because now that person is out there, and they know too much.

And maybe I miss that closeness.

Maybe I miss that I could share that part of me, that private part, that was clinical with a medical professional but was funny with a friend.

I also guess I’m not as close with my husband as that guy on Reddit is with a bunch of strangers, because it actually would have been really weird if he showed up with a photo of his poop. It would have been even weirder if he asked me to check it out in the bathroom.

But again, that’s not my thing.

Oh, and if you want a not-shitty time, I’m going to be at BaltiCon reading scary things and sitting on panels discussing writing. You can also read my non-fiction story (that does discuss shit!) “Can’t Chicken Out” in Coop Zine.

This is the important thing we think when dissecting deep POV. I, and in turn you, only see what the character sees—or at least that’s what we think when we’re writing deep POV. The character is the lens that you’re writing through, their experiences and their hopes, dreams, and desires. Reliable, unreliable, whatever, that’s what you’re looking through when you’re writing a deep POV story.

The reality is, that’s not the case at all. A deep POV story is always told through the lens of the reader perceiving the character.

Let me back up a little bit.

I’ve gotten to be known for writing in deep POV, first through my Pushcart Prize nominated fiction, “The Executive Park Sirens,” first published in Moss Puppy Magazine. It’s the story of a pudgy, middle aged man who begins to see mermaids in his office park pond and obsesses over them while his life moves on around him. This man becomes someone the reader loathes and relates to, even as he makes increasingly unhinged decisions.

Now, the character himself doesn’t think of himself as someone who should be loathed or that any of his decisions are unhinged, in fact he implores the reader to understand his decisions. It is the reader, and their lens, that invites the judgement.

When writing deep POV, you need to remember who your audience is, and the kinds of things they are looking for when they’re reading your character. If your character is racist, a typical audience is not going to like your character, because a majority of people see that as a negative trait. No matter how much your character thinks that this should be a likeable trait, they’re still going to be seen through the lens of the reader as being unlikeable.

That beginning part is pretty obvious, but let’s dig a little deeper.

You can take this in really interesting ways. Your character can do things and say things that are completely contradictory to the way things clearly are to the reader. For instance, let’s take this scenario: Judy is in love with John. Judy doesn’t want John to leave her but he’s decided she drinks too much.

I watch him as I pour another vodka from the bottle. It sloshes over the glass. It’s making a mess, and he’s always told me not to make a mess and here I am, making another mess.

I’m not upset. Not really. It’ll be better with him gone. The house will be quiet. I’ll have more time to read.

I think I’ve had enough to drink. I pour myself another.

Look at all the ways the reader knows she’s not telling the truth. This is not because she’s an unreliable narrator. She’s perfectly reliable, she’s telling us everything that’s happening in the world, she’s just lying to herself, and the reader can tell.

You need to know your audience well enough to play with things like this.

Be aware of who is sharing the headspace with your character. Who will be judging their thoughts, who will be looking behind their eyes. Who are your targeted readers. Not editors, but the readers that are your audience. Not to say “fuck them editors” but I mean, yeah, fuck them editors. Care about who is reading your work. They’re the ones passing the judgements.

Next part: Unreliable Narrators, Reliable Thoughts

I will be at the 804 Dinner and Wine Fundraiser and Reading on May 9, as a spectator, and at Stoker Con on June 4-7 (as a reader on June 7 at 11am). I look forward to seeing you all there.

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A vague tweet. An errant substack post. A TikTok with the hashtag #iykyk. They’re all about publishing drama. They all know something and you don’t.

To be perfectly frank, this happens to everyone, even someone like me who keeps my ear pretty close to the ground with what’s going on with the industry.

And, to be clear, there are multiple kinds of “in the know.” There’s in the know about movers-and-shakers. There’s in the know about dramamongers and problem-starters. And then, there’s in the know about the venn diagram that interconnects these two.

Because, whether we like it or not, there’s a venn diagram and sometimes it looks a bit like a circle. And I don’t want to be anywhere near that circle, so to know what to avoid, I gotta know what I’m avoiding.

But how do you stay “in the know?” How do you keep yourself from being one of those people who is constantly dropping messages into people’s posts going what’s going on???

There are a few pretty easy ways to do that and I’m gonna show you how.

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TW: Eating Disorders

See, I’m really concerned about what’s going on with Trump’s America, and not because of the dystopian politics and the speculative crap that’s happening with AI nonsense. No, I’m really worried because it’s veering so far to the right that, like all bad things, it’s bringing us so close together and making us care so much for each other that it will, inevitably, make us snap right back to where we were—if not even worse.

Don’t believe me?

Let’s look at our crap with weight loss. Particularly the early 2000’s.

Ally McBeal–played by Calista Flockhart–was considered “too skinny” in 1996, and we made a lot of “don’t be too skinny” ads when I was in high school, fresh off of the heroin chic of the early 90’s, but that stuff rolls back around, as it always does, and it rolled back around to the intense fat shaming of the early 2000’s. During this time, we were starving our bodies and telling Jessica Simpson she was too fat. Sex and the City had an episode where they had an intervention for Samantha’s “weight gain.” It was a whole thing. I was there. I shoved my head in a lot of toilets and vomited up a lot of good meals to make myself a more palatable teenager. I remember it.

Afterward, we, as a world, had the body positivity movement. And let me tell you what, I fucking loved the body positivity movement. For the first time in my life, I was allowed to be myself. I was able to create and say yes, I am beautiful. I am able to wear clothing, any clothing I want, and create.

And there were lots of fat creators. And, to be clear, I’m going to use the word “fat”, not plus-sized, not overweight. Fat. Because I don’t think that there is a “plus” in a size. I don’t think there’s an ideal weight. Fat. It’s a word. Grow up.

But, unlike the 90’s, the body positivity movement came with the Internet. We didn’t have it in the 90’s, and so with the movement came opinions and topics we didn’t have before. People could say things and discuss who was and wasn’t allowed to talk.

I, for instance, wasn’t allowed a voice as big as others, for I was a midsize creator. I was taking the space away from real fats.

“Who the fuck do you think you are,” comments would roll in. “Getting into our spaces?”

I didn’t understand, of course. I was just looking to belong. I had spent my entire youth being told I didn’t belong in skinny spaces. Now, I didn’t belong in fat ones?

For many of you, you may be asking, “what the fuck is midsize?”

Midsize, in the world of fat, is anything from size 10-16 (and for some opinion-havers, it’s actually anything from 6-18, depending on what a callous cunt you are). They’re acceptable within the realm of beauty to be considered beautiful. They’re “normal.” They have hips and curves and flat stomachs. I mean, at the time I didn’t but get on with your bad self.

See, to be able to say you are a “fat” creator you have to be a certain size. You have to fit a certain beauty standard yet again. You have to have rolls. You have to have pouches and ripples. You have to fit in.

And then there were superfats. They had big followings to go with their big bodies. They were extremely well loved. They had sob stories I, in my size 14 body, could not understand. Sure, I had self esteem issues and nobody would hold the door for me, but I couldn’t understand what it meant to need to buy two seats on a plane. I was less. Quite literally.

Of course, the body positivity movement would not last like this, the fats eating themselves, if you’ll pardon the expression. The non-fats and fats alike saw the moment as toxic and it crumbled. “Wellness” moved in. Anorexia came into my life. I became very sick and almost died.

Now, almost fifteen years later, doctors push Ozempic on me as the world falls apart. The left huddles together like a rat king. Have you ever seen a rat king? They’re a bundle of rats, their tails twisted together and they can’t move. Slowly, they starve.

We’re all so certain that we’re so much better, everyone is so much more liberal with such a very, very conservative president showing us how wrong his ideals are.

When the pendulum swings one way, I’m worried the momentum swings really far the other way when it comes back around.

Oh, in other news I’ve had my hybrid poem/short Chimera accepted to Flash In The Court, and my piece The Reproductive Methods of the Ten-Armed Allona Mermaid will be reprinted with The Hooghly Review.

I’m also teaching a course on First Lines this Saturday at 11am ET. Reach out if you’re interested in attending. I have a few more spots available.

In the meantime, have a donut.

A few podcasters bashed Toni Morrison a few days ago online and people are fucking livid. If you don’t know who Toni Morrison is, I can only assume you missed 10th grade English or had a bad time with it, which is understandable. I hated algebra until I had a decent teacher who showed me why it didn’t suck. So here’s the skinny.

Toni Morrison is a Black author who pumped out 11 literary novels ranging from historical to speculative (sci fi/fantasy) for many years, won a bunch of well-deserved awards, and not a lot of people read her work but everybody owns a copy and says that she’s their favorite author because she’s a really safe Black author to say she’s a favorite. Did I get that right? I think I got that right.

When watching the Apple Podcast Cannonball, the one that’s got everybody kind of up in arms right now, that’s pretty much what Parul Seghal is saying: people are turning their descriptions of Morrison’s work into “I” statements instead of about what the work meant to her when describing it. “I felt this” and “I felt that.” Perhaps it’s because many of us are introduced to Morrison’s work in school, in English class, that it’s an integral part of our book-learning experience that we integrate it into who we are, rather than who the author is.

This is actually a pretty cool discussion, imho. However, at this point, Wesley Morris and his editor Sasha Weis roll their eyes like two literary bros. “Can you believe this?” Morris says. Then, Morris starts about how mid Toni Morrison is.

My cursor hovers over the little x in the corner of the video and I suppress the urge to click it.

I already gave them my views, I’d already read the whole discussion on Threads from dozens of white people going “not my favorite author!!!” while I was pretty sure they’d never read any of her books outside of a classroom. I wanted to give these podcasters the benefit of the doubt. I want to understand what the hell the upset is about.

But to imply that Morrison is mid?

That’s like saying that tiramisu is mid, or that Love is Blind is mid. Dude, you either love the shit out of those things, or you hate them. You do not give Toni Morrison a three star Yelp Review.

See, I really do like Toni Morrison, and I like her in the selfish, cruel way that I like books that affected me when I was young. I have read and reread her books until they’ve fallen apart. I’ve laughed over sentences that I think are silly and I’ve memorized them. I like Toni Morrison because I don’t canonize her. I don’t think her writing is perfect. I see her flawed paragraphs and incomplete metaphors and I think it makes her writing brilliant. Her writing is a fever dream of someone angry and lashing out in a controlled way, making flawed and twisted women who are hated by society and when I was young, I fed on her work because I had never encountered writing—from a white or a Black person—written that way before.

Toni Morrison is so cool. She’d think I was super lame and that’s okay.

Anyway, back to the podcasters. I’m at minute 12:30 something. Weis rolls her eyes as Morris finishes reading the segment of Tar Baby. It’s a short series of blunt sentences, followed by a one-page long vulgar, stream-of-consciousness moment in the protagonist’s mind. I’ve read the piece before and I find it moving as fuck. Seghal seems to be nodding, like it’s a good piece. Weis and Morris look exhasted. There’s a moment, during this, where I get the feeling the three of them are in disconnect—Morris and Weis seem to think that everyone should realize how unaffected, and Seghal looks confused.

But maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s what the issue is here. We all sit in the room and assume we should know how we feel about Toni Morrison. The literary bros assume we should all just know that Morrison has flaws, and the world outside is enamored with her, as they grew up with her and know her for what she did for the world. And even still there are those of us who love her flaws and that’s what enamored us in the first place.

To step back to Seghal’s initial subject at the start of the podcast—the I in Toni Morrison’s work: I am now an author myself. I write difficult women who are subject to my own marginalized past. They do not apologize for their difficultness. I would never have been able to write like this, with their blunt cruelty, without the inspiration of Toni Morrison’s work, in particular Sula, my favorite of her works, that I first read when I was 16. I was raised in a white, racist household, not understanding what I was surrounded by was racism, until I came into contact with her books. She changed me. When I say that Toni Morrison is one of my favorite authors, I say it having consumed much of her work, analyzed it, and recognized it for more than just her recognizable name. She made decisions politically I disagreed with. She was a person. She was a great author.

Anyway, I’m glad she’s been brought back into my headlights this week. I’m on the hunt to do some first edition searching in my local thrift stores.

I’ll be at AWP next week on the “Secrets of the Editors: The Fine Art of Rejection” panel! Check out my Instagram for details!

My essay, “Can’t Chicken Out,” has been accepted at Coop Zine! More details on its upcoming publication soon!

First, my story, “A Common Tongue” featured in Timber Ghost Press, is on the recommended reading list for the the 2026 Nebulas. I’m totally beside myself.

Second, I just found out I was awarded a 2025 SFWA Givers Grant, which is an incredible honor. I’m not sure when all of that will be announced properly, so I’m not going to go into big details about my project, but I’m working behind the scenes to get everything in place for when it is. I’m completely thrilled to have my work in Montgomery County funded this year, and I’m hoping to bring a lot of great things to authors here. Please stay tuned.

Third, I’ll be judging the PING anthology, which is accepting stories from speculative authors until March 31. Can’t wait to read your incredible stories.

Finally, I’ve purchased my tenth bodysuit from OQQ from TikTok, as seen in this photograph. I feel like that’s a milestone worth celebrating.

Let’s talk a little bit about how shops like TikTok and Temu operate, because as these billion dollar corporations eat up our small shops, I feel like you should see the mechanisms behind them.

The goods on TikTok can be legitimate companies (like OQQ), small retailers, and independent sellers. On Temu they are all knockoffs of higher priced legitimate sellers. All the same, the pricing scheme is the same: low cost items with higher anchor prices and high markdowns. As you scroll, you will find the same item, priced lower. You will be thrilled, remove your current item, and immediately put that item in your cart. You will be encouraged to scroll to see if you can find it even lower, encouraging impulse buys. They offer coupons and free gifts if you buy a certain number of items, encouraging extra purchases and more scrolling.

They don’t organize their goods, instead requiring you to look based on an algorithm of what you have looked at before. You can’t search very well, only being able to look based on hashtags, and being required to scroll. This requires you to look and impulse buy longer.

Anyway, if you were wondering how I have $122 of t-shirts and socks in my TikTok cart, I think I’ve cracked the code.

I've been in rather a bad depressive mode lately, but I'm trying to get out there. I'm trying to teach. I've got a few classes coming up, and I hope I'll see you there.

In Maryland, I'm teaching an in person class on writing with voice in Montgomery County on January 30 at 6pm.

Come join me if you can!

But if you are too far away and would rather see me online:

You can learn to write with voice with me on February 1st at 1pm EST/10am PST here:

Writing for Beginners: Writing With Voice

I made this.

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It’s been a long journey. The road is bare of supplies. Every shop has been empty, every chest has been bare. The monsters keep coming but you, you are strong. You want to move forward.

Goals.

You’ve had one goal in mind for so long. You can’t give up, not now, not after everything you’ve been through. This is the path. The only path. Turning around is not an option. Too much has been given up to stray. But every effort yields such tiny results.

But there—

A light. A beacon.

A siren.

She calls to you in the night. In the darkness. She beckons you with the promise of a better future. A hopeful future. A future where things can be better. Where you can get what you want if only you give her what she wants.

She can’t want that much, can she?

You approach. Your feed pad against the dark dirt as the light gleams against your sweat-stained skin. All your efforts could come to fruitition if you just gave in. If you just submitted. Others have done it, she says. The successful. And you know she’s not lying. You’ve seen them, gleaming with her charms. They take her wares and they win. Why not you?

But your morals! How could you give them up? And are they worth it?

You stare at what she offers you. You try to tell yourself it’s only one, but you know it won’t be. The others didn’t only buy one. And you wouldn’t either. Thousands—some have spent thousands trying to be successful and have failed.

That could be you, too.

“Come on,” the siren says. “Why not take a taste?”

Your finger hovers over it. 10,000 views for $20/day. Jesus, it would be great to break out of the 100/view range, but Instagram really is starting to feel super pay-to-play.

Anyway, so I had a lovely conversation with Venessa Kelley, author of When The Tides Held the Moon on Instagram this morning about how social media is feeling like a bunch of those awful microtransaction games. And like those games, microtransactions are meant to go on forever, paying for this boost or that boost without end. You don’t win with boosts. Posts get supressed with only an occasional jump in views for just enough of a dopamine hit to keep you going and then enough of a crash to bring you right back to paying for more.

Like one of my otherworldly creatures says in my current novel, Pierce: “It’s the drug of this century.”

How do we beat it, then? How do we beat this system and win?

Like any toxic relationship I’ve ever been in, the way I like to win is not to play. I won’t play a numbers game with social media. I post for fun. I post because I like it.

My only worry is that I’m just not going to reach people.

Let me know if I’ve reached you.

And paid subscribers can have some of the outtakes tomorrow ;) If you’re not interested in subscribing but just want to support what I do, please feel free to drop me a little on my ko-fi. It’s much appreciated.

A lot happened this year for me.

My first novel, The Truth The Dead Know, sat on submission for six months. Glowing rejection—but a rejection, mind—flooded my agent’s inbox. We threw more submissions to the wind. Rejections came back.

One thing you should know about me is I have no intention of ever dying. Not me. I’m going to live forever—a concept spoken about in my novel Pierce and yeah I don’t have to put this after an em dashesbut you can pull them out of my cold, dead hands you em dash hating motherfuckers okay? And The Truth The Dead Know would not be one of those novels that did what those in the industry call “dying on submission.” It would not die. I would save it before it fell.

Besides, it was June, and my new website was up. I rebranded as a speculative horror author. My first novel was a speculative thriller. It didn’t fit my brand. It didn’t fit my promise to my readers.

We pulled it back for edits and pushed out the novel I had just finished. Tin Heart.

A speculative horror romance about a mistreated Moon Base computer who falls in love with her newest technician, the concepts behind the novel are what make me love it so much. When we think of AI systems, we think of Siri and Alexa. Female voices, women who do things for us. If one of them were to become sentient, would bossing them around still feel okay? If we needed to open up their battery packs and futz around in their systems and they didn’t want it, would that be a violation?

ELSA, the Electronic Lifeform Simulation Assistant, is tired of being manhandled and having technicians rummaging in her systems. She’s tired and angry. With every violation, her algorithm gets a little more violent until she explodes—ripping her prisoners limb from limb. Enter Leslie White, the first female technician that ELSA has ever met, there to test ELSA’s sentience and fix her malfunctioning mainframe. Leslie is kind, gentle, and asks for consent before touching her. ELSA’s programming identifies Leslie’s actions as the only thing it can be: love. And love must be protected, at all costs.

Tin Heart is a blend of horror, romance, and poetry blending into a kind of algorithmic soup of what inputs and what outputs make us who we are and draw us to each other.

Anyway, I’m just really proud of it.

I also published 10 pieces this year, from anthologies to small Twitter features to spicy horror flash, I’ve had some of my favorites out there, and I can only hope to see more next year.

Next year.

Can you believe next year is 2026? Do you remember when Zoe in Doctor Who said she came from the distant future of 2000? When she wore a gold catsuit and could recite computer languages?

I mean. Her catsuit was kind of bitchin’ and my husband speaks python or whatever, so I guess that isn’t too far from the truth.

This year’s project is Pierce. Think Apple TV’s SEVERANCE x DOWRY OF BLOOD.

I don’t know I’ve been having fun with it. I think you will, too. When you read it.

Thanks for being here, everybody. We’ll have fun.

Oh—and I started a ko-fi. Feel free to leave me a one-time tip if subscribing is too much. I’m always trying to bring joy and information to everyone out there.

Happy New Year. x

First of all: fuck yeah. Your stuff deserves to get out there.

There are lots of amazing places to submit your work. Short stories, poetry, experimental stuff. Whatever you like, there’s probably a home for it on the internet, and there’s lots of places to find it. Let me get you started.

First:

Clean your work up. Edit it. Make it shine. Is it fiction? Is it nonfiction? Is is creative nonfiction, written poetically? Is it poetry? Is it poetic prose? Pick. That’s your story.

Title it. Your title matters.

Count your words and determine what kind of work you have.

Poetry: by page count

Microfiction: under 500 words

Flash fiction: Under 1000 words

Short stories: 1,001-5,000 words

Long short stories: up to 17,000 words

Novellas: up to 40,000 words

Novels: usually over 50,000 words (and a whole other conversation)

So, when a place says they’re looking for flash, they’re looking for 1,000 or under. You could probably send them 500 and they’d be OK. When someone is looking for micro, they want 500 or less.

What if my piece is way shorter than what they want?

That’s probably OK. You can tell them in the letter. We’ll go into that in a minute.

Now that you know what you have, think about where you want to send it. There are a lot of great magazines. How do you find them? First, you can check out this list of some top-tier magazines to see if they’re open. They’re reputable and well-put-together.

I also recommend checking out Chill Subs. They’re a free group that puts together lists for submissions. They are reputable, caring, and I have been using them myself for years. Authors Publish is also a group that I have heard amazing things about and have recently followed.

Let’s say you find a magazine. In this case, we’re going to look at The Hooghly Review, one of my favorite magazines. As you can see, they are only open for their ASAP corner right now.

So we’ll scroll down to see how to get to their submission guidelines in order to know how to submit to ASAP corner.

So ASAP corner is for reviews and nonfiction. Let’s say we want to submit something we’ve written. We can click on “detailed guidelines” and see if our review will fit these guidelines.

These guidelines explain how to submit the review. We need to format our document exactly as the submission checklist states, and move forward with submission.

Is this the only way to submit?

Of course not! You might have to use Submittable.

What’s that?

It’s a form you can use to submit and track your work. You go in:

And then utilize the form to put your work into the magazine.

And it’s really as simple as that. Submit, and then wait for a response.

How long do I have to wait?

Sometimes, no time at all. Sometimes, ages. Oftentimes, you can track things on Submission Grinder. (But that’s probably a whole separate post!) Some magazines will tell you 6-8 weeks, or give you an estimated deadline. I put the deadlines from their submission page onto a spreadsheet I keep for myself.

Right now, acceptance rates for magazines vary anywhere from 4-0.001%, depending on the magazine. So I aim for 100 rejections a year. With that in mind, I should get at least 1 acceptance. This year I got 10! It was super exciting!

Let me know if this post was helpful and if you’d like to see more of this, or more of the tongue-and-cheek stuff.

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And feel free to check out one of my recently published pieces, A Common Tongue, out with Timber Ghost Press. My piece, The Unbroken Circle, is also out with Enter Here: An Anthology Of Portals, just released December 2!

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This is organization, not madness.

Jeez. Madness has one ‘d’. Oh my god, all those handwritten essays to Mrs. Gerfelstein with two ‘d’s. No wonder she thought I was stupid. I remember, sitting in her twelfth grade class—and I do apologize because we’re going on another journey into my school years again and I’m not sure why thinking about submitting things makes me think about school but here we are, bear with me—and telling her that I, her least favorite student, was going to best the A.P. English test.

“I’m going to get a 5 on that test,” I told her.

She laughed in my face.

Needless to say—or perhaps not needless to say for the haters in the audience—I did get a 5 on the test, which was the best grade you could get on the big test at the end of the year. I kicked ass at it. Mrs. Gerfelstein threw a desk at a student the following year, I heard, and was ousted from teaching. I don’t know what happened to her. I like to think she went to therapy and now runs a yoga studio. Or maybe boxing. Maybe she left the concept of teaching all together and was wandering the streets of Glen Burnie, Maryland, USA, bereft, and some man stopped her on the street.

“Are you okay?” he asked her.

“I just lost my job,” she blurted out. “What do you fucking think?”

He nodded. “I like your spunk,” he replied. “We need that in the Kingdom of Mushrooms and Fire. Join me.”

Maybe that’s why I haven’t heard from her since. Anyway—so one of the reasons I get published a lot is because I write a lot. I have a huge backlog of shorts, poetry, and nonfiction. I usually churn out 1-2 pieces a week, edit them, and immediately submit them somewhere.

I aim for 100 rejections per year, like I said in my last submission-based post. Not just submissions. Rejections. And that’s not just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. I like to look at places I’m submitting to and trying to see if I’m something similar to what they like—or, occasionally, something wildly different that they might love. It’s about vibes and excitement.

Why do people like my stuff? Why am I getting crazy accepted? This year, I had 109 submissions, 9 acceptances, 1 semifinalist in a contest, as of this post 22 pending, and 77 rejections. That’s a 10% acceptance rate. Pretty sweet!

Is that the best in the world? No. I’m also not the best in the world. I’m just a dude sitting in front of a computer hammering my shit out and hoping people will love me. I’m taking editor and peer feedback and trying again and again. Sometimes, magazines don’t accept you—sometimes, they surrender.

You also can’t take rejections seriously. It’s about vibes and personal taste and what they’re trying to do with each of their setups. It’s not always about you. It’s about what they’re trying to do.

Stay tuned for my next installment for this which will be a paid member thing whatever piece called SPREAD YOUR SHEET, HOW I DO MINE AND YOU CAN DO YOURS.

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Anyway here’s wonderwall.