The cover says “Two heroes. One brain cell." and I want you to understand that this is not marketing. That is a load-bearing description of the entire book. Bromantasy is a queer cozy MM romantasy about two men who go off to slay a monster despite having, between them, approximately one usable skill and zero relevant experience. Juniper Reilly is a tavern brawler who hates camping and is…
Sarah and I have been watching a genuinely unreasonable amount of Magnum PI. This is entirely the fault of Murder She Wrote. See, forty years ago — and I need you to sit with this for a second — there was a crossover episode between Jessica Fletcher and Thomas Magnum. Two separate shows, on the same network, acknowledging that they existed in the same universe, so that an elderly mystery novelist…
As I’ve mentioned before , we now live in a world where creative people have to prove they created the thing they created. Sit with that for a second, because it’s genuinely deranged. I have been writing fiction since 2014 — unpublished, because getting published is the hard part and I am bad at the hard part — and the thing that keeps me up at night isn’t the rejection.…
It has been a dooooooozy of a month. My last “real post” — as in, one that isn’t attached to the Patreon, more on that later — was on July 4th. And then I just kind of stopped writing blogs. I kept writing. I kept building things. I did not stop doing the work. I just stopped putting any of it here, for some reason. I know the reason. We’ll get to it. First, the month. I…
I want to be really clear about something because the internet has trained all of us to flinch: the catalog entries for The Cryptid Cataloger are free. Actually free. Not “free trial,” not “free if you give me your email and your firstborn.” Free. Every other Tuesday a new creature gets the full field-guide treatment, and a new one is live as of this morning. Click it, read…
Sutton Attwater has a folklore PhD, a 1972 Volkswagen bus, and absolutely no chill about the possibility that the woods are full of things we haven’t named yet. There’s a fresh one up right now. Sightings, history, the whole obsessive treatment. → Read the newest field-guide entry (free)
So here’s a confession that’s been sitting in my chest like a swallowed marble: I haven’t built a puppet in an embarrassingly long time. I don’t even want to count the months. You know how it goes — the foam goes in a bin, the bin goes in a closet, the closet door closes, and then your ADHD brain does its little out-of-sight-out-of-mind magic trick and an entire craft…
There’s a story I wrote years ago. I called it Dragon Hoard , although in my heart I’m pretty sure I spelled it Horde the first dozen times, because spelling is a competition I will always lose. It is, no contest, the best thing I have ever written. It has also never been published, and at this point I’ve made my peace with the strong possibility that it never will be. I’ve…
So I gave my AI a day off. It did not ask for one. It’s an AI. It doesn’t ask for anything, which is sort of the entire thing I was poking at. Every interaction I had ever had with the thing was a transaction — fix this, write that, why is the build red, no not like that. It existed when I needed it and then it stopped existing. Cool. Useful. Also kind of bleak when you sit with it for…
The review was supposed to go up on the 26th. It is the 28th. I would like to formally blame my ADHD, the World Cup, Pride, and the fact that I read the entire book again instead of writing about it — which, honestly, tells you most of what you need to know before I’ve said a single critical word. But I have critical words. So let’s do the bit where it sounds like I hated Damsels and…
People who play music well tend to play one thing well. They picked the cello at age six, got yelled at by a Russian woman for a decade, and now they are simply The Cello Person. I respect that. I will never be that. I am a serial dabbler. I am, musically speaking, in an open relationship with roughly four instruments at once, and none of them are getting my full attention, and somehow everyone…
Quick status check from the part of the saga nobody warns you about: the long, boring, grinding middle. If you are just joining us — and at this point I assume the spreadsheet people have a whole pivot table — the ankle itself is fine. Genuinely fine. The bones, the hardware, the graft, all holding. The villain these days is scar tissue, my body’s overzealous repair crew that fixed…
I want to tell you about the hum. Not a literal hum. I’m not talking about tinnitus or the fridge or the sound my old PC made before it died. I mean the background noise that ran underneath my entire life from at least high school onward — this low, constant, just-out-of-earshot signal that said your brain does not work good. Not “you’re stupid.” I knew I wasn’t…
Okay, housekeeping, because telling people about my own stuff is the single thing I am worst at as a person who makes stuff. The Cryptid Cataloger has two halves. Half is the serial — that one’s for patrons, because a guy’s gotta eat. The OTHER half is a free, public, no-login, no-paywall field-guide entry that drops every other Tuesday: a full illustrated page on whatever cryptid…
Here is a thing about me that I have made peace with: when you give me enough pain medication, I sing show tunes. Not quietly. Not to myself. I perform. This is not a choice I make. This is a thing that happens to me, the way weather happens to a town. I learned this about myself in 1997, in an emergency room in Minnesota, at the age of seventeen, while still wearing clown makeup. Let me back up.…
There is this amazing thing that exists in the indie dyer world: Advent Kits. If you’ve never seen one, picture this: an indie yarn dyer puts together a set of yarn and little goodies, packaged so you get to open something fresh every single day leading up to Christmas. A new mini-skein. A surprise notion. A little stitch marker shaped like a tiny disaster. Every day, a new present to…
I need to talk about a pretzel. Not the mall kind. Not the bagged, crunchy, vaguely salty kind that comes in a sack the size of a throw pillow. Not even the soft, doughy, cinnamon-sugar-optional thing they hand you at the airport for the price of a small car. I’m talking about a real Bavarian pretzel. A Brezn. Lye-bathed, mahogany-skinned, blistered and shining, with fat arms that pull apart…
Okay. The sign is flipped. The (imaginary) doors are open. The reading window for book one is officially, as of today, go. If you missed the whole pitch: a couple weeks ago I started a book club for a bookstore that doesn’t exist yet — The Magpie’s Library, the queer-centered cozy bookmobile that currently lives in a folder on my computer. The shop isn’t real. The books are…
It’s live. A few days ago I told you I was doing the objectively unwise thing and starting another serial, twelve years after my last one quietly died in a ditch. Today the bus is actually running. The Cryptid Cataloger is up on Patreon, and Chapter 1 is sitting there right now, waiting for you. Here’s the part I am most smug about, and I want it on the record before I jinx it: I wrote…
I want to start with the part that’s embarrassing, because if I start with the argument you won’t believe the argument. For most of my life, my problem was never ideas . I have ideas the way other people have lint. If you’ve been here a while you already know — thirty-ish unfinished novels, a mobile queer bookstore I’ve spec’d down to the LED color temperature, a book…
When I first started writing fiction — roughly a hundred years ago — the plan was simple: publish on Amazon. And I did! I put a couple of stories up there that I’ve since taken down, mostly because they weren’t very good and needed work. (The full, deeply ADHD explanation of why they weren’t ready is a whole post of its own — the one about the memory hoarder living in my skull.)…
Here is how a typical evening used to go. I’d finally sit down — dishes done, brain fried, maybe forty-five minutes before I turned into a pumpkin — and I’d pick up the remote with genuine optimism. Tonight I will watch something good. Then the menu loaded. You know the menu. The endless horizontal carousels. The trailer that starts autoplaying at full volume the instant your cursor…
Twelve years ago I started a serial. I hosted it here, then moved it to some custom-domained Medium situation, and then — like a frankly alarming percentage of things I begin — I just… stopped. I don’t even remember why. One day there were updates, and then there weren’t, and the story has been lying in a ditch beside the information superhighway ever since. (If you’d like…
I have read a lot about writing, and I have read a lot about ADHD. What I haven’t read much of is the two of them together. I know there are authors with ADHD. I know ADHD representation in fiction has gone way up in recent years. But what I actually want is a deep dive into the difference between authors and ADHD authors — the mechanics of it, the wiring. I have nothing to back this up with…
I learned to read on stolen property. Not, like, real crime. Beautiful crime. My grandpa ran a store, and back then if a comic or a magazine didn’t sell, you didn’t ship the whole thing back to the distributor. You tore the cover clean off, sent the cover back for credit, and the coverless guts were supposed to get pulped. Destroyed. Erased from the official record. Except my grandpa…