I’ve recently had a few short fiction pieces accepted by literary publications, and the first one is live, live, LIVE!
You can now find “Jump,” a short action piece, on Flash Fiction Magazine‘s website, direct link here:
“Jump,” T.J. Baer.If you read it and find yourself overflowing with love and admiration, feel free to leave a comment. :P
Greetings, friends. Today I found myself faced with a truly monumental decision: Should I watch The Jeffersons marathon or the Supermarket Sweep marathon?
Sometimes life is hard.
In other news, I’ve been doing some work on Chosen (also knows as the LGBTQ fantasy epic I’ve been chipping away at since approximately the age of the dinosaurs), attempting to inject some more action and awesomeness into the book. It’s going pretty well so far, and I’ve also done another experimental gender-switch and transformed the main love interest, Nicholas, into a female character who is primarily attracted to women. This wasn’t something I planned, but it makes her romance with Kaine (biologically female but male by every other definition) all the more interesting and complex, and also ups the number of main female characters.
IT’S BACK.
…on a Saturday, because no calendar tells me what to do, yo.
For the uninitiated, Fighting For the Galaxy is the epic science fiction masterpiece* (*citation needed) composed by my Star Wars-obsessed thirteen-year-old self. It features Commander T.J. Baer and her struggles to defeat evil aliens, save the planet Earth (and the galaxy, one would assume), and have happy kissy times with a violet-eyed boy named Rendar she apparently has heterosexual-type love feelings for. (13-year-old me was still somewhat in denial on that front, alas.)
To read Fighting For the Galaxy from its glorious beginning, you can check out the FFtG main page here: Fighting For the Galaxy: Main Page
In our last installment, T.J., Jess, and Captain Abrigio were forced into the scantily-clad service industry in a fine home on planet Sffonia; Rendar, Mark, and Jen busted out of jail with an exceptional degree of violence and snappy comebacks; and Rendar said, “Damn, damn, DAMN!” because 13-year-old me thought “damn” was the height of swearing, and damn x 3 was bound to be 3x as cool.
Today, we once again visit the alien planet of Sffonia, where T.J. leads a daring escape, Jess makes yet another unfortunate decision that leads to gunfire and general mayhem, and Rendar, Jen, and Mark wander around the city arguing and wasting time. ONWARD TO EPIC SCI-FI!
Kaine’s kickass mother Hema, pictured here instead of Kaine because she’s far easier to draw in doodle form. :P
Long-time visitors will recall that I’ve been working on an LGBTQ+ fantasy novel called Chosen for approximately the last 17,000 years. Its main character, Kaine Ikarra, is a fifteen-year-old transgender boy who is struggling with magic, identity, and the fact that most of the people around town want very much to kill him. It’s tough being fifteen, man.
As I’ve mentioned before, this story started out during my teen years as a cookie-cutter White Dudes Doing Cool Stuff In A Fantasy Setting book, but it’s since evolved into a series that features mostly LGBT people of color doing even cooler stuff in a fantasy setting. Since this is a fantasy world entirely of my imagining, I can do what I want with it, such as making the dominant religion a pantheon of gods and goddesses, many of whom are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, etc., and this thus makes LGBT folks entirely normal and unstigmatized in this world. Likewise, the inclusion of a female chief goddess (and various other awesome females in the pantheon) encourages more gender equality, which means that gender roles in this society are far more equal, and that gives me the opportunity to have kickass ladies all over the place and not have that be at all weird.
The latest I Can Do What I Want aspect of the story has involved my going through the book and subtly altering what everyone is eating so they subscribe to a more plant-based diet. It’s not something you see often in fantasy books, I’m willing to bet, but given my own commitment to avoiding meat and animal products, I figured…why not? WHY NOT HAVE THEM ALL BE VEGAN. MUWAHAHAHAHA I’m drunk with godly writing power.
So. Chosen now features a transgender, pansexual, vegan person-of-color as its main character, and I am quite pleased about that. :D
In which I cook stuff, Darla tries to burn down the house, and I get a new cookbook (and a shiny new proof copy of Talking About Fungus). Such good! Many excitement!1!
Taking a brief vacation from the new vlogging obsession, I thought I’d compose a short post that actually pertains to writing – ho ho. I recently realized that my first novel, Talking About Fungus, passed its ten-year publication anniversary last year, and that is both impressive and deeply, deeply unsettling, for it further underscores the fact that I am old.
Old.
Old.
OLD.
So, yes, in sort-of honor of that milestone, I thought I would have another look at Fungus (I’ll take Weird-Sounding Sentences for 400, Alex), give it a little spiff-up, and then re-release it as Version 3. So, that is what I’m in the process of doing.
Unfortunately, Amazon Createspace, the platform I’d previously used to publish Fungus after its initial rights at Torquere Press reverted back to me, is now in the process of being swallowed up by the Amazon Kindle Store, and the Kindle Store – or KDP, as it jovially refers to itself – is giving me a great deal of grief in the republishing of said book. Rather than going into details about that (Cliff’s Notes Version: non-matching ISBNs, cover text, cover image, cover text again – DIDN’T I ALREADY FIX THE COVER TEXT??!!, etc.), I’ll just say that the whole situation is In Progress, and hopefully soon I’ll be able to link to the new and improved print version of Talking About Fungus.
The good news is that the Kindle version was far easier to create, and thus I can in fact share that:
Talking About Fungus, **NEW AND SPARKLY AND IMPROVED** Version
This updated version boasts a new and semi-attractive cover, which will end up being slightly different for the print version since…well, see above re: KDP giving me grief. :P
I fixed a few formatting errors from version 2, deleted some of Jamie’s monologuing (which, as a kind reviewer pointed out in his Amazon review, does tend to go on a bit), and just generally tidied things up.
Another sign of my advancing age, perhaps, is that I now look upon the sex scenes (which multiple reviewers have informed me are quite tame) with an excess of embarrassment, and in general I just feel as if this is 100% the book of a Young Person (TM), which I presumably am no longer. Regardless, it’s still a book I enjoy reading and which I think does some things quite well, so if you’re in the mood for a quick and youthful read, perhaps give it a go. (It’s only 0.99 cents, so hey, why not? WHY NOT INDEED.)
Evidence above re: why writers should not do their own marketing.
Anyway, more on the print edition when information becomes available, and/or when KDP decides to stop tormenting me and just publish the durned thing. And yes, I did just say “durned,” because…
So…yeah. It’s been a while.
To all those impatiently tapping their feet, looking at their watches, and saying, “What kind of time do you call this, then?” I can only offer the excuse that I’ve been buried under piles of crazed and lovable children, struggling to complete my MFA, and spending the rest of the time sleeping.
The good news, however, is that I’ve actually managed to complete my MFA with a Hermione-worthy GPA (insert smugness and general academic fatigue here), and my tenure as a teacher of preschoolers is wrapping up in favor of shifting gears to writing, editing, teaching, and (hopefully) recovering somewhat from my eternal and unceasing state of exhaustion.
In any case, because so very much has happened since my last update sometime in the Mesozoic Era, I offer you updates now in the form of a handy list:
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