When I was a child, the world had a lot of surprises for me: even as a rough-and-tumble tomboy who delighted in running and climbing trees, the world of books was an endless imaginative joy. It seemed that reading them opened up a door in the back of my mind and I could just fall […]
Pain and fatigue are everywhere in speculative fiction. The more dramatic the stakes of the story, the more likely you are to witness the protagonist dragging their broken, battered body through a slew of ridiculous challenges to succeed. From Frodo and Sam entering the caldera of Mount Doom to Ripley fighting evil aliens for her […]
It’s in the stereotype. The artist of tempestuous temperament who drinks to excess as he stumbles, lean and tuberculotic, up the winding steps to his garret. Van Gogh cut off his ear. Plath put her head in the oven. The artist is passionate; the artist is mercurial; the artist is mad. Sometimes stereotypes do hold […]
I don’t know what it is. When I was younger, I was made to believe it was polio, and then I met survivors of that disease and it put doubts in me. Now, I think maybe it’s clubfoot. I could ask my mother, but then, I don’t have the urge to find out. I don’t […]
“I much prefer you in cat form, Dream, old friend. When you wear a human head, I find it so hard to know what you are thinking.” So says the Egyptian goddess Bast to the King of Dreams. This line appears in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman: Season of the Mists, and in the context of […]
I’m going to explain about how A Wrinkle in Time gave me the title for this, but to get to that, I have to talk about imagination, about three things that got in my way when I tried to write this, and about inspiration. (I’m also going to yell at abled people a few times. […]
What does autism representation in fiction mean to me? There is almost a formula for answering this question. A story about looking fruitlessly for yourself in the books you love, finally grabbing them to assert your right to be in them anyway. This is a meaningful story which is real and important for a vast […]
Late last year, my therapist told me I was bipolar. We had talked about my personal history, and I’d always had phases of depression and mania, though the former had lately been a deeper, more life-altering issue. Depression for me is melancholy, feeling I’m sinking deeper into a hole, and compounded guilt over missing deadlines […]
Design a spaceship. Or a space station, if you prefer. Imagine an artificial planet, or a galaxy. But start with a spaceship. Start from nothing except the vacuum of space. Sketch it with a freshly sharpened pencil across the blue-green lines of graph paper, or model it in three dimensions, dragging your mouse to shape […]
(Content Note for discussion of self-harm and suicide.) The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley taught me that gangly, self-conscious girls could become heroes; not damsels, but knights and dragon slayers. Robert Heinlein’s Friday introduced me to pansexuality, sex without shame, and the joy of multiple partners. Like most, I discovered myself through the […]