Poem in GUD Magazine

GUD Issue 7 CoverI have a poem in the new issue of GUD (Greatest Uncommon Denominator) Magazine. It’s called “Monkey Bait”, and is inspired by the story of how the jellyfish lost its bones.

This is an odd announcement for me, as I stopped writing poetry years ago. There were a lot of delays with the magazine, which is why this poem is surfacing now. Some might recognise that it was also in my collection, as the exclusivity part of the contract with GUD was waived some time back.

I’ve always liked poetry, but never really in the way the current market likes poetry. I like writing poems about ideas I find neat. They might be serious sometimes, but they’re not linked to serious issues in the real world. Neat idea poetry tends to get flatly rejected (sometimes with strained “this isn’t the direction we’re going in” messages). So there’s always that pressure to be more meaningful and make it relate somehow to a real world issue, even if it’s a poem about robots.

Added to that, poems don’t have space to clarify what they’re about. That’s much more of an issue when it is about a real world thing. It’s more likely to hurt someone, which is exactly what happened when I tried to write poetry that was better suited to the market. That poem was a science fiction scenario with some things based on my own experiences, but there wasn’t really space to make that clear, so that wasn’t how the poem was taken.

That “Monkey Bait” is my last published one is fitting in a way, as it wasn’t a market-pleaser. There isn’t a hidden metaphor here for anything else. Just a different take on the theme of the original tale. I won’t say I’ll never write another poem, but it’s not something I have plans to do. In the meantime, I hope GUD readers enjoy my take on the story.

Conversation in Strange Horizons

Bogi Takács and I have a non-fiction piece in Strange Horizons. It’s called Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in SF: A Conversation. We talk about various stuff, from things we think are handled badly to recommendations. This also marks my first non-fiction sale.

While we were talking, I did have a tangent that I didn’t include. It’s something I think would interest my fiction readers more than people who don’t know who I am. Namely about the issue of times when it’s hard to show in a short story that humans do something too / it’s not an alien-only thing. I had a story where it was an issue: “The Dragonfly People” in Rainbow Lights. The viewpoint character is a giant scorpion-like alien, who comes from a strict trinary gender system. She assumes, based on what she sees, that humans have a strict binary gender system. Without concepts like being trans existing in her own culture, or a fluent shared language to discuss the issues, she remains thinking her initial assumption is correct.

It was something I considered at the time I wrote it, though I felt overall it’d be clear it wasn’t my view from my body of work, and there was a sequel in progress about the alien/human relations in the next generation that tackled those issues.

But the thing that struck me, and where this tangent is going, is those sorts of stories are rarely the ones where people are saying they couldn’t see how to mention it. They tend to be stories with human viewpoint characters, very human-like aliens, and/or characters who speak each other’s languages fluently. Which is why I often feel like replying to those statements with, “Is your viewpoint character a giant scorpion who thinks humans are weird squishy things that make funny sounds? No? Then someone can tell them trans people exist, okay.”

Now, I’m off to eat solstice chocolates. I hope you enjoy the conversation!

Story/Art at Unlikely Story

Cartoon Honeybee

In my (probably) last story of the year, “On Shine Wings” is up at Unlikely Story. It’s part of the Journal of Unlikely Entomology and it’s all about bees! In space!

Story Link: On Shine Wings

You’ll also note the artist for the story has a stunning resemblance to me, making this my first art sale. The art piece is titled “Spacebees”, because my ability to title doesn’t when it comes to pictures. It’s acrylic paint, tea and ink on watercolour paper.