When it's pretty good, but not quite marvelous.
I'm Amanda. Originally from the USA, now Belgian, married to a Czech woman and living in Prague. Sometimes life gets complicated.
35 year old stage IV lung cancer survivor, amateur adventurer, poet, book lover, and general all around dork.
Though my poems might slice like old bread knives—unexpectedly sharp at the heel—the person behind them is built of blanket forts and mismatched mugs. I try to carry calm like a cat on a radiator: heat-soaked but easily startled, open to curling around sorrow as much as around laughter. I want my blog to be the spare room where both love and loss can leave their slippers by the door; tenderness isn’t an accessory here, it’s wallpaper—patterned with paradox. Some days I reach out with hands full of sunlight; some days I offer only shade.
This space is one that moves irregularly between a queer joy that bubbles over the rim of chipped teacups, to honest sorrow that sometimes sours the milk before morning. You’ll find frank talk about cancer diagnoses scrawled beside post-it reminders for groceries; child loss sitting across from half-eaten birthday cake; grief dust settling on every surface, yet still enough room to set down your own story if you need it. Please take what fits—skip anything that stings too sharply today or any day after; absence here isn’t exile but evidence you know how to tend yourself first.
I write because the world too often mistakes silence for safety—I’d rather risk cracked porcelain than starve compassion under lock and key. I’m looking for other life-livers who treat gentleness like an anchor dropped into wild water: not something designed to halt all movement, but enough to keep us moored together when wind kicks up regret, or longing, or both at once.
If you craft things—sentences or stew—or simply nurse stories inside your own ribcage until they thrum, you already have a seat at this patchwork table. Let’s trade blueprints for hope alongside admissions of failure; let’s toast our unfinished projects as warmly as our completed ones; let’s swap burnt toast confessions for honeyed truths without embarrassment.
And if you ever find that following feels more burden than balm—or if absence is the only comfort you can carry—I wish you soft landings wherever else you roam online. If there are content warnings I should fold in more carefully or ways this space could better cradle its visitors: please let me know. My best intent is always learning—a mixing bowl never quite empty.
Please note with the below categories that there may be overlap. To illustrate: divorce involves love, marriage, and grief, after all.
📬Conversations & Connection
🫧My Replies
🫂Community
📫Asks and Responses (none yet!)
✍️Writing & Reflection
🍞Original poetry
📚Book reviews
💌Love & Living
🩷Love
👩❤️👩Marriage
✡︎ Jewish Life & Practice
✡︎ Judaism
🌱 The Tender/Raw Stuff
💊Cancer
🌧️Grief
💔️Divorce
🗺️ Languages & Belonging
📖Language Learning
🇨🇿 Czech
🇳🇱 Dutch
🇫🇷 French
⚡Change & Justice
✊Politics
🏳️🌈Pride
Lastly, my personal website: https://marvelish.me
If anyone is a fan of horror by BIPOC authors, pre-orders started today for a new book by Tatiana Schlote-Bonne, via Boozhoo Books https://boozhoo.binderybooks.com/item/1ILBaRyLxry5atRsLT9f/
I enjoyed her first two novels. My review of her first book can be found at https://marvelish.me/such-lovely-skin/
Disclosure: I'm a supporter of Boozhoo Books, but that only means I'm giving money to them; I'm not getting anything—except satisfaction—for this promotion.
Content warnings: gun violence, mass shootings, antisemitism.
Tonight, when I strike a match in my kitchen
and say, lehadlik ner shel Chanukkah—
the word for light catches in my throat
like a bone.
Blessed are You—
You who are praised in every kaddish,
great and holy—
they say Your name grows
each time we say it.
Does it grow tonight
by the muzzle-flash,
by the blood on the boardwalk?
The sea keeps davening
its indifferent psalm,
kol Adonai al ha-mayim,
voice of the Unending on the waters—
but today the loudest voice
was the news anchor
mispronouncing Chanukkah
over donuts growing stale
and plastic dreidels
behind police tape.
Half a world away,
my heart is pressed between the pages
of someone else’s siddur,
stained with someone else’s
first-night oil.
Half a world away
I watch my own candle burn,
refusing to believe this
is what it means
to increase the light.
Tonight, when I strike a match in my kitchen
and say, lehadlik ner shel Chanukkah—
the word for light catches in my throat
like a bone.
Ble
First, the reviewer's bare minimum: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is one of the best books I've read this year. It's Stephen Graham Jones at his most ambitious—a 448-page historical horror novel that uses the vampire as a lens to examine genocide, survival, and the question of who gets to tell Indigenous stories.
It's a stunningly effective horror novel. The kind where you read a scene, close the book, stare at the wall for five minutes processing what just happened, then pick it back up because you're compelled to know what happens next. Jones understands that true horror so often lives in the spaces between what's said and what's implied, and he plays that gap like a virtuoso. The nested narrative structure could've been a gimmick; instead it's a ratchet, tightening with every perspective shift. If you stop reading here, you know enough—five stars, buy it, read it, be devastated.
But what struck me most, what I haven't been able to stop thinking about since I finished it, is how the book is an act of archival sovereignty—both within its narrative structure and as a work itself.
Before I say anything else, I need to be clear about where I'm coming from. I have Stockbridge-Munsee ancestry, but I was raised entirely disconnected from that culture. I'm not an enrolled tribal member. I'm doing my best to learn and connect, but I'm speaking from the outside looking in—someone who desperately wants to understand her people but knows she's setting off on a journey, not arriving at a destination. If I get something wrong here, I welcome correction and discussion. This review is, in part, my continued examination and re-evaluation of my own perspectives—I'm speaking as a student and not a teacher.
Earlier this year, I read Rose Miron's Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory, which documents the Stockbridge-Munsee Community Historical Committee's decades-long fight to recover and reframe Mohican history. Since 1968, this group—mostly Mohican women—has been collecting and reorganising historical materials to shift who controls how Native history is accessed, represented, written, and preserved. They founded the Arvid E. Miller Library/Museum, which now houses the largest collection of Mohican documents and artifacts in the world. For centuries, non-Native actors collected, stole, sequestered, and profited from Native stories and documents. The Historical Committee's work reclaims that authority. They are making themselves the source. (Aside: they are also raising money for a new cultural centre. If you're interested in donating to the effort, contact info can be found here).
What Jones does in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, in many respects, works in parallel ways, and reading these two works in the same year completely shifted how I understand the relationship between fiction and archival activism.
I'm citing Rose Miron's work on Mohican archival activism here because that's what I've read, and thus what's shaped new pathways in my thinking this year. I haven't yet engaged with Blackfeet historians like Rosalyn LaPier or William E. Farr, whose work directly addresses Blackfeet history and the contexts Jones is writing from—but reading this book has made that gap in my knowledge impossible to ignore. I've added to my list, and I welcome suggestions.
The novel is structured as nested archives: in 2012, a professor named Etsy Beaucarne discovers her great-great-great-grandfather's diary hidden in a wall. Arthur Beaucarne was a Lutheran pastor in 1912 Montana, and his diary contains both his own observations and the confessions of a Pikuni man named Good Stab—a being who can't die, who has survived since before the buffalo vanished, who hunts the buffalo hunters to exact a reckoning for a genocide.
The structure itself asks questions about whose stories survive and how. Arthur's diary survives because it was preserved in a wall—a white pastor's documentation of Indigenous experience, mediated through colonial institutions, missionary frameworks, and the English language. It's the kind of archive that has always existed and dominated: Indigenous voices filtered through white recorders, being shaped by their assumptions, their translations, and their comforts.
But Jones doesn't let that be the only story. Good Stab's voice breaks through. His sections are Blackfeet-dialected English, peppered with Pikuni terminology and left untranslated. There are no glossaries, no footnotes explaining what words mean or providing cultural context for non-Indigenous readers. Jones has said he writes for Blackfeet readers first, and this is what that looks like on the page—linguistic sovereignty practiced through craft. It's the same principle the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee seems to operate from: Indigenous people control how their stories are told, how they're accessed, and what gets explained. If you don't understand, that's not the storyteller's problem. If you want to understand, you can make the effort to learn.
I've moved to countries where I didn't speak the language twice as an adult, had to learn by immersion and context, so this didn't bother me personally. I picked up what I could, managed with what I couldn't, and trusted the narrative to carry me. I know some readers struggle with this; that's understandable, and I think it's also the point. Jones isn't writing for their comfort. He's creating a Blackfeet-centered archive within the genre of literary horror, and centering Blackfeet people means some readers will be on the outside. That's also what it feels like when your stories are held in institutions that don't serve you, in languages that aren't yours, with context you're not given access to. The discomfort is pedagogical.
The vampire mythology Jones builds is both familiar and unlike anything I've encountered previously. Good Stab must feed on human blood to maintain his form—if he feeds on other animals, his body begins to transform into theirs. This isn't metaphor, it's literal: consume what you hunt or lose yourself. It's the logic of forced assimilation made flesh. "Kill the Indian, save the man" becomes "consume whiteness or cease to exist as Pikuni." Good Stab finds a way to refuse both options.
There's a colonial trope here that could be ugly—Native-on-Native violence that absolves settlers of responsibility. Jones handles this possibility by making the violence a direct result of forced assimilation. Good Stab isn't violent against his own people because he's Indigenous; he's violent because colonialism has engineered a scenario where survival requires feeding on his own people. His violence isn't inherent; it's imposed. He survives by feeding on his own people when necessary, which breeds its own horror—to remain Pikuni, he must consume Pikuni lives. It's an abhorrent choice, and Jones doesn't offer Good Stab easy outs. Good Stab is not noble or tragic in sanitised ways. He's hungry, vicious, and brutal. He also has his agency. He chooses survival, and sometimes survival is grotesque.
The buffalo are everywhere in this book, and if you view them as kin—not as resources, not as symbol, but as revered family—the horror of their extermination lands very differently. The systematic slaughter of the buffalo wasn't just ecological destruction, it was kin-murder on a genocidal scale. It was callously engineered to starve Indigenous peoples into submission. I know many readers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, were devastated by what happens to Weasel Plume—I've seen the Goodreads reviews and Discord discussions, and I know of people who struggled to finish through their tears.
That grief, with its singular source and focus? That's one buffalo. Multiply it by the millions slaughtered for little reason but to starve Blackfeet people, and the awful scale of what was done comes into focus. Good Stab hunts the buffalo hunters because they're killing his family. The supernatural horror is a secondary one. The real horror is that the U.S. government sanctioned the near-extinction of an entire species of animals as a weapon of genocide, and we have receipts. The Marias Massacre (January 1870) is the historical anchor—nearly 200 Blackfeet people, mostly women, children, and elders, murdered by the U.S. Army. Jones doesn't use this as window dressing, obviously. It's the engine of the narrative, the wound Good Stab carries. It's the reason he exists. The book refuses to let us look away from that.
What also struck me is how Jones balances horror with humour. Arthur Beaucarne, despite being the white Lutheran pastor, carries most of the book's lighter moments—from his affected prose and his earnest attempts to understand Good Stab, to his very human flaws. The humour doesn't undercut the horror; it helps to metabolise it. This is something I recognise from other Indigenous writers like Tommy Orange and Cherie Dimaline: humour as a survival mechanism, not an escape. You laugh because otherwise you drown. Arthur's sections often provide tonal reprieve without ever letting the reader forget what's at stake.
The epistolary format exposes the seams in all of it. The transitions between Arthur's journal and Good Stab's confessions jar at times—intentionally. Indigenous history is almost always mediated, fragmented, and reconstructed from incomplete records put down by people who didn't understand what they were documenting and who would often simply change or omit things if it didn't fit their world view. The novel's structure performs a similar fragmentation while simultaneously offering Good Stab's voice as a counter-archive—a record that survives despite the colonial frameworks trying to contain it, like all the stories and histories passed down within Native communities.
And here's where fiction and archival activism converge: Jones isn't just writing about a Blackfeet vampire surviving across centuries. He's practising Indigenous narrative survival through the act of publishing this book. By centering the Marias Massacre in a literary horror novel, he places it in the canon where it can't be as easily ignored. By refusing to translate Pikuni language, he asserts linguistic sovereignty. By giving Good Stab complexity, agency, and hunger, he refuses the "vanished Indian" narrative that still haunts public memory. The book itself becomes another element in the archive—a Blackfeet-centred, Blackfeet-authored intervention in how Indigenous stories are preserved, accessed, and controlled, but also how new ones are created. I know that publication isn't protection, and that this book can still be co-opted, decontextualised, and taught badly, but it exists in the first place on Jones's terms, in his language, and that matters.
This is what the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee has been doing for fifty years, in many ways. They're reclaiming physical documents, reorganising archives, and ultimately making the Arvid E. Miller Library/Museum and the Mohican people the authoritative source for Mohican history. Jones is doing it through fiction—creating new narratives that centre Indigenous perspectives, languages, and survival, writing those stories into perpetuity within the literary landscape. Both are acts of sovereignty. Refusals of erasure. Insistence that Indigenous people control how their stories are told.
Reading The Buffalo Hunter Hunter after Indigenous Archival Activism made me reconsider what I'm doing with my own writing. I write poetry, I write reviews, I'm working on a novel, and now I've been thinking about how those forms function as archives. What am I preserving? Whose language am I centering? When I write about books by Indigenous authors, am I translating for non-Indigenous readers' comfort, or am I speaking to Indigenous readers first? With what authority am I speaking, and what lack thereof? What would it mean to approach my own work as archival activism—not just recording my experiences with cancer, displacement, and learning to connect with my heritage, but actively shaping what survives, who has access, and what gets explained?
Jones has given me a model for how fiction, great fiction, can do the work of reclamation. You don't have to write nonfiction or history to engage in archival activism. You can create new stories that center your people, refuse translation when translation means dilution, and trust your primary audience to understand. You can ask people on the outside to do their own work to engage if they want to, just like you've had to do in a cultural landscape filled with narratives that don't center those like you. You can use genre fiction—horror, in this case—as a vehicle for historical reckoning. You can make your readers uncomfortable when discomfort is the pedagogical point. And you can do all of this while writing a genuinely gripping, terrifying, occasionally funny vampire novel that works on every level.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a masterpiece. Horror. Historical fiction. A meditation on survival and accountability and the question of what gets preserved. It's also proof that new works of fiction can function as necessary and important archival records in a people's ongoing story—evidence that storytelling is sovereignty, and that Indigenous writers are creating the records future generations will inherit. On their own terms, in their own languages, with their own people at the center.
I'm still learning. I'm still figuring out what it means to write as someone disconnected from her culture but trying to reconnect. Jones has shown me what's possible when you refuse to let colonial archives have the final word. Good Stab survives because he refuses to die. The Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee thrives because they refused to let others define them. And Stephen Graham Jones is writing books that ensure Blackfeet stories endure in forms that can't be stolen, sequestered, or mistranslated.
That's more than horror. That's resistance. That's hope. That's archival activism in both ink and blood, and it's one of the most important books I'll read this year.
First, the reviewer's bare minimum: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is one of the best books I've read this year. It's Stephen Graham Jones at his
Book Review: The Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso
Content Warnings: mass death, impossible moral choices, reality distortion, coercion, sacrifice, violence, death
This book came to me as a metaphorically dog-eared suggestion from my friend Eliot, and I'm so glad they suggested it; it's just the sort of book I love. In The Last Hour Between Worlds, the latest release from Melissa Caruso, the author builds up catastrophes like a clockmaker who's bent on breaking time. She coaxes loose each cog until the whole contraption convulses, collapses, and casts loose pieces to ping across the floor—okay, that metaphor got away from me.
Even in moments when Kembral, our protagonist, is staring down impossible choices, the book won't hand us heroes wrapped in moral certainty. And she's not even supposed to be working; she's on leave! Instead, we watch people scrabble for meaning when every path leads through wreckage, their words worn thin by the particular—and too familiar—fatigue that comes from having no good options left. What cuts even deeper than this philosophical weight is how Caruso lets her characters speak with brutal honesty instead of pretty lies. Maybe I'm hearing echoes of my own bone-tiredness in Kembral's voice, but heck—I know many of you are just as exhausted as I am with impossible choices, these days.
The fantasy elements in the story work like emotional architecture—and yes, I realise I just called magic 'architecture', but bear with me here. Caruso makes reality itself intentionally wobbly. Each "echo" carries extra freight. When the world goes "blurry, like someone erased it and wrote over it," trauma gets literalised through magical realism that keeps metaphysical concepts tethered to recognisable human hurt. Think of how a teacup's hairline crack creeps along, almost invisible, until one morning it splits clean through in your grip. It's much like that, though the metaphor is too gentle for what Caruso serves up. It reminded me of reading The Fifth Season for the first time—that same feeling of the world literally breaking apart, except Caruso's fractures happen faster and with less warning. Her world-building moves without mercy, fractures fast, as new terminology piles up during crisis scenes like debris in the clean-up after an explosion.
There are moments when dialogue digs up character traits like an archaeologist, where voices and personality traits get the dirt brushed off of them, and suddenly you're seeing the messy bits people usually keep buried. Kembral's "respectfully, this isn't the moment for dramatic gestures" made me physically wince—it's deflection dressed up in desperate, sarcastic politeness. I wasn't sure if I wanted to reach through the page and shake her or hide under a blanket because my own conflict-avoidance was being called out so hard. The Midwesterner in me totally gets using manners as armour when things fall apart—I once said "excuse me" to a door that hit me in the face. Caruso weaponises that kind of courtesy like she knows it as well as I do. That's a precision which can, sometimes, read more like authorial commentary than authentic human response, but here? I think it works.
Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but Caruso's treatment of consent under coercion felt less like abstract philosophy and more like lived experience. There are moments I desperately want to spoil—seriously, the restraint is killing me—where Caruso won't let sacrifice be pretty or easy. She makes you engage with the awful necessity of it, and the text earns these story beats through an accumulation of scenes brimming with impossible choices. There are no easy outs.
But here's what surprised me: Caruso trusts us to sit with discomfort. We don't get an answer to every question. She doesn't show us a justification for every choice. Kembral just has to live with the wreckage she's made, sometimes, just like we so often do. You know what? I'm okay with that. It's actually refreshing in a genre where most problems get solved by either stabbing something or having a heartfelt conversation—preferably both.
All in all, I adored this book. If you're on the lookout for a morally murky fantasy-mystery without clean heroes, then you'll find rich material here. If you're hunting for traditional heroic journeys or clear ethical answers, you'll probably chafe against ambiguity that spurns such comfortable categories. To anyone who's sensitive to themes of mass death or unstable realities, either skip this one or come in prepared—this book's examination of catastrophic decisions shows no mercy.
I'm a US expat, queer, married to a Czech woman of colour. Going back to visit friends and family feels perilous right now, at least if we're going together, and my health is uncertain enough that I don't feel confident traveling alone.
I also have stage IV lung cancer—I have maybe a year left, maybe twenty, and no real way of knowing. These things together mean I don't know if I'll ever safely see my people again.
Last night gave me the first breath of hope about it I've had in months.
Content Warnings: Death of a sibling, car accident, grief, guilt, self-harm ideation, blood/gore, gaslighting, cyberbullying, parental grief
Such Lovely Skin does something clever with the evil doppelgänger premise—the monster is more than a corruption, it's a photocopy set to maximum contrast so that all Viv's worst qualities are printed in ink too dark to deny. Viv is a Twitch streamer, a chronic liar, and someone carrying the weight of her little sister's death. When a demonic mimic enters her life, it starts destroying everything she's built—but here's the thing: Viv has spent so long lying for sympathy and scattering rumours like salt that no one believes her when she insists the horror isn't her fault this time. It's the girl who cried wolf turned up to eleven, and the wolf is wearing her face.
Tatiana Schlote-Bonne's debut is viciously smart about the mechanics of consequences. The horror here isn't just supernatural—it's the slow-motion realisation that Viv has built a life where the truth can't save her because she's spent years making herself unbelievable. The doppelganger is terrifying, yes, but it's working with materials Viv already provided. It takes every lie, every slick manipulation, and turns them to tools—dismantling her life with a butcher's systematic attention to the joints. It's The Ring with receipts, and the bottom line is brutal.
I know some readers will balk at Viv's voice—the internet slang, the "ugh" and "wtf," the gaming jargon—but I'm from the internet, as they say, and it read as authentic to me. Schlote-Bonne clearly knows online culture, and more importantly, she nails the particular hellscape of being a young woman trying to build a platform online. The casual misogyny, the weaponised doubt, the way Viv's history of lying intersects with broader cultural unwillingness to believe girls—it's all there, and it's not subtle. Shouldn't be. Isn't—not for those of us up to our chins in it.
The grief, too, is handled with an unflinching clarity that I appreciated. Viv isn't grieving in acceptable ways, and that's understandable. She's numb, she's selfish, she's trying to throw money at her parents as penance instead of giving them honesty. Meanwhile, her parents are drowning in their own loss and can barely see her, which is its own kind of grief. I lost a son, so I recognise that particular drowning—Schlote-Bonne doesn't reach for the parents' hands to pull them out, which is the only honest choice. It's ugly. Uncomfortable. Grief has the texture of rot lodged deep in a place you can't reach—behind the ribs, maybe, or the back of the throat. Schlote-Bonne doesn't sanitise it, and she offers no easy grace for the wreckage grief leaves in its wake.
It's possible some readers might flag the twists as predictable, but there's a difference between obvious and properly telegraphed. The clues are there if you're paying attention—but that's good craft, not a failure of surprise. A plot twist you can't possibly see coming often means the author cheated. Is it the most challenging mystery to unravel? No, but not every story needs to be. Schlote-Bonne plays fair with her structure, and the satisfaction comes not from shock but from watching the pieces click into place.
Ultimately, at times Viv isn't likable, and that's the point. She's done real harm—to Ash, to anyone who believed her, to the foundations her life is built on. The book asks whether someone like that deserves saving, and more interestingly, whether she can save herself when no one else believes her capable of truth. The answer is complicated. Knotted. The kind of knot you can't untie without cutting something away.
Such Lovely Skin is fast-paced, genuinely creepy, and smarter than it needs to be. I'm still thinking about that final scene—the one where you realise the doppelganger might have been the honest one all along. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it. Either way, bad photocopies leave residue. This one's still dark on my fingertips.
It takes every lie, every slick manipulation, and turns them to tools—dismantling her life with a butcher's systematic attention to the join
When a space cares a lot about making sure its members are queer enough to participate, you get a space that aggressively polices the queerness of its members. There's no way around that, it's pretty much tautologically true. Only by paradoxically not actually caring if you're queer or not can a group really accept the full range of what queerness can look like.
Also, a space that has room for a cis straight guy who means well and wants the best for his friends has two crucial things going for it.
1) it has space for people who are learning and might fuck up a bit while they figure things out, and that learning process is probably not so godawful and unpleasant that a guy with other prospects would have to be a fool not to go find some nicer friends. This is nice because it is very difficult to personally embody the entire alphabet at once, and learning how to be good allies to one another is a crucial part of queer solidarity. It's nice for that process not to be painful.
2) it has space for people who aren't yet willing to or comfortable with presenting an externally queer label to continue to exist and soak up the queer vibes and information, which means it's welcoming to actual questioning people rather than the theory of questioning people. Probably it therefore has more interest in actually doing things rather than hierarchy politics.
3) it's probably not a radfem tar pit interested in weaponising you against people they've decided to hate in a social smear war that benefits nobody and nothing but their need for a power trip
Oh it’s even more than that! The cis straight guy is very often a ride home, dad or husband. Or a Bob which I will explain in this essay is a signifier of a healthy ecosystem, like frogs are.
This is a 3 am take so consider this a blanket apology and a readmore but if you hate this post you were warned.
If he’s someone’s ride home, then his presence enables queer people to show up. Note this importance in, say, rural America or where the person might use a wheelchair or need care or can’t drive. Or where the meeting place is generally awkward.
If he’s someone’s dad, his presence enables kids to show up. I know a 5 year old trans kid in real life. I know a nonbinary teen in real life who’s allowed to do a lot on their own, but their parents worry, and if they’re hanging out with adults the parents want to attend and meet the adults. Teenagers are so liminal with this.
If he’s someone’s husband, that’s a perfectly common accessory for a bisexual, nonbinary, or trans person. I think it adds a delightful dimension to queer spaces. I think it’s great that there’s a whole class of sexuality that’s “bi wife energy” or “straight except for loving this person” or “straight since I think nonbinary people are considered a different gender to my own - actually I’m completely lost about whether that’s true but we’ve been married ten years?” or “straight except for the fact that my partner transitioned, and we’re still married, and it’s none of your business.” At this point they’re so common that they’re their own subspecies. I think all spaces should have a slightly bewildered guy in his late forties who owns a set of good screwdrivers. I am bi and have one myself; it is a common pairing. “Why would your husband come to your social thing” idk this is a genuine thing people do sometimes in non-tar-pit spaces. They stop by. It’s almost like birds. You meet this incredible ornate, splendid older queer person and then they introduce their husband Professor Robert “Bob” Kevinsworth, who’s just this extremely straight old big fat Linux geologist in a 90s t-shirt with a trout on it, they’ve been married 45 years. Evolutionary pressures mean that the Bob must be relatively drab in order to camouflage themselves on the nest or something; if you want to attract the flashy half of the couple to your garden, then you have to provide habitat for Bob. idk it’s 3:46 am right now. But it’s like frogs; the presence of Bobs indicates a healthy and established ecosystem, like Grison and Derin indicate. Because frogs, who absorb environmental toxins readily through their skin, are an indicator species for pollution and biodiversity; a Bob means there is going to be less toxicity and more diversity.
[And also it’s none of our business but there are an awful lot of queer Bobs (Bob himself, again, possibly being queer) and it’s really none of our business. Sure, maybe that person looks like a straight grandpa. A lot of people do/did. I have always hated the idea that you can “spot” a queer person by their haircut, clothes or youth (largely because I don’t look very unusual or amazing myself.) the oldest nb person I know is a sort of Bob with a big white beard and grandchildren, and I’m sorry but at their age they are NOT going to be getting a different haircut! Let alone pink Shein dungarees and black circle sunglasses to signify their queerness to gatekeepers. A lot of people seeing them would assume they are cishet. Nope! Just old, fat and unfashionable.)
So a space that doesn’t have room for a cishet guy is a space that has made decisions about children, non-drivers, a large proportion of bi and nonbinary people, straight trans women, dads, and so on.
Which is fine in itself I suppose, but what they’re clearly kinda selecting for is a population of able twentysomethings who can all have sex with each other. and the thing is that there’s often a vibe they feel annoyed by seeing people they don’t want to fuck (children, middle-aged people, unfashionable queer people, people unironically wearing trout t shirts).
So in my admittedly highly limited personal experience, the exclusionary “queer spaces” just tend to be an elaborate drama-production exercise for twentysomethings to date each other, the rituals are intricate etc.
And all the rest of the weird queer people are just. at the seed swap.
I've seen situations where the cishet person in those spaces later turns out not to be, but hadn't even fully come to the realization yet.
My wife and I both also don't tend to get read as queer without saying or doing something specific to clue people—like referring to the other as our wife—and often don't seem to set off people's gaydar. I could very well be thought of as the cishet person in the room.
Policing other people's identities is exhausting, and I have better things to spend my time doing.
We swap hyperlink chatter for chain-mail clatter,
thumb-sparks peppering cheap denim with ember freckles.
No mission statement—only steel on strop or stone,
queer clang leaking from the shoebox flat like pirated midnight radio.
I skim my grin along the grinding wheel,
metal tang flooding my mouth like a bitten coin.
You answer with an axe kissing spruce,
each chip a swirl of winter kindling,
each swing muscle's rebuttal to the canon of apology.
Swords belong to Sundays—polished beside the sink:
dish suds, rainbowed film, your elbow nudging mine.
We study beveled edges and boundaries together—
keep fingers clear, keep wrists loose,
keep gossip sharp enough to julienne shame.
Daggers wedge into boot tops like a spare key taped inside the fuse box;
the metro lurches, a flash of steel where adverts used to glare,
commuters blink and blame the neon,
never clock the covenant riding our calves.
We travel light, pockets bristling with maybe.
Spears won't fit the studio,
so we lash steak-knives to broom poles with bike-tube strips,
stack them in a milk crate by the radiator—angles waiting,
warm metal scenting the air like rain on tin gutters.
Our armoury grows on the floorboards.
Risk isn't rhetoric; it nicks.
You misjudge the draw—tip snips a stray curl,
burnt hair rising like solder smoke;
I loop gauze as you laugh at the sting,
our shared breath clinking louder than any lecture on resilience.
Last spring's blade-kiss still brackets my palm,
a silent grin the steel recalls when I forget;
tonight it winks beneath dish-soap light, proof enough.
Inventory in motion, never just counted:
an awl punches fresh holes in the belt of bad news;
a boning knife fillets lies from the spine of whispers;
a crochet hook loops copper wire into trip-line lace.
Edge to edge we stand, spines aligned, steel tongues spelling breach.
Our blades keep singing, shouldering daylight through the crack.
We swap hyperlink chatter for chain-mail clatter,
thumb-sparks peppering cheap denim with ember freckles.
No mission statement—only steel on
Let's talk about the best ways to support authors, indie publishers, and the literary community in general, rather than just big retailers.
I made this blog post talking about platforms and royalties. Have a look. Please tell me where I'm wrong or what I missed!
Feel free to reply to me on here or in the comments on the blog post—you can sign up for free, your info remains private, you won't be spammed. I promise that I care about privacy!
That's one reason Google is on my own don't-buy-here list.
Authors, lend me your spreadsheets. Readers, lend me your receipts.
Someone in the Sapphic writers' Discord server that I'm on asked about
You wake up tired,
scroll bad news until it blurs.
Answer emails, jaw clenched tight—
or can’t even bear to look.
You say “I’m fine”
with three tabs open—rent, repair, relief—
and one on how to sleep through the stress,
or how not to sleep all the time.
You forget.
You snap.
You soften.
You try again.
If you are carrying
children, parents, partners—
meals, medications, moods—
and no one asks how you’re doing,
this is me asking.
Not just if you’re managing.
If you’re okay.
If you’ve been held, or fed,
or even seen.
How are you, really?
If your brain jumps tracks
mid-sentence, mid-plan, mid-dream—
if the dishes feel impossible,
if you forgot again
and hate yourself for it—
please hear this:
you are not alone.
Not at all.
This world wasn’t built for minds like yours,
but that doesn’t mean yours is wrong.
It means you’ve been trying
to bloom through cracked concrete,
drinking whatever rain you could reach,
and still—still—you flowered.
If the world was made for
standing without thinking,
for walking without fear,
for climbing stairs without pain,
for seeing every sign,
for hearing every word—
If holding a pen, a fork, a steering wheel
costs more energy than you have,
if you measure your day in spoons left,
not hours passed—
you are not broken.
You are not a burden.
The burden is stairs with no ramp,
streets that swallow wheels,
silence when you ask for help.
If rest feels dangerous,
if joy feels stolen,
if you’re so used to pushing through
you forgot how to just be—
you’re not the only one.
The world wasn’t built for you.
Not for most of us, was it?
But you are here anyway,
making it work how you can.
That is not failure.
That is survival.
That is a kind of brilliance.
You are not failing.
You are not falling behind.
You are responding to a world
that punishes tenderness.
And still—
you are kind.
You are trying.
You are here.
If you wonder whether I mean you,
I do.
Even if the voice says "not me,"
I still do.
Come as you are:
tired, tangled, beautiful.
You don’t have to fix yourself
to deserve rest.
You don’t have to be better
to be loved.
You wake up tired,
scroll bad news until it blurs.
Answer emails, jaw clenched tight—
or can’t even bear to look.
You say “I’m fine”
with three tabs open—rent, repair, relief—
and one on how to sleep through the stress,
or how not to sleep all the time.
You forget.
You snap.
You soften.
You try again.
If you are carrying
children, parents, partners—
meals, medications, moods—
and no one asks how you’re doing,
this is me asking.
Not just if you’re managing.
If you’re okay.
If you’ve been held, or fed,
or even seen.
How are you, really?
If your brain jumps tracks
mid-sentence, mid-plan, mid-dream—
if the dishes feel impossible,
if you forgot again
and hate yourself for it—
please hear this:
you are not alone.
Not at all.
This world wasn’t built for minds like yours,
but that doesn’t mean yours is wrong.
It means you’ve been trying
to bloom through cracked concrete,
drinking whatever rain you could reach,
and still—still—you flowered.
If the world was made for
standing without thinking,
for walking without fear,
for climbing stairs without pain,
for seeing every sign,
for hearing every word—
If holding a pen, a fork, a steering wheel
costs more energy than you have,
if you measure your day in spoons left,
not hours passed—
you are not broken.
You are not a burden.
The burden is stairs with no ramp,
streets that swallow wheels,
silence when you ask for help.
If rest feels dangerous,
if joy feels stolen,
if you’re so used to pushing through
you forgot how to just be—
you’re not the only one.
The world wasn’t built for you.
Not for most of us, was it?
But you are here anyway,
making it work how you can.
That is not failure.
That is survival.
That is a kind of brilliance.
You are not failing.
You are not falling behind.
You are responding to a world
that punishes tenderness.
And still—
you are kind.
You are trying.
You are here.
If you wonder whether I mean you,
I do.
Even if the voice says "not me,"
I still do.
Come as you are:
tired, tangled, beautiful.
You don’t have to fix yourself
to deserve rest.
You don’t have to be better
to be loved.
You wake up tired,
scroll bad news until it blurs.
Answer emails, jaw clenched tight—
or can’t even bear to look.
You say “I’m fine”
with three tabs open—rent, repair, relief—
and one on how to sleep through the stress,
or how not to sleep all the time.
You forget.
You snap.
You soften.
You try again.
If you are carrying
children, parents, partners—
meals, medications, moods—
and no one asks how you’re doing,
this is me asking.
Not just if you’re managing.
If you’re okay.
If you’ve been held, or fed,
or even seen.
How are you, really?
If your brain jumps tracks
mid-sentence, mid-plan, mid-dream—
if the dishes feel impossible,
if you forgot again
and hate yourself for it—
please hear this:
you are not alone.
Not at all.
This world wasn’t built for minds like yours,
but that doesn’t mean yours is wrong.
It means you’ve been trying
to bloom through cracked concrete,
drinking whatever rain you could reach,
and still—still—you flowered.
If the world was made for
standing without thinking,
for walking without fear,
for climbing stairs without pain,
for seeing every sign,
for hearing every word—
If holding a pen, a fork, a steering wheel
costs more energy than you have,
if you measure your day in spoons left,
not hours passed—
you are not broken.
You are not a burden.
The burden is stairs with no ramp,
streets that swallow wheels,
silence when you ask for help.
If rest feels dangerous,
if joy feels stolen,
if you’re so used to pushing through
you forgot how to just be—
you’re not the only one.
The world wasn’t built for you.
Not for most of us, was it?
But you are here anyway,
making it work how you can.
That is not failure.
That is survival.
That is a kind of brilliance.
You are not failing.
You are not falling behind.
You are responding to a world
that punishes tenderness.
And still—
you are kind.
You are trying.
You are here.
If you wonder whether I mean you,
I do.
Even if the voice says "not me,"
I still do.
Come as you are:
tired, tangled, beautiful.
You don’t have to fix yourself
to deserve rest.
You don’t have to be better
to be loved.
You already are loved.
Still.
Still.
You wake up tired,
scroll bad news until it blurs.
Answer emails, jaw clenched tight—
or can’t even bear to look.
You say “I’m fine”
with t
My feelings about how some people are reacting to the flooding in Texas…
They crow over corpses,
grin from gutted homes
they claim as ramparts—
raise rotting banners
above splintered stone,
surveying flooded streets
like conquerors gloating
over vanquished dead.
Politics as pastime
curdles conscience,
barters breath for points,
scores sorrow in salt.
Some cradle lives
like cupped embers;
others stack the dead
like carrion coins.
Their glee grinds
like grit in gears,
scrapes mercy raw—
a chorus of jackals
gnawing the bones
of unburied grief.
