Ian Pierce

Author: Ian

  • Books I’m Enjoying, November 2025

    Books continue to exist, and therefore I’m buying and reading them. While a lot of my reading comes from the Seattle Public Library, I’m always down to support local bookstores. Around where I live, I recommend Elliott Bay Book Company, Third Place Books, and Kinokuniya (not a local store technically, but still one of my favorites for manga series and works in translation). Here’s a selection of what I’m enjoying now:

    Kuzushiro, The Moon on a Rainy Night

    I have the softest of spots for chaste, slow-burn yuri manga, and The Moon on a Rainy Night hits me right in the sweet spot (so much yearning!). But the real reason that I love this manga so much, and why I immediately purchase a new volume when I spot it on the shelves, is because one of the characters is Deaf. While former piano prodigy Kanon still has some hearing in one ear, she needs a hearing aid to be able to go to school and interact with the world. Her disability has isolated her, and it’s only when the bubbly Saki shows up in her life that she’s able to connect with friends her own age. As someone who deals with an invisible disability every day, I was astonished at how well Kuzushiro portrays the social aspects of disability. The responses that Kanon gets from fellow students in her class – “she’s only doing it for attention”, “she just wants special treatment”, “everyone lets her get away with everything”, “she’d be a lot better if she actually tried” – are exactly the sorts of comments that people in my adolescence, even into my adult life, so they hit particularly hard. I’m just hoping that these crazy kids can kiss soon, because it’s been seven volumes. I mean, I like a slow burn, but does it have to be this slow?

    Inio Asano, Goodnight Punpun

    I was familiar with Asano’s work from his haunting adolescent romance manga A Girl on the Shore, and after spotting this series at Kinokuniya, I decided to pick it up. It deals with a lot of the same subjects as A Girl on the Shore – the isolation of young people in disastrous family situations – but with a darkly comedic twist. I always enjoy stories that can go from laugh-out-loud funny to deeply emotionally affecting. I also love Asano’s art, which ranges from hyper-realistic backgrounds of run-down Japanese suburbs to the cartoony abstraction of the main character Punpun. Also, in case you’re wondering, at no point does anyone comment on the fact that Punpun is a bird.

    Marta Skaði, Confessions of an Antichrist

    More teenage outcasts in blackly comedic situations, although in this case they’re members of a black metal band with a lead singer who may legitimately be the Antichrist. I know for a fact that I would love second-wave Norwegian black metal, but every time I consider listening to Mayhem or Burzum, I remember Varg Vikernes’s politics and recoil in horror. (There’s a fair amount of black metal that I do enjoy, but anything from that scene is not my jam). The members of Baphomet’s Agony spend more time beating up fascists and religious bigots with comically oversized dildos, though, so that’s more in line with my overall worldview. And Confessions of an Antichrist contains enough sex, Satanism, and metal to make my withered, blackened heart grow several sizes. There’s even a touch of romantic angst. Apparently my choices in reading lately have a theme…

    Alexandra Bracken, Silver in the Bone and The Mirror of Beasts

    Speaking of tormented teenage romantic longing, this duology has that in spades. I had a lot of fun with the main character Tamsin’s banter with her rival-turned-lover Emrys over the course of these books, as well as the Arthurian and Welsh mythology that underpins the setting of the book. I love seeing Welsh myth brought into the modern era – it’s far less utilized than Irish legend – as you’ll see if/when my New Adult urban fantasy novel comes out. Maybe it’s time for me to reread the Prydain Chronicles again so I can scratch that itch…

  • Desert Bus!

    Every year, I look forward to the second week of November because of one amazing thing: Desert Bus For Hope. This event, put on by Canadian streamers and sketch comedians LoadingReadyRun, is a tiny fragment of joy in a dark, cruel world, and it’s one of my favorite things in the world. The gist of it is that a team of funny internet people play the most boring video game ever made for a whole week in order to raise money for children in hospitals and domestic violence shelters.

    I could explain how the event works and why it’s so special, but honestly, the About page on the Desert Bus website describes it far better than I ever could:

    Started in 2007 by internet sketch comedy group LoadingReadyRun, Desert Bus for Hope combines video games and tedium to benefit charity.

    Desert Bus is the world’s longest running internet-based fundraiser and has raised more than $10 million for Child’s Play over its eighteen-year history.

    What started as an impromptu event broadcast from a living room is now a professionally organized fundraiser; it takes more than 13 people to plan the event and another 55 dedicated volunteers to keep the whole thing running once it starts.

    Our viewers direct the action, talking with us via live chat, challenging us to sing, dance and generally make fools of ourselves in front of thousands of viewers. The Desert Bus Craft-Along allows people from all over the world to help us raise money by donating incredible handmade art and goods for auction.

    Desert Bus is a great example of what happens when a huge community of people from all over the world – organizers, volunteers, crafters, sponsors, and viewers – come together to achieve a common goal.

    Desert Bus the Game

    Desert Bus is a mini-game from the never-released Sega CD game Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors. Challenging the player to drive a listing, unreliable, virtual bus on an endless, eight-hour-long strip of highway between Tucson, Arizona, and Las Vegas, Nevada, it is widely regarded to be the worst video game ever made.

    We play it for as long as donations come in. In order to keep things interesting for our viewers we have live and silent auctions, giveaways and contests, celebrity guests, and a lot of silliness.

    Child’s Play – What is Child’s Play?

    Child’s Play is a registered charity dedicated to improving the lives of children undergoing treatment in the hospital with toys and games. The charity supports a network of over 180 hospitals worldwide.

    Child’s Play also supports domestic violence support facilities and aims to provide opportunities for positive engagement, distraction, and play for children in domestic violence shelters and advocacy centres.

    Personally, I’ve been watching Desert Bus since 2012, when I was in college. In fact, while I was taking a class in computer graphics, I made this image as as assignment:

    As far as an image made by a twenty-year-old amateur taking a breadth requirement class, I think it’s not too shabby, Alonso! And it shows that my love for this deeply strange event, which has grown like a beautiful pearl around the annoying piece of grit that is one of the world’s worst video games.

    If you want to check the stream out and join in the fun, go to desertbus.org! And if you want to chip in with a li’l bit of financial support, I would appreciate it muchly. These are dark times, after all, and if we can provide just a little bit of kindness to children in need, it’ll make the world a little lighter.

  • random sketchery, november 2025

    Since I’ve started my new job working with kids at an after-school program, I’ve had to find some way to impress or entertain them. Fortunately, I’m sort of a competent artist. At the very least, a lot of the kids think that I’m amazing, and drawings from Mr. Ian have become coveted commodities – so coveted, in fact, that I’ve had to institute a limit of one drawing per kid per day in order to actually be able to, you know, do my job. At the request of my cousin Stephen, an award-winning illustrator who enjoyed the drawing on the About page, I decided to share some of my recent random sketches.

    Most of the drawings come from the 5e Monster Manual, which I bring to class as reference material, and in order to instill a proper sense of geekiness within my young charges. These drawings use the art in that book as reference, and were drawings that I chose to make for myself. Drawing from photographic or artistic reference is a great way to practice, and it’s a good thing I have the Monster Manual in front of me, because I couldn’t do nearly as nice work without something to guide me.

    Mind Flayer:

    Minotaur:

    Human Fighter:

    Archmage:

    And finally, as a non-D&D related piece of art, a baby with two wheels instead of hands, in tribute to the beautiful minds of Sirs Thomas Cardy and Brian David Gilbert:

    As an aside, I’ve noticed that there’s a certain segment of commenters online who say that drawing using reference material is a crutch, that it’s at best lazy and at worst an act of plagiarism. I find this completely baffling. Not only have artists used references for literally thousands of years (unless you think that those Renaissance masters came up with the subjects of their portraits and still-lives entirely out of their imaginations), but how do you think you’ll be able to draw what something looks like if you don’t actually, well, look at it? I shouldn’t let comments like that annoy me too much, though. Probably the people who say things like that aren’t actual artists and have never made anything in their lives. Either that or they’re bots farming engagement. What a time to be on the internet…

  • in the wake of adversity

    credit: Jabin Botsford

    When I was just a little guy, a baby-faced twenty-year-old with a downy chin and a lingering adolescent acne problem, I couldn’t imagine ever getting a rejection for my writing. Why would I? As discussed in one of my previous posts, I thought I was hot shit.

    Now, after almost seven hundred rejection letters, I can really imagine getting rejected.

    I’m not unique in this, I know. It’s frustrating because I know I’m a good writer. Am I a great writer? Probably not. But I have an ear for dialogue, an eye for description, an ability to create complex and compelling characters, and more importantly than anything, an unutterably stubborn, pig-headed determination. But even I’m not great, I can take a lesson from those who are not only great, but who are transcendent: the kinds of talents that come along once in a century, if not more.

    Case in point: Lionel Messi.

    By any reasonable statistic, Messi is the greatest footballer of the twenty-first century. The only people who even come close to his level across history are Pele and Maradona. Maybe you can include Christine Sinclair, if you want to add women’s footballers. But even though he’s possessed of a left foot blessed by the golden gods, it wasn’t as if everything came easy for him. When he was a boy on the mean streets of Rosario, Argentina, he was head and shoulders above all the other kids in the Newell’s Old Boys academy in all ways except height. In fact, he was released from the academy because the club couldn’t afford the hormone treatments that would allow him to grow to anything approaching a normal height. Fortunately for Messi, FC Barcelona stepped in, said “We will pay for your growth hormones, tiny child,” and took him to Spain to play for their academy, La Masia, which is basically the equivalent of Soccer Harvard.

    Messi advanced through the ranks and broke into the first team, and he and Barcelona started dominating. League titles, Copas del Rey, Champions Leagues… there was nothing that the Barcelona of the 2000s and the 2010s didn’t win. And yet, while Catalunya loved him, the people in Argentina thought that he was barely even Argentine. He had grown up in Spain, they claimed. He wasn’t a “man of the people”, whatever that means. Whatever their justification, the people of Argentina were cool, if not overtly hostile, to him.

    Fast forward to Qatar in 2022. Messi no longer plays for Barcelona. He’s well into the last stages of his career. 2022 might be his last chance to win a World Cup. Fortunately, after winning the Copa America last year, the Argentine public has warmed to Messi. His fellow players will run through a wall for him. If Messi wants to win a World Cup with Argentina, this might be his last chance…

    …and they lose the first game to Saudi Arabia.

    It seems inevitable in hindsight, when really it was anything but. They got out of the group stage, fought tooth and nail through the knockout rounds, and got to the final against France. Even then, Argentina had to overcome over two hours of football (two regular halves and two extra-time periods), a Kylian Mbappé hat trick, and a pants-shittingly tense penalty shootout before claiming the world title after the greatest final in World Cup history.

    I remember that final. I was in a pizzeria in Madrid when I watched it. Most of the people working there were Argentine. You’d think the roof would’ve come off that place when the final penalty went in.

    I’m not the Messi of writing. I’m not even close. But if someone who has a legitimate shout to be the greatest of all time in his particular field still had to go through the wringer to achieve his destiny, maybe none of us should feel bad for going through adversity to achieve ours.

    Even if it kind of sucks.

  • how i spent my saturday

    I had a pretty eventful Saturday, and I figured it might be nice to share some photos from it. As I’m sure people are aware, the No Kings protest went on across America, from massive cities to tiny hamlets, and Seattle was no exception. I went to check it out and show my support in the fight against fascism, and it was a great time. I’m so glad that across the country and the world, there were no violent incidents at all. I worried that if some idiot tried to start some shit, the right-wing media (and probably a lot of the mainstream media too, let’s be honest) would be trying to paint this movement as a violent insurrection no matter how small the incident was. That’s how they did after George Floyd’s murder, after all. The fact that they decided to drop the “scary violent Hamas Antifa Marxists” angle for a “these are just a bunch of old white people” argument just shows how successful we were in puncturing their bubble.

    First off, before heading to the Seattle Center for the protest, I had to get there. The Link was already crowded by the time I got on, and got more and more crowded with every stop.

    After I got off at Westlake and grabbed donuts and coffee at Top Pot, I made my way up 5th Avenue towards the Seattle Center. By that time the speeches had been going for about an hour, but there were still plenty of late arrivals.

    Then I finally arrived at the west lawn of the Seattle Center, where the speeches were being held. Back in April, I went to an earlier protest at the same site. There had been a lot of people there: tens of thousands.

    This put all of that to shame.

    I literally couldn’t fit through the crowds of people to see my representative, Pramila Jayapal, speak. I have been in mosh pits with less density. It was glorious.

    But we had only barely begun. It was time for the march down 5th Avenue towards downtown. The atmosphere was excellent. It was like a parade, which is exactly what it should have been. The best way to fight anger and hatred is with love and joy, and there was so much of both in that march.

    Even my axolotl brethren came out of the canals to join in the fun!

    We passed under the monorail tracks, waving and cheering every time a train went by. I sang verses from the Monorail song from the Simpsons episode “Marge vs. the Monorail”, much to the amusement of nearby fellow nineties kids.

    As we approached the convention center, I broke away from the crowd because I had plans to hang out with a friend at the Oddities and Curiosities Expo. When I arrived at the convention center, it was easy enough to follow the steady stream of alternative kids to the show floor, where plenty of strange and wondersome artifacts were on display for our purchasing enjoyment, from the bones of beasts…

    …to snakes in jars and butterflies in boxes…

    …to beautiful art and apparel in any color you want, provided it’s black…

    …to taxidermized beasts of many varieties.

    I ended up buying a shirt with the Sigil of Baphomet and the legend “KEEP ABORTION LEGAL”. My friend wasn’t quite so lucky. She ended up spending nearly $200 on fox skulls and various other bones. Still, I can’t think of a better way to spend a Seattle Saturday, from coffee and donuts in the morning to bottled snakes in the afternoon, together with friends old and new.

    ~ Ian (listening to Psychotic Banana by Hand of Juno)

  • portraits of a seattle autumn

    Growing up in California, I was always told that my home state didn’t have seasons. I knew that wasn’t true. California, especially the Central Coast where I spent my childhood, has seasons that can largely be determined by the color of the hills. Roughly, the three seasons are when the hills are green, when they’re yellow-brown, and when they’re orange and smoking.

    Still, here in a more northerly city, the changes in seasons are more dramatic, with flowers in spring, red leaves in fall, and even a scattering of snow in winter, on occasion. And autumn in Seattle is a special time. People claim that summer is the most beautiful season in my city. I admit that the clear blue skies, warm temperatures, and endless evenings have their charm. They certainly trick tourists who visit in July, all of whom are confused that they don’t need an umbrella or a rain jacket.

    (Side note: carrying an umbrella, especially for only slight rains, is one of the most telling signs that you’re a tourist in Seattle. The only more obvious indicator that you’re not from here is calling it “Pike’s Place Market”.)

    But in my opinion, Seattle is at its most beautiful in the rain. With the sharp edges of the world blurry and smeared by mist and rainfall, the streetlights reflected in puddles, the subdued colors… it may not be the sort of weather that gets put on the postcards, but it’s ours. And when the clouds crack and kindle the red and gold and green trees into bright fire… it’s enough to make you think this place is magical.

    Autumn is the perfect time for spookums and spectres. It’s a time for leather jackets and big boots. It’s a season for sitting inside a cafe with a nice beverage and a book, staring out the window and thinking about death. Since all of these things are my favorite, it stands to reason that fall is as well.

    Plus, this fall feels especially charged with meaning in Seattle. There’s a mayoral election, and to the shock and delight of many in the city, the Mariners are one game away from the World Series. They say autumn is the dying time of year, but somehow everything feels more alive than ever.

    ~ Ian (listening to Holocene by The Ocean)

  • do you ever just think about HOLES?

    Due to a combination of apathy and shame, I haven’t been to the dentist in years, and as such, my teeth are extremely fucked. That’s always my problem. I go for so long without visiting the dentist that I build up this extreme paranoia about going in for a routine cleaning, perhaps because I think the dentist will judge my moral fiber and overall value as a person based on my teeth’s decrepitude (and naturally, the opinion of a medical professional who I see every six months or so should naturally be valued more than those of my family, friends, or coworkers). At the point where carelessness tips over into embarrassment, it’s impossible to stop, until my teeth are riddled with holes like worms in the timber of an old-fashioned sailing vessel and beginning to fall out of my head.

    Intelligent design is a dumb concept for a lot of reasons, but a lot of it comes down to the fact that whatever creator god you believe in is a terrible engineer, and any reasonably clever eleven-year-old could build a better solution for the given problem. I wonder what proponents of intelligent design must think their creator’s thought process must have been when making teeth. I imagine it must have gone something like this:

    INT: GOD’S WORKSHOP UPON THE SIXTH DAY OF CREATION

    ALL KNOWING, POWERFUL, BENEVOLENT DEMIURGE: I have developed “teeth”, which the beings that I have created in My image shall use to crush and render the organic matter that they require to sustain their metabolism. They shall be made of the hardest material in their bodies, and will last for tens of thousands of years, provided that they are not wet and covered in food residue, which is exactly the environment in which they shall primarily be utilized. If damaged, they cannot be healed or replaced, and injuries to them can result in intense pain, dismemberment, or death.

    ALL KNOWING, POWERFUL, BENEVOLENT DEMIURGE: …

    ALL KNOWING, POWERFUL, BENEVOLENT DEMIURGE: Fuck it; let’s ship it.

    It’s especially frustrating because there are so many other animals that have far better dentition than us idiot humans. For example, if we were really intended to be the culmination of the Creator’s design for the cosmos, maybe they could have chosen one of the following other options that they have provided for other organisms:

    1. Have teeth that are constantly being lost and replaced over the course of our lives, like our friend the shark do
    2. Have very long teeth that are continuously extruded from our gums and worn down as we chew our food, like our friend the horse do
    3. Have enamel reinforced by LITERAL IRON, like our friend the beaver do

    In addition, if we chose that latter option, we would have dental appendages in a vibrant shade of orange, which in addition to being evolutionarily practical, would be stylish in a vintage, midcentury sort of way.

    I have many other bug reports to give to the creator of the universe, if I turn out to be wrong and I will not be consigned to endless oblivion if I happen to breathe wrong for, like, two minutes. Currently the teeth stuff is highest priority, but I’m sure that might change the next time I play soccer and line up to block a free kick. Unless there’s an absolute cosmic necessity that my testicles cannot produce sperm unless they are several degrees COOLER than my core temperature, thus requiring me to carry them around in a sack outside my body for my whole life. But I shouldn’t question. It’s probably all part of God’s plan.

  • Books I’m Enjoying, October 2025

    People like me keep on writing books, and the publishing industry still views fiction as a profitable enterprise (for now), so there’s an inexhaustible supply of reading material for us all. The amount of new stories means that I can literally never run out of books in my lifetime. Still, I’m the sort of person who rereads books. If there’s a story I enjoy, I love experiencing it again. Sometimes this exercise is nostalgic, like the comfort of coming home. Or, like Bilbo coming back to the Shire in The Hobbit, I come back to an old favorite to learn that I’m the one who has changed. 

    Currently, I’m rereading the entirety of the Elric series by Michael Moorcock, in the gorgeous Saga Press hardcover omnibuses that got put out a few years back. It’s perhaps impossible to exaggerate how important the Elric books were to me as an impressionable teenager. The saga of a sorcerous emperor, slayer of his kin and marked as an outcast by the fact of his albinism, utterly dependent on his demonic sword and controlled by a doomed destiny… let’s just say that the character was like crack for an angsty young man with Very Big Feelings™. I wasn’t alone. The Elric stories, and Moorcock’s work more generally, were so influential to sixty years of writers that it’s sometimes hard to tell in hindsight just how influential they were. I feel like they’re like the Amber books by Roger Zelazny in that regard. There are plenty of similarities between the Elric and Amber stories as well: the multiversal travel and the somewhat ironic tone is part of the appeal of both. 

    Someday I might want to do a series of blog posts about rereading the Elric books, like the reread blogs that Jo Walton had collected in Why This Book Is So Great. I’ve got a lot of plans for this website in general, though, so it might take a little while before I get to those. 

    At the same time, since I can never read just one book at once, I’ve been reading a lot of Haruki Murakami as well. I started by plowing through the entirety of 1Q84 over the course of a visit my best friend in Boston (another reread book that I hadn’t dipped into in over a decade), then picking up Novelist as a Vocation at the Kinokuniya in the International District, along with other works like Killing Commendatore, After Dark, and the short stories in First Person Singular. I really enjoyed the essays in Novelist as a Vocation, by the way. 

    I especially liked the story about how Murakami decided to become a writer. He was at a baseball game at Meiji Jingu Stadium in Tokyo, at the Yakult Swallows’ season opener. The leadoff batter in the bottom of the first hit a double into left field, and as it dropped, Murakami suddenly thought, I think I can write a novel. That night, he stopped at a bookstore in Shinjuku on the way home and bought a pad of notebook paper and a ¥2000 fountain pen, and over the course of the rest of the baseball season, he sat at his kitchen table and wrote Hear the Wind Sing. 

    That’s the secret. It really isn’t complicated to write a novel. You don’t need an MFA or divine inspiration or anything like that. You need an idea, the persistence to work consistently, and something to write on. It’s that simple, and that hard, at the same time.

    Going back to the fantasy genre, I recently read R.R. Virdi’s The First Binding and really enjoyed it. I would basically pitch it as a South Asian Name of the Wind. And when I say it’s like Name of the Wind, I mean it’s really like Name of the Wind. It has a frame story, a talented, determined underdog hero, and more than that, many of the plot details follow Rothfuss’s work to the degree that it can’t be up to coincidence. 

    Still, even with all these parallels, I had a lot of fun with The First Binding. Talking of further blog posts, I want to write something about how originality in fiction is a vastly overrated virtue. The ability to come up with original ideas is far less valuable than being able to tell a story convincingly and compellingly. Besides, Shakespeare only came up with one original plot in his life, and people don’t talk shit about Shakespeare being unoriginal, do they? 

    Anyway, that’s a sampling of what books have been in my backpack in the last few weeks. Anyone else enjoying some stories? Anything you’d recommend? 

    ~ Ian (listening to Cartoon Darkness by Amyl and the Sniffers)

  • i take a whisky drink, i take a lager drink

    I’m trying to get back into the swing of blogging, now that I have a website again. It’s been something like ten years since I’ve done anything approaching a blog, and those ten years have been filled with a lot of things: moving to Seattle, starting and ending a podcast, getting a house with a friend (which subsequently led to the end of that friendship, but that’s a story for another time), teaching English in Madrid, writing and sending out thousands and thousands of pages of fiction, not to mention world events like the pandemic, war in Ukraine, genocide in Gaza, and the creeping spread of fascism in the United States… A lot of history can happen in ten years. Besides, even in the last few days, a lot has gone on with me personally. I started a new job, and literally one day later, I broke a tooth and ended up needing several emergency dentist visits. Needless to say, things have been stressful lately.

    When I was in college, from about 2012 to 2015, I had a blog. I was a kid then, and yet I thought that what I had to say to the world was so meaningful and profound. When you’re a teenager, there’s a weird combination of arrogance and doubt intertwined in your personality. Your thought process goes something like “Yes, the world sucks and everything is scary, but I’m awesome so I’ll be fine.” The thing is, the arrogance runs out faster than the doubt. For me, that arrogance was depleted by about 2014, when I had a moderate nervous breakdown that delayed my graduating and led to a period of time when I was sort of a hermit, living at my parents’ house and sleeping all day so I didn’t have to interact with people any more than was absolutely necessary. If it weren’t for the fact that I love going to coffee shops for caffeine and snacks, I might not have left the house at all. 

    I got out of that state after a few years of angst, medication, and meeting with a shitty therapist. That doubt was still there, however. I didn’t blog for a lot of reasons, mostly because I felt like I’d be some kind of imposter if I did. Maybe when I’m published, I thought, people will take me seriously. I guess the reason I waited was because I didn’t take myself seriously. I craved external validation, and only when I got that would I give myself permission to actually make a website. 

    Really, I had a classic case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome. The less you know about a topic, the more you overestimate your own skills. When I was in college, I thought I was shit hot, that I was only a few months, or even weeks, before I broke through the publication ranks and became the award-winning, bestselling author that I knew was my destiny. A decade and hundreds of rejections dissuaded me from that notion. Instead of being a transcendent literary genius, I was just another kid with big dreams, writing checks with his mouth that his ass couldn’t cash. 

    Maybe that’s a sign of how much I’ve progressed in my writing skills. The fact that I have so much doubt about whether I’m any good or not – whether there even is such a thing as good writing – means that I’ve actually hugely improved over the past decade and a bit. I have to tell myself this: that hubris is the worst thing for any creator. Once you think you’re untouchable, that’s the moment you’re ripe for a fall. 

    Still, beneath all that doubt, there’s a sliver of arrogance left in me. Maybe the ratio of doubt to arrogance is about 90/10. Maybe it’s even 95/5. Still, as long as there’s that remnant of arrogance left – combined with its cousin, sheer bloody-minded determination – I’ll keep going. As famed anarcho-punks Chumbawamba said, “I get knocked down, but I get up again.” Maybe a little arrogance isn’t entirely a bad thing. 

  • the meteor story

    Last summer, I went on a trip with my parents to Vancouver Island. It was an epic ten-day road trip. My mom would fly to Seattle, where she’d stay in my apartment for a couple days, then my dad would pick us up in his F-150. We’d take the ferry from Port Angeles, then, with a group of other overlanders, we would drive across the island, camping by lakes and rivers, enjoying the serenity of nature and the challenge of navigating difficult back roads. 

    The day after my mom arrived in Seattle, she got a text from her brother that her mother, who everyone in the family calls Muz, wasn’t eating. The nursing home where she lives would keep an eye on her, but we should be prepared, just in case her condition got worse. 

    Concerned but undaunted, my parents and I continued with our plans. We drove to Port Angeles, camped for the night in a provincial park, and set off on our road quest. On our first day, we were driving along the northern shore of Lake Cowichan, looking for a place to camp, when my mom got a phone call from my uncle. Muz had entered a transitory state – the sort where they didn’t expect her to ever come out. If my mother wanted to say goodbye, she had to do it now. 

    The next day, we drove my mom all the way back to Victoria. She got on the Clipper to Seattle, where she’d spend the night in a hotel and fly to California the next day. My dad and I, still wanting to complete our trip, headed back up-Island to catch up with our group. 

    Muz died several days later. 

    * * *

    I’m a night person. I always have been. The early-to-bed mentality of the other campers didn’t suit me, so I would often stay awake late at night, sitting by the campfire, drinking a beer and staring at the stars, alone with my thoughts. The night Muz died, I sat by the shore of a lake, gazing at the night sky, feeling a lot of very big feelings. As I turned my head upwards, a meteor so bright it cast shadows streaked across the heavens, seemingly from horizon to horizon. I don’t know what possessed me in that moment to make a wish. But I figured it wouldn’t do any harm. 

    I wished that I had some sign, no matter how insignificant or small, that my writing career was moving forward. I’ve been writing since middle school and querying my novels for nine years, getting close several times but never quite reaching that next step. After the fire died to embers and I finished my beer, I went back to my tent and fell asleep. 

    The very next morning, I got an email from Lezli Robyn telling me that my short story, “Tales from the Sub-Ocean: or, Video Game as Metaphor for Mental Illness”, had been nominated for the Mike Resnick Memorial Award. 

    I didn’t expect that result. I had submitted the story to the contest back in January, fully expecting to get rejected, as all my stories had already been. I am not a superstitious person. I believe in a quantum universe of random chance and coincidence. Yet if there are such things as shooting star wishes, I had no idea that the ROI was so fast. 

    Now I had decisions to make. I had to get a flight to Atlanta, where the Resnick Award would be presented along with the Dragon Awards at DragonCon, along with a hotel room, a convention pass… I don’t want to say it was overwhelming, but it was definitely a surprise. 

    “Don’t worry about it,” my dad said. “I know that you can’t afford it, but we’ll get you there. It’s for your writing career. It’s important.” I’m so grateful to him for this gift – this, and so many others. 

    Five weeks later, I was on a morning flight from Seattle to Atlanta, preparing myself for DragonCon. 

    * * *

    If there’s a polar opposite of a nighttime lakeside in rural Canada, it’s probably DragonCon. The lines, the noise, the colors blaring from the vendor booths, the amazing costumes… There were times my autistic brain couldn’t handle it and I had to calm down the main way I know how: hiding in a corner by the elevators and blasting progressive death metal on my headphones. 

    Yet despite the overstimulating chaos, it was amazing to meet people in the actual publishing industry, who said that my writing was good and that I had a bright future ahead of me. Even more amazing was meeting my fellow nominees: C.E. Singer, Anaïs Godard, Tara McKee, and Jason Boyd. We shared stories, and theirs were all so amazing that I was sure that I would place something like fifth or sixth in the judges’ estimation. I didn’t care. I’d been rejected so many times that the cliche statement “it’s an honor just to be nominated” was entirely accurate. 

    Satisfaction is reality divided by expectations, and since my expectations were low, when I heard my name being called as first runner-up, you can guess I was extremely satisfied. I assume there’s video out there of the 2025 Dragon Awards showing me running up to the stage, giving a giant hug to Tara, the second runner-up, then hugging the winner, Anaïs, as she came up the stairs. We gave huge goony grins as we got our picture taken. I’m not sure what the biggest moment of my life was. Hopefully there are a lot bigger moments in my future. I’m just so glad it happened, and that I got to share it with such awesome people and writers. 

    That night, I took the MARTA back to my hotel, the dopamine rush of the last few hours had faded into a blissful serotonin haze. A thought came to me in that moment. I think I can do this, I thought. I think I can actually be a writer. 

    The idea of a writing career had always been somewhat hypothetical: a cool dream, but not one that had any tangible reality. Yet as the train sped through the dark, for the first time, I felt genuinely confident. I had been struggling for so long on a journey through territory that never changed no matter how far I struggled, like a thick forest that opposed me at every step. Now I was stepping out of the forest, under a vast, open sky, able to finally see the stars.