Ian Pierce

Author: Ian

  • light a roman candle and hold it in your hand

    It’s July 4 here in America. Well, technically it’s July 4 everywhere, except on the other side of the International Date Line, where I suppose it’s tomorrow. This is America’s Independence Day, and more than that, it’s the 250th anniversary of America’s independence. This is a big deal! As far as I can count, there are eight countries (Czechia, Slovakia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Timor-Leste, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, and South Sudan) that are younger than I am, so lasting this long is something to be celebrated. 

    And yet, due to the Way Things Do Be™, I’m left with more complicated feelings about this anniversary than celebratory ones. A lot of those have to do with the rotting pumpkin man currently occupying the White House. But more than that, it’s about the hijacking of patriotism and even the definition of what it is to be American by billionaires, religious extremists, and bigots of all kinds. As usual, I’ll try to get my thoughts in order by writing them, and I’ll end by saying why I think it’s important to celebrate Fourth of July despite these assholes. 

    When we define a “country”, we’re really talking about three separate things: the people, the current government, and the land itself. Those can become difficult to tear apart for some people, especially since the government supposedly flows from the wishes of the people, but there is a difference between, say, an Iranian person and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran is a land rich in culture and tradition, a culture that rivaled Rome at its height, which brought us Persepolis and the Behistun inscription, algebra and the 1001 Nights. I have a great respect for that culture and the people who came from it. I do not have respect for the Islamic Republic, which is a theocratic fascist regime, nor do I have respect for the Shah’s rule that preceded it. I hope that someday a government comes to Iran that reflects that country’s heritage, the wisdom and gifts that it has given the world. 

    Similarly, I can love the people of Israel while categorically rejecting the Zionist project, fight for Palestinians’ right to self-determination without supporting Hamas’ terrorist attacks. One of the most important lessons about the internet is that, most often, the assholes aren’t the majority, even though it seems that way. It’s just that they’re the ones who can scream the loudest – and often, those loud screamers end up in positions of power. 

    Which brings me to my country. In terms of land, America is unparalleled anywhere in the world. What other country has tropical rainforests and arctic glaciers, alligator-filled swamps and mountains that practically scrape the sky? And what other country has cities like New York or Chicago or Seattle, places where people from all around the world can mix, creating new foods, new art forms, entire ways of thinking? We’re the country that created New York pizza and the Mission burrito, hip-hop and rock and jazz, the animated cartoon and the video game. 

    We can do this because “American” isn’t an ethnic identity like “Norwegian” and “Japanese”, because we don’t have thousands of years of history and tradition weighing us down. Because of this, anyone can be an American, and we can all look to the future. 

    That’s what I believe. But there are millions of people – not the majority, but a significant amount of very loud assholes – who reject that idea. They’ve created a restrictive version of America that doesn’t include the masses, that only includes them and the people who look and act and believe like them. They’re trying to force this definition on the whole country, forcing us to get in line with their view or be destroyed. And they just so happen to have elected the loudest, stupidest asshole in the whole world to be their figurehead. 

    These people have hijacked the symbols of patriotism like the flag and the national anthem so that now, in order for people to show that they do not stand with the loud assholes, they are forced to reject those symbols. And by rejecting those symbols, the assholes claim that we hate America. The ironic fact is that these assholes, who paint themselves to be so patriotic, actually do hate America. Or rather, they hate Americans: millions of us, brown and gay and trans and disabled, anyone who does not conform to their narrow, exclusionary vision of what it is to be American. 

    Well, guess what, fuckers. We don’t have to conform to your vision to be American. We reject your small-minded vision of what this country should be. Because America has never been a white Christian English-speaking nation. (Just look up the Treaty of Tripoli for proof of that fact.) And even if it were, we have the right to choose our own path. We have the right to reject the atrocities committed by the past and create a new future where your toxic beliefs remain in the sewer where they belong. 

    I’m not advocating blind patriotism. America has done and continues to do horrendous things, and many of those crimes are still unanswered for. But loving a friend or a family member doesn’t mean loving them only when they do the right thing. It means accepting their flaws while also holding them accountable. One of the most patriotic things we as Americans can do is demand that our government should be better. If you see a friend or a family member hurting themselves, either unwittingly or knowingly, you help them. And America is hurting itself. Stepping in to stop that – to make it and ourselves better – is the most patriotic thing you can do. 

    People don’t protest because they hate America. They protest because that is one of the most profound expressions of love anyone can give: to recognize something is wrong and stepping in to fix it. That’s what true patriotism is about, not blind obeisance to a pedophile rapist dementia-riddled nepo baby snowflake who’s turned the executive branch into his own personal racketeering operation. 

    The assholes have claimed the symbols of patriotism because they see themselves as the only true Americans. The most powerful rebuke of that attitude is not to reject or denigrate those symbols but to appropriate them for ourselves. They do not get to say that only they get to wave the American flag or celebrate the Fourth of July. They do not get to say that only they are the real Americans. They do not get that right just because they say so. They claimed it for themselves, and we can take it back. 

    So, for America’s 250th anniversary, this disabled, queer, progressive, autistic, asexual, democratic socialist, atheist, long-haired, Satanic t-shirt-wearing American citizen is going to be doing exactly that. 

    And eating hot dogs. 

    Because hot dogs. 

    ~ Ian (listening to When the Kite String Pops by Acid Bath)

  • i am a writer and i am digging a hole

    I’ve been down in the editing mines recently, revising a fairly large portion of an unfinished novel before I resume drafting. I would say that editing is one of my favorite parts of the writing process, but since I enjoy every part of the writing process (it’s the publishing that I hate), I would say it’s about equal with all the others. I get the same enjoyment from editing that a lot of Type A people get from tidying up, which is ironic, because I am absolutely terrible at keeping my apartment clean.

    When I’m editing, my goal is generally to cut about 5-10% of the words in the total project, usually averaging to around 7.5%. Interestingly, I almost never have to cut actual story content. Most of the revisions are finding more concise ways of writing sentences and paragraphs: if I have a ten-word sentence, finding ways to say it in eight, and so on. This ends up making the story more effective, as I’m able to get rid of extraneous fluff while keeping the good stuff.

    It’s sort of like pasta sauce. You can make a really good pasta sauce out of a can of tomatoes, garlic, oil, and some spices that tastes better and is cheaper than the jar pasta. But just pouring a tomato can and the rest of the ingredients over cooked pasta doth not a sauce make. You have to simmer it, steaming off the water and condensing the liquid until it is thick and saucy and delicious.

    Revising is just as important as writing. Or rather, it is writing, because coming up with a first draft is only the start of the process. The first draft is the raw material. It’s your job as the writert to sculpt it.

    These are a lot of mixed metaphors, I guess? Whatever. In any case, getting good at editing and revising is one of the most critical skills I can give to a young writer. And don’t give me that “spellcheck is really advanced these days”. If you don’t know how to spell words, revising is the least of your problems.

  • this is kind of like an instagram i guess

    Here’s a dump of some pictures I’ve taken in the last few weeks. Hope you all enjoy!

    Just a few snapshots of our depressing life in the gray, miserable Northwest…

    ~ Ian (listening to Payan by Samavayo)

  • untitled update, june 11, 2026

    I had a visit to the tooth doctor again last week. It ended up with some bad news: it seems like three of the teeth on the upper left side of the mouth are so fucked up that removal is the only option, as soon as possible, along with implants, bone grafts, the whole nine yards. If you’ll recall from last year, I had some additional tooth-related problems that led to a root canal, which was the most painful experience I’ve ever had, since for some reason the anesthetic they gave me didn’t fully work, so I could feel most of the pinching and pulling at my nerve. I hope they give me the gas this time, since three teeth are coming out. Let this be a cautionary tale to all ye Gen Z wastrels who will not go to the dentist! I didn’t go for years, and at this rate, I’m going to eventually look like one of those cartoon characters that gets hit over the head with a piano and stumbles out of the wreckage with piano keys protruding from his toothless gums.

    And yet, even if things are going poorly mouth-wise for me, I can’t help having a bit of confidence, a bit of spring in my step. The news that one of my stories will be published has reinvigorated me, where in the past few months I have definitely been de-invigorated. It’s given me a boost to my spirits that makes me feel like the big weird fish guy in that lake in Resident Evil 8.

    This piscine ebullience also stems from the fact that, after two years of radio silence on the part of agents, a literary agent has requested to see a full manuscript of one of my books! It’s no guarantee that I’m going to get an agent – in fact, considering my luck, I’d still say the odds are stacked against me. But it’s a new start.

    A lot of the time, the process of trying to get published has felt like bashing my forehead repeatedly against a brick wall until the wall crumbles. Usually, that strategy is a failing one. It does much more injury to yourself than to the wall. Over the last few months, however, ever since being nominated for the Resnick Award and going to Dragon Con, I’ve started to see cracks form in that wall. Hopefully it comes down before my skull is as broken and shattered as my teeth!

    ~ Ian

  • Dethklok, Moore Theatre, May 25, 2026

    This is coming more than a week after the fact, but I still figured I might share some photos from the Dethklok concert I went to at the Moore Theatre! It was a great time. The Moore is a legendary historic venue where some of the most famous bands in history played before they made it big (I’m thinking specifically of a certain trio of Melvins fanboys from Aberdeen, Washington, with a famous ditty about smelling like deodorant), and I’d never been to a show there before, surprisingly! The opening bands, Witch Ripper and Thrown Into Exile, absolutely shredded. It was also cool to see Witch Ripper again. They’re a local band, and I caught them opening for Year of the Cobra at Tractor Tavern in Ballard a few years back. It’s awesome to see local artists getting a big spotlight by playing with a huge band like Dethklok!

    The only drawback of the show was that I believe I caught a cold there that I haven’t been able to shake for over a week. I’ve been treated to a sore throat, painful swallowing, blocked ears, and new and exciting flavors of phlegm. Ah well. So it goes.

    ~ Iann 0)))

  • Books I’m Enjoying, May 2026

    May is nearly over, but that’s no excuse not to do a Books I’m Enjoying post! It’s hard to believe that it’s almost summer and that 2026 is nearly half over. At the same time, with all the ongoing goings-on, it feels like it’s been 2026 for almost a decade. At least, I felt like I’ve aged a decade in that time. 

    That being said, books continue to come out and remain great, so let’s get into some of them! 

    Destroy All Humans, They Can’t Be Regenerated by Katsura Ise and Takuma Yokota

    When I was in elementary school, I got really into Magic: The Gathering, as many people do. I credit MtG for introducing me to algebra, at least when I realized that the X in mana costs didn’t mean ten. And while I don’t play Magic frequently these days (the onslaught of Universes Beyond slop has really turned me off the game), every few years my love of the game returns, like some childhood virus that lingers in my system, occasionally flaring into a disgusting Magic rash. Does this mean that Magic is like shingles? I don’t know. This metaphor makes sense in my head. 

    Anyway, this manga brings back all the nostalgia for that time for me, at least the good aspects of elementary school. Set in 1998, the main characters, Emi and Hajime, are middle schoolers obsessed with Magic who form a friendship despite being academic and social rivals. The art is cute and winsome, and the scenes between the MCs toe the line between funny and heartfelt, often on the same page. I love the rivals-to-friends-to-lovers story arc that Emi and Hajime are going down, and it’s great to see a manga with genuine appreciation for the game and the connections that it makes. I’d be curious, however, if the scenes with card games make any sense to non-Magic players. I understand what’s going on in them because I understand the rules and strategies, but would a normie? 

    Daemons of the Shadow Realm by Hiromu Arakawa

    Hiromu Arakawa is a manga legend. She created Fullmetal Alchemist, which so many otaku consider to be one of the greatest manga and anime of all time, and if she just retired after FMA to bask on her laurels, I would understand. But in recent years, she’s created a new series about two siblings, Yuru and Asa, raised in a hidden mountain village that comes under attack from the modern world, and who command paired daemons. Daemons of the Shadow Realm has all the shonen action and compelling magic that characterizes FMA, set in an alternate modern-day Japan. Fans of the Elric brothers will not be disappointed! (I think? It feels weird to talk about books as if I’m writing a review column for Kirkus, but maybe that’s what this is? Ah well. Es lo que hay.) 

    Beyond the Clouds: The Girl Who Fell From The Sky by Nicke

    I swear I’ve been reading more than just manga lately! This series, however, is something special. It’s about a ten-year-old winged girl named Mia who falls from the sky, then awakens in an industrial city called Yellow Town with no memory and no ability to get back to the sky. Fortunately, an engineer boy named Theo constructs a mechanical wing for her. But when she starts manifesting bizarre magic powers, they leave Yellow Town on a quest to learn how to control Mia’s magic. Nicke’s art is lush and appealing, her steampunk-inspired setting feels so real you could jump into it, and the adopted sibling relationship between main characters Theo and Mia gives all of the feels. If you like early Ghibli films like Laputa and Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind, this should hit you just right. I assume. 

    (By the way, interesting fact, in Spanish, Laputa was renamed to Lapita, because la puta means something obscene. Being bilingual is fun!)

    Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake

    See? I can read books without pictures in them – although Mervyn Peake was, in addition to being a transformative writer, an illustrator of great talent. His black-and-white line drawings accompany the text, and they are just as haunting and unsettling as the words, putting Peake in a category with other dark fantasy authors/illustrators like Clive Barker and Brom. 

    The Gormenghast books are difficult to describe. They lie at the boundary between fantasy, gothic horror, and surrealism. Ostensibly, they’re about Titus Groan, seventy-seventh Earl of the castle of Gormenghast, but at the same time the series is about Gormenghast, with the motley cast of characters (wicked Steerpike, doomed Fuschia, darkly comic Doctor Prunesquallor and his spinster sister Irma, among many others) acting almost as personas within the psyche of the castle itself. This isn’t an original observation – any gothic tale from Castle of Otranto onwards is as much about setting as it is character – but it’s reinforced by the madness that the oppressive setting places on Titus and his household. The Gormenghast books were a huge influence on my literary hero Michael Moorcock, who I would like to be when I grow up, and I can definitely see a connection between the grotesques of Titus Groan and the emotionally-warped weirdos that populate the Elric books. 

    Tapping the Dream Tree and Spirits in the Wires by Charles de Lint

    I’ll finish with these two contemporary fantasies by Charles de Lint, both set in his magical realist city of Newford. The first is a selection of short fiction that blends urban life with fantasy in de Lint’s inimitable way, and the second is a novel about a website called the Wildwood that has magical properties. I was especially fascinated with Spirits in the Wires because it depicts an older version of the internet that has been lost to time: an era without social media companies and online megastores dominating every aspect of our online lives, a time of webrings and animated GIFs and MUDs, an age when you could just spin up a website with a rudimentary knowledge of HTML and a server to host it on. It’s a vision of the web, in short, that’s much like the internet that I knew when I was a kid, a boundless resource that may have been irrevocably destroyed by some of the worst people in history. 

    As an aside, I bought my copy of Spirits in the Wires at the Half Price Books in Lynnwood, and somebody had marked it up in a few places with ballpoint pen. Whoever did this made various grammar corrections, as if trying to show that they were so much smarter than the author. What’s worse, they didn’t even correct the grammar in the right way. It’s perfectly acceptable to use the objective case with comparisons (like more girly than me rather than more girly than I), especially in casual speech, and anyone still sticking to those archaic syntactic rules makes me think of a purse-lipped spinster English teacher with her glasses on a chain, sneering down her nose at her students who have the temerity to split an infinitive or use they as a singular pronoun. Did the existence of more contemporary grammar than was acceptable in 1920 send this person into such paroxysms that they had to write their “corrections” in ink, then donate it to a used bookstore where it could no longer offend them? 

    At least there weren’t that many comments and this wasn’t a library book. There is a special place in hell for people who ink commentary in library books, alongside those who defile innocence and people who talk in the theater. 

  • PUBLICATION ANNOUNCEMENT: “Faerie Stories”

    Ten years ago today, I started querying for my first book. Literally: I keep track of every query I’ve ever sent, every response I’ve received, and the first queries I sent, for a post-apocalyptic novel called Wither, were mailed on May 27, 2016. It’s been a very long time since I started my journey. There have been times that I’ve gotten close to having an agent, but for that decade, my dream of seeing my work in print has been just that: a dream.

    Until today.

    I’ve been sitting on this for a few days, but I can finally announce it: my contemporary fantasy short story, “Faerie Stories”, will be published in the Winter 2026 edition of Illustrated Worlds Magazine! It’s a small publication with a fairly small readership, at least for now, but I’m hoping that this can be the start of something amazing! I’m so thankful to Jennifer Cox, the editor of Illustrated Worlds, for seeing something in this piece, and I’m so excited for what comes next! In the not-too-distant future, I’ll finally have achieved my dream of being a Publicated Authorist™.

    Now on to the next story!

    ~ Ian

  • plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines

    At Miniature World in Victoria, they have a room that’s full of incredibly elaborately detailed dollhouses that were constructed over the course of decades by couples who are no longer alive. These dollhouses represent a lifetime of love and labor. They are literally the culmination of these couples’ lives together. But when these couples pass away, their children are faced with a dilemma. Obviously they can’t throw the dollhouses away – that would dishonor their parents’ memories and all the work they put in. But who in the world has room in their house or garage for a gigantic, fantastically-crafted dollhouse? So these dollhouses go to Miniature World, where they linger, memories of the love that dead couples share, until they are entirely forgotten.

    I feel like those couples sometimes when I work on my Big Project, the story that I’ve been making for over a decade now. It started as an outline in college, then became a half-finished novel manuscript, and now it’s a narrative game in an episodic Life is Strange sort of manner. I’ve worked on it off and on for so many years that I can practically see the locations, the design of the characters, all the way down to the UI. This is my own Miniature World dollhouse, only it’s the work of one person, who so far has had to do programming, character design, and write every word of dialogue and every description.

    I did a draft of the script that was well over 150,000 words, then scrapped it to rewrite it in Ink, an open-source markup language developed by Inkle Studios, makers of Heaven’s Vault. This language is useful for my purposes because it has Unity integration, which other narrative game engines like ren’Py and VN Maker don’t allow. My dream is to someday assemble a team and make this game for real. Until then, though, I’m simply tinkering, building this mad dollhouse bit by bit.

    I guess this makes me sort of crazy, I guess. I think all creative people have to be a little crazy. And I will admit, my mental health, she has not been so good since I’ve been unemployed. I’m thinking of getting out of Seattle for a while, at least until the current economic scenario isn’t completely shittered up. I know this place is my home, but still…

    In any case, that’s just an update on what I’ve been doing. I also did a count recently and found that I’d written eight short stories this year, and it’s only May. Perhaps working with my Resnick writing group has kickstarted my imagination in that regard. Or maybe I’m getting better at writing short fiction. Either way, I view this as a positive. It’s been my dream for years to have a short fiction collection one day. Perhaps this is a step towards that goal!

  • now’s the time for all the people to get together

    I hope all my allosexual friends out there are having a good First of May so far! My asexual friends as well. It’s nice to be inclusive!

    ~ Ian

  • the men that don’t fit in

    I wanted to show my dad some of the poetry of Robert Service, a.k.a. “the Bard of the Yukon”, because his poems so often celebrate the beauty of the solitary life in the wilderness. I downloaded a copy of The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses from gutenberg.org, and after reading through the poems again, I was struck by one particular verse. It’s called “The Men That Don’t Fit In”, and I’ll reproduce it below, because the poem’s in the public domain and no one can stop me.

    “There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
    A race that can’t stay still;
    So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
    And they roam the world at will.
    They range the field and they rove the flood,
    And they climb the mountain’s crest;
    Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
    And they don’t know how to rest.

    If they just went straight they might go far;
    They are strong and brave and true;
    But they’re always tired of the things that are,
    And they want the strange and new.
    They say: “Could I find my proper groove,
    What a deep mark I would make!”
    So they chop and change, and each fresh move
    Is only a fresh mistake.

    And each forgets, as he strips and runs
    With a brilliant, fitful pace,
    It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones
    Who win in the lifelong race.
    And each forgets that his youth has fled,
    Forgets that his prime is past,
    Till he stands one day, with a hope that’s dead,
    In the glare of the truth at last.

    He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
    He has just done things by half.
    Life’s been “a jolly good joke on him,
    And now is the time to laugh.
    Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;
    He was never meant to win;
    He’s a rolling stone, and it’s bred in the bone;
    He’s a man who won’t fit in.”

    I wonder how many of the gold miners in the Klondike (and in California, and in Australia, and in every gold rush there was in history) were neurodivergent. They definitely weren’t people who had happy, stable, settled lives. In the days of the Oregon Trail, about one out of every ten pioneers died on the trip to the Northwest. The reward, when they reached the end, was to be cut off from all their family and friends back East, possibly for a lifetime, while they scrabbled in a wilderness devoid of material comforts, far from the madding crowd.

    What would make a person choose to leave all of that behind and go on a trip that they would never return from, that carried a ten percent mortality rate? I expect that the reason was that the slim prospect of something in Oregon was much better than what they had back East. Many of them, probably, didn’t have to worry about leaving friends and family behind because they had no friends and family. They didn’t leave jobs and housing and a stable life because they didn’t have those things. They left, in short, because they had nothing to lose.

    I resonate with those people, and with the men that Service wrote about. I’ve struggled to find work for my whole adult life, lost friendships because of the other person’s intolerance and rigidity. And I think that if I wrote stories that were more commercial, more in line with what the publishing world wants, I would be published by now.

    But my brain doesn’t work like that. That statement isn’t a humblebrag, by the way. So much of my life, my childhood training, my neuroses, are about pretending to be “normal”, whatever the standard definition of “normal” is, and falling short. It’s not that I don’t try. It’s that a “normal” brain is as alien to me as my brain is to the average neurotypical.

    How many people like me have there been throughout history? Sure, some of them struck it rich, but how many of them died alone in the wilderness, lost to history, just a pile of weathered broken bones? How many of them would have survived if their brains had worked in a different way?

    It makes me wonder. I don’t know the answer. All I know is that if it weren’t for the men and women who don’t fit in, neurotypicals would be lost without us.

    ~ Ian (listening to the soundtrack for Where the Water Tastes Like Wine by Ryan Ike)