Ian Pierce

Category: Uncategorized

  • 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!

  • 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)

  • down here near the poison stream our god has gone insane

    On Monday I had a sustained panic attack that lasted for nearly an hour. I was sobbing, hyperventilating, the whole enchilada, if an enchilada can be made of cortisol and tears. I stayed on the phone with my parents for that whole time while they tried to calm me down. It worked, eventually, but the whole time I wanted to die, to have my throat close up and suffocate me, just because that would end the pain.

    I’m sure you can guess why I felt that way. It’s not every day that the president of your country threatens an entire 3000-year-old civilization with extinction just so he and his shitty friends can game the stock market. But that’s where we are. That’s where the last fifty years have led us, ever since billionaires used Ronald Reagan as a shill to sell Americans on the scam that if we let them exist without paying their fair share to the society that sustains and enables them, it will benefit us in the long run.

    We are building dystopia brick by brick, one that combines the surveillance of 1984 with the medicated numbness of Brave New World, and for what? So a handful of people can become trillionaires? So that moneyed pedophiles can escape accountability for raping underage girls? So we can cram AI that no one wants or likes into every physical objects? So boomers can die in their giant air-conditioned houses, surrounded by wealth that my generation will never know, like Egyptian pharaohs in their lavish tombs?

    I’m sick of it. I’m sick of the constant emotional trauma that these brigands force into my mind. I know this blog post is a rant, and that’s fine. Sometimes you need a place to rant. But if the next fifty years are going to be as exploitative and dehumanizing as the last fifty, I don’t see why I shouldn’t get off this elevator bound for the abyss right now.

    ~ Ian (listening to New Day Symptoms by Final Gasp)

  • drops of jupiter in your haaaair

    Wednesday was a gray, tempestuous day here in Seattle, just as we like it. What better occasion would there be, therefore, to ride the new 2 Line Crosslake Connector for the Link: the final piece of the ST2 light rail expansion, and the first ever floating rail bridge in the world?

    Overall, the train is an excellent addition to our transit landscape! I saw people coming home from a Mariners game, got some books at Half Price Books in Redmond, and snagged some great pictures.

    On a final note: it was just recently announced that Sound Transit has such a budget shortfall that they are not going to complete the ST3 expansion as Seattle voters approved it. That means that there will be no trains to Ballard, West Seattle, or Tacoma. This infuriates me for so many reasons.

    The biggest, however, is this: there are so many billionaires whose companies are destroying Seattle for working and disabled Seattleites. If Bezos wanted, he could simply write a check to Sound Transit for the expected budget shortfall and do something – anything – to redress the damage he’s done. But he doesn’t care about that. He doesn’t even live in Seattle. All his focus is on disassembling historic bridges so his big boat can get out of the harbor and shutting down Venice for his fancy celebrity wedding.

    I tell you what, if Bezos’ next penis-shaped rocket explodes with him aboard, scattering his component atoms across the mesosphere, I won’t be shedding any tears.

    ~ Ian

  • no kings day, santa cruz, march 28, 2025

    As an aside to this whole post, I’m going to say it was incredibly frustrating to see that the vast majority of protestors in Santa Cruz (about 90%) were boomers. Millennials and zoomers are the largest age demographic in the US, and we were extremely few and far between. It is pathetic to see older people willing to stand up and fight for the future of our country when the people who will inherit it show such unbelievable apathy. There are a bunch of criticisms of young people (or not that young anymore, in the case of older millennials) that are completely invalid, but it’s true that millennials believe that putting out a Twitter hashtag constitutes activism, and that zoomers will do whatever the influencers that their TikTok algorithm serves them will tell them to do.

    Nonviolent protests in Minneapolis got ICE to stand down and back off. In my city, the current mayor was elected by only a couple hundred votes. If I and a few hundred people decided not to vote that day, Seattle wouldn’t have our most progressive mayor in a generation.

    Cynicism is not wisdom, and memes are not action. My generation needs to learn that, because not caring will only end with us being crushed by oligarchs and techno-feudalists, and ensure that the future looks like a boot, stamping on a human face, forever.

  • mountain stars

    I’m in California right now, but I thought I’d check in. I was up in the mountains skiing for a little while, which was weird, because the highs were in the low seventies, so it was like skiing on Slurpees for most of the time. But even so, I had fun. It was typical spring skiing: guys in shorts, girls in bikinis, guys in Spider-Man costumes… the usual shenanigans. The only problem was that the weather was like what it is at the end of April, not the middle of March. So it goes!

    I tried to take some pictures of the stars while I was up there. I think they turned out pretty good! At least, they were pretty good for a basic iPhone camera.

    It’s nice to be able to see stars. Back home, the night sky is shrouded in clouds most nights and light pollution the rest of the time, so seeing some actual spacelights is a welcome treat

    Writing continues apace. I’m almost done with a draft of a novel. Gonna ship that out to beta readers soon and start querying it by this summer. I’ve also written a few short stories that I’m going to submit after revisions. My hope is that 2026 will be the Year When It Finally Happens™. Unfortunately, I wanted that about 2025, and while the Resnick award was cool, I’m still not a Publicated Authorist, as I call it. My fear is that I’m going to think that this year will be the Year When It Finally Happens™ until there are no years left. I don’t think that’s a writer thing, though. It’s a human thing.

  • thoughts on being average

    Thought the First

    If we trace the Semitic languages as far back as we can, we can find out that the Proto-Semitic word for blindness was something like *ʕwr. This eventually got extended to mean “damage someone’s eye to make them blind”, and eventually, when it arrived in Arabic as ‘awār, meaning “damage” more generally.

    By the time *ʕwr became ‘awār, the Arabs were no longer desert nomads. This was the Islamic golden age, and ships of Arab sailors plowed the Mediterranean, trading with nations across Africa, Asia, and Europe. The Venetians and Genoese were especially close trading partners with the Arabs. They borrowed the word ‘awār as avaria, which, due to the maritime links with the Arabs, meant “damage to a ship’s cargo”.

    The word got borrowed into many different European languages, usually meaning something like “damage”. The word averría in Spanish, for example, means a mechanical failure in a car. But in English, after a detour through French as the word avarie and the addition of the suffix -age to bring it in line with words like damage, this word passed into maritime law as a method of determining the shared liability of cargo damaged or lost at sea. This financial liability would be apportioned by adding up the value of all damaged goods and dividing by the number of interested parties.

    By the 1600s, that word got used to refer more generally to taking the arithmetic mean in general, then, in the 1800s, to mean “typical” or “ordinary”, then, finally, to mean “unexceptional” or “middling in quality”. And that’s how we get the word average.

    From blindness to boring in five thousand years.

    Thought the Second

    Half of all people have two testicles. Half of all people have none.

    Half of all people have two ovaries. Half of all people have none.

    This means, mathematically speaking, the average person has one testicle and one ovary.

    Thought the Third

    Some people lose fingers or toes. Some people have their ears cut off. Some people have one or both eyes put out. Some people have their arms torn off or their limbs amputated.

    I have ten fingers, ten toes, two ears, two eyes, two arms, and two legs.

    I think, technically, that makes me above average.

  • they promise education but really they give you tests and scores

    This last few days has, unfortunately, been the cat vomit frosting upon the giant shit cake that 2026 has been so far. There has been a bit of turmoil in my personal life. Unfortunately, I got fired.

    I won’t go too far into the details, but the tl;dr is that there was a girl who was being a consistent bully. Every single day, she was consistently, deliberately cruel to other students, mainly a group of other girls, and – worse than that – an autistic first grader who had to be moved into another group because of her actions. The bullying took the form of insults, mockery, physical harassment, and, on two separate occasions, spitting on other students. Last week, I finally lost my temper at her and said some things that, perhaps, I shouldn’t have said. She told her mother, who is a teacher at the school where I worked. And because of that, I got let go.

    I accept full culpability on my part. I said things that were wrong, and I acknowledge it. But I cannot stand bullies, and especially those who enable them: which, I realize now, my after-school program was doing. Furthermore, they provided me with inadequate support to deal with the situation from either a disciplinary or emotional perspective, and then punished me for their lack of competency. I generally give people the benefit of the doubt. But by condoning this child’s harmful, antisocial behavior, I realize now that this job wasn’t worth my time.

    When I was growing up, I was conditioned by teachers and, especially, my in-classroom aide of ten years to expect bullying as my birthright. If I fought back, I was punished for acting out. If I reported other kids’ behavior, I was told off for tattling. The other kids, seeing that I was being punished for their actions, were emboldened. Eventually I bore it in silence, keeping my anger simmering on the inside like a pressure cooker with a faulty release valve, until it exploded outward.

    I don’t blame the other kids for their actions. Kids don’t have fully developed empathy, and honestly, they don’t entirely finish growing that part of their psyches until they’re in their early twenties. But I blame the authority figures around me, who should have seen that I was vulnerable, and instead of protecting me, just made me a target. Furthermore, whenever another student was nice or kind to me in any way, I was expected to treat it as an act of generosity on par with Mother Teresa. For my teachers and aide, bullying and cruelty were the default state of affairs, and even being deliberately ignored was considered a kindness.

    Ever since I left high school, I’ve arranged my life so as to avoid bullies. Now that I finally have a choice as to who I spend time with, I’ve cut off contact with any of the teachers who enabled my bullies, as well as other toxic influences in my life – arrogant bosses, narcissistic roommates, manipulative and judgmental former friends. I survived school. I’m done with it.

    I believe I’m done working in education for a while. I don’t want to be a part of a system that punishes those who stand up to bullies while, at the same time, rewarding the arrogance and cruelty of those same bullies. As the death stick merchant in Attack of the Clones said, I need to go home and rethink my life. As that nice Mr. Vonnegut said, so it goes.

    ~ Ian (currently listening to The Silver Cord by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard)

  • lights in the winter darkness

    When I first moved to Seattle, it snowed a few days every winter. Not a lot, only a few inches, but the city shut down because of it. For some reason, Seattleites are unable to handle the smallest number of flakes, and grocery stores would be stripped bare, as if an apocalypse was at hand.

    It hasn’t snowed this winter.

    I don’t know if that’s just an anomaly or if that’s going to be the pattern going forward. The climate is fucked. I don’t know if it’s irrevocably fucked, but the people in power show no interest in un-fucking it. Maybe within my lifetime, snow in Seattle will be a distant memory.

    Perhaps more distressing, I’ve heard that, due to climactic changes, it will be impossible to grow coffee at large scales within a few decades. Coffee needs a very specific biome to grow in, and that biome will very soon be gone. This has vast implications for Seattle far beyond not having snow. What are we supposed to do if we don’t have coffee? Go to a cafe and pop an Excedrin?

    Change is the constant of the universe. That doesn’t mean all change is good, unfortunately.

    ~ Ian (listening to Wasting Light by Foo Fighters)