Hey all! I’ve been off work for some time due to several upheavals in my life and being houseless for the past two months. It’s been a difficult time and I’m eager to get back to work, which will also help stabilize my situation.
I’ve focused on accessibility for authors with fewer means or less experience […]
CW: discussions of homelessness, transmisogyny, anti-trans racism, transphobia, persecution of sex workers, suicide, violence, trauma
The past several months have forced me to rethink my life. A major curveball has been the introduction of a spicy new fact to that life—
I am a homeless trans woman.
This is That Thing I’ve spent most of my life afraid […]
Content Warning: mention of rape, violence, and murder, transmisogynist slurs, descriptions of transmisogynistic sentiments
I’ve thought a lot about what to say in this post. It all sits like a weight in my belly, the sensations of my body shaping around it the way water is displaced by a stone. I need to get this stone […]
One of my goals is to provide a library of free content for writers, including tools I have found useful as an author, as an editor, and as a sensitivity and artistic ethics consultant. This will include resources for writers who are trying to learn to navigate the publishing industry and career life […]
Content warning: non-graphic discussion of racism and transmisogyny
Romance Writers of America, or RWA, is a writer’s organization that throughout its existence has been a source of much good as well as much harm. It was the harm that primarily concerned Courtney Milan, a best-selling romance author and seasoned advocate of the needs of underserved populations, […]
Content warning for frank discussion of transmisogyny
Let’s talk about coding. Not every message is spelled out unambiguously. Fiction in particular tends to deeply integrate the implied, messages expressed behind the text. You may already be very familiar with a common form of this: queer coding.
Queer coding is when a character isn’t explicitly queer, but seems […]
Not long ago on social media a reader asked whether Lord of the Last Heartbeat could be considered paranormal romance.
It’s categorized as high fantasy romance (and sometimes dark fantasy, aka fantasy with aspects of horror), but for a reader to think of it as paranormal romance makes sense to me. Moon-souls overlap with shifters […]
I’d like to talk about a problem that has plagued me for years, without me knowing what to call it or how to talk about it. It’s a problem I call over-manipulation.
Most writers seem to run into it at one point or another, and surprisingly little advice is available to help deal with it.
Over-manipulation is […]
I’m thrilled to be opening my availability for new clients (and new manuscripts from existing clients) throughout 2019 and 2020, with slots available in each month.
One of my professional goals is to help marginalized authors get through the barriers they might be running up against in the publishing industry, and give a boost to newer […]
Art is hard.
At least, it’s quite an undertaking. It’s generally harder to create something than to destroy something, and that art is a particular labor of creation: creation from the disorganized substances of the artist’s life, hopes, memories, beliefs. Numerous little deities of sorrow, passion, and fury people the halls of our imaginations, and they […]
If I had to name the part of my role as an editor I find the most daunting, I’d probably say sensitivity editing. But I’d also name that among the most important.
For those not familiar with the term, sensitivity editing is editorial focused on making sure a work is written with care toward its audience. […]