My kids are in the world! My first ever publication is Patient Was the Doctor, a hefty 7,100-word short story with Analog Science Fiction and Fact, in the July/August 2025 issue. Electronic and box subscriptions are always available, and paper copies should be available soon in stores like Barnes and Noble and Kepler’s. Behold, the official magazine cover in its tentacular glory!
I’m delighted to report my story happens to include tentacles, too. I pulled together some stock photos from Pexels and composited a little poster.
The main character in this one is a clinical psychologist, inspired by my experiences as a mental health worker. While I have never personally worked with an alien (that I know of), this is about the radical transformations that we, therapists, experience through our work. It is NOT just the patient who learns and changes. I also drew from the queer and otherwise non-traditional families in my life and, of course, a love for octopuses.
A million thanks to editors Trevor Quachri, Emily Hockaday, and Kevin Wheeler, as well as my beta readers Upa, Amy, Courtland, Victoria, Jonathan, Gloria, and others that I’m rushing too much to recall (love y’all, sorry). Additional thanks are owed to those who helped me with the technicalities of publication, including my literary agent, Ernie Chiara.
Here is my second story, titled milt (2,300 words)! It was published by the British Science Fiction Association’s in the anthology Fission #5, just yesterday on Amazon UK. I eagerly await my author copies! I am honored to be sharing a table of contents with such writers as J.L. Akagi and Gareth Powell, and joining my friend, the inimitable Angela Liu, in this lovely annual publication. Here’s the cover:
Buy on Amazon UK
Or on Amazon USA
(Free on Kindle Unlimited)
And my animated poster for this charming specimen (warning: it DOES have audio).
Next week, I’ll promote milt at the British Science Fiction Association’s Annual General Meeting online! I look forward to sharing my inspirations and the source of this idea, which include simply inverting everyone’s favorite horror trope: the haunted house. What if the malevolent force animating your home was human and the victim was not. (Also, what if horny was plot.)
Editors Eugen Bacon and Gene Rowe were a delight to work with. I am so honored to make the cut, out of almost 450 submissions.
I’ll eventually throw ‘how I made these videos’ into my newsletter. Obviously everyone subscribes to author newsletters in order to get amateur video editing advice.
These two stories come on the heels of working for years on developing my own style and approach to writing short stories. I cut my teeth on NYC Midnight‘s prompt-driven flash fiction challenges, where I joined with friends and we beta read for each other. With NYCM, I learned how to stand out by writing something a little weird, veering off the (wildly subjective) beaten path. However, some very long breaks cut up these short fiction efforts, when I focused on novels to reevaluate my techniques.
Just last year, friends showed me Megan Chee’s The Giants Among Us, and A Well Fed Companion by Congyun Gu, both of which made me cry in different ways. Just like that, the short story urge was back! To these new efforts, I brought comfort in writing my own identities (intersectional) for the first time, and a fresh new fluidity with extracting essences from my job, my grief history, my observations of my niece’s early life, even my anxieties about the state of the country, and speculating about them in fiction. Writing these pieces was unlike anything I’d ever tried before. While I was familiar with tropes and genre conventions, making them my own activated parts of my brain that were both monstrously effortful and incredibly inspiring.
These publications also, incidentally, represent the second and third times I’ve ever gotten paid for my writing. Altogether, I’ve made almost $900, which is a delightful amount of sushi money.
I am delighted to report, these two short stories were the sample that got me into Clarion West 2025! That’s right. Your girl is obligated to write even more stories, despite her penchant for naps. Not sure whose big idea that was.
