Hello, and welcome back to the feast! I have some exciting news for you this month, as well as an update, places to find me, and a hard but important topic to talk about. I’ll put the hard topic last, so anyone who doesn’t want to engage with that content can easily skip it.

Where I’ve Been + New Anthology Pieces

I’ve been a little bit more offline due to taking care of a family member going through some health challenges. While these are finally resolving and they’re recovering, I’m still going to be offline for a bit longer taking care of this family member. I’d planned to get something out this month, but it just wasn’t possible with how busy my day job was, plus this extra thing.

However, I plan to be back promoting, writing, and publishing, as well as working on some other projects that you can look forward to in the near future!

My religious horror short Devil’s Dues is in Smitten Land Vol. 2, which is coming later this month. It’s about a deal with the devil, with a twist, and features second person narration, a tiny bit of body horror, a moderate serving of smut, and a whole lot of ‘fuck capitalism.’

I also have a corporate horror piece titled Ambrosia coming out in the Boy Meat anthology, curated by Magnus Thorne and H.S. Wolfe, and presented by CLC Press. It’s coming out this summer, and I’m excited for you to read one of the weirdest, bloodiest stories I’ve had the pleasure of writing yet.

There’s another anthology piece I’m working on that will be announced soon, something I’m very excited to share with y’all!

Update on Weird West Stories

I know I said I’d have this out for y’all in my last newsletter, but there’s been some minor and major changes as well as a very cool collaboration going on behind the scenes with a good friend of mine that will take this project to the next level. I don’t want to say too much about it yet, but in return for it being put off for a bit longer, there’s going to be more content than I promised in my last post, and I hope it’s worth the wait. These stories are all very close to my heart and I want to do them justice.

Keep an eye out for updates on that, as well as teasers that I’ll be posting for each story soon!

New Project Announcement: Roadside Hymns

I’m very excited to announce what was supposed to be an Easter project, a religious horror about a came back wrong trans Jesus Christ and the unsuspecting neighbor he has in the run-down motel room next to him.

Blue is running from something, with cash to burn and no clear direction, and they’re just trying to keep their head down and make it through. But pretty soon, the weird weather and strange happenings in the next door room become impossible to ignore. What is their neighbor, and are they even safe with him?

It’s an apocalypse story, a revenge story, a story about PTSD, and faith. It also has a healthy helping of body horror, which is something I’ve been yearning to explore deeper and push further. I’ve had big thoughts about Jesus and the Eucharist for a while, and I’m hoping to explore that as well in this story.

Apocalypse horror is one of my favorite horror subgenres to consume, and one of the first stories I worked on with the intention to self-publish was an apocalypse novel. I’m thrilled to be returning to this genre!

I’m hoping to have it out early next month, if everything goes to plan. It might land a bit later, but I am working hard to get it out as close to Easter as possible for the Vibes. I hope you will enjoy reading my return to religious horror as I’ve enjoyed writing it!

Here’s the cover for y’all!

Sexual Assault Awareness Month, The “Perfect Victim” Stereotype, & How it Relates to Fiction

I’ve gone back and forth on saying anything about this, but upon remembering that it’s Sexual Assault Awareness Month, I think it’s the best time to talk about it. Content warning for discussions of sexual assault, but nothing will be in detail. Please click away if you’re not in a good headspace to engage with this topic, and stay safe! Thank you for reading and I’ll see you in the next one!

For everyone else engaging with this, I’m going to get pretty vulnerable which is so scary for me, so please bear with me, and thank you so much for reading this!

I would also like to preface that this is all a collection of my personal thoughts and opinions, and you might not agree with everything!

There’s a strange dichotomy I’ve witnessed in fictional media, especially books, surrounding sexual assault. On one hand, there are a lot of books that include it, casually and sometimes callously.

I have a vivid recollection of finding the first two books of a high fantasy series at a church sale in middle school. The first book opened with the graphic and lengthy assault of the main character, and followed up with it being a thing that “made her better.” This put me off of even finishing the first book, and I got rid of them both as soon as possible. I could have checked online reviews, but this was before I used Goodreads, or even knew to look for content warnings from other readers (because they certainly weren’t in the books!!! Content warnings are so incredibly important to me and the book community in general, but that’s an entirely different topic for later.)

It happens far too often in my opinion, that we see characters, especially female characters, getting a ‘character arc’ that involves them becoming stronger or “learning” from their assault. While this has been handled with care, and while I see less books using it in this way, it is still a prevalent trope in some popular media, and often times is not handled with survivors in mind.

Horror can also include this in some of the ‘darker’ more shocking content. Often times, this isn’t written by a survivor, and often times, it is not handled with care. Rape purely for shock value is not good horror (to me). I stay far away from books that handle assault like this.

There are much smarter people who have a lot more to say about this than me (and much more eloquently than I could ever put it), but I’ll simply leave it at this: I do not ever plan to use assault this way in my books. If a book that I write includes a survivor, I will never include the assault on page, and the aftermath will never be used for shock value. I want to focus more on the healing and how it is not directly because of what happened to them, and never used as a “learning” or “leveling up” moment.

As a survivor myself, and an author who is slowly working through their various traumas, I do feel like it is an important part of healing for both me and people who can relate to my work, but I want to handle it a very specific way that I hope comes off as respectfully done. To each their own of course, I’m not going to tell anyone how to write, but this is just what you can expect from me and my work.

On the flip side of this dichotomy, there is a strange box society puts real life survivors into. The “perfect victim” who is pure and uncomplicated, and easy to define, who isn’t hypersexual and doesn’t get turned on by “things they shouldn’t” is seen as the way that survivors “should be.” The truth is, survivors are all different, and everyone heals in different ways. Healing is not linear, straight, or simple.

This is particularly a hot (and recurring) topic in dark romance and similar subgenres. The age-old debate of whether or not consent play, like dubcon and noncon and consensual-nonconsent can be helpful for survivors is still a recurring debate on various social media sites in the bookish world.

To me, it’s completely up to each survivor. It helps me personally, to interact with this kind of content in a safe space where I know what I’m getting into. Queer work with consent play especially has helped me so much, and I’ve learned a lot about myself by both reading and writing it.

However, it’s definitely not for everyone, and learning limits by engaging with this kind of work can be very helpful (or just steering clear entirely!) Some people cannot handle it in fiction, whether survivors or not, and that’s fine! I wouldn’t ever claim that anyone who is uncomfortable with it should try to force themselves to read it. Again, this is why thorough content warnings are so important, especially in subgenres like erotic horror, romance horror, and dark romance, but I digress.

Talking about sexual assault in books is something I think is important, and shouldn’t stop. It can help people cope, heal, and understand themselves. It can help people feel seen, and it can help people relate. It should always be properly tagged, so that readers who don’t want to engage with it can close the book, turn off the show, etc. It’s not for everyone, but I do think that it is important and valid, and gives everyone a lot to consider.

Roadside Hymns is the first project I’ve written recently that deals with this subject. A main character is a survivor, and their healing is important to write for me. The physical reactions their body is dealing with related to the PTSD is also important to me. The character struggling with the aftermath and not being a “perfect victim” is very, very important to me.

This won’t be the last book I write about it, I’m sure, but I will always strive to handle this subject with the complexity and respect I think it should be shown, to help myself and (maybe?) others feel seen. It won’t be a book that all of my readers pick up, and I respect you all so much for that. Stay safe and don’t push yourself to read things that might hurt you.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you so much for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject, as I know my perspective is just one and there’s lots of aspects that I’m unable to see.

I apologize for my newsletter once again getting super long (1800 words this time, good lord I sure did yap), and y’all are cool as hell for sticking with me through it!

Until next time,
— mars