Hello, and welcome back to my feast, I hope you’re ready for a multi-course meal because I have lots to talk about this time!

Disability December & Life as a Disabled Worker in the Capitalist Hellscape

It’s disability December, and I am disabled. I don’t talk about it very much, and it’s only featured minorly in my work so far, but it does impact my life in a huge, pretty much all-consuming way.

Sorry to start this newsletter off on a sort of low note, lol but I promise it’ll look up.

I cannot work full time because of chronic pain, chronic illness, and fatigue. I work part-time doing a very physically intensive job that requires me to be in good health. There’s something so horrifying about not knowing if I’ll be able to work in a day, in a week, in a month if I get sick or injured, especially as it happens frequently. My job pays me by the hour, by the work I do, so if I’m sick, injured, or unable to work for whatever reason, I lose out on money. I have to be very gentle with myself so that I don’t disrupt that delicate balance, which is frustrating in so many ways.

This is why I’m trying so hard to build a backlog and publish more! My pace might be a little fast for some people, and some people might wonder why I’m trying to publish so much so quickly, but I don’t have another option, unless I want to go back to school for something, which isn’t really a viable option to me right now.

So, for now, it’s either I go back to ghostwriting, or I focus on building my backlog. I’m lucky to be in a place where I can focus on building my backlog, with less bills and lower rent than I’d have on my own.

I doubt I’ll ever be able to write full time, but I’m not sure that’s something I want, anyway. I like having multiple jobs, so long as I can physically handle the work and stress load! All I hope for is that someday, my work reaches a wide enough audience that I can feel like it’s something I can lean on and rely on consistently. I’m already getting closer to that every day, and it brings me so much joy and hope.

Every sale, share, anything that anyone does to help push my books further out into the vast void that is the internet, is so helpful to me.

I want to thank you all for everything that you do to help get my books out there. Your support quite literally changes my life every day, and brings me closer to a dream of not having to work so hard physically in my other jobs, or be worried about making enough to support myself. Thank you so much!

On a somewhat less personal note, I hope that I can start writing more about disability. It’s present in EYETOOTH and the FIRST CREATION universe, but it’s not a central theme in either. There’s something about body horror as a vehicle to describe what it’s like to live life as a person with invisible disabilities, and someday, I hope I can find words for that.

Until then, thank you for buying my work that does deal with disability, even in minor ways. I hope that those of you who also deal with disability in your day to day lives can find some solace in my work, and feel seen.

Alright, now onto some book news!

EYETOOTH news

So, after some debating and figuring things out, I decided to put EYETOOTH on Amazon/KDP as just a paperback.

My decision is mostly based on how much I like itchio, the royalty split that it allows, and the price of the EYETOOTH eBook. For those of you who don’t know, any book under $2.99, Amazon only gives you a 30% royalty split, versus anything over $2.99, it’s 70%.

I don’t feel comfortable charging more than I already am for the EYETOOTH eBook since it is under 20k words. $2 seems like a fair price to me, and I always want my books to remain accessible to people. So, for now, unless there is a huge demand for the eBook on Amazon, it’ll remain as just a paperback.

If you want to snag a copy, here you go!

Sales, Deals, and General ‘where is mars this month?’

I’m super excited to be doing a couple of fun events this month!

First of all, I forgot to shout out my short story RED AS BLOOD, BLACK AS TAR that’s in DEAD COWPOKES DON’T WRANGLE. CLC Press was a huge passion project that me and H.S. Wolfe started, and I still get misty-eyed every time I think about how far we’ve come. Seeing all of your excitement and support of the anthology has been incredible, and I hope that you enjoy DCDW as much as we enjoyed putting it together. You can find more about the anthology here.

EYETOOTH will be available in the Monster Manor Book Fair itchio bundle! You can snag it, and 28 other incredible books either as a bundle or individually. Check back to this link on Dec 12th to get this incredible deal!

FIRST CREATION is going to be part of the Dark Mode: Stuff Your Kindle event! On December 27th, the Amazon eBook of FIRST CREATION will be free, along with a whole bunch of other cool books. Be sure to take a look at the incredible lineup in this event. You can check it out here!

New Book! The Apples of New Eden

I made an announcement just before Thanksgiving, but in case any of you missed it, I have a new book coming out this December, on the 20th!

Here’s some more about it:

THE APPLES OF NEW EDEN is a sci-fi taboo horror romance standalone novella, centered around two brothers. Ripley works as a mechanic on a desolate planet in a terraformed network of domes called New Eden, and Archimedes is part of the huge army and government called the Commonwealth that New Eden struggles to feed with their climate-controlled domes. Weird, wolf-like creatures with too much intelligence lurk just outside of the protected city, lending a frantic worry to everything the citizens of New Eden do.

It’s Christmas, and Archimedes should be coming home for his yearly leave. But last minute, Ripley gets news that he won’t be coming home this year due to a mix-up, which dredges up some very old, very violent feelings Ripley has about the Commonwealth and his place in it.

In a twist of fate, Archimedes arrives last minute, injured, scared, and harboring some deadly secrets. The two try to enjoy the holiday as much as they can, while also coming to terms with how New Eden is directly contributing to the oppressive horror that is the Commonwealth, and that they might be on the wrong side of history. (They also fuck. Quite a bit. In unusual and tech-supported ways.)

It has a HFN ending, and despite taking place in a very desolate and terrible place, there’s grains of hope to be found scattered throughout.

I’m comping it as THE DARKNESS OUTSIDE US x REBEL MOON, and it has a trans main character. There's also a bit about bodily autonomy, disability, and rebellion against an indifferent society that only sees the value in what you can produce. It’ll be itchio exclusive because of the incest. I hope you all will enjoy reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. Long-form sci-fi is a new genre for me, and I’m a little scared, but it’s been so fun to explore.

Below, enjoy a scene from the draft!

(Note: not finalized, liable to change. CW for a consanguineous relationship between brothers, mentions of war, torture, imprisonment, mention of a dead family member, graphic depiction of disassembling a robotic arm.)

“You look sad,” Archimedes says, still quiet.

“I am,” Ripley says. He squeezes Archimedes’ fingers, even though the sensors are down and he can’t feel it. He aches, horribly, with the days and years of coming home to an empty home all culminating into one, giant black void that sucks the happiness straight from Ripley’s veins. Is it all worth it, for these stolen moments? “I missed you so much. I’m already missing you again, isn’t that funny?”

He expects Archimedes to say what he always does; that they should focus on the time they have instead of dreading the future, that if he goes back enough times, it’ll be worth it. That eventually, they’ll crawl their way out of this on hands and knees, and lap up the riches won like lame hunting dogs retired out of necessity.

He doesn’t. He simply sits, breathes, and then visibly braces himself.

“I’m not going back,” Archimedes says, voice so low that Ripley barely catches the words.

Ripley’s head jerks up. “You’re not?”

Archimedes shakes his head. He opens his mouth, and Ripley sits, poised for what fucking possible explanation he could have that will follow up that bomb, but his arm sparks again. Archimedes goes stiff, grits his teeth. “Fuck,” he says emphatically, and Ripley quickly ducks his head again to see where the energy surge is coming from.

“Tell me later,” he says. “I need to get this fucking arm disconnected so it doesn’t fry your brain.”

“Please,” Archimedes grits out. “It feels like someone’s put a cattle prod to my ribcage.”

Ripley pulls a face, wonders how Archimedes knows what that feels like, and then carefully sets that thought aside, because visions of his brother being tortured aren’t what he wants to think about right now. He traces a long, green wire interwoven into the metal skeleton of Archimedes’ arm to its source. “Hold still,” he warns, and carefully worms his fingers into the tight space without touching any of the surrounding metal. “I can’t recover from an electric shock as easily as you can.”

Archimedes nods and, amazingly, does. The green wire is in a socket with several others, two that Ripley has already disconnected. He wants to tear the whole thing out, but if he doesn’t disconnect them in the correct order, there’s a chance that he’ll short the whole thing out, and Archimedes will be left with a thirty-pound hunk of useless metal attached to his body.

He wishes, viciously, that the prosthetics the soldiers get are the same as civilians; that he could just pop the arm out of the socket and be done with it, but of course it’s not that simple. After rebels got hold of some tech from captured prisoners and reverse engineered it for themselves a few decades back, it’s been more of a liability than anything else. These enhancements are woven in at the muscle fiber level, nerves and fascia attached to metal and wire. It would take more trouble than it’s worth to try to sever the arm from Archimedes’ body, and cause him a great deal of pain besides.

Pulling the green wire stops Archimedes from twitching, at least. He sags against the counter, lets out a deep breath. “Thanks,” he says. The sparking has stopped, too, which will make Ripley’s job of repairing the connections much less dangerous.

“Don’t mention it.” Ripley untangles two identical looking red wires, and curses. “You have a leak,” he says. “Whatever cut through your arm got to one of the wires. Just barely nicked it, but you’ve lost some fluid.”

“Shit,” Archimedes says, rubs his other hand over his face. “This is a mess.”

“I have some spare at the shop, and the tools to fix it,” Ripley says, glancing up at Archimedes. “But for now I’ll have to staunch the flow and leave it unplugged. Is that alright?”

“Fine,” Archimedes says, waving his functioning hand towards Ripley in acquiescence. “I can deal with a dead arm for one night, I suppose. At least it’s here and not out there.”

Ripley nods, and leans over once more to disconnect the leaking wire. Archimedes jerks as all the sensations that are supposed to be funneled through several interfaces get redirected to one.

He lets out a noise, not exactly pained, and Ripley grimaces again as he remembers someone else describing it as having pure lightning poured into their body. They usually put soldiers under when working on their machinery to such a detailed degree, but Ripley doesn’t have the skill or the supplies to do that.

“Sorry,” Ripley says. “I know it’s uncomfortable. I have to leave it in so you can tell if I’m fucking something up. It should only be a few minutes.”

He wipes the wire down as best as he can before tying it off and slowly runs his fingers over it to find the nick. It’s a tiny thing, barely big enough for Ripley to see even with the lights turned up as bright as they’ll go. He curses the delicacy of the wires as he wipes it free of fluid once more and begins the long, arduous process of taping it up as it keeps slipping through his fingers, leaking more fluid than any wire with a cut this size should logically be able to.

It’s a tiny thing in his fingers, and Ripley holds it reverently. This is what moves Archimedes’ arm, his fingers, what allows him to feel and interact with the world better than a flesh arm would let him. He has the strength to crush rocks and skulls between his fingers, but the delicacy to pick flowers to put on their mother’s grave and ruffle Ripley’s hair. For all he didn’t have a choice in the matter, the tech the Commonwealth provides is damn good.

Archimedes sits ramrod straight on his stool, jaw and working fist clenched painfully tight.

“Are you okay?” Ripley asks after he tapes it up and carefully places it near the port for easy re-connection later.

“Yeah,” Archimedes grits out. Every line of his body, the trembling strain in his voice, indicates that he’s clearly not.

“In pain?” Ripley begins delicately removing the pseudo-skin from the damaged metal panels by sliding a scalpel in between. It peels off, and its consistency is so similar to real skin that Ripley has to swallow down bile.

Archimedes shakes his head. “Not exactly.” His chest rises and falls quickly, such shallow breaths that Ripley is surprised he’s not hyperventilating.

“Let me know if you need a break,” Ripley says.

Archimedes shakes his head again, sharper this time. “Just get it done.” His eyes slip from Ripley’s, and don’t return. His fingers work, clenching and flattening where they rest on his lap, and Ripley reaches up to briefly brush his fingers against the back of Archimedes’ neck. He means to soothe him, but Archimedes reacts like he’s been struck.

He flinches, pulls away, and lets out a small sound, utterly raw and animalistic. Ripley hardly gets his fingers out from between metal bones in time to avoid undoing all the work he just spent the last few minutes laboring over. “Archimedes,” Ripley scolds. “Hold still. Let me help you.”

“Fuck,” Archimedes says again.

Thank you for reading <3

As always, if you made it this far, you’re God’s strongest soldier, extra today because this is a twenty-five-hundred-word newsletter. I hope you enjoy your December, and I look forward to sharing The Apples of New Eden & more work with everyone soon!