writing
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This Delicious Death is a young adult horror novel by Kayla Cottingham following four girls struggling with their ghoulish urges to eat people. Each of these girls is also queer. What follows will have spoilers — read at your own risk. The central conceit of this book revolves around an event we only ever see…
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This has been on my mind for weeks now, this nonstop frustration over how much time I have to do things that feed my soul. I have a lot of hobbies, and I’ll try out a new one at the drop of a hat. I’ve got several that I’m very interested in, but simply have…
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I get the marketing appeal of compressing yourself into a single concept. It makes your self presentation easy, prompts you to lean on whatever one attribute you’ve reduced yourself to. It’s like a pocket resume: here’s me. Here’s all you need to know. As a writer, though, I recoil from that. I can certainly say…
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Today, I woke up at 1:10 PM. Left to my own devices, I consistently sleep until 11. Give me a late night, and we can push that time forward to noon. Not later, though, so seeing the afternoon glaring at me through my phone screen threw me for a loop. It took me an hour…
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Monday. Tired as I am, the world feels wide awake. The sun is warm and I can almost smell vanilla in the air. Today I Can: Breathe Deeply Alarm for 11:30 Appointment at 2:00 Wonder AloudTuesday. The sun is out today, but the brightness of morning hurts my eyes. Something stinks like gasoline. Today I…
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We don’t outgrow the things we love, not like a plant outgrows the pot its in. These things simply fall away from us when we no longer need them. Less like a too-small shirt and more like pine needles that drop off in the winter. They can always grow back. I can always pick up…
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This is an age of polished media. I’ve talked about it before in my review of Videodrome, on how the polish often paints over the grime and devalues the time put into something imperfect. I pick apart and apart and apart my crochet projects because I’ve missed a stitch, misread the pattern, and the project…
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My first computer — the first one I have clear memories of, anyway — was an off-white boxy monitor running Windows 98 on a dial-up connection. The dial-up didn’t last long, though. My whole family had to use the internet connection, and in those days my mom was still on top of her computer science…
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Paint a picture of the American West for me. Paint me sprawling yellow deserts and blue mountains reaching to the heavens, arches of red rock and dusty ghost towns beneath stone spires. Draw me the abandoned mine shafts, the long lonely highways. I want to hear the sad twang of guitar between that night sky…
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The act of naming is strange. As a nonbinary person, I’ve been named a number of times — by my parents, by my friends. This blog itself is written under a penname, but the name I use when I publish is no less real than the names I use with my friends or family. In…
from the pen of icarus blake 