Writing

It’s alive! “The Insects of Love,” a story about sisterhood, stars, and the entomology of space-time, is available now from Tor.com. (The gorgeous cover art is the work of Tran Nguyen, who won the Spectrum for it! Clearly I’m a biased vote, but I’m so excited for her well-deserved Gold.) Before Fairuz got the tattoo, I’d never even heard of the beetles. I just knew that the tattoo she wanted was enormous, and that it would take all night, and even as I agreed to come with her I said, “This is a bad idea.” “Good,” she said, and hit the gas. I expected some shithole off the main drag, the kind of place Fairuz would go to make a point. But it was clean as a dentist’s office, and they gave us paper caps and told us to watch what we touched. Inside was even cleaner, and the man waiting for us was in a work suit that zipped up to his neck. “Lie down,” he said, turning on the projector. As Fairuz pulled… Read more »

So, I have a story in the out-now anthology Willful Impropriety (Wilful Impropriety for those who live outside the US and/or hate excessive “L”s). “The Dancing Master” is about Leah, the dancing master her parents hire for her, the cousin the family invites for her, the paid companion who Leah idolizes, and what happens after. (Spoilers: pining, sadness, kindness, rebellion, and the Mazurka.) But it’s also a story about the constraints of Victorian etiquette, because it is out of control. It’s almost hilarious reading through etiquette manuals, in all their specificity and emphasis, right up until you realize that this was, in fact, internalized code designed to create and perfect a rigid class system, entangle women in a microcosm of concerns to keep them from activism in the public sphere, and demonstrably “elevate” the Victorian above the people they were colonizing and repressing, who did unforgivable and “vulgar” things like eating with their fingers or speaking vociferously. Then it’s less funny. (I wrote about them in a much darker story, The Burmese Tailor, a few… Read more »