My new short fiction collection, Gender Panic and Other Stories contains 253,948 words of transgender fiction: seven short stories, seven novelettes, one novella, and two short novels. Six of the stories (including both novels), 163,318 words, have never appeared online before. The collection has an introduction, an overview of the stories, and content warnings, and afterwords to all the individual stories.
My new short story, "Carpet-Bound,"
is available from itch.io in epub and pdf formats. But you can get more stories
for your money by buying it as part of
the Secret
Trans Writing Lair Mermay Bundle, with eight mermaid and summer-themed
stories by trans authors for $8.
I have a 4200-word short story, "A Post-Scarcity Christmas," in the new ebook bundle Santa's Secret Transfic Stash Vol. 3. The bundle has twenty-one stories totaling over 180,000 words. My story is available in epub and pdf format for $2, but buying the bundle for $8 would be a lot more fiction for your money.
I just finished the second draft of Wings, the sequel to Pioneers, and I'm hoping to get feedback from beta readers before starting the third draft in a couple of months. Wings begins by retelling the events of Pioneers from a different point of view, and then continues well beyond the point where Pioneers ended. It's set in dkfenger's Trust Machines universe, but it should stand alone whether or not you've read any other Trust Machines stories, or even Pioneers. It's 188,000 words.
I'm one of twenty-five trans authors with a story in a new bundle on itch.io. My story in the bundle, "Armored", is a secondary world fantasy about a scavenger who finds an unusual set of armor in the buried ruins of a mage's house. It will appear on BigCloset, Scribblehub, and other sites eventually, but for now you can either get it as part of the bundle, or as a stand-alone download from itch.io.
My new collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available now from Smashwords and Amazon. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
It contains forty stories and 335,000 words of fiction: twenty-six short stories, seven novelettes, two novellas, three short novels, and two reviews of imaginary books and TV shows. Thirteen of the stories (over 180,000 words) have never appeared online before, and three others appear here in a significantly expanded form. Each story has a new afterword or introduction; many of the afterwords have recommendation and links for similar stories by other authors.
Dragon Princess by S. Andrew Swann (DAW, 2014) is a comedic fantasy
novel with a transgender body-shuffle plot. Frank Blackthorne, a
thief, is on the run from the government of one country, and flees to
the neighboring country, where he’s recruited by a wizard to kill a
dragon and save the princess he’s kidnapped. He objects that he’s a
thief, not a hero, and the wizard responds by giving him an ancient
sword with enchantments designed for killing dragons.
The Dragonsword trilogy by Gael Baudino consists of Dragonsword,
Duel of Dragons, and Dragon Death.
I first looked into it because I’d
heard of its having strong TG elements, and though the covers were
unpromising, looking like fairly generic high fantasy, I was pleasantly
surprised to find it much better and more original than I expected.
I recently finished a short novel (46,800 words) set in a fictional midwestern college in the early 1970s. I've done research, but I wasn't born yet at the time the story is set, and I'd like to have at least one older beta reader read it and give me feedback before I do the final draft and publish it.
I've been slowly reading
through Sarah
Emma
Edmonds' Nurse
and Spy in the Union Army (1864). She was a Canadian immigrant
who disguised herself as a man to serve in the Union army during the
American Civil War. One passage of her book reminded me of those TG
stories where someone is transformed into a woman either in order to
evade military service, or as a punishment because they are unwilling
to serve, such as The Professor's "Draft Dodger Rag" and
many others:
Hikaro and I are getting ready for the next TG Mixed Tape anthology. The deadline for submissions to the next Tape is March 31; there is no particular theme except TG content (if only implicit).
Hikaro and I are getting ready for the next TG Mixed Tape anthology. The deadline for submissions is 12 December 2017, and the theme is Winter holidays: Christmas, Hanukah, Hogmanay, New Year's Day, etc. Stories submitted don't have to fit the theme, they just have to have TG content (if only implicit).
Stories should ideally be between 1,000 and 2,500 words, but certainly under 4,000 words. Poetry and nonfiction pieces are also welcome.
Planetary Brigade by Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis, and various artists is a superhero comic, published in two miniseries in the mid-2000s. It's about a superhero team, mostly a Justice League analogue (there are obvious analogues to Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Green Arrow, while other characters are not such obvious analogues of DC or Marvel characters). It's mostly funny, with some serious bits. (Giffen and DeMatteis are best known for their comedic run on Justice League International in the 1980s-90s.)
I'm working on a story with a legal subplot now, an expansion of my story "Free" from the latest mixtape. One of the main characters was infected with slave nanites that changed him into a woman and made her imprint on the first person she saw (his partner; they were police officers trying to arrest a slaver) as her master. The psychologists and psychiatrists at the hospital recommend she be declared incompetent and be assigned a guardian.
Wonder City Stories by Jude McLaughlin is a series of novels and short stories set in a
world with superheroes, but the stories are not primarily about active
superheroes (or supervillains). Most of the main characters are
ordinary people with minor superpowers, who work regular jobs
(construction work, barista, architect, journalist, therapist, etc.)
and don't have codenames or crimefighting identities; some are retired
superheroes, others young trainee heroes. Several characters are transgender, gender-fluid, or non-binary.
I’ve just finished the first draft of another Valentine Divergence
story, and a month ago I finished another fantasy novel. I’m probably
going to start something new soon, and I wondered if my readers might
have a strong preference among the story ideas I’m considering:
It’s been slightly over a year since I started selling ebooks via the
Amazon Kindle store and Smashwords. I thought I should share some
information about the results with other writers.
The Constantine Affliction by T. Aaron Payton (Night Shade Books,
2012) is a steampunk detective story, set in an alternate London where
a sexually transmitted disease has recently begun spreading,
killing many and changing the sex of the survivors. This is central
to the plot, but not in the way that it would be in a story that’s
solidly in the TG fiction subgenre; none of the viewpoint characters
are transformed, though a couple of major supporting characters were
transformed in the backstory, and one other is transformed in the
course of the story, though not onstage.
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories is now available
in ePub format
at Smashwords and
in Kindle format from
Amazon. The collection contains three short stories, seven
novelettes, three novellas, and a short novel -- over 219,000 words of
fiction. Five of the stories (over 75,000 words) have never appeared
before.
I don't necessarily do New Year resolutions every year, but I found myself looking over my records of my writing in 2013, and thinking about how I could improve, and found myself making a whole passel of writing-related resolutions, some vaguer and more tentative than others.
Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s sequence of novels A Red Heart of Memories
(1999), Past the Size of Dreaming (2001), and A Stir of Bones
(2003) may be of interest to this site’s readers for one major
transgendered character, who is onstage in Past the Size of Dreaming
and A Stir of Bones and appears in flashbacks in in A Red Heart of
Memories. Several other characters are more or less atypical in
their gender identity and presentation. Hoffman has also written a
number of short stories about the characters from these books, some
but not all of which are in her short story collection Permeable
Borders.
Every Day by David Levithan (Knopf, 2012) is a novel whose main
character, A, wakes up every morning in the body of a different
person. "The Safe-Deposit Box" by Greg Egan (Asimov's SF, 1990) has the same basic premise, but a very different plot and tone.
Checks can be made out & sent to:
Joyce Melton
1001 Third St.
Space 80
Calimesa, CA 92320
USA
Note: $6000 is the operating, maintenance and upgrade budget. Amounts received in excess of the $6000 will be applied to long term debt accrued over the last 19 years.
.
