Month: April 2016

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March and April updates

Charles Payseur was kind enough to mention my story, “The Scrape of Tooth and Bone”, a second time – this time in his Monthly Round, in which he pairs his favourite short speculative fiction from February with an adult beverage.

Indeed, even with the other amazing stories this month, I’m not sure any can live up to the sheer number of different awesome elements crammed into this tale. Steam-powered archeology featuring a queer neurodiverse female protagonist interacting with the ghosts of dapper sentient dinosaurs while acting as a double agent and getting double crossed and navigating some heavy misogyny and it is all just so good.

The Scrape of Tooth and Bone’s official drink pairing is a rye IPA. Not being a drinker myself, I had to look up what an IPA was, but I am quite flattered.

Meanwhile, I am pleased to report some new and very exciting poetry acceptances.

“Snowflake”, a love poem, will appear in a future issue of Through the Gate.

“Million-Year Elegies: Tyrannosaurus”, the poem where the entire idea for the Million-Year Elegies series comes from, will appear in a future issue of Uncanny Magazine.

“Million-Year Elegies: Edmontonia” will appear in an issue of Mythic Delirium.

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New poem: The Raising of Lazarus

In the Spring 2016 issue of “Breath & Shadow”:

http://www.abilitymaine.org/breath/spr16h.html

This is a poem I came up with in the summer of 2014, when recovering from a bad mental health breakdown.

It’s also the most overtly religious poem I’ve ever written, though I hesitate to call it a Christian poem; it is not particularly concerned with any specific articles of Christian doctrine. Then again, poems get associated with other religions without being dogmatic at all. So. Whatever. Enjoy.

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Autism News, 2016/04/05

Today is a very big Autism News post! Partly because I procrastinated harder than usual, but also because there is genuinely a lot of autism stuff in the news, especially as we gear up for the Awareness/Acceptance Month of April.

Since everyone is lighting it up different colors for autism right now, we should probably start with Real Social Skills’ post on what autism awareness means to them.

There was a lot in the news lately about euthanasia, murder, death in general, and other medical problems for disabled people. Everything in this section has a TW for these and related topics.

Meanwhile, autistic self-advocate John Elder Robison wrote a book about his experiences with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.

  • Here is a post by Robison about his book, and on the difference between “having feelings” and “reading social cues”
  • Sonia Boue lists objections that many autistic people are raising to the promotion of TMS in Robison’s book
  • This interview with Robison responds to some of these objections, and goes into more depth on Robison’s feelings about the potential risks and drawbacks of TMS.

Posts about adult diagnosis:

Pan-disability posts for the SFF crowd!

Other pan-disability posts:

  • Erin Human on why she says “disabled”, not “special needs”
  • Feminist Aspie on food policing
  • Clarissa Krikpe on community living for people with high-support/ developmental disabilities. (Note: There is a lot of parent-centric language in this article, but if you can deal with that, it has some pretty interesting information.)
  • Karen Hitselberger on why the “How Do You See Me?” campaign doesn’t work

Misc: