Last Ocean Tide Lost in Sand

cover of Capricious #11

I’ve got a new story out: “Last Ocean Tide Lost in Sand” is available in Capricious #11! It features an aromantic family, a depressed spaceship and a magical fox all seeking a better life on a planet that’s un-terraforming into contagious, deadly sand. Every person is non-binary, there’s multiple sets of neopronouns, and it’s sort of Space Australia!

The kernel of this story is about a decade old and I was only able to finally figure out how to tie it all together in early 2018 when seeing Sword & Sonnet, so it’s really nice not only to have actually written it, but to have it published as well!

There is also an interview with me in this issue. I talk a bit about “Last Ocean Tide Lost in Sand” and a bit about some weird Australian animals.

Additionally, next month Sharp & Sugar Tooth is being released and you’ll find my short “Red, from the Heartwood” in it! There’s also an aromantic, non-binary family… but none of the other things! It’s set in modern day Perth and features arospec questioning, vegetarian cannibalism, polyamory with both a queerplatonic relationship and a romantic one, and weird apple stuff.

I meant to do a 2018 summary but I ended up too busy in December because I got top surgery!!! It went well and I’m really happy! Dealt with a lot of anxiety about Am I Queer Enough and Do I Deserve This and Can I Afford This, but the recovery so far has had some rough spots I have not for one single second regretted it. (Also I went back to full-time hours halfway through last year and that’s been a rough adjustment…)

Painted podcast

“Kin, Painted” has been reprinted and podcasted at PodCastle! It’s narrated by Julia Rios. If you’ve had a hankering to listen to a story about an aroace middle child of a queer-normative and supportive family trying to find out how to fit into the world and how or whether to paint, well now you’re in luck! Hooray!

It is so wonderful to me that so many people like this quiet little story.

Heartwood

book cover
Sharp & Sugar Tooth
The Kickstarter for Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up To No Good and Sharp & Sugar Tooth: Women Up To No Good (edited by Joanne Merriam and Octavia Cade respectively) has relaunched! My arospec love story “Red, from the Heartwood” appears in Sharp & Sugar Tooth and features a non-binary arospec dryad, who bakes desserts with apples plucked from her own body, juggling her long-term queerplatonic relationship and her new romantic relationship with a woman who’s having a little bit of difficulty with the idea of relationship anarchy. It’s got body horror and good food and weird food and questioning arospec wonderings about romance and puns and getting to know your girlfriend and aroace metamour over Star Trek and, don’t worry, the queerplatonic relationship is still strong and happy at the end of the story. You can read the opening of it here! Please have a look at the line-up and the other sneak peeks, Sharp & Sugar Tooth is looking pretty mouth-wateringly good.

some January news

New year is sure off to a start!

artwork
cover for Capricious #9, art by Laya Rose
New story: Issue 9 of Capricious, The Gender Diverse Pronouns Issue, is available now in ebook and paperback! It contains my story “Walking the Wall of Papered Peaces”, featuring a (sex-repulsed demiro ace) cis clockmaker engaged to a (allo) non-binary plumber, both of whom end up on a weird quasi-magical quest to find a wall made of origami animals because of communication problems in their relationship. I have some things to talk about regarding this story, but that’ll come in a later post. As you might expect, the other stories in this issue feature gender diverse pronouns and a lot of non-binary characters! Please check it out, and thank you to everyone who supported its fundraising and who has talked about it!

New poem: earlier this month my poem “Penelope’s body looming” was accepted by Strange Horizons! It’s inspired by Greek myth and my gender journey, and it’s the first poem I’ve written in two years so that’s very exciting.

New calendar: well this is a bit late now but at the start of this year I was convinced by some friends to make a calendar of my bird photos for them, and I did so, and now you can buy this bird calendar if you’d like! The individual photos are also available as prints and cards. I have been told I’ll be making another calendar for next year, which I’ll hopefully get organised before next January… :p

New page: I’ve added a wallpaper page to this site! It currently has a few 1920×1080 wallpapers of my wildlife photography (at present, black cockatoos and other native Australian birds) and I’ll be adding more birds to it soon as well as some bees and architecture and flowers. All the wallpapers are and will be free to download. If there’s any specific bird (or other) photos I’ve posted on Twitter that you’d love as a wallpaper, let me know and I’ll prioritise that!

New focus: the last few months I’ve been grappling with an issue that took up a lot of mental energy and time. An issue I started thinking about in 2016 but put off because of the toxic job/unemployment situation. An issue I have, as of this week, partially resolved in that I booked a date for top surgery.

meanwhile and far away

2017, huh? Okay, so. At the beginning of the year I quit my job because workplace conditions had repeatedly deteriorated to the point where my mental health was in a tailspin and dragging my physical health down with it. With no relief in workplace conditions and workload in sight, unable to reliably fill out job applications because my free time was occupied with being stressed out from this week’s workload and being stressed out thinking about next week’s workload, feeling constantly miserable and drifting towards… the bad end of depression… I quit. Luckily I had enough savings to weather several months of unemployment, and now I have a new job which I very much like and my co-workers are lovely and supportive and my manager isn’t toxic and I am not being overworked and underpaid! It’s nice and strange and good for me.

I’ve been trying to work on improving my mental and physical health this year. Reclaiming it, I suppose. De-stressing from that awful job, unlearning the unhealthy habits I formed trying to cope with the stress, forming better betters. It’s been going okay. It’s difficult sometimes, when you have mental illnesses and physical conditions that feed on each other to make you feel like shit, to work out what healthy is, what you can actually aim for, what you can actually achieve. When I look back on how I was this time last year versus now, though, I can see the difference in my life. I can see how far I’ve come, how much of me I’ve rediscovered. I still have ways to go—reading and writing is still very difficult, mental energy-wise—but I’m buoyed with my progress so far. …I think I say that every couple years and then I have a downslide so we’ll see what Terrible Stressful Things next year throws at me.

I’ve continued to delight in photography this year. I’ve had two weekend road trips down south. I’ve tried to see more of my friends. I’ve done 50% of my Pokemon blackwork sampler and I’ve made some embroidery pieces I’m really proud of, like this rainbow lorikeets once.

I sold a story I’ve been editing for what feels like forever, it was on its fifth or sixth revision and I’d actually trunked it. That is “Walking the Wall of Papered Peaces” and it’s going to appear in Capricious in 2018. It is a story I don’t think I would write now—about the insecurities between an asexual clockmaker and her non-asexual romantic partner—but I’ll go into that when it’s published.

“Kin, Painted” will be reprinted again, this time in Queerly Loving #2 by Queer Pack in 2018. (Queerly Loving #1 will be released very soon!)

And I also actually wrote a story this year, and sold it too: “Red, From the Heartwood” will be appearing in Sharp & Sugar Tooth: Women Up To No Good in 2018 or 2019. “Red…” features a dryad who works at Bunnings, her two partners, a light smattering of body horror and lots of apple desserts. There is a queerplatonic relationship between two arospec enbies, and a romantic relationship involving a queer woman. Given my dislike of when non-aro people write non-human aro characters and when non-NB people write non-human NB characters I think I will have some things to talk about when it comes time to talk about this story! I still can’t really believe that I wrote a whole short story. The last one I finished was “Kin, Painted” in early 2015. Since then I’ve had trouble just writing a single scene. But when I saw the theme and Octavia Cade’s name attached I was instantly inspired with the core idea (ha ha… apple pun). It was still a struggle to write and edit it inside three months, even though I was unemployed and it was only 5,000 words, but I did it and it was a huge accomplishment for me, and then even more amazingly Octavia accepted it! I can’t wait to share two new arospec characters with everyone, to talk about this story and to see what other stories are in the anthology.

Unfortunately I haven’t written much since “Red…” but I’ve been settling into my new job and routines and dealing with, uh, well let’s talk about that now. Last year I started binding occasionally, on the weekends sometimes with close friends. I started researching top surgery, not sure if I wanted it or not—not sure if I could even access top surgery here as a non-binary person not taking testosterone and not transitioning in other ways to masculinity. Binding made me happy, but sometimes I was indifferent to my breasts or mildly liked them rather than hating them, so I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to get top surgery and, if I did want to get surgery, would I still want to get top surgery if I had to fly interstate or overseas to get it. But then I put that all on hold when I decided to quit my job. Now it’s a year later, I’m employed again, my health is better than it was to boot, and I’ve started researching and thinking about top surgery again. If I like the surgeon I’ve booked a consultation with then I can get it done at home, and if not then I can go interstate. While I’m not 100% decided yet—hopefully the consultation will give me the answers I need to finally, fully, make that decision—I feel clearer in my feelings, though if I need to go over to Melbourne or Sydney I’ll have to consider whether the added expense and difficulty on top of all the other expenses and difficulties will still be worth it. I don’t mind if, after all of this, I decide I don’t want top surgery. But if that happens, I want to decide this because I want to keep my breasts, not because I’m too intimidated by the logistical difficulties, the pain and the potential awkwardness.

She is, there—amongst the Mango Trees—a Flytrap Garden

Here’s a flash prosetry piece of mine which appeared in Verse Kraken in 2014! The formatting in this inspired me to do “stone”, my twine poem.

“She is, there—amongst the Mango Trees—a Flytrap Garden”
by Penny Stirling

Continue reading She is, there—amongst the Mango Trees—a Flytrap Garden

We Met in Dragon Shadow

Here’s a poem of mine which appeared in ASIM in 2014!

“We Met in Dragon Shadow”
by Penny Stirling

The first kiss is a fleeting duty
on my cheek burned and sooty.
“Thank you,” she says, “mighty sir—”
But then I remove my armour.

Although the fight was my conquest
the dragon’s sullied the success.
My gryphons are dead, my magics blown.
Princess and I have a long walk home.

Continue reading We Met in Dragon Shadow

So you’re allo and you want to write an arospec character (dos and don’ts)

Do think about why. Why do you want to write an arospec character? Are you questioning or have you identified as aro in the past? Do you have aro friends or acquaintances and what to do right by them? Did you accidentally create an aro character and realise something that an aro wrote resonated? Do you want to be inclusive and raise awareness and educate your readers about us? Have you read about the aromantic spectrum and thought it was interesting? Did you decide not to write a romance and then thought “well, in for a penny in for a pound”? Have you been thinking your writing’s getting a bit formulaic and that it’ll be an invigorating challenge to write an aro character? Are you collecting characters of different identities like they’re Pokémon? Do you think it’s the new craze to make you stand out amongst the crowd? Are aro readers just easy advertising and money? Do you think being aro is more palatable than other queer identities? Is there some plot block that you can only solve with an aro character?

Just like with any minority, there are better reasons and worse reasons to write an aro character. I’m not saying that if you have some particular reason then you shouldn’t, but you perhaps should think more carefully about the character and whether the reason for their existence might lead you to negative stereotypes and upsetting real life aros with this representation.

Do open up your search engine of choice and start researching! Use search terms like aromantic spectrum, aromantic identities, aromantic terms, myths about aromanticism, aromantic stereotypes, aromantics in fiction, aromantic representation, aromantic fiction recommendations, realising you’re aromantic, might be aromantic, writing aromantic characters, aromantic resources, aromantic relationships, aromantic relationship hierarchy, relationship anarchy, what does aromantic feel like, am I aromantic…

Continue reading So you’re allo and you want to write an arospec character (dos and don’ts)