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I committed an act of poetry over the weekend, and looking at it again this morning, I still feel pretty good about it (after a bit of a clean up). Here you go : The world’s on fire, Hatred, despair, an atmosphere of ignorance abounds. I’m only one person -   There’s nothing I can do. Well -   There’s breath in my lungs, Life in my body and mind. Existence is resistance When someone hates who you are. I can exist with all my might. There’s ink in my pen, words at the ready, Able to call forth new worlds on a whim. Words can create, destroy, distract, console -   Put cats in pants in space for science! I can write with sorrow and delight. There’s outrage and sorrow in my body and soul, Fuel I can turn into action. There’s space to listen, to learn, to grow, To remember to rest and recharge and regroup. I can use my grief and my fury to fight. I’m only one person, but so’s everyone else. By our powers combined, we can work the problems. The world’s on fire, but we all have ...

 Remember when 2025 seemed like a year out of a science fiction novel? It didn't seem like a real year, it was so far into the future. Would we have flying cars? Robot maids? Computer chips embedded into our brains? The future was full of opportunity and excitement! Well, now the future is here. I don't know about you all, but this isn't what I imagined for "the future." I'm not one to talk about politics - I freely admit to being ill-informed about the nuance about a lot of things - but high-level, I believe people have the right to live their lives as their whole, true selves, regardless of their gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disability status, or anything else. People are people, and they all deserve to live lives that don't harm other people. Apparently, this is a difficult concept for some of the people in power in the US these days. Things are getting hard, and it's really difficult to see what a single person can do to ma...

Want to read a book that's still in-progress and provide feedback that may or may not be incorporated into the finished project? Want to just read some long-form fiction from me? You're in luck! I've been working on what I've affectionately been calling "The Novel" for four-ish years now, and I've gotten a good ways through it, but keep stalling out. I n an interest in providing outside accountability, I've started sharing chapters of it on Royal Road  - the first chapter is up now, and the goal is to put a new chapter up every two weeks on Wednesdays. Feedback is always welcome! And with that, we get ready to close out 2024. My goal for this year was to start sharing my writing publicly, so I think I can say that I made it, hooray! May we all have a much calmer 2025 in which nothing exciting happens. It's time for boring, no? QWERTY contemplates what to destroy first in the new year

 I was fortunate enough to be able to host a workshop at GeekGirlCon last weekend, which went extremely well. My friend Erin was in town for the convention and was kind enough to co-host the workshop with me, which worked wonderfully because she was able to answer some questions that I didn't know how to answer, and also keep us on time (she's a professor, so she's experienced with dealing with classrooms full of people). I thought it would be a good idea, for my own benefit if nothing else, to document the first part of the workshop, which was a talk about embroidery and mental health. I've made the PowerPoint and list of resources available on a separate page of this blog ( here ). I don't know about you, but the last few years have not been especially kind to my mental or emotional health. I discovered early on in the pandemic that going back to something I learned when I was a child, cross stitch, was something that could help ease my anxiety and give me somethi...

Last week, during a community call with the In Surreal Life crew (that's the poetry fellowship I've been taking part in all month), I was asked the question "When did you start writing (or other art form if you primarily do that as your creative outlet)? What got you excited about it?" I'm actually pretty pleased with my answer to the question, and since the call was recorded, I was able to transcribe the answer here: So, I don't remember learning how to read. As far as I can tell, there were just always books in the house, and they were all mine. I mean, technically they were my mom's and my dad's and my brother's, but they were mine. And I just always had them, and they just were always there. And we'd go to the library and there were books there, and we'd go to the bookstore, and there were books there and I had no idea where they came from, they were just there. And at some point, I don't remember exactly when, I was pretty little,...

It's hard to believe it's only been a week since the Flights of Foundry convention - it feels simultaneously like it was forever ago and just yesterday. It was a marvelous convention, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in a more literary-focused convention that's both international and online. One of the biggest discoveries for me was the world of speculative poetry. The last few months, my writing has tended toward poetry, at least in part, and I have no idea why. If you had told me even five years ago that I would be regularly writing poetry, I would have thought you were nuts. High school and the need to analyze the bejeesus out of every word of every poem pretty well ruined any appreciation for poetry that I had for a long time, and it wasn't until I started realizing how much poetry is meant to be performed (thanks, Shakespeare, for a big part of that realization) that I started letting myself be interested again. Speculative poetry is a space I hadn...