New Book! New Bird!

2025-07-36

Dear False Potato Mother,

Yesterday I saw a new bird. I've set up four feeders around the outside of our house and have been watching all the birds come in. And until yesterday it had been the same three kinds of bird over and over: Red-breasted nuthatch, Black-capped chickadee and Steller's jay. Well, I was in my wife's bedroom yesterday and saw the most beautiful little Chestnut-backed chickadee hop over to her feeder. I got so excited. She teased me. Yes, it's the same bird but in a different color, but the color's SO PRETTY.

I'm sitting in my trailer at 6am before work, typing this while listening to ska (I love ska). It's been a very exciting week with the upcoming book release! Sara, or, 'I lived my life as a cloud that followed overhead' will be ready to ship on September 17th! (preorder!) This book has been special to me for awhile. The first part of it I wrote pretransition, the second part I wrote after 7 or 8 years of being trans (my 12 year tranniversary is next year--I cannot believe it). When I wrote that first section, on some level I was creating a new 'me' to put out into the world eventually: a female me. I've been reading Alyson Greaves' wonderful Dorley Hall series recently (it's quite long if you get into the patreon/scribblehub content), and a point of discussion in it as various characters are transitioning is the idea of essentially "make up a lady you want to be and be her and eventually the fake stuff will fall away and you'll be you but new." I think that sort of coincidence of intentional and unintentional planning happens to everyone to some extent during their transition. I remember trying to make a pinterest mood board about my femme self, but it didn't get very far. The real pinterest mood board had always been Sara. Many of you will remember I have gone by (and still do in some contexts) then name Sara. Well, this is who that comes from.

I'm doing a reading! Chicago, come through! It'll be October 10th at 6pm at the historic, iconic Leather Archives & Museum with Russell Price, eri lucia kapling and more. More info to come (probably here). I got my start in the Chicago lit scene and it'll be great to be back!!

I'm editing poetry for issue 4 of the world's only telnet-based literary magazine (that we know of), New Session. We're looking for work where the work that "has small or large changes based on any number of conditions, but which change permanently, and for every reader, all at once. For example, a story can be different if it’s been read more than one hundred times; the one hundred and first reader (and all subsequent readers), would receive a story that’s either subtly or entirely different than the previous one. Your story could also change if a famous person dies, or if the stock market dips below a certain value. These are just examples, but in issue four, we’re being significantly more open about the variances: There are no technical limits to what you can choose here. If there is no way to manage this automatically in software, the editors will “flip the switch” for you manually (though please expect it to take a day or so)." More info at New Session.

A friend of mine, a queer elder closer to my parents' age than mine, recently read a proof of this book that I'd gifted him when we were grabbing coffee in Olympia. "You're so ungenerous to the reader!" he told me. I said "Do you mean it's difficult?" and he said "No, you can breeze through it, but if you do you'll miss everything!" I think I know what he means. I write the kind of books where I get together all the ingredients to a cake, put them in the same grocery bag and hand them to you, saying "Here! I made you this cake!" Well. Preorders are up now for my Sara or 'I lived my life as a cloud that followed overhead' right now. Here, I made you this cake.


Music for the ska-lover in you:


Books for the ska-lover in you:


TV shows for the ska-lover in you:


Love you forever,

Never Angeline North, a bee with pears all over it