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Unpredictability:

Kinse the kobold is a party planner by trade and she doesn’t know how to please her latest dragon client. The trouble comes in when Wylia, the dragon, is just so nice to her. She’s not used to dealing with clients that are this nice! Kinse’s story is one that speaks to my experiences in working in service jobs. Trying to be the best I could be and getting burned for it. Burning myself out for folks who would not appreciate that effort. The dynamic between Kinse and Wylia tries to heal some of that hurt and show that not everyone is going to be terrible. There are good dragons out there that will recognize your needs and help you.

Distress Signal:

Originally published in a charity anthology from Goal Publications, this was my first story with a bit more sci-fi bent to it. There’s space travel, cybernetic dragons, and lots of discussions around how far you should go to save the person who saved you. I didn’t set out to make a major theme of this one a discussion about disability for dragons, but it turned out that way. Rimor’s existence as a cyborg means that he has to deal with issues that are brought up with his half-metal body. The nature of how he exists in his town and what he has to do to maintain his body is a big part of the story. How he has learned to live, and in many ways has avoided living, comes up within the story.

Letters From Nathaniel Hedgeworthy Addressed with Great Longing and Adoration to Symon the Dragon:

Yes, that’s the full title. I love this title. It’s my favorite in the collection. It helps to characterize the kind of story it’s going to be right from the jump and that’s awesome. Nathaniel and Symon’s story has gone through so many iterations. It started as a 7K word NSFW story that tied in flashbacks and a few sex scenes but after it got rejected from the anthology I submitted it to, I went back to the drawing board. I expanded it out, added more characters, fleshed out some scenes, and then it became 15K words. It was a mess. There were multiple point of view characters, way too many threads happening at once, and it was just generally too much in some places and not enough in others.

I decided to cut down a bunch of it and add more to the letters that Nathaniel wrote in his journal and the new story became about 3K words of an incredibly gay fox pining for a big dragon. A big dragon he’s supposed to be hunting for a bounty, no less. This story is part of my ongoing discovery and interrogation of my gay attraction and longing. I wanted a story filled with the imaginings and amateur writings of someone discovering their sexuality and I succeeded in that.

And here’s a picture of some stuffed animals that I have sitting on my desk that I think of as Nathaniel and Symon. Symon is not pink and sparkly but they looked too cute together for me to resist!

Brunhilda:

Written for the Ghost of Dog themed submissions over at the Voice of Dog podcast. I wanted to tell a story that was less abjectly scary and more Goosebumps spooky. It can get scary at moments, but it’s not terrifying. Clive and Sherman’s relationship is one I’m proud of. I loved writing a coward and the brave paranormal investigator dynamic. Without spoiling anything, I really like what I did for the dragon in this story. And while not explicitly stated within the story, Clive and Sherman are absolutely dating.

The Wyrm in the Mountain of Apples:

Written for the Anthrocon conbook in 2018. The story was my take on a monster movie trope of a small child keeping a dangerous monster from wrecking up the town. It’s the first thing I had published in a physical book and was one half of my publishing credits I needed to get accepted into the Furry Writing Guild. Getting membership into the FWG was a big motivating factor for me in my early writing career and seeing something of mine in print at that con made my entire weekend. My writing was good enough to get published in a conbook. And Anthrocon no less! The fabled Anthrocon! A place I had only ever heard about until I went for the first time for a single day the year before. It’s important because of the weight it has in my motivation as an artist. I got accepted once, I can get accepted again. I’ve cleaned it up a bit for the collection and I can’t wait for folks to read the new version.

At Sunset, She Flew:

Where to start with this one! I wanted a story that could make use of a repeating line to bring the rest of it into a new light. I wanted to do a kind of mix of the repeating lines at the end of lines of poetry and the struggles of a dragon who was trapped. The resulting story posits feathered dragons as a metaphor for being queer and not being able to hide that queerness. Everyone knows there’s something different about you and that colors all of your interactions. The dangers that are inherent to you being a dragon are still there. There are people outside your door who will kill you if they have the chance. So what do you do? Do you rot inside your cave forever? Learn to live with less and less, make yourself smaller for your own survival?

Or do you find a way to be yourself?

There’s so many big queer feelings I was working through when writing this story. I love using dragons to explore these concepts because dragons have big emotions. It’s kinda hard for them not to! The way that this analogy speaks to me as someone who feels emotions so strongly is something I try to carry through into all my writing. The story also deals with what can happen when you draw inward on yourself too much. It deals with heavy themes, but it’s something I desperately wanted to talk about.