Aborigen

I am still writing, I am. Just not here so much.

My Scandinavian Myths course has ended some months ago, so now I’m just holed up in my apartment, studying others’ research and analysis of the Old Norse stories. This, to scrape for any hint of information about the giantess-worship cults of heathen Scandinavia—an oral tradition, nothing written down until centuries later with the Christian colonization. I’ve come up with a lot, enough to offer a course on Scandi giantesses for a local community of lifelong learners, presenting in January 2026. I will set up a couple online sessions to practice my material, so keep an eye out for that.

I’m also keeping up my newsletter, That’s About the Size of It, roughly once a month. Google Alerts isn’t turning up anything good lately, so I thought expanding my search terms to other languages might be beneficial. It isn’t, especially in languages where “giant” can modify a feminine noun to mean anything large, like a hardware purchase or a financial deficit. Still, news does come in, and I also explain a Scandi giantess in each issue—so far I’ve covered Angrboða, Gefjon, Gerðr, and Bakrauf—as well as new flash fiction at the end.

And it’s October, you might have noticed, and that means Drawlloween and Inktober for many people. I’ve tried it, I usually give up within two weeks because I lack the drawing discipline. I can sketch simple images but I’m no good at this, and of course my online feeds are full of artists I admire, so one can’t help comparing oneself even when it’s completely unreasonable. Instead, I’m undertaking another story-a-day challenge on Neocities. I’ve missed a couple days, some due to depression and some because I was camping, and I aim to make those up, but so far it’s a successful endeavor.

So much so, that I’m looking at getting published again. I’ve data-mined all the details of 107 magazines, zines, and journals, then triaged these into 30 medium-prestige titles that would be open to Size Fantasy (erotica, slipstream, paranormal, fantasy/scifi, or “we like weird genre-bending shit”). I’m not doing this for money, most of them don’t pay: I’m doing it to see how many places I can get my name into, to prove to others that the world really is ready and waiting for us. I dunno, maybe it is a search for legitimacy.

Not all of those places accept reprints, of course, and publishing to your own webpage or blog counts as first publication. This means I have to pick out one of these titles, study up on what they’re looking for, and tailor a new piece that I can’t share anywhere. That will be a new experiment on its own, writing stories and keeping them private. It sounds lonely, but more or less so than posting to an obscure website occluded in search results by the dead internet and SEO-hogging pirated porn pages?

I don’t want to neglect this blog. This is my main place, my central area that leads to everything else. This is where people can find me when Bluesky crashes and everyone gets suspended on DeviantArt. But if I’m going to get something published, I can’t post it here. And the experimental stuff I’m writing on Neocities might get me flagged here—I thought about consolidating all those stories to this site, but figured that was inviting trouble. So maybe this will just be a site for occasional announcements, for a while, hopefully announcements of getting published. My “Tiny Diner” will appear in the July 2026 issue of Allium, for example, I’m excited about that.

In the meantime, bookmark my Neocities site and subscribe to my newsletter for new stories.