I read in one of the threads Nilly saved for us that I never wrote "Places" I'm pretty sure that that version of me would find this version mortifying, but she's not here anymore, so who cares? And what's a couple decades among friends. [link]

Tep, since I'm so sure you couldn't get on with your life without knowing what "knots" made me think of, here that is. [link] I could have written more about my couple and whether they wanted to get married, ie, "tying the" but this is probably 100 words anyway, about people who just popped in my head. (If you guys give me a thread, I might take it, you know.)

cheerios: Wrote this while watching a documentary about art. [link]

I talked to the workshop about my recent success. [link]

I love "Possibilities, in A Sentence"

I could drabble again. I just finished my first complete Discworld and it's resuccitated my writing bug

I watched a reel from someone who is entering every short story contest of 2026 and now I'm getting inundated with short story contests and I'm wondering what are the ways to tell if any of them are legit

It's hard to know And if they're famous cause they published Flannery O'Connor or some shit like that, they get inundated with entries.(The entry fees aren't huge, but entering them all would add up.) Here's what I have so far about "Wedded Twist"

“Wedded Twist” might have been the first crime story even partially inspired by an article on Cosmopolitan’s website. I wish it hadn’t taken so long to perfect a draft—between the pandemic and other projects, the path from initial inspiration to my second EQ acceptance took about six years—if that hadn’t happened, maybe I’d remember what internet trail I’d been following when that article about “secret weddings” lit a sort of adaptive lightbulb in my head. I know as few abled people do, the drama that disabled people would seek to avoid by hiding our nuptials would be more bureaucratic than “You can’t pick your family,”(I, benefits penalty or not, a fairly committed Singleton—although if some “shepherd” did show up and want to fully blow my mind, it’s not a rule that I’d say no-- and early-adopting The Wire fanatic, unexpectedly do love comedies about family drama that erupts as someone tries to plan a wedding. Maybe some things are funnier from the outside.)

It’s been tough to establish a mature, lifelong disabled voice. (I wanted to write “adult” there, but that’s a word shared between serious people who really know what the Federal Reserve does, and that weird XXX room that used to be in Blockbuster.) Neither fit, so, maturity.

Hard enough to find when you’ve missed rites of passage and your daily life works best if you lose out on the capitalistic score-keeping that fuels conversation between American strangers. Early on, I had some success, and got third place in a college contest, writing as the wise-assed, wheelchair-using college girl of my wildest dreams, a young woman who said most of the things I thought I “should have said” after the fact.

My little world loved that chick as much as I. Until I finally realized that I wasn’t actually going to be her, so continuing writing wasn’t going to be as simple as aging her up. My own life faced too much uncertainty for Working Hard and Playing By The Rules to answer every question, no matter how witty my quips were.

Besides, since I’m Gen X, even college has changed, at least in the day-to-day particulars (not griping about the kids on their phones, but even if I thought that was great, my fingers need buttons too much for me to fully participate, much less bear witness to anything about it) to allow me to keep a time warp alive. It was tough at first because I felt some pressure to create a character that is both larger-than-life—probably why Corrine is so vivid and threatened to steal the story as an antagonist—but also something of a representational “roll” model. It was hard for me for a long time that my investigator Allyson(named in a shoutout to an online friend, not Elvis Costello. Much as I’m not named for the soap-opera vixen) isn’t…perfectly imperfect, that she needs things, and people, harbors competitive feelings, and isn’t imagining some Kinsey Milhone-style (RIP) round of punishing physical activity to show she can keep up. I’ve written the work that I wished I could have read.