Ghost Post: January 2025

2024 is the year in which I outlived someone who wanted me to die. Someone who made me feel small and worthless and unloved and alone. At my lowest point, he made me suicidal. What turned it around for me then was that, in that moment, he had won. I couldn’t have that. I had to live, if only to make sure he didn’t get what he wanted.

In the 20 years I gave myself out of spite, I found more things to live for than I can count. I found friends whose kindness and generosity have knocked me breathless, whose creativity and humour have made me cry with laughter, whose support has been unconditional and unquestioned. I found a purpose that led me to my current job, doing work that matters, putting small good things into the world where I can, even if I can’t change the world in profound ways. I found love that fulfils me and brings me joy beyond words. I’ve travelled to places I always wanted to see, created art I always wanted to create, eaten pastries that made me fall in love with life all over again (as pastries often do).

His death was such a small blip on my radar. I was surprised, at the time, that I wasn’t more affected. But I think it’s very telling that he mattered so little to me in the life I have now. I spent those 20 years making him insignificant to me. I made him powerless to stop me. He wanted to make me nothing, and instead, I did that to him.

In the first few of those 20 years, I feared I’d get to the point where I’d outlived him and then have nothing else to keep me going. I was afraid of an Inigo Montoya situation where my whole life was revenge and, having achieved it, I’d find myself at a loss. But revenge hasn’t been my whole life. I’ve had other shit to do.

As I enter this 21st year that spite achieved, I am no longer counting. It hasn’t mattered in a long time. And that’s my wish for all of us in 2025: that your enemies, that the enemies we share, will become so insignificant we barely notice their passing. That their influence on our lives recedes into nothing. That they cease to hold power over us, in whichever ways they once did. That our lives are so full of joy that there’s no space even for thoughts of them.

And that we all eat more pastries.

Ghost Post: December 2024

The light is coming back.

Days are dark, and getting darker. The wind is cold, and getting colder. But before I speak to you here again, the light will start coming back. It’s so close now.

And it’s hard to believe that in the dark, I know. But that’s the point. To believe in the light when it’s shining on you is nothing.

This month, we celebrate Dionysia and thus I am allowed to be back on my Dionysus and Ariadne bullshit. The spring Dionysia is probably more understandable at first glance; a spring celebration of feasting, creativity, and sex certainly feels Dionysian in a way winter doesn’t.

The world is dying — we can feel it in the arctic summer winds no longer held back by ice walls that no longer exist and in the warm winter breezes, see it in the bare tree branches and brown flower petals, read about it in the headlines cheering on the rise of fascism and in the scientific studies detailing how corporations are killing our planet.

The first Dionysus was killed. Directed by Hera’s jealousy and rage, the Titans sneaked into Olympus and pulled a Disney’s Hercules (sorry) on the baby Dionysus, tempting him away with toys and treats. Once safely away from the reach of the rest of the gods, the Titans dismembered the baby. His death was brutal, gruesome, unthinkable.

But Zeus recovered his heart. After all of that, there was still a heart. It’s not a lot. But it’s enough to go on.

The world dies, and it comes back. Dionysus dies and rises. We are broken and beaten and full of despair in the darkness. And we find our hearts again. And we come back.

It’s not just the coming back, though. I think especially now, resilience doesn’t feel especially desirable. Why bother coming back if we’ll keep dying, too? Sometimes the cycle isn’t comforting. Sometimes it isn’t a beacon of hope. Sometimes it’s just tedious. It’s exhausting to think about going through the same fucking thing over and over and over forever and ever. The same rise only to be met by the same fall.

So why bother?

Helping Theseus wasn’t a stupid thing to do until he left Ariadne on Naxos. That’s the thing about when we take a big swing and fail; it’s easy to look back and say, ‘well, that was stupid,’ but before there was hindsight, it was courageous. Ariadne wanted to get out, and she found someone with a ship. She tried. She hoped, and she worked towards that hope.

That hope didn’t come through for her. After all, hope isn’t certainty. It’s just hope.

I think of Ariadne on that beach, watching Theseus sail away. I think of how abandoned and alone and broken and miserable she felt. How, in the lowest point of her life, she was certain nothing would ever get better, how she would never get out, how there was no love in her world, how the world was just going to keep breaking her and everyone she cared about down until there was nothing left.

And then Dionysus showed up.

What he brought with him was love, of course, but more than that. With him came the eternal party of his followers, the joy of companionship, the freedom that a support network brings. Abundance in every sense of the word, dance and music and laughter and stories and food and people and light.

It’s not that there weren’t tough times. Travelling the world looking for acceptance, being met with hatred and bigotry and ignorance, being ridiculed and attacked for daring to be transgressive and honest and making a space for other people to be their truest selves. But everywhere he went, there were people looking for others like them. Kings told him he was alone while their subjects joined him in droves.

What gets us through — what really matters while we’re rolling through the cycle — is who we’re rolling with. What gets us through the dark is the hands we hold. And even in the dark, we will celebrate. We will have our moments of joy and they will matter. We will have lives filled with love and they will matter. No one can take that away from us.

It has been a hard month. It will be a hard year. But the light is coming back. We will find our hearts and we will rise again. And there will be light. We will make it so.

Ghost Post: November 2024

I don’t think Icarus was a fool.

Hear me out. People are so sure – reading myths, scoffing and professing the failures to be stupid, rather than human – they’d never do the same. They’d never turn around to make sure Eurydice was behind them. They’d never love a man who wasn’t good for them.

Here’s what I know about Icarus. He lived in a world of darkness. Icarus grew up in a cold stone trap made to imprison a monster, confined there for a crime of which his father was suspected. A monster, a traitor, and a boy, as an afterthought.

There was neither day nor night in the Labyrinth. There were no seasons, no months, no years. No celebrations, no feasts. There were mournful wails, sometimes. The cracking of bones, the tearing of flesh, the weeping, the weeping – sometimes the monster, sometimes his father, sometimes himself, and you’d think he’d be able to tell when it was him, but when there is nothing but darkness, you become the darkness and the darkness is you and the Labyrinth was his body and inside it was all dark and nothing and cold and echoing cries in the dark.

Perhaps there was a time, long ago, when Icarus was happy. When he played like a child with other children, when he ate and smiled and laughed. When he was bright and outgoing and funny and charming and full of potential. Perhaps there was once a promising future ahead of him. But he couldn’t remember it, in the Labyrinth. He looked back into the past and saw nothing but the same black abyss that swallowed his present. He could not think of a future that was otherwise.

One day, his father promised him wings. Told him they’d fly to freedom like birds. Icarus didn’t remember birds.

Icarus dutifully learned all the rules. He listened to his father and nodded along, practising his flapping and testing the straps. Icarus could go through all the motions. But Daedalus had something Icarus had forgotten how to have: hope. No part of Icarus believed he would see the world outside the Labyrinth again. No part of him believed in a world of light. He humoured and pitied his father, with the private certainty that he knew better.

He didn’t believe it even as they packed their few belongings. He didn’t believe it as they crawled through the dirt, through the crudely-dug passage that led outside. He didn’t believe it, until he felt the first ray of sunlight on his face.

Have you ever felt that? The first sun of spring after a long, cold winter? How, at first, it’s still cold, but bright glowing red against your closed eyelids, until slowly you feel it melt the ice that you think has been frozen inside you forever? How you cry and cry all that newly-melted water and think, “This is happiness. I had forgotten.” How you listen closely to the sounds of the world around you expecting to hear that electric buzz that’s everywhere always now, and you don’t hear it, and the air around you is light and thin and warm and warm and warm, there’s sunlight on your face and on your arms and everything is going to be okay and what a miracle it is, that everything could possibly be okay? How your face aches and you realise you forgot how to smile and the unfrozen tears are still flowing hot down your smiling, aching cheeks? How you spread your arms out as if you could hold the sky in them and when the warmth becomes heat you don’t care, you don’t care, because you’ve been cold for so long that you don’t mind burning now?

So yes, Icarus forgot what he’d promised his father in the darkness. Yes, he went from nothing to everything and didn’t know how to live in moderation. Maybe the meaning you need to take from him is not to let your pursuit of joy take you too close to the sun. Maybe we need the reminder that we are prone to giving in to things that will destroy us, when we’ve had nothing and are desperate for anything.

He made a mistake. But he wasn’t a fool. If you’ve never been in that Labyrinth, if you’ve never forgotten what the sun feels like just to find it again – well, here’s what I think: to fall is human.

Ghost Post: October 2024

I hate having to ask my students what they want to be when they grow up. I hate that, even at a special education school, where we know most of our students will never have jobs and there’s a definite percentage of them who won’t even reach adulthood, we have to pretend we’re making good little capitalist drones who will be Productive Contributors to the Economy. But it inevitably comes up every now and then. Often I get worried stares or a nervous “I don’t know,” because they are 7. So I tell them, “When I grow up, I want to be a ghost,” and I do my best spooky haunting and they laugh and tell me they want to be a mermaid or a superhero or a Sonic the Hedgehog.

While working on setting up my website recently, I put the line on my about page that I put whenever I’m forced to have an author biography of some description: “When she grows up, she wants to be a ghost haunting a seaside manor.” This has been my go-to for a while, and typing it up, I really thought about it for the first time in a bit. Would I make a good ghost after all?

To answer my own question, I thought about what a ghost really is. Of course, as you already know, as has been said by many people who all know what’s up, everything is about ghosts except ghosts, which are about love. I think, fundamentally, this is what draws me to ghosts. Ghosts are manifestations of love too powerful to be defeated by death. Ghosts are love so profound that reality bends around it. Ghosts are love as an immortal noun, long after the people who made it a verb are gone.

Love feels like that to me. Like something too big to be contained in my present, that has to last forever just to fit into time and space. I love too much, as the old cliché goes. It’s the most important thing to me, what drives me, what comforts me. In that sense, I’d be an exceptional ghost.

There’s also the literary sense of a ghost: something occupying a liminal space. Neither living nor dead, neither past nor future, neither present nor absent, neither real nor imagined. Ghosts sit in a space meant for moving through; ghosts exist in between two states of being. It’s something I feel as a bisexual, neither gay nor straight. It’s something I feel as a polyamorous person, neither ‘taken’ nor single. It’s something I feel as an immigrant, neither American nor British. I wouldn’t say it’s a space I’m necessarily comfortable in, but it’s a space I know.

I’m also thinking of ghosts in the sense of ‘ghosting,’ in the sense of Nell Crain screaming though no one could hear her, in the sense of invisibility. It’s an extension of the ‘here and not here’ liminality I mentioned before, but it’s also a separate issue, I think. In the former case, it’s about the ghost’s own experience of existing outside binary states, but looking at it from a different perspective makes it about the perception of the ghost’s existence by their audience.

I spent a lot of my life wishing for that invisibility and thinking I’d found it in ghosts; I empathised with the desire to disappear, take up less space, be ignorable. I’d love to say I’m at complete ease now with being perceived and noticed. I’ve improved, I think, but I still wish for my own silence when British people make fun of my accent. I still think sometimes I could solve all my problems by disappearing from society. I’ve been very happy in making myself less available. But I think I’ll never be as small as I wish to be in those weak moments, and that’s probably a good thing. I think when I am myself, I’m loud and embarrassing and passionate and excitable. I just spent a very long time not comfortable enough to be myself. And now that I am, I’ll never be a good ghost who just fades into the background. Love or hate me, I’m not ignorable and I’m not pretending to be less than myself.

Overall, though, I think I would be a great ghost, actually. Know that if I haunt you, it’s the greatest compliment I could pay.

Ghost Post: September 2024

I grew up in a country that isn’t real to most people in the country where I now live. They know it exists — as I have learned to my chagrin, nowhere in the world can escape constant and persistent knowledge that the United States exists and is doing things — but not as a real place where real people live. Dreamy-eyed Brits ask me to tell them about the mansions and swimming pools, the sports cars and three-story McDonalds, plastic food sparkling in the grocery store aisles, free from those pesky EU food standards.

Of course, the country in which I now live is just as unreal to the people in the country from which I came. It’s a caricatured villain in the American Revolution pages of history books, a Doctor Who episode come to life with charming goofballs around the corner from the cosy cottages everyone lives in, or a red-phonebooth-dotted empire of tea-drinking RP-speaking nobility.

I’m often asked why I chose to move to England, and this is usually asked by people I don’t really want to get into it with, so I just say it’s because my husband lives here. But I was recently asked instead why I chose to leave America, and something about it being worded that way made me think. (I should note at this point that ‘America’ is a useless thing to talk about as a whole in this context. I grew up in the American South, and it’s really the American South I didn’t get on with. I think there are likely parts of America I would’ve got along better in, but I didn’t grow up there and I’ll never know. I still wouldn’t have been able to afford my meds on that side of the Atlantic. Anyway, that’s what I mean when I say ‘America’ in this conversation.)

The thing is, it was a no-brainer. I always felt like there was something about me that was at odds with America — and yes, in retrospect part of that was the experience of unconsciously growing up queer in which we all felt like we were different from everyone around us, I know I’m not that special. But there was a particular American mindset I found especially alienating.

It’s the unreality of other places, the dismissal and disregard that comes of not acknowledging the rest of the world as real and worthy of respect. There’s that joke in an episode of Parks and Recreation with the conservative woman arguing against art and saying, with that fake-real disgust conservatives do for plausible deniability, “Ugh, Europeans!” People were like that! For real! In real life! Any positive mention of any other country in the world was met with distrust at best and open hostility at worst. It was unpatriotic to insinuate that another country might be beautiful and exciting and worth seeing with one’s own eyes. It was ungrateful to suggest that there might be value in learning about the rest of the world, as if everything anyone could ever want was not solely the province of the US. It was arrogant, selfish, and snobbish to look beyond the dirt you were born in.

I remember the look of absolute horror on my uncle’s face when I mentioned that someday I wanted to move to another country. He tried to explain to me how morally wrong it was to even think of betraying This Great Country by leaving it. I asked what, exactly, I was betraying. He couldn’t answer me, but continued to try to make me feel ashamed. Why see European castles when Disneyland is right there? Why eat international cuisine when there are Good Christian Hamburgers with freedom fries on the side? Why visit the Mediterrannean? Isn’t the Gulf of Mexico enough for you, you ungrateful wretch?

I was a weird kid who grew up watching her dad play Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego and lying on her stomach in the computer room (remember computer rooms?) reading her mum’s encyclopedias. I loved to learn and I loved that there was a whole huge world full of things for me to discover and explore. I didn’t understand why I was supposed to hate the rest of the world, and no one could give me a convincing reason when asked. I was just told not to want it.

I am not good at being told what to do. If you saw me playing Dredge recently, you may have torn your hair out when the game told me to go to Gale Cliffs and I said, “You can’t tell me what to do,” and merrily trotted off to a region far too advanced for me and had a miserable time. An ex told me to stop trying to get a job I really wanted and settle for something I hated, so I stamped my little foot and said, “You can’t make me,” and I got it. (And it turned out the job sucked but that’s not the point.) So being told not to want to see the world was never going to get the desired response.

Along with many other unfortunate American imports, I’ve seen this isolationist mindset growing in England – certainly you could say it existed before I even got here, but I’ve noticed it a lot more recently. Perhaps it was ramped up for the recent World Cup, during which the violently xenophobic and racist things my teenage students said about players from other countries got to the point of having to file reports. But even aside from that, I’ve been overhearing people my age talking about resort holidays as a way to go somewhere warm without being confronted with the people, laughing at me for mentioning a museum or art gallery and retorting that that’s too “high-class” for them, all the casual xenophobia and racism that gets thrown around daily without thought. One of my colleagues went to Singapore over the summer holidays and someone else, inexplicably trying to get me to talk shit about her with them, derided travelling to other countries with the explicit goal of seeing those countries as ‘conceited.’ I recognise that travelling is a privilege! It takes money to do these things and I get that. But deriding the concept of travel, the desire itself to experience the world, as ‘conceited’ – well, it all feels so American, pushing away the rest of the world, refusing to acknowledge other places as beautiful and worthy of respect, making it a shameful thing to be interested in going to other places and having new experiences. Maybe I’m being too generous in giving America credit for it; maybe it’s just original flavour British Empire solipsism that America unconsciously took with it.

I wish travel were easier and more accessible; it should be, for many reasons, but I think a really important one that doesn’t always get talked about is that it really does widen your horizons. I remember hearing that and thinking, ‘Yeah, sure, whatever, just going to a new place doesn’t make you a more thoughtful person,’ but I think it really does. I think being in another country – and not just a resort – confronts you with the fact that people are people everywhere. People want me to tell them about the imaginary America filled with Barbies in pink Corvettes and swimming pools full of cash; they don’t want me to tell them that even working a full-time job, minimum wage left me so grindingly poor I once had to make a $1 bag of potatoes last for all my meals for a week because it was too hot to not pay the electricity bill, or that in America your utilities do get shut off if you don’t pay that bill, or that you just hear gunshots all the time and either get used to it or develop an anxiety disorder that you can’t afford to treat because the money you pay for insurance is money you don’t then have for a doctor visit (which, yes, does cost money each time), or that if your car breaks down and you can’t afford to fix it (aforementioned potatoes), there’s no public transportation, so you have to walk to and from work 2 miles each way and hope you don’t get so dehydrated in the heat that you pass out before you get home. Because all of that is too real. It shatters the dream they have of this fantasy world far away across the ocean. And if America is real, so might be Ukraine and Palestine and Sudan and the Congo and Aotearoa and Taiwan and everywhere else. And all the people in those places might be real. Is it fear that if none of those places are just names on a map – if all of those places are real and full of real people – that the amount you’d have to care is too daunting? Is it apathy? I don’t have the answer. But I do wonder if it all comes back to this perception that the rest of the world isn’t real, that it doesn’t matter, that it isn’t as good as us, that it isn’t worth thinking about or visiting, much less loving and respecting.

All of this was on my mind because I was thinking about how I learned that in Germany, excepting historic graves and some other footnotes, graves are on kind of a rental system where you get a spot for 20 years and then they dig you up and give the spot to someone else. What a wild thing I never would’ve discovered if our very sweet boyfriend hadn’t indulged us in a cemetery trip while we were visiting him in Germany! Learning is fun.

29/08/24: I'm Pulling My Books From Draft2Digital

Short version: I am pulling my books from Draft2Digital’s distribution. Ebooks are still available through my Ko-fi shop and paperbacks are available through the end of August. I want to have print copies available again sometime in the future, but I don’t know how long that will be.

Long version:

Apparently generative AI companies have been approaching my book distributor, Draft2Digital, seeking to acquire books distributed through them on which to train their AI. Some authors (not me; I was alerted to this by December on Pillowfort) received an email with a survey link asking how we feel about receiving 1/10 of a cent per word for our work in exchange for training an algorithm to write stories we’ll then have to compete with in the publishing market. For context, bare minimum industry standard is 5 cents a word. We’re being asked to take a fraction of what our work is worth in order to put ourselves out of jobs in the future.

Y’all? I’m miserable about this. I’m angry, I’m exhausted, I’m devastated. It feels like this is happening at every turn and now my fucking book distributor is salivating at selling my work out from under me for pennies so that AI can write stories instead of me.

Right now it’s just a survey. But the fact that they’re even considering it tells me they aren’t trustworthy with my work. I suspect no matter how much pushback they get in the survey, they’re going to do it if they want to do it. I’m not giving them the opportunity to do this to my books.

When I was unemployed and writing was my only income, I resisted wider distribution for so long. Nearly every channel I could find required me to go through Amazon, and I wanted to stick to my guns on not letting Jeff Bezos make one red cent off me as long as I could. But I needed money, and people wanted to buy my books in Real Bookshops (and also Amazon), so I caved. And it was nice! I was grumpy about Amazon making money off me but people bought my books and I could buy groceries. If you bought books from me back then, you cannot know how grateful I was and am, and how much that helped me.

I mention this because there isn’t a mass exodus from D2D brewing. You’re not gonna see every author you know who distributes through them pulling their books. I want to be clear that I’m not making a moral judgment on everyone else. I depended on that book money and so do tons of other authors. We’re all weighing the factors in our lives and figuring out what we can bear to do. Some people are going to take that shitty deal because no money doesn’t pay the bills, and some money, even if it’s insultingly little, does. It isn’t our fault that we’re being put in the position of trading our futures for short-term cash; it is these AI companies and everyone who funds them, it is CEOs who hoard wealth and refuse to adequately compensate the people on whose labour they profit, it is capitalism, full stop. It is the system that’s been created to stop us from doing anything that isn’t making money for the man at the top.

I’m incredibly lucky in many ways, not least of which is that I start a permanent position next week which will allow me not to depend on book income as much. It still certainly helps (especially because I haven’t been paid since July and have had a broken bed and a broken laptop to replace ha ha ha) but I can afford to keep my books safe from exploitative entities.

I hate this. I really do. I wish I could just keep them available. But I really believe in doing the good I’m able to do. One person keeping their books out of the AI training buffet isn’t going to make a huge difference, but it’s four fewer books in the matrix. And if everyone who can afford to pull their books does, that’s even more of a difference. And if they don’t, at least I did what I could.

I had actually been looking vaguely at switching to a different print distributor, so at least that was already on my radar. They charge upfront, and as mentioned previously, I’ve had some financial hits between paychecks, so it’s not going to be an immediate switch. I’m also going to have to talk to them about AI now apparently!! I’ll keep you posted on how that goes. For now, I’m leaving the print books listed through the end of August, which I know isn’t much time. If you want a print copy but can’t afford it right now, let me know and I’ll be happy to get you a copy if you can cover shipping from the UK.

Ebooks are still available through my Ko-fi shop.

As a final note, in case you hadn’t picked up on this, it’s an incredibly demoralising time to be a professional author. If you’re looking for ways to help, genuinely the best advice I can give is to support your favourite authors in the ways they say help them the most. For some people it might be Patreon, for some it might be liking and commenting on YouTube videos. For me, it’s Ko-fi. And if you like someone’s work, it’s always worth saying something. Tell a friend you think might like it, or let the author know what it meant to you.

And don’t fucking use AI.

10/06/24: Authors for Palestine: Free Books for a Good Cause

I've joined over 50 other authors supporting Palestinian families in need through a fundraising giveaway! Here's how it works:

1. Donate to one of the families we've chosen through Operation Olive Branch

2. Fill in the form on our website and attach a screenshot of your donation

3. Receive free books and discount codes as thanks for your help

AND

Be entered in our giveaway to potentially receive even more free books and extras!

All participants will receive a free copy of my queer gothic ghost story romance, The Hunt and the Haunting, plus a code for 50% off everything in my Ko-fi shop. There are also two ebook copies of my novella retelling the myth of Ariadne and Dionysus, Crown of Ivy, up for grabs in the giveaway.

Check out our website for all the details!

25/05/24: Generic Foundational Blog Post Title

Preserving my post about quitting Instagram here:

I grow weary of the internet being run by tech bros who never took an ethics class. Not that it's in the least surprising, but IG is the latest platform to be mined for 'AI' datasets, and so this is where I draw the line. Link for further reading here.

For those who don't understand why artists are upset about AI - which, tangentially, is not artificial intelligence, as it doesn't think for itself but runs an algorithm on aggregated data to find the mode - these bots are fed art and writing taken from artists without either consent or remuneration, then used to approximate our creative work. From a purely ethical standpoint, these bots are trained on stolen art and used to recreate that art without paying the people who made it. From a standpoint valuing human creativity, this is both unforgivably inane and gallingly dismissive. People create art to say things to each other about the world we experience and the things we value. Who cares what the algorithm values? Art is an inherently human endeavour, and the people who create it deserve the resources to live our lives in this capitalist hellscape. Attempts to create a world where art is manufactured by robots and humans are stuck with the menial labour are so backwards it blows my mind.

I'm not a visual artist but my writing has been scraped for AI use without my consent, without my receiving credit or compensation, and without my ability to remove it from that sphere. I don't want to be part of a machine meant to replace writing jobs! I want to GET those writing jobs! But those jobs are being eradicated so that robots can have them instead, and that's supremely uncool.

Please stand with your artist friends. Don't use AI generators and don't feed the bots.