I’m at World Fantasy Con in Oakland this week!

You can find me at the following sessions:

October 22
Reading with Erik Grove, Victoria Shi and Kimberly Unger
3:30pm in Salon 3 & 4

October 23
It’s the Only Earth We Have… Is Escape An Option? Eco-fantasy in Today’s Stories at World Fantasy Con (moderating)
5pm in Room 201

October 24
The Writers Grotto Reading
9pm in Salon 3 & 4

and I’ll also be in the Dealer’s room from time to time, at the Dog Eared Books table. Come say hi!

SF to GZ Fundraiser, October 26

When Lauren C. Johnson approached me earlier this year about doing a fundraiser reading for SF Bay Area Mutual Aid and Bookworms for Gaza, I was thrilled to help, and all these months later, we have an amazing lineup: Tihi Hayslett, Cynthia Gómez, LP Kindred, Bob Ostertag and Elijah Kinch Spector, with M. M. Olivas hosting. There’ll be book signing after, and Cafe Suspiro is generously donating 10% of book sales to the fundraiser. If you’ve ever seen any of these authors, you know this is going to be a night with loads of energy, feeling, and charisma. I’m so excited to see them all together, and it’s probably the only time we’ll get to see LP, Tihi and Elijah on the same stage, since they’re all traveling from different corners of the country. It’s right after World Fantasy Con on the 26th, at 1246 Folsom in San Francisco. Register for the event here.

My work-in-progress made the Uncharted Novel Excerpt shortlist, judged by Micaiah Johnson!

Way back when I was a functional-alcoholic hipster art student, I wrote a truly atrocious novel about a reprehensible functional-alcoholic hipster art student who ends up with a time machine. It was so, so bad. Anyway this year I randomly got inspired and started writing a new quasi-autobiographical novel that picks up where that one left off, and leans into how awful the character based on my 20 year-old self is. The working title is Trunk Machine. I’ve had a total blast with it so far, and I submitted an excerpt to the Uncharted contest, and somehow it made the shortlist?! Only the winners get published, so I’ll share a little snippet with you here:

We sat on a sauropod femur like it was a normal log, in front of a campfire, warming up two cans of SPAM. The sun was going down, but it was still warm, warmer than the Pacific Northwest had any right to be.

We hadn’t said much. Or said anything. Hippy J flicked her cigarette butt into the fire and let her head fall into her hands. She rubbed her temples, and said, “What do you think she meant when she said ‘Save them, it’s the only way’?”

“Uh...” I glanced at the giant rib bones towering above the flowers behind us, backlit by a ferociously beautiful Danian sunset over the shallow green sea that glaciers would eventually turn into Puget Sound.

I was born near here.

“She was pointing at the dinosaur, right?” Hippy J asked.

“She definitely was.”

“There’s nothing else she could possibly have been pointing at?”

I shook my head. Hippy J looked up at me, one hand still holding her face.

We both blinked.

We both said, “Fuck.”

Congrats to the winners and everyone else on the shortlist! You can see them all here.

New interview with Swetha Amit for JMWW

It’s a bit more unhinged than the other interviews I’ve done about The Wildcraft Drones, but you know what, it’s been a long year. Anyway, I’m psyched to return to JMWW — they were the first folks to ever published my fiction, back in 2018. (You can read “Surface Tension” here. It got an honorable mention in the New Millennium Writing Awards!) Read the interview with Swetha here.

Recommended read: Wine for Roses by Emily O’Malley Liu

When I was a kid, we had a huge rosebush outside the house in Guerneville where we lived for a year, and when it was in bloom, I used to snack on the flowers. The pink petals were delicate, and tasted like their fragrance, but sweeter than you’d expect, with just the right amount of bitter. That’s pretty much how I’d describe Emily O’Malley Liu’s debut, Wine for Roses.

Wine for Roses is the sweetest gay gardencore romantic fantasy novella I, or I suspect anyone, has ever read. Do you like wine? How about roses? Haunted houses? Mysterious curmudgeons? Working class guys just trying to get by while having lots of feelings? Cats? Yes. You will enjoy this book. I found it delightful and it made me wish I had a rosebush again. (For the snacks.)

Buy Wine for Roses at Bookshop.org (using my affiliate link helps me pay bills but I also strongly support ordering it from your local independent bookstore!)

That’s all for now —

T. K. Rex