Ash Vale Updates: October 2025
Happy Halloween!!
I hope you’re all doing whatever it is you’d like on this lovely Halloween—I’ll be spending my night traipsing around with my toddler dressed as Elsa, trying (and failing) to convince her that some candy is only for grownups. She might even let me have some of it!
The OTHERSIDE Kickstarter is officially over! I’m just completely in shock at how well it went—every day felt like, yeah, this is the day it’ll slow down and stop moving and that just absolutely never happened. We funded in 4 hours (!!!), hit all our initial stretch goals in 4 days, and ended with just a beautiful community out of it and more money to fund the magazine than we had possibly imagined. Thank you to everyone who checked out the project, supported us, shared it somewhere—I feel like I need to take a nap for 1,000 years after this but I couldn’t be happier.
Now onto Christmas! (kidding, kind of)
Writing
Out Now
I have a story out today in Die Laughing magazine!! This is a super fun, silly little horror piece that’s written like an academic journal article. The article abstract is about using mushrooms for mycoremediation, an actual process of using fungi to absorb harmful chemicals from the ground.
These mushrooms have more of a hungry agenda than other ones might though 🍄
"Results of groundwater formaldehyde reduction using M4501 strain of pleurotus ostreatus" is available for purchase now, and for just 5 bucks you get an excellent PDF with my story and some other funny/scary ones!
Sales/Updates
The contract is signed, so I can announce that I sold a fucked up, really depressing story about a trans shapeshifter and their mom to If There’s Anyone Left! I don’t have a release date yet but it’s one that will be free to read online, so I’ll include it in the newsletter down the road. I love ITAL and they put out some really weird and great stuff, so I was incredibly delighted with this sale.
In Progress
Gah I’m in the final stretch y’all! I’m into editing the last ¼ of my sapphic romance book for the current draft. I’m joining some friends in the OTHERSIDE discord (which you can join by the way, if you’re on our Patreon!) for a November writing challenge (nanowrimo style but without being nanowrimo because they’re AI shills). The finish line for this draft is in sight! Maybe!
Short Story Recs
I have two spooky recs because what is Halloween for if not something weird and delicious?!
The first is “sharp house” by Samir Sirk Morató in Nightmare Magazine. This piece is creepy and tense; a group of young people break into a ‘haunted house’ that is certainly haunted, but in the sense of housing despair and desperation, not necessarily a ghost. I love a misunderstood monster moment, and this absolutely delivers on that front with a terrifying and impossible creature that hurts when it tries to hold.
My second rec is “This Is What Mouths Are For” by Parker M. O’Neill in Flash Fiction Online. This story hits the ground running with disgusting visual descriptions of a four-headed creature starving, eating things it knows it shouldn’t, but it just can’t. Stop. Eating. Is it punishment? Are they holy? We’re left uncertain of anything in the end except hunger, relentless and unforgiving. Beautiful, vile prose (complimentary).
📚️ Reading
He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan (fantasy China/historical/lgbt)
Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture by Virginia Sole-Smith (nonfiction)
📺️ Watching
Dropout TV’s Crowd Control - I’m behind the times on this one I know, but catching up and it’s so damn funny.
🎵 Listening To
Parachute by Hayley Williams - the whole album, really, is just constantly on repeat in my house, but this song in particular is an unexpected banger.