And the terrible landlord had all in his tow

"I feel less embarrassed about being related to poop-throwing monkeys! Orangutans that masturbate in public! At least bonobos have a concept of sexual consent!"

(I was yelling about politics in the shower. I think spatch was relaying me highlights from 45's AP interview and had just quoted something wildly inaccurate about China, but really, the whole situation deserves it.)

The water can't drown me, I'm done with my dying

Still sick. This is so boring. A couple of writing-related things:

1. My poem "The Firebird's Revenge" is now available in the latest issue of The Cascadia Subduction Zone. I wrote it last April for Rose Lemberg. It was an angry poem then. It's even more applicable now.

2. My short story "And All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts" has been reviewed along with the rest of Dreams from the Witch House (ed. Lynne Jamneck, 2016) in a recent episode of Steve Rosenstein and Rodney Turner's Microphones of Madness. I am afraid that I did not really work out Punnett squares for my ideas of Innsmouth genetics—my major departure from canon was in treating them as genetics at all when Lovecraft's universe plays by the supernatural one-drop rule—but I am delighted by the podcast's conclusion that there is real cosmic horror in the characters' awareness of the world they cannot live in, because I thought so, but then I've always wanted gills. The comparison to Ruthanna Emrys' "The Litany of Earth" is fair; I held off on reading that particular story until I had finished my own, but I am in no way going to disclaim the tons of other neo-Lovecraftian influence and I am not surprised that the genocide aspects of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" leap out at Jewish readers (I am aware that the opening lines about "the secrecy surrounding the disposal of the prisoners . . . vague statements about disease and concentration camps, and later about dispersal in various naval and military prisons" would not have carried quite the same historical weight when Lovecraft was writing in 1931 as they would acquire in hindsight of the next decade and a half, but I didn't read the story in 1931 or even 1936 and so here we are). Honestly, I wish I could get this story reprinted as an independent pamphlet or something just so I could use "Melancholy" as a blurb.

3. I read a story I really enjoyed—Jenn Grunigen's "Figs, Detached"—and saw afterward that I was name-checked in the Author Spotlight. Which was just a bonus.

I wish I did not feel so terrible. I don't see what the harm would be.