Blog Tour: Twice Spent Comet

 

We're happy to help Meerkat Press support the release of their latest title, Twice Spent Comet, by participating in their blog tour. 

Today we are joined by Ziggy Schutz. Ziggy is a young queer writer living on the west coast of Canada. She’s been a fan of superheroes almost as long as she’s been writing, so she’s very excited this is the form her first published work took.

When not writing, she can often be found stage managing local musicals and mouthing the words to all the songs. Ziggy can be found at @ziggytschutz, where she’s probably ranting about representation in fiction. 

To help celebrate the release of Twice Spent Comet, Ziggy is participating in our Indie Spotlight series:

Seeing Yourself

 

It's funny. I've been writing since I was a little kid and my grandmother let me play with her typewriter, and I've been talking about representation in books for what feels like almost as long. I used to do queer education in schools, and it was something we talked extensively about -- how important it was, to find your own identity staring back at you from the page of a good story.

 

And still, with all of this, it took me until 'twice-spent comet' to realize that I could do this with my own identity.

 

I write queer fairytales and space operas, and yet I hadn't ever written someone who had the same pronouns that I've been using for years. Was it fear, that made me hesitate? Having to explain my shifting mix of 'he' and 'she' to an editor, which felt like a much larger task than the quick rundown I give to folks I've just met? Or was I not practicing what I had preached for so long -- that every identity is worthy of a story and an adventure.

 

When I sat down to write Quarter Jones, a minor character that sits somewhere between memory and myth for most of this novella, writing her pronouns out felt scarier than the rest of the story put together. I wanted to do right by him, and by everyone else who was like me, using he and she interchangeably. I wanted to try to capture the joy that I feel every time I hear someone juggle my own pronouns. Here I am, writing a story about space mermaids and terraforming asteroids. Why was I so worried that it would be the rebellion leader's pronouns that made the story feel less real?

 

But I did it. And as 'twice-spent comet' is released into the world, I couldn't be prouder of Quarter Jones and her mix and match words. In a strange way, it makes it easier to feel proud of myself, too.

 

So go on. Write that story that hits a little close to home. Sure, readers will find it who need to read it. But also give yourself the grace of writing what you might need to read. You deserve it, just the same as anyone else does.

 

Happy reading, y'all. And happy writing, too.

 

- Ziggy Schutz

(she/him/he/her)

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RELEASE DATE: Dec 3, 2024

Science Fiction |  LGBTQ

The fall from hopeful revolutionary to prison laborer is a hard one. Fer’s world has shrunk from the whole damn universe to this anonymous asteroid and the four other convicts who share it with them. It’s a fitting end, for someone who used to wish on stars but now can only seem to collect endings.

But magic and falling stars have ways of finding those who need them, and when Fer takes a chance and looks up, there’s a mermaid staring back at them, silhouetted by stars.

twice-spent comet is a fairy tale for forgotten places and the people whose stories are stuck waiting for the next sentence. 

Bookshop.org  |  Amazon

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Excerpt

1

In the beginning, before Humans had claimed the stars as their own, they held hands as they watched lights streak across the sky and called it Magic.

Magic, as everyone knows, must be Spoken and Heard and Believed, and so it was so, that stars were Magic, and those that fell especially so.

Sometimes, the beginnings of stories are just as simple as that.

~~

Waking up is always the hardest part.

Fer’s been on this rock long enough that they’ve gotten used to the routine. Even grown to almost like it. Maybe it is just like an earthborn kid, to search for the positives of the place that’s going to kill you, but it’s hardly the worst of the habits Fer was born into. On the days that feel just that much longer, they even take to listing those positives, counting them off on fingers that no longer swell with just one day’s work.

They like how easy the work has gotten, when early on they’d barely been able to make it through the day. They like their new muscles, filling out fabric that had hung loose before. They’re fed better here than they were in the prison or the transfer ship, and the companionship is a huge upgrade.

The transfer ship’s captain wasn’t a fan of lights for the prisoners. Wasn’t a fan of much chatter, either. And in the dark, people lose things. Faceless, silent shapes. That’s what the prisoners became, on that ship. Fer paced their cell aimlessly, spilled ink on a blank page. Even now, months later, there are days where words sit heavy on their tongue. Like they’re a limited resource, waiting to be wasted.

Waking up has always been a slow process for Fer. On bad days, they wake up on that ship. On the worst days, there’s a moment where they forget they ever got caught at all. Where in the moment before they’re properly awake they really do expect to see the cluttered walls of their last hideout—dangerously close to being a home. Back before Adrastea happened, and everything went tits-up.

Then they open their eyes to the soft curves of their small cell, and they remember they’re here. Officially occupying the middle of nowhere, six months into a fifteen-year sentence they’re not expected to survive. And everything presses down on them, like artificial gravity.

But, hey. Could be worse.

Fer reaches over, taps the speaker set into the wall so that it’ll stop telling them to wake up. They step into their orange jumpsuit, garishly bright against the soft blues of the metal walls. With an underlayer that will glow even brighter in the event of a loss of light, the suit is “the height of prisoner-safety technology,” according to the worker who had issued it to Fer. As if Fer wouldn’t notice the fraying seams or dried blood staining the cuff of one of the five otherwise-identical suits.

They saved that one for days when they felt especially lucky. Or bitter.

Today, they’re mostly feeling hungry.

They duck through their empty doorway—no doors here, no barricading yourself away, just a thin audio divider that always feels slimy when stepped through—and into the common room, letting the noise of the only other occupants on this asteroid roll over them.

The best thing about prison is other people. Who knew?