The more I learn about this Anthropocene we’re living through and how we’re changing our world—how our soils are depleting, how our oceans are overfished and filling with plastic, how the “forever chemicals” are truly forever, in both the body of our planet, and our own bodies—the more I see in granular detail the reality that we’re intimately connected to… Read More

Not Just the Hero’s Journey But With a Girl Since I first discovered Gail Carriger’s Heroine’s Journey in 2020, I’ve written exclusively Heroine’s-Journey-structured stories… I can’t promise I’ll never write another Hero’s-Journey-structured novel, but given that I’ve pretty thoroughly found a genre-home in hopepunk (and climate fiction), and my penname writes romance (which is all Heroine’s Journey), I don’t really… Read More

Hopepunk: collectivism in storytelling We live in a hyper-individualist world, especially in America. This extreme focus on individualism has many costs—an epidemic of loneliness, the fracturing of the social fabric, the breakdown of communities—and yet we’re still convinced that “rugged individualism” is the pinnacle of American virtue (rather than, say, working together, organizing for a larger cause, compassion for the… Read More

It all comes down to the purpose of violence. There are so many aspects to our world that we simply take for granted, until the world is turned upside down and nothing makes sense anymore. A worldwide pandemic sweeps through, halting everything for a few breathless moments, and suddenly people rethink their lives and decide to go back to school,… Read More

Writing has always centered me.Writing hopepunk* is saving me in a whole different way.*”A Brief History of Hopepunk is the first in this ongoing series of blog posts about hopepunk as I write it. Disruptive compassion. I don’t know about you, but these two words ignite something inside me. It sets alight the rebellion I have against the cruelty of… Read More

2017: A term is coined WHAT IT’S NOTNaive. “Nice.” Sunshine and rainbows and utopia (at least not the kind you’re thinking). Hopepunk may be the opposite of grimdark, but that doesn’t mean it’s not grimy. WHAT IT ISWeaponized optimism.An understanding that the fight never ends.Radical compassion, cooperation (as opposed to violence) as an organizing principle, and a conscious choice to believe… Read More