Hopepunk as a genre is still struggling to be born. It’s popping up in books like Becky Chambers’ Psalm for the Wild-Built, TV series like the third season of Star Trek: Discovery, and movies like Free Guy. In retrospect, I’ve been writing hopepunk for many years, but it was only in 2017 that I started writing it in an intentional… Read More

Do I start now or wait until the apocalypse is over? You know what makes me laugh? And by “laugh” I mean “chuckle knowingly but shake my head.” The idea that being hopeful is naive, childish, starry-eyed, PollyAnn-ish, or whatever disparaging term you use to tear down someone who dares to do something you’re too afraid to do. This makes… Read More

We have a very tangled relationship with hope. It’s like hot ex-lover we can’t quit. We deny we have it or even want it—we’re too cool for that! But we desperately, ardently do, and when there’s even a flicker of it, we leap up, hearts aflame, ready to tumble into love again because it just feels so good. Then we… Read More

Oh, how vulnerability terrifies us. And writing something called “hopepunk” opens you up wide to all the criticisms society lobs to keep us from hoping for better, daring to change, and worst of all, organizing collectively to make a difference in the world. “That will never change.”“It’s hopeless.”“You’re silly/foolish/naive to think anything like that could work.”“Work together? Have you met… Read More

It’s a testament to the hard reality of the last couple years that you could write a blog post titled, Writing in the Time of Insanity, and literally not know WHICH YEAR you were referring to. 2020, when SARS-COVID-19 shook the world to a standstill? 2021, when we had an armed insurrection at the Capitol? And a vaccine for the… Read More

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