This site

These are things I’ve written, drawn, (maybe) photographed (if we ever decide to post any of those here), or otherwise made.

You may have noticed tags next to some of the titles. Here’s what they mean:

This is not safe for work.

There is content advice here.

(‘Content advice’ means the same thing as ‘content warnings’. I like the former phrase for its connotations, which feel to me more polite; I’m not warning you to stay away, only offering advice that you are welcome to consider and act upon at your leisure.)

Links which bear these tags are safe to follow. Whatever merited the tag isn’t shown until you’ve had a chance to consider the attached content advice, and chosen to proceed. You can also go back, without ever seeing the tagged content at all.

Links which do not bear these tags are also safe to follow. If a link is not tagged, it’s safe for work, and it includes nothing which would merit content advice.

I’ve done my best to make sure that anything meriting either or both of these tags has them. If you find something that should, but does not, please let me know! You’ll find my contact information on the bottom of every page.

There’s also RedFlag, a lovely service that lets you set up content-warned links for anything on the Web. I hope you won’t need it for my site, but it’s there for everything else!

Me

Hi! I’m Alexis. I do things and I am things.

I’m a writer, primarily of speculative fiction and weird tales, occasionally of poetry, blog, and assorted et cetera.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve imagined other worlds. Eventually I decided to try to share them, and that’s what I’m doing here. They are all, in one fashion or another, worlds I’d like to see, and in which I’d like to live. Writing about them, creating them, for me is a way of doing that. Perhaps reading about them will be something similar for you. I’d like to hope so, and I hope you find them as appealing as I do.

They’re all love stories, one way or another, and they’re likewise all autobiographical. That probably says a lot about me. You’re welcome to try to figure out what.

I’m a wildlife photographer, with a particular interest in urban fauna, raptors, arthropods, and waterbirds.

A fox trotting along a grassy hillside, pausing to glance suspiciously back at a human whose business in her woods she questions, is beautiful. A jumping spider, motionless save the two big central eyes scanning its own reflection, is beautiful. An osprey soaring above the harbor, big bright eyes spying fish as they dart to and fro beneath the waves, is beautiful. A big shiny shield beetle trundling along a handrail, its tiny mind full of beetle occasions, is beautiful. A Polistes metricus wasp, whatever she might happen at any given moment to be doing, is extremely beautiful.

My mother taught me to recognize and appreciate such beauty; my grandfather taught me to preserve it in photographs.

I’m a vector artist, apparently!

A week ago, at time of this writing, I wasn’t. But since then, we’ve made this and this and they seem to be pretty good!

We’re intersex and genderqueer…

We’re not really plural, we think, but there exist a male me and a female me who most times mostly overlap, and occasionally make ourselves more distinct when to do so suits our purposes. This makes perfect sense to us, especially since the body we share is chimerically 47,XXY. We graciously do not require that it make any sense to you.

…but mostly we just think of ourselves as a monster.

And why not? We’re a chimera and a hydra, just to start out with. What are those, if not monsters?

It’s an interesting word, ‘monster’. Sure, it means a horrible slithering tentacled thing that strikes terror into the hearts of men. (Or anyone, really, if you like. We’re not picky, but we do operate exclusively on vampire rules: first, you have to invite us in.)

But ‘monster’ also means a creature of omen and of wonder, and while we make no representation of ourselves as such a beast, this is certainly what we try to be, certainly if nowhere else in our - in my - stories.

And, too, ‘monster’ means a wellspring of knowledge, ready to share itself with any who should desire to learn. (We most typically see this sense of the word in ‘demonstrate’, which shares the root.) While, again, we make no representation of success, we try to be this, too.

We’re a huge nerd, too.

And this page is a work in progress, because if we sit here and mess with it until we decide it’s finished, this site will never go live.