Several months ago, an acquaintance and fellow book enthusiast named Swapna Krishna reached out to me and graciously asked me to contribute a story to an anthology she was co-editing. I immediately said yes, even though I hadn’t written any fiction since high school, or any work of any length at all since my memoir was published in 2006. But it felt like too special an opportunity to pass up, as intimidated and uncertain as I felt.

The anthology will be called Sword Stone Table, and it will feature tales that reimagine characters and incidents from Arthurian legends, with an emphasis on stories that feature gender-bent, LGBTQIA, neuroatypical, and otherwise diverse casts of characters.

I write very very very slowly. I worked on my idea in my head for months, then finally began composing it about a month ago, getting out a couple of pages here, a couple of pages there. Well, after some real struggles clarifying some of my ideas for the story, and not always knowing how I was going to best express those ideas, at long last, tonight, I sent Swapna my first draft. I just wanted to take a moment to celebrate that fact. I hope Swapna responds well to it, and I look forward to engaging with her notes and feedback, and to diving in on the rewriting process, which I have always found to be much easier than the initial composition process.

That’s all.

Thanks for reading my first-ever official blog post!