Michael G. Williams 🏳️‍🌈

A very sincere happy 48th birthday to the day activist Thom Higgins threw a cream pie at anti-queer hatemonger Anita Bryant. :)

I don't know the details, but you are an awesome person and I am sorry you're having to deal with heavy shit!

@davidniallwilson.com thank you for moving away from Substack for your newsletter! Was pleased to see that in the most recent edition!

Ugh, Matt, I am so sorry to hear that! Continuing to think of you and yours!

Today’s scam email: the new “book club” variety, but localized such that it referenced a real bookstore and real book club about an hour from where I live. I checked the store site to confirm the email was bogus. When the scammers work this hard, I have to think a real job would be less effort.

FB drama: I just saw a cis-het man try to gatekeep trans horror. Have never unfollowed someone so quickly. Good lord.

just wrote about how the nc senate redistricting chair drew himself a new district in '23 that included App State and then redrew county commission maps that mostly neutered the vote of students at his alma mater over the objections of 71% of that county's voters www.ncrabbithole.com/p/why-voters...

Did I bury this in the timeline at 1:30 AM so that, absent an algorithm, no one would see it but I needed to get it down in words? Maybe. 😃

Anyway, it’s queer cosmic horror and if you happen to have read Children of Solitude then it’s about Isaiah King.

And then also there are horrible and inhuman things at the edges, like the sky is an arena ringed with monsters watching in coldest silence, and they know this has all been for the monsters’ disinterested delight, and *that* is how they reconnect to humanity? Because who hasn’t been there?

And what if they look at themselves and see the badness, and they want better, they want it so badly and it’s just right there, but the person they were could never have it—would never have known of it to want it in the first place—and the person they are now is too stuck in that mirror to act?

What I mean when I say “until the feelings are all there and in the right order”: but what if the most joyous moment of a bad person’s life ruins them, and they didn’t mean to be bad, and, bereft, they have to start small, and then joy taunts them, and then they realize they are their own problem?

I’ve been frustrated at having no time to write but also I haven’t been ready to write the next thing. I can’t start a book until the feelings are all there and in the right order (I know no other way to describe it). But the feelings are starting to arrange themselves. Mighty close to ready.

Semi-finalist graphic for TERROR AT TIERRA DE COBRE by Michael Merriam.

White man with beard and graying hair holding his book and a mug with his book cover on it.

Cover for LAST CAR AT ANNWN STATION by Michael Merriam.

#Booksky Big congratulatory 👍🏻 to author Michael Merriam @mmerriam.bsky.social! He is a finalist for the Starpath Creatives contest, a semi-finalist for the Small Spec Book Awards and he’ll be selling books at @creamandamber.bsky.social’s Fall Mini Market 10/11! queenofswordspress.com/authors/mich...

I basically have a book out every other year. Sometimes I’ll also manage a short story.

Still thinking of you, Matt! So sorry you are having to deal with this, but so glad you’re in good hands.

"The consumers won't care if it's AI."

Ah yes, horror fans -- y'know, the people who famously ask "Are the FX Practical?!" about literally every movie -- definitely won't care that you're feeding them prompt-generated slop. Good call there.

Tech bros are trying to convince us that the AI they’re building will one day become Data from Star Trek. But right now we’re headed for AM from “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.”

Our next campaign is about series! Here's the first 4 new books from Space Wizard:
DEC 2025: The Dragonscale Comb by J.S. Fields
JAN 2026: Corruption by Alexander Verbeek-van den Toren
FEB 2026: Tea Tale by Kristina W. Kelly
MAR 2026: The Healer's Magic by C.J. Hosack

#lgbtqfantasy #sapphic #gay

THE COME BACK KIDS is cosmic horror with tinges of sci fi, my take on "creepy kids" stories.

#writesky
#queerwriters
#lgbtqwriters
#writers
#LGBTQWriteAThon
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🩸📚
💙📚

Hi #LGBTQWriteAThon! My WIP is a mix of kids-on-bikes and dystopian adult sci-fi.

My current #WIP is set in Hazel Branch, NC, USA, a small town in the high mountains of Appalachia. It's a modern-day queer cosmic horror novel called THE COME BACK KIDS.

#LGBTQWriteAThon
🌈📚
🩸📚
💙📚

Hi #LGBTQWriteAThon!

My WIP is set in and around Colorado Springs, across three time periods: an apocalyptic 1993, a dystopian present, and the Late Cretaceous (75 million years ago). 🦖

Photograph looking up the trunk of a massive oak tree toward a colorful autumn canopy. Partway up the trunk, a white trail marker blaze has been painted on the bark.

Up-close photograph of ghost pipe, a parasitic, non-photosynthesizing plant growing low to the forest floor. The pale pink stalks terminate in pink knobs, where the summertime flowers have closed.

Photograph looking across a mown grass field toward a line of trees, with rolling hills beyond under blue sky.

Photograph looking up at a colorful forest canopy, popping with yellow and red autumn leaves.

Unseasonably hot amble on the Appalachian Trail today.
1. Big oak tree.
2. Ghost pipe gone to seed.
3. Fields.
4. Autumn color.

Do this! Bookshop.org is good stuff.

Sending you good thoughts and hoping you recover quickly and soon!

I feel a ton of despair at the moment so this is a long-distance supportive fist bump/friendly nod/etc to say yes, you are not alone in that.

Ray Bradbury really understood October
#booksky

My poem “Shapeshifters Local” has been published in the Autumn 2025 issue of @kaleidotrope.bsky.social, alongside what looks to be an amazing TOC. Read my poem here: kaleidotrope.net/autumn-2025/...

Landscape photograph of a pond catching autumn sunlight. The foreground is a shadowy wooded shoreline. The far shore is forested, with pops of fall color under blue sky.

Photograph of a sunny wetland area. Water and grassy open space fill the foreground. Autumnal trees form the middle ground under blue sky.

Photograph looking up the bole of a large, scraggly old maple tree touched with autumn orange.

Photograph of a hemlock forest catching sunlight in its branches. Bars of shadow stripe the forest floor.

In the woods today with @craftyrowan.bsky.social.
1. Pond.
2. Wetland.
3. Maple.
4. Hemlocks.