Indigo Rue

"For your consideration" poster featuring 2 pieces of Photoshop composite art. One shows a giant octopus grabbing a man, for the short story Patient was the Doctor. The other is a red mermaid curled up in the sea, for the story titled milt. Both stories are stated to be free to read/listen to.

QR code for milt, reprinted in audio/podcast format on Escape Pod

QR code for Patient was the Doctor, in PDF form, on the Analog Magazine website

I have 2 short stories awards eligible this year!

1. Patient was the Doctor (PDF 📝) analogsf.com/for-your-con... with @analogsf.bsky.social (Locus & SFWA recommended)

2. milt (podcast reprint 🔉) escapepod.org/2026/02/12/e... with @bsfa.bsky.social and @escapepod.org (mild nsfw 🔥)

✅ WEIRD ✅ QUEER ✅ HORNY ✅ HOPEFUL LET'S GO

Listen to this story by @shiwritesprose.bsky.social if you also like weird queer horny mermaid stories

"Nothing is safe from the muck."

Read "Swampland" by the talented @erinbf.bsky.social at @flashfictiononline.bsky.social

"I didn’t realize that’s how God worked. That he punished little girls for things their parents did."

Read the rest of @marjeec.bsky.social's story at Maudlin House

Out now! A post-apocalyptic sci-fi weird horror short story, "The Desolate Order of the Head in the Water" by A.W. Prihandita. There's a picture of the magazine cover, Clarkesworld issue 232, featuring the torso of a huge robot covered in moss in a forest. In the background of the graphic, there are the words "new year, new story" in big fading text.

“The Desolate Order of the Head in the Water” by A.W. Prihandita. It’s about a child in search of his lost parents, in a post-apocalyptic world where all adults have implanted computers that have been hijacked by an AI-gone-rogue. It’s also like Thanos’s “snap my fingers and half the world dies,” but in the context of modern AI’s ecocide, written in the style of weird horror and the aesthetics of the uncanny valley. 
Footnote: “Weird horror” is aspirational. I was reading a lot of Brian Evenson. I hope this is weird enough! You can read for free at clarkesworldmagazine.com, buy a digital copy or a print copy, AND subscribe to the magazine for more outstanding short fiction.

If you like that scene from Pluribus where everyone speaks at the same time, saying the same thing, in the same cadence because they’ve been taken over by aliens—only in this story, it’s AI that has hijacked everyone around you. There’s a screen capture of the aforementioned scene, with the female lead character standing by a truck outside a hospital, a crowd of doctors, nurses, and other patients (none of whom are quite alive or conscious because they are victims of a virus that enables aliens to control them). The crowd chants as one, “We just wanna help, Carol.”

If you like this opening paragraph of Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism: “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a political project. It might rest on something sim-pler, too, like a new habit that promises to induce in you an improved way of being. These kinds of optimistic relation are not inherently cruel. They become cruel only when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially.” ... and think our relation with Al is maybe, definitely, a relation of cruel optimism. As in, why do people hope Al will help them find connection-through chats, storytelling, advice, therapy, whatever-when all it has ever done is further sever us from our humanity, our fellow humans, and our land, leaving us alone and parched?

Hello and happy new year! I'm pleased to announce I'm returning to @clarkesworldmagazine.com with a sci-fi- weird- eco-horror short story that's OUT NOW!

It's called "The Desolate Order of the Head in the Water."

Read here and subscribe! clarkesworldmagazine.com/prihandita_0...

Illustration of Enitan (a Black woman with brown skin and short black hair in a green tunic) and her sibling Xiang (a Chinese person in a reddish-brown tunic) by @ashcremated on Tumblr.

Happy New Year's Eve, y'all!!

This just in: THE SPLINTER IN THE SKY is 1.99 on Bookshop and Rakuten Kobo too!

✨ Bookshop: bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

✨ Kobo: www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/...

The children yearn for the underground

Read this heartbreakingly gorgeous micro by my friend @lyss-b.bsky.social

I have a new prose poetry piece, "Subway Surfing," out today at the lovely @lostballoon.bsky.social.

Thank you to Chelsea and the editors for giving this one a home.

I know! @beingcam.bsky.social is so talented!

I love this story in 1000 different ways.

If you have a moment, read my friend @marjeec.bsky.social's delightfully chilling story.

Congratulations, friends! 💜💜

What Jeané D. Ridges Has Published in 2025: ~ “the south pervades even the pluriverse” (https://stoneofmadnesspress.com/jeane-d-ridges ) ~ SISTORIES Issue V: Fluid By Nature — Contributing Editor as Luminary Editorial Incubator Fellow — Short Story “com·​mem·​o·​ra·​tion” & “Telling On Ourselves: Interviews with Black, Gender Unbound, (Dis)abled/Chronically Ill Speculative Storytellers of the South” ( https://www.sistories.org/b26db0d6-709b-4706-84f6-6f7dbe8b7af0 ) ~ “Writing the Space Between Here and Elsewhere: Interviews with Jennifer Hudak and Shingai Njeri Kagunda” (https://www.khoreomag.com/non-fiction/writing-the-space-between-here-and-elsewhere-interviews-with-jennifer-hudak-and-shingai-njeri-kagunda/ ) ~ “Porch Pull Up Ep. 204” (https://theseventhwave.org/publication/issue-18/jeane-d-ridges/) ~ “Recipes for the Course of Living” (https://www.juliarios.com/the-february-2025-issue-of-worlds-of-possibility/)

Trying an eligibility post for the first time. I'm grateful to myself for showing up this year to tend myself, the work, and community. Thankful for everyone I've met, deepened bonds with, and/or collabed to realize something wondrously meaningful.
With and wishing care always, Jeané 🫂

Congratulations! So well-deserved!

And this review by @laurabesley.bsky.social 🥹

Lee Aeronautics On a lazy mayfly day, we sit on Grandpa Lee’s wrap-around porch, purple-tongued and sticky-fingered from the grape soda and teriyaki jerky he keeps in the pantry because they’re your favorites.&nbs…

“You name each shape in sing-song, asking me to play along, but it’s the summer before seventh grade and I’m too old for make-believe.”

Read my contest-winning story, “Lee Aeronautics,” here:

White text on black background: Indigo, extremely cool generous pretty

Today’s rejection therapy

psssssttt just found out there are 15 print copies of The Celestial Seas up for grabs in a Goodreads giveaway! If a queer Moby Dick in space sounds fun please go check it out ✨✨✨

#thecelestialseas #scifibooks

"Something’s in the air these days, your neighbors say, and you have a sense they don’t mean the smoke or the ash."

Happy book birthday!!!

Drawing showing the two main characters of the book, Fen and Alekhai, back to back, facing off against hidden enemies. Art by Eepz.

Twenty years ago, her parents’ rebellion failed. This is the story of what happened after.

THE KING MUST DIE comes out tomorrow!

bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

Mood

A powerful story I think most creatives will relate to.

Bourbon Penn 37 Stories by Lavie Tidhar, Clelia Farris, Nick DiChario, Bree Wernicke, Nicoletta Giuseffi, S.F. Wright, and Andrew Daniel Dick. Cover art by Brian Haberlin.

Bourbon Penn 37 is live with brand new stories from Lavie Tidhar, Nick DiChario, Clelia Farris, Bree Wernicke, Nicoletta Giuseffi, S.F. Wright, and Andrew Daniel Dick.
@lavietidhar.bsky.social @breewernicke.bsky.social @dearnicoletta.bsky.social

POETRY by Bree Wernicke Welcome to the Horror Opposition Association!  Quote "Unless you move/transform/get eaten/somehow fail to maintain proper quantities of teeth, you’ve joined your local Horror Opposition Association, permanently. Yay!" 13 October 2025 Strange Horizons

Welcome to the Horror Opposition Association! 
by Bree Wernicke

"Unless
you move/transform/get eaten/somehow fail
to maintain proper quantities of teeth,
you’ve joined your local Horror Opposition
Association, permanently. Yay!"

Link ⬇️
strangehorizons.com/wordpress/po...

#poetry

I‘m going to double up on it because it’s absolutely worth reading twice: Metal From Heaven by August Clarke. For short fiction: I Am Fire by Y.M. Resnik

Get more from OTHERSIDE on Patreon a magazine of the queer fantastic.

To celebrate 200 total patrons, we're giving away a 6-month Patreon subscription, including Discord access & Issue 1 of OTHERSIDE in 2026!

Winner will be drawn on Monday! (We'll choose a bonus winner from free patrons, so be sure to sign up.) To enter, repost & reply with a favorite queer read.

We extended this to today (which is not, in fact Monday, if you are like us and lost track of space and time). Last chance to enter! Winner will be pulled at 4pm Eastern Time!