THE Teflon Tarantula

so of course every snake that has the instinct to warn humans of its presence gets killed, and only the snakes that bite first and dont make themselves known get to survive. a human who's been bitten is too worried about his swelling ankle to decapitate a snake with a shovel.

When this news broke my dad told me and my siblings, all of us who are US Citizens, born and raised in the US, that we have to carry some form of official documentation on us, especially because we live in a city that has been heavily targeted by the Trump administration for being a sanctuary city. My grandmother was staying with us and even though she is my non-latine grandmother, and she's a US citizen, my dad and aunt made the decision to have my dad drive her back home to New Jersey because she has an accent and her documents are back home.

As someone who is latine and south asian, I need you to know that this will not just affect latine people! My non-latine cousin was pulled over by ice about two weeks ago just for being brown! However this will disproportionately affect latine people. Just today ICE was seen on the street by my home and my work! One of my duties at work is to make sure that ICE does not come into our elementary school because we're a predominantly latine school. I HAVE TO MAKE SURE ICE DOES NOT KIDNAP 5 YEAR OLDS. That is the reality of the situation.

I want it to be known that I have been scared before because I'm living as a person of color in the United States. I have been scared before because of being a south asian born post 9/11. I have been scared before being a latina growing up during the Dreamer movement, despite being a citizen. However, before this week I have never been scared enough to feel the need to carry documentation proving I am a citizen of the damn country I was born in! Now I feel that scared though. Especially because a few months ago, for the first time in my life, someone assumed I didn't speak English. Another person of color assumed I didn't speak English and shit talked me in the CVS aisle because they assumed I didn't speak English. And then a week ago I also got mistaken for not speaking English when I went to the doctor's office and chatted with the receptionist in Spanish and then was handed Spanish paperwork to fill out.

Anyways, the point is the fact that I have seen maybe two? three? posts about this on here is upsetting and immensely telling. Speak up. Talk about the fact that this is happening because it will not stop with targeting latines. It will become worse. It already is because the government is going to punish immigrants for "making light of" charlie kirk's death. Not for celebrating, or joking, for making light of.

June 6th, 2025

Unbound, my former UK publisher, owe me a lot of money.

What’s worse, though, is that during their collapse, it came to light that they were underreporting my sales and shorting my royalty payments.

So, I haven’t been paid for the last 18 months of book sales, and when they were paying me, they were underpaying by a lot. It was gutting to hear that my second book had flopped in the US, selling under 1000 copies. Two years later I found out that it actually sold over 10,000 copies and the reason that it was selling no new copies week to week was because there were no copies left to sell.

John Mitchison, Unbound’s publisher, posted a heartfelt apology yesterday, announcing that he was stepping away from the business because authors are not getting their money. I feel a lot of empathy for John, because he, too, lost his dream to Unbound’s financial mismanagement. But the act of destroying a creative person’s confidence to hide the company’s monetary losses is unforgivable.

It took me two years to get over the feeling of rejection that came from a book that, it turned out, was successful and should have had a second printing.

That fucking sucks.