#payment processing bullshit

And then I realized… I sell books on itch. Two books; one novel, one 14k word novelette. Nothing explicit, nothing "objectionable," just unapologetically sapphic.

And yeah. I checked. They're both delisted from itch.io's search all the same.

I don't want to cast this as a case of "I was one of the good ones," or anything like that. My decision to not write pornography is just a case of, well, my lack of interest in that particular genre. Porn deserves to exist just as much as "safe for work" creative outlets. But we knew that the war on porn was really a cardboard disguise for a war on all queerness, whether or not it "qualifies" as being "safe for work". You can't separate the one from the other.

Anyway. This isn't an essay, I'm not a theorist, just a creative writer who really shouldn't be surprised that her work was caught in the latest fascist wave of censorship.

I don't support myself with my writing; I'm a high school substitute teacher, and my partner also works full time to support us. But I'd be lying if I said money hasn't been tight these last few months; subs don't get paid during summer vacation, and also aren't eligible for unemployment since they're just "on break" for those months. I still have a job come September. But this censorship has shone a spotlight on how precarious art really is. I made a deliberate choice to pursue a day job that would allow me to continue my creative writing. And now that writing is, in a small way, being excluded by virtue of its queerness.

And that sucks. Full stop. It just sucks.

Go support your favorite queer artist right now; even if they don't sell through itch (or Steam), I'm betting that they need the support now more than ever.

If you wanted to support me, I'll pull together a list below of links to my work available online below the cut. Thankfully the itch.io links still work; these titles are just not listed through the search, limiting their discoverability, their reach. And thankfully other storefronts still list them, for the moment.