Improbable Press Blog — Volume Blue

By Ali Coyle I love to meet nonbinary characters in fiction. I love nonbinary protagonists, nonbinary antagonists, and nonbinary side characters hanging around in the background, waiting for their fleeting chance to exist and prod the plot along while the main characters catch a break. What I love even more is nonbinary characters who are sensitively written. But what does that mean to me? Below are my three favourite things about well-written, fictional, nonbinary characters. Disclaimer: this is my personal view as a nonbinary human and you are free to agree or disagree to whatever extent is comfortable for you....

By Cheryl Sonnier I didn’t know I had breast cancer when I wrote Investigating the Sea-Hag Menace, in April this year. I didn’t have the routine mammogram until mid-June, a month and a half after Improbable Press accepted the story for Dark Cheer: Cryptids Emerging (Volume Blue). A couple of weeks after that, I was called back for more tests, and on 2nd August I had a mastectomy on my right side. I know, however, that people who know about the breast cancer, when they read the story, they are going to think the line below from the story’s narrator...

By Dannye Chase "I went home," Pearl said. She knew she had a sharp mournful cry, and struggled to keep it out of her voice. "Your old home." "Enfield," Jessica said. "Oh, my dear, I haven't lived there in twenty years." My story of cryptids emerging focuses on the lifelong romance between a human woman, Jessica, and a swamp creature named Pearl, who is based on the legend of the “Enfield Monster.” In the story, Pearl’s memory has started to weaken with age. I based Pearl’s experience on a very good friend whom I lost to dementia. His name was...

The thing we want to do with the cryptid books is what we want to do with all our books – tell adventure-mystery-eerie-cool stories about everybody else. You know who I mean by everyone else, so I'll say little other than across volume blue and volume silver we have a siren in a wheelchair, an autistic sea monster, a trans shapeshifter, gay characters, disabled characters, minority characters – these two books (and a pending third) are filled with adventure tales about people who are these things but not just, not only – and half the time simply incidentally. Breathing Deep...

By Ali Coyle I am excited to have a short story in Volume Blue of Dark Cheer Cryptids Emerging, IP's new two-volume anthology. Why write about cryptids? Why not! Mythical creatures fascinate me, especially shapeshifters. I never quite felt comfortable in my skin as a human until I learned the words 'agender' and 'nonbinary' to describe part of my identity. As a child (and teen and adult), brought up with strict certainties about gender, in my imagination I was a shapeshifter who could choose to be male or female or both or neither, human or animal or alien, whatever made...