“Disability can be a queer thing to talk about – at least until you’re high and asking: what even is any of this shit? Arlee Sullivan, known throughout the Pacific Northwest by her stage name ‘Arlee the Dragon’, had been high for almost three days now – ever since she dropped the music video for her single “Give Head to the Marginalized”. That’s when the backlash had started coming in. It’s amazing how people don’t bother listening to your art until they find a reason to hate it.“

This is how Light-Roasted Spider-Fems, my long-term speculative fiction project, begins. The novel is about 31-year-old artist Arlee, who after experiencing a public cancellation, is caught in a gas explosion and finds herself blasted into the apocalyptic world inside a coffee mug she must set out on a journey to find her place in this universe.

The book a re-imagining and expansion of a fantasy novella I wrote and published on a very limited-run more than ten years ago about a disabled boy who falls into a coffee mug. Returning to this project in 2025 with a different positionality than I wrote with in 2014, I am revisiting the same world through the lens of what I have learned about internalized ableism, disabled identity development, and the aftermath of an explosion over the decade since.

I am sharing a first look at my draft over on Patreon, one chapter per month, starting with Chapter 1 in May 2026 and concluding after 19 chapters and an epilogue in December 2027. This is a behind-the-scenes look at my draft, and the story may change further if I pursue traditional or self-publishing.