Introductions, Projects, and Past Works
New to me? This is a good place to start.
*dusts off hands*
Okay, so things seem to be settled in enough for a proper introduction, so … Hello! I’m Bats. I’m a fiction writer, of both the original fiction and the fanfiction variety, and all of it very genre-focused. You’ll see fantasy, horror, science fiction, romance, and adventure from me, and while I dabble in short stories, novels are my bread and butter. Also, while not exclusively the case, most of my stories are sapphic interest.
It’s been a while since I’ve had a professional writing presence online because there was this whole gender thing, you see, and my first name changed to Eris, though the Bats name’s been around forever and didn’t change, but all the stuff was in my deadname, not Eris, so it got all deleted, and now I’m here starting over. And because I have a couple of active projects in the works, it’s Time™ for this to happen. So! First things first, here’s what’s in the works that you can expect on a somewhat short but like not really because these things always take forever timeline:
Current Projects
I have recently finished a novel! Here’s a quick synopsis:
Scars of the Grimalkin: No Pets Allowed
After living in the same apartment for years, Jenny Sumner is ready for a change. Finding something that's in her budget, and still within spitting distance of her best friend, Lucia, is a little easier said than done. That is, except for an apartment just down the block from where Lucia works. The price seems a little too good to be true, and has everything Jenny could want, including hardwood floors and air conditioning, and it even has an Olympic-sized pool, though that's a bigger selling point for Lucia than it is for Jenny. It's basically the perfect place ... except that the listing says no cats, and there's no way in hell she's not taking her cat, Moxie, with her. But, perhaps, Jenny has a workaround for moving into the place that's too good to be true ... and, perhaps, it seems too good to be true because it is.
No Pets Allowed is an paranormal fantasy/supernatural horror original fiction novel, about 90k words total, and it’s been literally years in the making around other projects. It started out as a sequel to/reimagining and expansion of a short story I wrote (more on that down below), with the initial chapters written in 2015. In stops and starts, that first drift was written, chopped up, and put back together over the next few years, with a finished draft in 2019. It then sat in a drawer somewhere before I finally got up the gumption to go through my finishing edits, and the completed manuscript is going through some final reviews as we speak.
That dovetails nicely to the second project, which has to do with the publication of No Pets Allowed. I’m going to play the details of this a little close to my chest, but I’ll be more forthcoming as things start to come to fruition. The short, mum’s the word version is that this is in progress, with a planned release of probably 2026, unless things go much faster than I’m expecting. The release will be as an ebook for sure, and may also have a paperback print edition, but that remains to be seen. As this gets closer to happening, I’ll provide updates and fill in some of the details I’m being cagey about now.
Next up, I have recently submitted a short story to an anthology collection! Here’s a quick blurb on that story:
Tales Told in the Desert
Camped out in the desert with a gun at his side, Jim isn't sure that starting a fire is worth the risk of attracting unexpected guests. The one guest he gets, though, is a mangy, one-eyed coyote, looking for a pan of water … and maybe a story or two.
Tales Told in the Desert is a short story around 8k words in length, and the genre is weird western. This one was also originally written in 2015, as part of a short story jam, and I’ve held onto it with the vague plan of maybe publishing an anthology of my own short stories, once I had enough to fill a book. That hasn’t happened, and if it has a home in a different anthology, then that’s all the better.
The publication on this one is markedly different in plan compared to No Pets Allowed, since it’s far less of a sure thing. There’s a planned anthology with open submissions, and since I had a story that’s been lying around that fit the guidelines, I decided to enter it. I won’t go into details about the anthology beyond that since, like, it’s early in the process, I have no idea if the entry will be accepted, and I’m not looking to make a stink if they reject it. If it’s accepted, I’ll update here with the news and provide details and links for the anthology once it’s available. If it isn’t accepted, then I’ll take it in good humor with no hard feelings and just mention that it wasn’t accepted. If that were to happen, the story will go back to lying around for now, but might see the light of day at some point.
And last on the docket of current projects, I’m hard at work (or perhaps hardly working) on a new dark fantasy/romance original fiction novel! This blurb is a lot less settled, since I’m not anywhere close to finishing it.
Vorstnacht (working title)
Every year, when the gods go to sleep, the cold weather returns and blankets the kingdom in Vorstnacht, the long winter. Gwendolyn, a regal mage, spends her Vorstnacht on the outskirts of the kingdom in the little town of Dessel, a settlement that just grew big enough for the Regal Mage Academy to send out one of their members to shepherd the people through the harsh weather. Her assignment is about over, but as winter is supposed to end, for some reason, the warm weather doesn’t come, and wolves are howling at the doors.
This one, thankfully, was started much later than 2015. The first bits of it were written in … 2021, oh god, what is time anymore. Anyway! It’s the current thing on my plate, it’s fully outlined, and I’m picking at words as I can. The current draft as of this blog has about 13k words, and while I’m absolutely terrible at estimating these things, it’s probably gonna be in the ballpark of 100k words. This one seeing the light of day is gonna take a while, as I actually have to write the blasted thing first, but it’s what I’m currently working on.
So that wraps up the in-the-pipeline news. With that out of the way, for those who are curious about things that I’ve done before, here’s a quick rundown of projects, plus links where available, so if you want to check out my older stuff, you’re able to.
Past Stuff (Original Fiction)
There isn’t a ton to talk about here, unfortunately, as this is mostly forward-looking. There are some stories I have finished, as well as some things that have starts but no endings, which may or may not show up in a future update about things in-the-pipeline, but if we’re talking things that have already seen the light of day, there’s only one of those.
Lost Things
Jenny is a bit of a shut-in, and her best friend Lucia has a thing or two to say about that. Try as she might, though, Jenny can’t seem to bring herself to really want to leave her apartment … nor does her apartment seem to want her to leave, either.
This is the aforementioned prequel/original conception of No Pets Allowed, a paranormal fantasy/supernatural horror short story of about 9k words. Lost Things was published in 2017 under my deadname in a horror anthology called Restless, published by Frith Books. Restless was a cool little book, but unfortunately the press shuttered shortly after its publication and it’s since gone out of print. I retain publishing rights to it, though, and this is going to show up again in some form or another as No Pets Allowed gets closer to its release.
Past Stuff (Fanfiction)
Ah now, here we have way too many things to list individually! I would imagine that many reading this know me better from the fanfic days than the originals, as I have been quite the prolific fanfic writer, publishing under the name Bats for the past 13 years or so. I won’t go through all of it, because that’s like 40 things, but we’ll break it down by fandom.
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
This was where I got started and cut my teeth on writing. In the summer of 2012, I watched what was then a two season show, became totally enamored with the characters, turned to fanfiction to get the fix I was missing while waiting for a new season, went, “All right then, I’ll do it myself!” when I ran out of stuff I wanted, and then spent the next few years of my life writing story after story. Not to be too up my own ass about it, but I got to be fairly well known in the heydays of the show, and wrote what many consider to be a fandom classic, Spellbound Fireflies. I also wrote a story called Fluttershy Kicks a Puppy that gets the most, “You wrote that story!?” reactions out of anything else I’ve written.
The Owl House and She-Ra
It was a similar, though shorter history for The Owl House as My Little Pony. I watched the first season in 2020, wrote a fairly well regarded novel, Dangers in Fiction, while waiting for season 2, plus a couple of other stories. I also wrote some She-Ra to try something new around the same time, because fanfic can be a lot of fun. Which is why I’m including these fanfic stories here in this section! My experience in writing goes back over 30 years to my childhood, and while I always wanted to be a writer throughout my younger adult life, it was writing fanfiction that let me cut my chops and actually get good at it. These stories are not and cannot be for commercial purposes, but that doesn’t make them lesser, and I think fanfiction should be celebrated.
So What’s Next?
Next up for me is, currently, more writing. I’m tapping away at Vorstnacht (which should hopefully have a much, much shorter production cycle than No Pets Allowed) while things come together for publishing. Next update will hopefully have some good news on that front.
That’s all I got for this intro blog.
TTFN