Monsters in Love
How an anthology short became the most personal thing I've had to say about queer bonds.
If there’s ever a theme that I’m not necessarily in control of in my own work, it’s that love is matter. For me, there’s no other way to explain why certain bonds between people can shift and change across a lifetime. They created something between them, and it can start or end as vapor, crescendo as ice, or be a stream in the background… but it’s there. It’s matter, and it matters. When I was asked to pitch a story for Tiny Onion’s Monsters in Love: A Pride Anthology, I didn’t think I would be meditating on that theme, but that’s the exact place I landed.
The real hero in this entire entry is my editor, Greg Lockard. I did the thing no one should do: I sold him on the promise of an idea (one where I didn’t quite know where I was going to land), and he just ran with it. First, it was vibes.
“I want to tell a story that’s like P Craig Russell, Charles Vess vibes… about… a phoenix! Yeah, a phoenix, and a love that spans multiple lifetimes!”
(This is probably also a riff off what I thought Saltburn was going to be about. I walked into that movie knowing NOTHING, and when I saw Jacob Elordi’s beautiful face dressed in like seven different eras of clothing, sometimes in modern lighting or Shakespearean chic, I got so excited: a Russian nesting doll gay love story that spans multiple lifetimes!!!! No, it was Talented Mr. Ripley goes to Brideshead. I should still make a full comic about what I thought the movie was.)
Ever the amazing editor to collaborate with, Greg told me he had two categories for great short stories: the twist/ punchline at the end, or if it’s a successful vibes piece. Given that I was aiming for the latter, he was excited to see where I went with the story. I was excited too, given that I had no clue what the story even was! Either Greg or my friend (and fellow Monsters in Love contributor) Josh Trujillo was concerned with how I was going to handle multiple lifetimes in eight pages, but I was more concerned with how I’d portray an immortal firebird monster being “in love.”
My biggest hurdle was that even though a Phoenix is a fictional monster, it is first and foremost a bird. Approaching the story with a straightforward “human loves a monster” angle presented too many problems in terms of losing the reader the moment they start to think “Does that guy want to fuck a bird?” When I started to look at the story from the thought of how two misunderstood people find each other, that’s when possibilities opened up. This was also when the story started speaking to deeper nuances to queer romance.
Do other writers overthink their short story opportunities like this? For me, it felt like Greg was taking a chance on me, and that I knew I’d be working on something that reflected James Tynion IV’s larger universe of genre excellence, so I wanted to push myself and say something I hadn’t been given the chance to say, or showcase some skill that people hadn’t seen or expected from me. It took a lot of beating my head against many walls (and talking to my lifelong friend who literally has a PhD in the world of magic/ semiotics/ video games), but I found my angle…
An alchemist who spends all his time toiling away on projects no one else understands sees a flash of light in the late hours of the night. He finds a wounded phoenix. Being the only person who both understands not to fear the creature (and with the proper tools to mend its wounds), he heals the phoenix, and goes about his nighttime alchemy. From there, a bond is formed.
How that bond spans lifetimes, and how it says something new from me… well, you gotta read the story for that. I went for a simple storytelling approach, kind of challenging myself to also shut the fuck up as a writer and let the art tell the story. While I wish I could have had like five more months to figure out the art and get the style a little more storybook-y, I did my best and Greg seemed to think it was solid work.
The title was also a mind numbingly long process to get to the thing that was right under my nose. Originally, we called this story “Chains of Love,” because I was running around my apartment in a wig thrashing to the Charli XCX song of the same name when I was working on the story. That felt too trite, and then I went so stupidly on the nose with “The Alchemist and the Phoenix,” until the very end, when we had to send Aditya Bidikar the lettering draft of the script. Why “Of a feather” wasn’t the first thought I had? Being a human is fun!
Monsters in Love: A Pride Anthology is out June 10th from Dark Horse. Let me know how I did when you get a copy.
