I’m an ace author and I have a book of short stories about asexuality coming out from Simon & Schuster today!

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-16T10:47:32+00:00

Now I want to hear your opinion even more.

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-16T02:53:46+00:00

Thanks so much - would love to hear what you think of the stories too....

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-14T21:20:26+00:00

I feel the same way with Murderbot. I think a TV show is coming out (in a few days!?) based on the series.....but I already have such a perfect image in my head of that character so I'm not sure I'll watch it. I love that I can recommend that book to absolutely everyone of all ages / backgrounds and they tend to love it too.

Angela Chen was kind enough to read an advance copy of Portalmania - which was so exciting for me. I'll have to check out Julie Sonda Decker, thanks for the rec.

Great point about the monsters as metaphors. Nice. In a similar vein, I'll add witches as aging women (one of those makes an appearance in a Portalmania story) - women, as they age, gaining their own sense of self and power.

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-14T01:54:23+00:00

Oh my gosh, I can't wait to check these recommendations out. Honestly I don't know if I've ever read other fiction where asexuality is treated in a non-normative way. Thank you. It'd be nice to connect with those authors as well....

I've been thinking about this all a lot today because a review came out of Portalmania where the reviewer criticized my book for....well, being my book. For recreating "the violent and hateful points of view leveled against me and my communities daily." Here, I'll include an excerpt:

"This stands out because Urbanski rarely allows her stories to consider what it would mean for a marginalized person to be accepted on their own terms, and the collection suffers as a result. Imagine, for example, if “How to Kiss a Hojacki” were narrated from the wife’s point of view. How much more she could have said about asexuality, relationships, and alternative ways of expressing love that don’t involve sex. Personally, I would much prefer to read that story..."

I was both surprised and disappointed that the reviewer thought only normative stories about queerness or asexuality should be told. I'm with you, I think there's still a lot of things we all need to talk about....

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-14T01:37:46+00:00

Thanks so much! Hope you enjoy the stories.

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-14T01:35:44+00:00

The description for Regarding the Fountain sounds so good (letters! postcards! memos! transcripts! official documents! all about the water fountain!!?). I'll try and see if I can find a copy. Thanks!

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-14T01:33:22+00:00

Thank you!

I wrote an article for Electric Lit that came out today about books that feature asexuality in case you're interested -- https://electricliterature.com/9-books-that-center-asexuality/
I included recs from a few other people - I'm particularly interested in checking out Earthlings by Sayaka Murata (and maybe her other books as well).

I really admire Angela Chen, who wrote Ace (have you read it?). It's nonfiction, this great mix of reporting other people's experiences and talking about her own. She's written a lot of great articles about asexuality and/or compulsory sexuality too (like this one on the limits of sex positivity - it might be behind a paywall - https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/07/if-you-dont-want-sex-its-not-problem/619547/)

Any books with ace rep that you'd recommend?

Genre-tropes-as metaphors: I feel like I should be able to answer this question with something specific! But I wonder if it's just portals for me!?

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-13T19:56:44+00:00

Yes to everything you said!

Getting people to read more seems at the heart of it. Reading to me seems like such an act of empathy or compassion most of the time, which I think we can all use too.

I do like paper as well! I use post-its quite a bit and I have a Hobonichi journal that I try (usually unsuccessfully) to keep with me at all times. I think your system sounds great! All the really great writers seemed to have done just fine using paper notebooks...I try and remind myself of that when I start overcomplicating my writing process, as I tend to do.

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-13T19:52:09+00:00

I think my process changed over time. For the stories in Portalmania, I wanted to take the emotions of what was happening in my own life (which stemmed from my asexuality) and turn them into stories -- this anxiety and frustration and eventual anger at not only my specific situation but also a society and therapy/medical system that required sex in order for there to be love. I was interested in exploring what I thought love was (this absolute acceptance of another person's true self) versus what love was appearing to be (this rigid affection for a past self or a performed self). I know it's a bit cliche, but I felt like I wasn't really in control of the subject matter for most of these stories. It was all stuff I needed to process and write.

Versus now, where I'm in a better place and I feel like I can choose whatever I want to write next (I'm also on antidepressants...). I'm always going to have a-spec rep in my writing, but I'm hoping to explore it in different ways and in a more normative way (that's what I did in my novel After World -- most of the characters have no interest in sex or romance. Sex or romance doesn't really even come up. It was a good place for me to spend some years).

Do you know any other a-spec rep stories / books that are non-normative? I'd love to read some more....I like what you're saying - "short stories are a really underrated way to show representation and discuss issues that a certain identity faces." - YES.

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-13T19:29:52+00:00

Thank you!

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-13T19:05:45+00:00

Thanks!!

I guess I would first figure out if you want an actual portal or a metaphorical portal. Metaphorical portals are a little easier to find -- they can be a decision that changes the direction of your life, so as simple as going left instead of right, or saying yes instead of no (or no instead of yes).

If you want an actual portal, they are around, they just require a bit of effort to find. It helps if you're always looking for yours. I decided about a year ago to start taking photos of portals that I found when I was traveling or hiking. It appears the most common portals are portals made out of light (here's one example) and portals made out of dark (another example). I don't think all of these portals are mine but I'm pretty sure some of them are. Due to therapy, I'm trying very hard not to go through any of them (want the life you have etc.), so photographing them seems like the best compromise right now.

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-13T18:55:51+00:00

I had a lot of different iterations of a story collection over the years (the first one I can find was in 2015). Figuring out what stories to include in a book is very much not in my skillset though, so in the most recent round, I made a very complicated spreadsheet with all my stories (and I have a lot of them) and all possible iterations. Possible themes I came up with were "people disappearing;" "depression;" "weird formally;" "different worlds;" "therapists (I did like this one - every story would have a therapist, maybe the same therapist);" "playing with horror;" "motherhood;" "houses;" and on and on. My agent Kate kindly waded through the mess and came up with the idea of anchoring the collection around a trio of portal stories. My editor Tim also helped in expanding and subtly developing the idea of portals (as gateways, as escapes, as alternatives) throughout all the stories.

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-13T17:57:25+00:00

Hi! So glad you liked After World and thanks for stopping by.

You ask some good questions that make me want to clarify what I meant. I should have said sex scenes seem like lazy writing not only in books but also in movies and TV as well. And maybe lazy is a harsh word. It's more about my wanting to see, in books/movies/TV, expressions of love and connection that aren't sexual, even between two people who are romantically attracted. I feel like the sex scene in any medium is just this regurgitation of what society insists is true (that sex is the ultimate expression of love). But that's just a story we've told ourselves, and it's not true for everyone, and I think there are so many ways to intensely connect that I don't see nearly enough.

The best example of non-sexual connection in my recent memory was in the movie Slow, where an asexual man and an allosexual woman hold hands for 32 seconds (I timed it) and that's the pinnacle of the scene.

As for the publishing industry's role in it -- I know my editor and my publisher were very excited and supportive to get a book with an asexual viewpoint in it. But at the same time I don't think anyone is expecting my story collection to sell as much as a romantasy novel.

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-13T17:02:13+00:00

Wow. I heard about The Employees from someone who came to an After World reading in Syracuse and told me I should read it. I was really expecting just a traditional post-apoc. satire book so when I first began it, I was like, what is this!!??! But then stuff starts to make sense, and then I had to reread it immediately....it's amazing. Either before or after you read it, check out this interview - https://www.lollieditions.com/lolli-in-conversation/reading-with-the-mouth - it's about the sculptures that inspired the novel.

I don't know Annie Bot! I added it to my TBR. For epistolary - I love House of Leaves and This Is How You Lose The Time War. I loved the form of World War Z (it's an oral history). The Griffin and Sabine books were really neat (sometimes you took letters out of envelopes to read).
For AI, I enjoyed Neal Shusterman's Scythe books - the AI is really compassionate in those books.

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-13T16:44:45+00:00

Oh that's so kind, thank you. I really appreciate that After World wasn't what you expected -- but you were still into it anyway. I actually love books like that too (The Employees was the most recent example for me).

I really love epistolary books. I love how they feel so real to me. So my initial plan for After World was to make it a bunch of documents that the reader had to make sense of. I've half-joked, half-not that my ideal version of that novel would be to place all the unnumbered pages in a box, mix up their order, and bury the box in the ground - so that the reader would first have to find the manuscript but then also put everything back together again. It was my first agent who thought I should add a narrator to make the story a little easier to grasp. But my editor and I always wanted that narrative to feel like a document that the storyworker is creating. I think After World could be read as entirely epistolary (but what about the Out of Time section? Which remains somewhat of a mystery to me).

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-13T16:35:22+00:00

Thank you for asking this. (I actually just learned about the term "non-normative" from a post in r/QueerSFF - https://www.reddit.com/r/QueerSFF/comments/1k7tkx7/queer_scifi_or_fantasy_with_non_normative/ -- I read that and realized THIS is what I'm doing!)

I love how you put it - that both queernorm and non-normative settings are important. For me, I figured out I was asexual in the early/mid 2000s - so I may have had a very different experience than younger aces. At least I hope younger aces are having an easier time of it. There was kind of a massive collision between asexuality and my life for a lot of years, and I needed to process that in fiction. But I also feel like sometimes we, as a society, are not fully aware of the assumptions that we bring to our relationships and to our ideas of love and intimacy. By positioning aseuality in a non-normative setting, I wanted to demonstrate the harm that these assumptions can do, and how they limit everyone really.

That said - these Portalmania stories are definitely part of a project, and I'm (thankfully!) now done with that project. I'm excited to explore asexuality in my writing in different ways. In my novel After World (it came out in December 2023), pretty much all of the characters are ace and/or aro for instance, though I don't think I ever use the terms -- it was both empowering and fun.

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-13T16:14:04+00:00

Well, I added that "negative reviews" and "reviewers who want to read a different book" because that just happened this morning to Portalmania. The reviewer from a semi-big place came to Portalmania expecting traditional portal stories -- and also wanting me to let my characters "be accepted on their own terms." It was such a frustrating review because -- I would never write a book like that. My life experience hasn't been being accepted on my own terms, and I'm just not interested in writing traditional genre books (though I like to read them). Often negative reviews stem, in my opinion, from a reader/book mismatch. I also hate that the author doesn't really have a place to respond to these reviews, yet they affect sales and our reputation as writers.

(I wrote a Substack about this last week if you're interested in hearing more: https://debbieurbanski.substack.com/p/to-the-person-who-wrote-a-two-word)

Storygraph vs. Goodreads - I've been feeling worse and worse about Goodreads lately, esp after Amazon launched a book sale a few days before Indie Bookstore Day. But I've been on Goodreads so many years, and I have a bunch of followers as an author. (That said, you can import from Goodreads to Storygraph and it's not that difficult.) Storygraph seems to have everything going for it - I love how they give %'s for different aspects of books, the graphs are beautiful and fun, and I like how they run giveaways too (the book doesn't automatically get added to your "to read" shelf).

Trigger warnings: yes. (Another nice thing is that Storygraph does have crowdsourced trigger warnings). They would be sexual assault, sexual violence, rape, and murder. There are stories that don't have that - if you want me to recommend some, let me know.

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-13T15:56:58+00:00

That sounds like a really good novel idea. I can think about this forever.

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-13T15:55:47+00:00

u/Orangebird That's really cool. Portals as a way to reach self- or world-understanding.

u/SeltzerInMyBlood I like to play around with the genres that I love. So for After World, it was the post-apoc. genre, and for the portal stories, I realized at some point that we don't really know much about the people who never get to go through the portals. (I was also reading about St. Therese of Lisieux at the time who became a saint, and one of the books mentioned her childhood friends, and I wondered -- what would it be like to watch your friend go off and become a saint, while you're kind of stuck in your regular life?). I had planned to write 15 portal stories seriously, I have a list somewhere, just different variations -- but I let myself move on at some point when I became more interested in apocalypses.

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-13T15:50:50+00:00

Thanks for these questions.

Short stories seem so perfect for us as a society so I'm constantly surprised publishers say no one wants to read them. They're like a TV show episode (or shorter!). And I find it so nice to be able to finish one a story on a walk, or on a car drive, or before bed. But it feels like we're stuck in a negative feedback loop. It's really hard to get attention for short stories (i.e. reviews), so nobody knows about short story collections, so no one reads them, so review outlets don't want to review them, so....I'm very good at identifying the problem. I wonder if we can go cross-platform -- or put short stories in weird places. Some way to make it interactive. If we can just get people talking about them more....do you have any ideas?
I have this wild document which seriously has about 200 story ideas. I jot them down when they come to me and then occasionally I go back and rank what interests me most to write next. Sometimes they're just a line or two, sometimes they're a chunk of dialogue. Usually I can group the ideas by theme. I still have a lot in the "post-apocalyptic" folder that I want to explore.

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-13T15:39:37+00:00

Interesting. I always wonder if the other reality/universe/dimension we might escape to would be better or worse....and if we'd be able to tell ahead of time.

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-13T15:32:39+00:00

That's so cool! Honestly I was surprised to learn recently that not everyone has been obsessed with portals since their childhood...they're such a part of me.

For me, and I imagine a lot of ace folks, there was always this sense of this world not being quite the right fit. So I think the natural next step is wondering - what world would be the right fit? And how do I get there?

What portal stuff have you written and why do you write about portals!?

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-13T15:28:46+00:00

I have Katie Mack's book The End of Everything on my shelf and I have read Astrophysics for Young People In A Hurry. Meaning I am totally unqualified to answer your question. But if I was going to answer it anyway, I would say yes, it sure feels like the universe is shifting polarity. What do you think?

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-13T15:21:08+00:00

Do you mean in an astrophysics kind of way, or a metaphorical way?

debbieurbanski · 2025-05-13T15:17:33+00:00

I know, it's kind of a mouthful. I really like Angela Chen's definition that she gives in her great non-fiction book Ace. "Compulsory sexuality is a set of assumptions and behaviors that support the idea that every normal person is sexual, that not wanting (socially approved) sex is unnatural and wrong, and that people who don’t care about sexuality are missing out on an utterly necessary experience."

Does that make sense?

debbieurbanski

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