Storm Moon Press has a new queer superhero anthology out:
It’s not easy being a superhero. Sometimes it’s even harder when you’re super and queer. In Out for a Hero, LGBTQ heroes find themselves in tight spaces, moral quandaries, and sometimes heated romance.
In The Integrals, Kaveri, the daughter of two super dads, struggles to conceal her possibly criminal crush. But when Morning Glory clashes with her parents’ team, she has to decide how to work with her own developing powers to save the day, and her girl.
Sparks highlights the complications of an after-hours club where both superheroes and villains go to mingle. When Ignition meets Fusion, the leader of a supervillain group, she’s forced to dig deeper into the group’s activities to discover just who’s being wronged.
Patrick has a reluctant grasp on his own gift of fire extinguishing, and he recalls the day it took his lover, Victor, away in Firebreak. As he tells the story to Nissa, clues emerge that indicate that Victor might not be so lost after all.
In DVDRW, a hero with the ability to rewind and replay time falls in passionate love, or lust, with Michael, a normal human with bad connections. What starts as fixing horse races escalates into military exercises, until it’s almost too late to back out.
The hero of Pedal to the Mettle finds that transitioning is hard enough, but doing it when you’re a super-powered alien brings a whole set of troubles, until Floyd, another alien who just wants to go back home, makes him an offer he can’t refuse.
Lastly, in A Memory of Wind, Yeni investigates the secret of missing passengers and empty quarters on the starship that is her home. Her search for answers leads her to Wind, a flying woman who can help her learn what she needs to know.
Excerpt
“Cosmic Gir– Cosmic Man,” he self-corrected. His face was blank, so I couldn’t tell if he was embarrassed or mad at himself for forgetting. At this point, I was just glad that he’d bothered. “Do you want us to take him from here?”
I studied Floyd and resisted the urge to put my hands across my chest. It was still unfamiliar in the suit, and I wasn’t happy with the way it appeared. I also missed the cape. Maybe I would have to bring back the cape. Sure it sucked in the wind sometimes, but it provided a little bit of cover in times like these. Naieema had assured me that my ass looked ‘hella fine’ from the back, but I still didn’t know if I wanted it to be all over my fanpages. Talk about B-roll.
“No, I’ll take him.” I waved a hand at the cars and stopped traffic. “You want me to move this first?” Clearing accidents to the side of the road was one of the few things I did that endeared me to the local populace more than anything else. If you see a semi on its side, and you can literally drag it to the shoulder, stop and fucking drag the semi. Don’t be a dick, boys and girls.
So I moved the truck off to the side, stacked the cash machines in the sidewalk, wrapped my hand around Floyd’s wrists like a vice and pulled him up into my arms before taking off. His eyes fluttered open, and he smiled, and it was the saddest thing I’d seen in a while.
It’s not Floyd’s fault that he has three missing teeth—I knocked them out four years ago, and sadly, his alien biology won’t allow him to receive implants, courtesy of the prison medical program. On the other hand, he literally fell into my fist. He was falling off a building and I was trying to catch him and he was pulling out a firearm and I was trying to not get anyone shot and he was trying to totally shoot me, and the next thing we knew, we had collided in midair like two drunken teens on the prom night dance floor.
His head rolled to face me as I coasted over the back of the police station toward the front. There would be a unit waiting there to put him in the manacles that I designed especially for him years ago. You would think, by now, Floyd would have just given up on the whole criminal thing and gotten a job in the movies, or maybe a roaming carnival. He had many fine qualities. Somewhere.
“You know,” he said quietly, “I liked you better when you were a chick.”
I seriously thought about just dropping him.
— from “Pedal to the Mettle” by Gretchen Crane
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