Welcome Ziggy Schutz to the blog! Ziggy’s latest novella, Twice-Spent Comet is out now and it is absolutely beautiful. Such a heartwarming story of found family and romantic love. The structure is so well-done with snippets of an omniscient narrator at the beginning of each chapter introducing elements of the story. There is a big theme of magic in the novella and Ziggy has produced just that–a magical tale! Here is Ziggy’s favorite character in the story.
twice-spent comet revolves around a found family, and because of that, I often find myself having a different favourite character every time I read it. But if I had to choose, I would have to choose my own lead.
Fer’s voice was something that I really had to work at. I knew how I wanted their cadence and point of view to feel, and I knew I wanted to balance their contradictions just so — a revolutionary and a realist, a collector of endings and a believer in wishes. And in working and reworking their voice, what I kept finding was that every time Fer’s voice got stronger, the rest of the cast felt brighter. In understanding Fer, I could better see how dazzled they are by each of their companions. It was a really fun way to discover my own cast, as Fer and Ophelia were the only ones I had clear plans for, before I started writing.
Fer’s my favourite character, because they helped me fall in love with all of the rest of the characters, and that in turn made the story that much better. And I hope they get to play that same role for the readers, too.
~Ziggy

TWICE-SPENT COMET by Ziggy Schutz
RELEASE DATE: Dec 3, 2024
GENRE: Science Fiction / LGBTQ
BOOK PAGE: https://meerkatpress.com/books/twice-spent-comet/
SUMMARY:
The fall from hopeful revolutionary to prison laborer is a hard one. Fer’s world has shrunk from the whole damn universe to this anonymous asteroid and the four other convicts who share it with them. It’s a fitting end, for someone who used to wish on stars but now can only seem to collect endings.
But magic and falling stars have ways of finding those who need them, and when Fer takes a chance and looks up, there’s a mermaid staring back at them, silhouetted by stars.
twice-spent comet is a fairy tale for forgotten places and the people whose stories are stuck waiting for the next sentence.
BUY LINKS: Bookshop.org | Amazon
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ziggy Schutz is a young queer writer living on the west coast of Canada. She’s been a fan of superheroes almost as long as she’s been writing, so she’s very excited this is the form her first published work took.
When not writing, she can often be found stage managing local musicals and mouthing the words to all the songs. Ziggy can be found at @ziggytschutz, where she’s probably ranting about representation in fiction.
GIVEAWAY: $25 Meerkat Press Giftcard
GIVEAWAY LINK: http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/7f291bd844/?
EXCERPT
1
In the beginning, before Humans had claimed the stars as their own, they held hands as they watched lights streak across the sky and called it Magic.
Magic, as everyone knows, must be Spoken and Heard and Believed, and so it was so, that stars were Magic, and those that fell especially so.
Sometimes, the beginnings of stories are just as simple as that.
~~
Waking up is always the hardest part.
Fer’s been on this rock long enough that they’ve gotten used to the routine. Even grown to almost like it. Maybe it is just like an earthborn kid, to search for the positives of the place that’s going to kill you, but it’s hardly the worst of the habits Fer was born into. On the days that feel just that much longer, they even take to listing those positives, counting them off on fingers that no longer swell with just one day’s work.
They like how easy the work has gotten, when early on they’d barely been able to make it through the day. They like their new muscles, filling out fabric that had hung loose before. They’re fed better here than they were in the prison or the transfer ship, and the companionship is a huge upgrade.
The transfer ship’s captain wasn’t a fan of lights for the prisoners. Wasn’t a fan of much chatter, either. And in the dark, people lose things. Faceless, silent shapes. That’s what the prisoners became, on that ship. Fer paced their cell aimlessly, spilled ink on a blank page. Even now, months later, there are days where words sit heavy on their tongue. Like they’re a limited resource, waiting to be wasted.
Waking up has always been a slow process for Fer. On bad days, they wake up on that ship. On the worst days, there’s a moment where they forget they ever got caught at all. Where in the moment before they’re properly awake they really do expect to see the cluttered walls of their last hideout—dangerously close to being a home. Back before Adrastea happened, and everything went tits-up.
Then they open their eyes to the soft curves of their small cell, and they remember they’re here. Officially occupying the middle of nowhere, six months into a fifteen-year sentence they’re not expected to survive. And everything presses down on them, like artificial gravity.
But, hey. Could be worse.
Fer reaches over, taps the speaker set into the wall so that it’ll stop telling them to wake up. They step into their orange jumpsuit, garishly bright against the soft blues of the metal walls. With an underlayer that will glow even brighter in the event of a loss of light, the suit is “the height of prisoner-safety technology,” according to the worker who had issued it to Fer. As if Fer wouldn’t notice the fraying seams or dried blood staining the cuff of one of the five otherwise-identical suits.
They saved that one for days when they felt especially lucky. Or bitter.
Today, they’re mostly feeling hungry.
They duck through their empty doorway—no doors here, no barricading yourself away, just a thin audio divider that always feels slimy when stepped through—and into the common room, letting the noise of the only other occupants on this asteroid roll over them.
The best thing about prison is other people. Who knew?