Zig Claybourne

Spec fic shaken, not stirred.

Playground: https://zzclaybourne.com
Latest Publication: Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May/June 2024
Pronouns: he / him / they

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[email protected]

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relay.momostr.pink

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Last Notes

2026-03-14 00:56:39 GMT

When you finish writing a book you kind of think it should be momentous, right? But you do it at a dining room table, or on the toilet, your desk in the last 20 minutes of lunch, or sitting on the living room sofa while reruns of Dr Who play on mute on the TV. The thing gets done...and you sit there. You're waiting for lightning. A thunderclap. Some great emotional release. But that comes later, because at the moment? You're in shock.

2025-11-30 00:00:11 GMT

Just so folks know, December is PUFFS month. It's when I released AFRO PUFFS ARE THE ANTENNAE OF THE UNIVERSE 5 years ago. There were interviews, reviews, and buzzy things all over the place. I am going to be re-sharing them.
Maybe every. single. one.
Can't say you weren't warned.
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/115/635/701/245/411/929/original/10cf0514208ff06d.jpg

2025-11-23 14:04:25 GMT

Right now I've got the 2nd book in a fantasy trilogy out. People are saying things about the 1st 2 like "an immersive experience for lovers of folkloric stories."
Would you know about that if I didn't tell you? No, you'd be sitting there eating a McRib. Because the corporations will spend millions making sure you know the McRib is back.
I don't have millions, so
https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/02/17/the-sff-librarian-reviews-winter-2025/

2025-11-22 13:39:34 GMT

The one rule of cactus club: when you get blooms you share blooms. Look at this absolute beaut!
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/115/593/624/882/671/121/original/2529e6fa5e070ed5.jpg

2025-11-18 14:10:37 GMT

This last quarter of 2025 has been a solid winner reading-wise. Every book I picked up has driven my whee share up & significantly improved forecasts for my own creativity in 2026. Examples: The Inconvenient God; Lagoonfire; When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain; Dispelling Fantasies...
TBR is love.

2025-11-03 13:36:53 GMT

Indie books that have rocked my world: THERE IS NO LOVELY END by Patty Templeton
In the opening scene I got solid Americana, witchcraft, a jail brawl, an epic vendetta, a little terror and some surprising laughs. SOLD. Templeton doesn't write, she skates, seamlessly going from mood to macabre mood.
https://www.readindiefantasy.com/guest-post-we-live-here/
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/115/486/029/703/481/456/original/6267ac1cee42011b.webp

2025-10-25 01:16:03 GMT

Mountain Dew out of wine glasses as beef jerky a l'orange is prepared. In praise of those out there living their best lives amidst uncalled-for fuckery fully foul.

2025-10-23 13:13:52 GMT

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I was going to wait till Monday to post but I guess there's no time like the present. Not quite Happy birthday to me...
https://gofund.me/49c969cf4

2025-10-23 12:19:32 GMT

On Oct 9th a car veered across the road toward where my car was parked behind another car. The veering car hit the car in front hard enough to push it into mine, crumpling my front end. Thankfully I wasn't in the car. Been dealing with insurance companies ever since. Got word yesterday that they've decided to total my car out. My car was 15 years old; be lucky to get bus fare for it. I'll likely do a fundraiser. I can't be without reliable transport. Too many people depend on me.
So heads up.

2025-10-04 12:36:39 GMT

Up with the sun if for no other reason than to confirm the Earth still exists despite the fires fuckers set.

2025-09-17 01:15:46 GMT

If you know nothing else about Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, know that over the course of several days the greatest cinematic marketing campaign EVER graced newspapers, each day an image of the Enterprise above a different tagline, culminating on opening day with this full page beauty. I have each yellowing ad in a scrapbook somewhere. Part of my soul has wanted to create something worthy of touching the hem of that campaign.
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/115/216/984/106/930/084/original/9587a097abea0479.jpg

2025-09-04 13:55:27 GMT

Now that the book is out, here are A's to possible Q's:
It can be read as a standalone.
The series ends definitively at book 3.
In a fight between Bog the Unsmiling & Conan the Barbarian, Bog would simply wait for Conan to die of infection from one of his many previous untreated wounds. Bog knows the value of alcohol & a bandage.
Is there a chance the Khumalos might cross paths with Milo Jetstream? As our teacher Mr Spock is fond of saying, I'd like to think there always are...possibilities.
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/115/146/361/893/141/032/original/3c139609a1b60b75.jpg

2025-08-30 12:37:17 GMT

1000 word picture. At this point, all mistakes, flubs & missteps are on me. Physical copies on the way to the crowdfunder backers, ebooks transmitting 2day.
Available via your indie shop, B&N, 'zon and everywhere else Sept 21, pback & ebook only; hardcover's backer exclusive.
Cherry on top: sweet
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/115/117/742/592/620/106/original/cb5451fd40799c30.jpg

2025-08-28 15:08:12 GMT

Decide to read something. Decide to cook. Decide to sing. Decide to rest. Get up. Swing on em. Pivot. Help somebody else. You've decided to be human. No time for anything else.

2025-08-24 17:51:36 GMT

When I see something like this on Goodreads the pen feels that much lighter!
"Y’all, when I finished this book, I legit had a mourning period where I couldn’t read fiction for a couple of weeks. Everything else just felt hollow and lifeless."
I hope the next book fills folks to the brim and over.
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/115/085/008/033/008/643/original/f3b942d67ca70e24.jpg

2025-08-16 12:29:34 GMT

"At the same time as being tired and distrustful, we know we do trust each other, we do love, we provide rest. We need things from each other, not as predators but as gifters to gifted. That’s when the work moves and removes. That’s when the work clicks everything a notch closer to something..."
https://zzclaybourne.com/write-on-right-on/2025/8/16/chum

2025-08-05 00:51:57 GMT

It's Hot Writer Summer, by which I mean stay indoors for gods' sakes and get that project done. Have lemonade.

2025-07-04 14:21:26 GMT

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Repeat that if you want to or come up with one of your own. Either way, produce signal to noise. Exhibit the properties of the wave and particle simultaneously, ‘cause that’s how we exist anyway. Wave and particle.
You’re a quantum mechanic. Ain’t nothin’ bigger than that.
Gigantic.

2025-07-04 14:21:09 GMT

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You’re special. You fucking matter. You're so special you're common, and common is a beautiful thing. Common is a letter to friends, genuine caring, a hand being a human hand.
I hear myself right now. I sound concerned. That’s good. Before, I sounded worried. Yesterday. Earlier today. Worry’s useless. Worry’s just noise. The Machine loves a worried mind.
Hell with that.
Mantra:
I am the switch.
I am the volume.
I am the real message.

2025-07-04 14:19:53 GMT

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I don’t feel so small right now. The real world focuses on right now. Damned easy to forget it.
Easy to get caught in the Hell of Strident Voices & become confused. We’re beings of fascination & empathy, & the Machine hates that. “If it was special we made damn sure it didn’t stay that way.” That’s the Machine’s grease, not yours. The gears of your mind operate on a different system.

2025-07-04 14:18:22 GMT

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If you make *communication* you’re not small. Communication is key. A noise meant to frighten someone is as important as the sound a stone makes striking a wall. But communication? That’s what gets past the gears & pulleys, gets into the prime real estate of the grey matter & enlarges the world. The real world, not the fake one. When you’re a citizen of the real world you’re a giant. Nephilim be thy name. God Emperor of You.

2025-07-04 14:17:52 GMT

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The Machine creates an overriding fear of silence. You notice how those who hate must be vocal about it? The Machine says if you make noise you’re not small.
The Machine lies.

2025-07-04 14:17:23 GMT

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The perception of your size is a lie. The moment we break outside of ourselves—and we can, each of us—we instantly realize we’re gigantic. The only thing telling us otherwise is the Machine, and the Machine exists solely to be serviced.

2025-07-04 14:16:56 GMT

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It won’t let you study all the beauty & patterns that go into its construction because it’s full of stinging hornets. It won’t let you hold it. Won’t let you take your time with it so that you know it & it knows you. The world refuses to fit into your hands, and that becomes our definition of small.

2025-07-04 14:16:38 GMT

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Hard avoiding feeling small when at every turn you look into the sky it tells you to buy, believe, or accept something. Billboards, buildings, and planes overhead, planes crisscrossing the globe with dreams and schemes in equal measure. Very easy to feel small and useless…because you don’t want to be used by the world. You want to be of, part, and in it, but the world, it is a hive, isn’t it?

2025-07-04 14:15:13 GMT

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...always ready to be warmed a degree here, a degree there, until it bubbles over. It takes the form of Steve Millers, Trump families, flag lapel pins, white inadequacy groups, people being fashionably hateful, fashionably obtuse, or increasingly plain garden variety stupid.
We’ve made a way of life out of stupidity, haven’t we? Engines of industry and the whole works.

2025-07-04 14:14:22 GMT

Gigantic
It began yesterday and continued today, that feeling that nothing I do will ever change the fact that I’m small. I can barely save myself, let alone the world, and I do want to save the world.
Every day we're attacked by something. A bombing. A stabbing. Peaceful hopes trampled by all the sounds of fear: bigotry (the dumbest of the ills), idolatry (the most tragic of spiritual potentials), jingoism (the most childish of geography lessons)...

2025-06-06 12:21:53 GMT

Helped a little old Russian lady fill her tires with air this morning and duct tape her grill back onto her car. She apologized over and over for not having money to give me but gave me an orange and then said "May I hug you?" I said yes. We hugged. She said bless you. It's a good Friday so far.

2025-05-30 01:29:03 GMT

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He's fairly active on Bluesky.

2025-05-30 00:38:17 GMT

Now and then I think about 'The Sweet in the Empty' by Tade Thompson from the Mar/April 2023 issue of F&SF because it's 13 or so pages of absolute word bliss.
I still have the issue. Deep contented sigh. I love when stories find a place to live in us.

2025-05-14 15:38:27 GMT

1)WE'VE BROKEN 6K.
2)Y'ALL ARE AMAZING.
3)SIXTY HOURS TO GO.
4)LOOK AWAY WHILE I HAPPY CUSS
A writer wants'ta dance.
#ProjectWeLove
#Books
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidiansky/amnandi-sails
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/114/506/922/004/548/385/original/55c89037c12f99a6.jpg

2025-05-08 02:14:25 GMT

"I must have a lot of Douglas Adams fans supporting this campaign because apparently you all like the whooshing sound stretch goals make as they fly by."
A "good night" update on the AMNANDI SAILS Kickstarter.
'Night.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidiansky/amnandi-sails/posts/4380374

2025-05-07 14:51:46 GMT

9 DAYS TO GO!
Hi. My new book is on Kickstarter. It’s the sequel to Breath Warmth & Dream, starring Mother Khumalo’s daughter. I’d appreciate your support bringing book 2 of the trilogy home!
Book 2: AMNANDI SAILS. COMING THIS FALL! FUNDING NOW!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidiansky/amnandi-sails
#ProjectWeLove
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/114/467/101/469/929/168/original/e2a8ff5fdb823dcb.jpg

2025-04-27 16:04:38 GMT

What I Failed To Do Writing This Fantasy:
Not a single goblin fae.
Where the hell's the blond elf?
We don't need no stinkin magic system.
Do you even unearned-peril, bro?
No chosen one? What the hell?!
Wanna be an accomplice? Do fantasy crimes. Back the book.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidiansky/amnandi-sails
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/114/410/771/395/129/338/original/3cb54a8df2dff9ea.jpg

2025-04-26 13:54:07 GMT

Y'all know realistically Godzilla should honk or hiss. When's the last time you heard a lizard roar? Conversations need to be had.

2025-04-12 14:16:18 GMT

3 years ago I wrote about C.S.E. Cooney's Saint Death's Daughter, "Very few authors get my money for books sight unseen. C.S.E. Cooney is one. If you read to be surprised, delighted, and taken on epic journeys, each ride with Cooney is guaranteed."
Evergreen.
The sequel arrives April 24.
https://fantasy-hive.co.uk/2025/04/on-writing-a-sequel-guest-post-by-c-s-e-cooney-saint-deaths-herald/

2025-04-10 13:54:33 GMT

Soul check. Shake it up, crack it. Does it still light?

2025-04-10 12:15:56 GMT

Regarding the Light of Good News, Life, and Innate Joy: No reason to shine all the time but no reason not to shine when you want to. That surplus of soul that has seen/heard/felt in such a way as to have pushed you to sing (all art forms are nothing but song)? Share it. Increase the world's lumens.

2025-03-05 14:59:30 GMT

I'm halfway through this. Sometimes a story is so completely what it is that it needs no review, just thanks to the writer for telling it. Sometimes a book is pure deep-root sharing. This one's beautiful on so many levels, one of those 'I can't wait to reread it while reading it' books.
I'm a sucker for loveliness.
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/114/110/415/106/991/499/original/11c60c5639176860.jpg

2025-02-28 13:40:36 GMT

Fact: even after the last day of February, Black excellence persists.

2025-02-10 23:48:02 GMT

Im under the weather so I've had a chance for a lot of streaming offerings to watch me recover & I have to say to every artist in every discipline out there, but particularly writers since I wear that hat, please be wild & intriguing with your work. Droning sameness injected into everything hurts.

2025-01-22 15:55:37 GMT

Thinking of the happiest times I've ever been in my life. They've never involved things. They were feelings of being needed, instances of unfiltered human connection. Shields constantly exposed to the air calcify. Harden. The well-known protection and prison. The happiest times in my life? I felt free.
Whee.

2024-12-28 19:00:40 GMT

Why does the batmobile have turn signals?

2024-12-22 01:33:59 GMT

Something to show you Monday morning. A bit of pre-holiday cheer.

2024-12-10 20:03:38 GMT

sometimes
the only poem worth writing
concerns
how glad and surprised
it's ok to be
to see the sun
another day

2024-12-02 16:33:58 GMT

Throwback video game guaranteed to make today's kids cuss: Centipede. Which kinda makes me wish I had a stack of quarters, some blood pressure meds, and the day off. That roller ball of stress all day.

2024-11-25 14:13:30 GMT

Never believed the self-erasing lie that what we write can't change the world. World changes all the time. Intention, expression, and imagination do it. It's not a haughty thing, it's as commonplace as kissing. Human race ain't but a domino set of emotions so, writers, pucker the hell up.

2024-11-18 18:59:40 GMT

Black Panthers serving kids breakfast before school was considered a threat to national security. We know what happened from there. But a deranged white guy bringing along the most incompetent, duplicitous and vile people to fill a presidential cabinet & suddenly the US is "Oh, what can we do?" FOH

2024-11-04 15:05:05 GMT

Reminder: Hateful people whose sole reason for getting up is to make others miserable will stand 17 hours getting stung by bees if they think the outcome will somehow hurt you.
Go vote.

2024-10-31 12:16:37 GMT

Black Speculative Fiction Month ends today. My last highlight: not a single book but 2 awesome web pages, and the more awesome you get in you, the more awesome you be. That's quantum soul mechanics.
Get it, put it in ya.
https://geraldcoleman.com/just-add-coffee/f/beginners-guide-to-black-science-fiction-fantasy-part-iii
https://cerecerenniemurphy.com/authors-of-color

2024-10-16 12:09:11 GMT

Black Speculative Fiction Month
A book a day.
Why you should read this book:
Because if horror's not grabbing you by the throat and saying pay attention, what's horror for?
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/113/317/021/225/206/996/original/8612a5d72dad8c59.jpg

2024-10-15 12:14:20 GMT

Black Speculative Fiction Month
A book a day.
Why you should read this book:
Like groove, multiverse is in the heart. And sucker hurts.
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/113/311/378/632/347/525/original/680e236d8bc8726f.webp

2024-10-10 14:09:48 GMT

Black Speculative Fiction Month
A book a day.
Why you should read this book:
It's spine-tingler season. Halloween mic drop.
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/113/283/519/760/508/361/original/9bfdfd8067c3129a.jpg

2024-09-23 11:00:17 GMT

"The zig extends his arm from beneath his covers to test the temperature of the breeze coming in through the window. If cool air is detected, he immediately withdraws his arm to his cocoon of covers to sleep through the alarm once more."
Planet Zig. Coming to PBS this fall.

2024-08-06 13:18:17 GMT

Dear Creative Types: The fact that you're able to excite someone with your work in this hyper-commercialized, contentavized, blaring regurgitainment world needs to be up-played a lot more. Take that win.