A Visual Novel for the Psyche with Ultra Trash Dog

Sign-ups for my Indie Author Spotlight are open to every kind of author! We recently featured the poetry of DAJ 2020, and today we’re dipping into a surreal visual novel by the creator Ultra Trash Dog. This is an ongoing web serial with multiple storylines and some truly strange vibes, but hey, maybe you’re into that sort of thing (I know I am.)

Psych Ward in the Sky


From the author’s bio:

Nice to meet you! I’m ultratrashdog and I’m a solo game developer. I write, draw, code and make music. I’m the author of Psych Ward In The Sky, an online yaoi visual novel with a very silly transmasc MC Senj.

This MM romance is a slice of life: sci-fi/fantasy, with trans representation, kinky erotica, horror, drama… It’s wholesome and silly, but also contains material that may be disturbing. It’s raw and has some sharp edges, and touches a few disturbing topics.

It’s free to read/play on the official website: www.psych-ward-in-the-sky.com

Tearing though Space! with Cait Gordon & crew

And it’s only Season One, you say?

I like a feisty space crew, and bonus points for Cait Gordon for creating a world where disability isn’t erased, it’s normalized. Humans are always mutating, doncha know, and too many fictional worlds leave out disabled people completely. Science fiction is no exception, and we should expect space to cause a whole new category of disability that our descendants will have to accommodate. But there’s no reason reading about it can’t be fun! Sci-fi is where some our best ideas are born and tested out.

Season One: Iris and the Crew Tear Through Space!

In a galactic network known as the Keangal, where space is accessible…

Lieutenant Eileen Iris and the command crew of the S.S. SpoonZ haven’t a clue what it means to be disabled. An unexpected conversation with an intergalactic janitor brings up the question but offers no answers before he’s ’ported away.

Unfazed, duties resume as Iris manages an overprotective guidebot; Security Chief Lartha and her sentient prostheses offer kick-ass protection; Mr. Herbert’s inventiveness is a godsend (although he’s not quite grasped how to flirt); Commander Davan’s affable personality comes through whether trumpeted, texted, or signed; and Captain Warq’s gracious but firm leadership keeps everyone at their best.

Until on one mission, where the crew tears through space.

Just a little bit.


From the author’s bio:

Cait Gordon is an autistic, disabled, and queer Canadian writer of speculative fiction celebrating diverse bodyminds. She is the author of the award-winning, disability-hopepunk adventure, Season One: Iris and the Crew Tear Through Space! Her short stories featuring disabled and/or neurodivergent heroes have appeared in several anthologies and will be included in her first collection, Speculative Shorts: Stories That Fell Out of My Brain (2025, Dinsdale Press). Cait twice joined Talia C. Johnson to co-edit the (award-nominated) Nothing Without Us and (award-winning) Nothing Without Us Too disability fiction anthologies. She is also the host of The Disabled Crone podcast.

Find Cait’s work here: https://caitgordon.com

Read Season One: Iris and the Crew Tear Through Space! here: https://books2read.com/iatcS1

Sentient Glitter

a black sphere streaks across a black background, trailing a purple and blue aurora like a comet streaking through deep space

“The thing is, none of that shit is real.  Nothing is real, and I can prove it.  Pick any molecule in existence.  If that molecule was a solar system, that is, if some atom in a molecule in a mitochondrion in a cell in your body was the size of the sun, its electrons are somewhere out past Pluto. Most of you is empty space. 

Wait, it gets worse.  I can prove you don’t exist.  Science is fantastic.  I mean, I get why people think they’re just making stuff up, because quantum physics is bonkers.

Because if you get down that small, if you’re looking at electrons, first of all you’re using the most advanced science we’ve ever scienced, machines the size of cities, billions of dollars of infrastructure.  And it still barely works.  You’re trying to catch ghosts.  Really you are because the only way you see quantum particles is smashing them into each other and taking a photo.

I’m not kidding.  This is science.  That’s what they do at the CERN super-collider, which is why they call it a collider.

But think about that.  They’re seeking the building blocks of all we know, and you’d think it would be obvious.  I mean, we’re made of atoms, everything is made of atoms, but atoms don’t really seem to be made of anything at all.

You can know where a quantum particle was, or you can know where it’s going.  You cannot, cannot by the fundamental structure of the universe, know both.  They’re like cockroaches: if you turn on the light they disappear under the cabinets. I mean it, if you locate a quantum particle, the act of looking at it makes it change direction.

Imagine you’re at a baseball game and you’re looking at something else.  Like there’s someone on the jumbotron who doesn’t know her nip has slipped or whatever is distracting you.  And you hear the crack as the batter hits the ball and so you look and you looking makes that sweet long drive to the unguarded right field suddenly in midair veer to the left and land in the midfielder’s glove.

That’s what doing quantum physics is like.  At a million bucks a throw.

Here’s the even worse bit:  in the end the odds of finding any one particle in any one given state or location are just that, odds.  There is no certainty at the bottom of reality.  Just chance.  Your particles come and go, fluctuate in and out of being, are at best potentialities that walk and talk and wear pants and think they’re in charge of some shit when you don’t even really exist. You are seafoam on an ever-cresting wave sweeping through time and space, sentient glitter that winks in and out of existence faster than you or I can imagine.

So why the fuck does it matter which bathroom I use?”

Travelling

an aerial photo of a dramatically cloudy sky at sunset hazily overlaid by a drone-taken photo of a stark white iceberg edged with green

I practice a form of time travel called insomnia

or maybe it practices me

a liminal state

awake but wrongly

the morning uninevitable

though it is always morning somewhere

what is a morning but the night’s fist unclenching

present always but not noticed until it strikes

rattling your old bones

the earth dragged onward

spiraling through all that night

that fist

opening again and again

and closing

and us

raked by cosmic winds

barely clinging 

all our ambitions a smear on glass

a concrescence of matter

a chance

I practice a form of time travel called insomnia

or maybe it practices me