I create a lot of artifacts of world-building, and a friend of mine suggested they could be of interest to readers. So here’s first of a series on “facts” about the moons of Jupiter that appear in Resonance. The moons are settings, but also characters, and I kinda love them….

Eric Molinsky of the Imaginary Worlds Podcast, did a fabulous episode on Neurodivergent Futures in science fiction. The podcast includes interviews with Ada Hoffman, Nick Walker, Quinn Dexter, and me. Fun conversation about autistic representation and neurodiversity frames in science fiction fandom and content–plus an actor reading from Hoshi! Transcript…

I’ve wanted to share the story that starts in Resonance for over 20 years, and here it is. I’m excited, and hopeful, and terrified–which is all weirdly in alignment with the book’s exploration of the edge of hope and fear. Perhaps I’ve summoned an élan of my own. I love these characters and their…

I have a new book coming out in March 2022 called Resonance. It’s a literary science fiction novel set in the same world as Hoshi. It’s about what lives on the edge of hope and fear and the transformative power of art. The groundwork for this novel (and the one…

In the category of, “things that make perfect sense in my brain but no one else’s,” is likely why I call the world where Hoshi and many of my other stories are set the “Liminal Universe.” Here’s the missing info. liminal | ‘limǝnl | adjective 1. relating to a transitional…

Wow the past year was hard; I’m guessing for you too. Even though that meant most of my social media falling by the wayside, I did keep working behind the screens, and have some exciting things to share in the new year. So happy Solstice season! Here’s a new song….

https://youtu.be/h1XYKlR-28U This is a brief flip-through of the traveler’s notebook I keep for stories in the Mac Carroll multiverse. Tools I use: Notebook cover – Chic Sparrow Enchanted Woods Rosewood. Inserts – Paper Penguin and Rock Your Notebook. Pen – Pilot Custom 823. Inserts are for: Working things out which…

I approach the structure of an academic research article similarly to how I approach a piece of fiction. I shared this with a student the other day, and am elevating it from “Random Email I’ll Lose” to “Blog Post I Can Link Back To.” I like to think of an…

I’ve always loved journals, planners, and pens but the past few years innovations (and rediscoveries) have uped my game. I’ve gotten a lot of inspiration from others, so here I start to pass along the love. Or maybe I just want an excuse to go on about leather, stationary, and…

By chance, I’ve done a lot of mentoring lately about academic writing. Earlier I posted about rejection. This post is just a collection of random n00b-type things that I’ve found myself explaining to students a lot. Now I can just direct them here bwahaha Disclaimer: My experience with academic writing…

Academic papers are a lot of work. Your research is dear to you. You’ve loved this study enough to see it through, to write it up, to find a home for it. And then you get rejected—perhaps without any indication as to why. What’s that about? Are you a bad…

I’ve been working from home for over a decade largely as a disability accessibility thing & some people have asked me for tips. (Disclaimers: I’m a natural introvert and have no children.) Set up a work space that is for work. Do not do other activities in it until AFTER…

FIRST LAW OF THE REACHABLE NOWS: No alternate versions of a person may be in eye-line of each other within the same now, or both will suffer immediate death by fire. My novella “Hearts and Tails” in Spoon Knife 4: Spacetime is set in a soft-SF multiverse where WWI never…

I’ll write more–maybe too much–about this as time goes on but here is the very first post squeeeee. I am too excited/terrified. Terricided? Excitified? I am a weirdo. HERE ARE ALL THE THINGS 1. The wonderful folks at Wordgathering interviewed me about disability fiction, Hoshi, my next book in Hoshi’s world, and…

My twenties were belligerent. A few decades of living in fear will result in belligerency, apparently. They were also creative, beautiful, and engaged in the 1990’s post-punk industrial world of queered-up vampires, feminist philosophies, anarchist role models, cyberpunk promises, and aggro-rage mixed-media music, poetry, performance, fuck-this-shit manifestos. This photo of…

Exciting fiction news! My short mathpunk novella “Hearts and Tails” will be appearing in this year’s anthology Spoon Knife 4: A Neurodivergent Guide to Space-time!  The story takes place in an alternate 1991 where there are no computers, but there just might be magic, as well as a space-time connection…

Hoshi and the Red City Circuit is set in the liminal universe. I call it the “liminal universe” after the first book I wrote about it, which may or may not ever see the light of day. Other stories, though, have seen the light of day, and here is the…

I joke that the liminal universe, where Hoshi and the Red City Circuit is set, is a “post-post-apoclyptic” universe. But, seriously, it is! Earth dies, almost for good, and everything is awful, but then it (or at least humanity) recovers, and a few centuries pass and there’s space ships and…

At the height of my hacker years, I attended a Damien Conway talk on his Perl module quantum-superpositions. He described how quantum computers work, and exactly what the capacity to perform virtually infinite simultaneous calculations at once could mean for encryption. Nutshell: the best encryption we’ve got = LOL Around…

When I first started building the world of Hoshi and the Red City Circuit around 2000, I was mostly interested in why our world shits on its artists, scientists, and creatives. Autism and computer science were behind the core concept of the Operators, but autism was less relevant to the…

No, my characters are not explicitly Autistic. Yes, they are implicitly based on how some of us (myself included) experience autism, the intense world theory, and findings related to the associative nature of autistic intelligence (yes, I know “intelligence” is a troubling concept, but I’m not getting into it here)….

I’ll be reading from Hoshi and the Red City Circuit at AWP with the Disability Literature Consortium Reading on Thursday March 28th 6pm – 9pm. Authors will be: Susanne Antonetta, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Jennifer Bartlett, Jeannine Hall Hailey, Cade Leebron, Raymond Luczak, Dora Raymaker.  Read poems from all at wordgathering!…

The élan vitals–the invisible aliens that inhabit the slow waves of the electromagnetic spectrum and some part of physics we’ve yet to understand–were my invention to play with the notion of: what if ideas were sentient and we could talk to them? They were then sourced from a jumble of…

Someone recently asked me what it would take for me to feel good about Autism Speaks, a large, wealthy organization that has done repeated and significant damage to autistic people and has claimed a desire to change. My first reaction was, not my fucking weight to carry. They have to…

My doctorate is in systems science. I study general ways to make sense of things that are too complex for the usual analytical approach of “let’s take it apart and see what makes it tick.” And by “complex” I mean non-linear. And by “nonlinear” I mean many things affect each…

I learned of a lovely review of my novel yesterday. This is my favorite part. This is exactly the sort of conversation I think we need to be having about disability in literature, and what I hope to trouble for mainstream readers: “By telling the story from an autist’s point…

My essay on “Authentic Inclusion in Autism Research” is up on the Organization for Autism Research’s (OAR) newsletter. Many thanks to OAR for inviting me to write about some my favorite things. https://researchautism.org/authentic-inclusion-in-autism-research/

Red City, in my novel Hoshi and the Red City Circuit (among other tales), takes its diversity and streetwise from New York, its green-space-urban-planning from left-coast Portland, and its waterfront docks from “the Other Portland.” Five-hundred-ish years from now (assuming we make it that long), I figure we’ve learned a…

Becca Lory Hector’s latest Spectrumly Speaking podcast is up, with an interview with me. We talk about my novel, Hoshi and the Red City Circuit, and related topics. Talking with Becca is always delightful! Enjoy! Autism in Literature, with Dora Raymaker, Ph.D. | Spectrumly Speaking ep. 54 From the website:…

I’ve gotten back on a drawing kick, and revived my old webcomic project–this time with (hopefully) new wisdom about how to work the medium. These stories are set about 30 years prior to Hoshi. Operators have no rights. Almost no one knows about the aliens. Also, space pirates make me…

Hoshi and the Red City Circuit is set on the exoplanet Cassiopeia-Prime. The Mem’s Public Pedia has the following facts to present about it: Star System – Cadmus Natural Satellites – Cepheus, Phoenix Major Settlements – Red City (pop. 18M, Main continental plate) Big Island Interstellar Exchange (pop. 50K, Atlantis…

When I have frustrations I can’t resolve, and don’t know what to do with, I put them into story. In story they can be fixed, or at least examined in a cathartic way. I suspect that’s true of many story-tellers. The antagonists in Hoshi and the Red City Circuit are…

This comes from my fascination with space sounds. The space sound samples come from NASA’s Keplar: Star KIC12268220C Light Curve Waves to Sound and Kepler: Star KIC7671081B Light Curve Waves to Sound, both available here: soundcloud.com/nasa/sets/spookyspacesounds It also comes from my fascination with space ships possessed by alien consciousnesses. So…

Happy Equinox! Spoon Knife 3: Incursions is OUT in all senses of the word! I am a pile of melted squee to find myself listed along with these incredible authors. This volume contains my short story “Heat Seeking Entities,” which is set in the same universe as Hoshi and the…

Protagonists are defined as much by their interactions with other characters as they are by their own actions. Work-shopping the rough “draft zero” of Hoshi and the Red City Circuit through my writing group, a first-chapter comment went: “That Hoshi chooses to work for a police department that once owned…

Kelly Israel provided an excellent, in-depth review of my novel, Hoshi and the Red City Circuit. In it, she breaks down a number of the disability rights themes of the book, and how the story is situated within our current reality. Also, she says, “I found myself obsessively devouring chapters…

I went epic this summer–three “books” that were more like seven. Here are teeny reviews. ★ ★ ★ ★ Melissa Scott – Trouble and Her Friends A friend pointed me to this book because it’s feminist cyberpunk with queer characters, which is pretty much my Thing. As a gen-Xer who…

Join me at Another Read Through for a reading from my science fiction mystery novel Hoshi and the Red City Circuit, as well as conversation about my neurodivergent, disabled, and queer heroes; cool tech; systems science; and cantankerous detectives. I’ll have books available to sign and buy. Date: 9/20/2018 Time:…

I created Hoshi Archer because I was in trouble. I wanted to write the two-part epic of the end of Operator enslavement, narrated by an unreliable, drugged-up, mega-star anti-hero, but after ten years of wanting I still couldn’t write narration anyone understood, let alone liked. So, in an equal an…

Growing up, the closest thing to a hero like me was Charles Wallace in Madeline L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time. Outsider characters sometimes came close–psychics and rebels, like Katie in Willo Davis Robert’s book The Girl with the Silver Eyes, which I re-read into pulp. Of course there were many heroes…

OMG YOU GUYS! I released a book today!!! I am HOLDING a copy of a novel I wrote and some fabulous people (thank you Autonomous Press and Argawarga Press!) liked enough to edit and put into print. I am more proud of this than anything I’ve ever done. I hope…

In a far future, on the cusp of a major civil rights movement, a private investigator whose disabilities aid her in her investigations must stop a serial killer while political forces manipulate her for control of her beloved city. It’s said, “write what you know,” but I say, “write what…

Hooray! My science fiction mystery novel, Hoshi and the Red City Circuit, is available for paperback preorder through autpress.com! Ebook available now for immediate download; free ebook with paperback preorder. Due to their unique neurology, only the enslaved Operator caste can program the quantum computers that run 26th century Red…

★ ★ ★ ★ Jeff Noon – A Man of Shadows Jeff Noon is one of my favorite writers. The mind-bending prose-poetry hallucinogenic math-punk media beat of his story-telling has destroyed and rebuilt my view of what fiction can look like more than once. So at first I was almost…

Oh no! A famous person has hanged themselves! They will be so terribly missed the world is so much poorer without them how tragic SEE!!! depression happens to people who have everything! Well, David had nothing. He was shit-poor and in retrospect, I suspect, abused. He had a moustache and…

Some very preliminary findings from my autism and skilled employment project, from INSAR. Citation: Raymaker, D.M., Scharer, M., Nicolaidis, C., AASPIRE team. (May, 2018). Narratives of Autism and Skilled Employment: Barriers, Facilitators, and Considerations in Professional Settings. Poster Presentation. International Society for Autism Research, Rotterdam.

Mixed tape! Wherein I harken back to high school and the hours I spent on mixed tape album covers and spinning magnetic reels! Because fun! Also, because an excuse to listen to music I love. Ten Favorite Albums from the Past Ten Years The “10 favorite albums” question is fun,…

After traveling aboard Cassini for nearly seven years, the Huygens probe descended into the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan on January 14, 2005. It recorded the wind on the way down, along with with its radar and radio signals. The probe was designed to transmit its conversation with Titan for…

I gave a ten minute TED-style speech at the OHSU/PSU School of Public Heath’s series Public Health PDX Style on Neurodiversity: Rethinking Autism. Due to tech issues in the livestream, part the speech was not recorded. Below is the transcript of the speech in full. The recorded portions of the…