[Post originally published: May 29, 2026]

II admit that it would’ve been fun swapping “has” for “have” in the title, but different from the dragon, John Wiswell has no complaints about his release! The Dragon Has Some Complaints is John’s humorous fantasy novel slated for July 14th.

John is one of my favorite contemporary fantasy authors and it’s a great honor to have him here hurtling through the hyperspace.

In more personal news, my fantasy story Prayskin will be out in Trollbreath Magazine #8 in early June! It’s a piece about a woman with terracotta skin where people carve their prayers on her. It’s a tale about war, loss—and romance! I remember I first had this idea when I visited the Terracotta Army in China, back in 2019. Hope you all enjoy it as much as I did writing it.

Tell me more about something you have published recently (or will publish soon) and what made you write it.

On July 14th, I’m releasing my next novel: THE DRAGON HAS SOME COMPLAINTS. It follows Garrodigh, a curmudgeonly dragon who pretends to be tame so he can eat for free at the local dragon riding academy. There is a lot of comedy and antics as he tries to infiltrate the academy. But he’s a three-headed dragon (used to be four, but lost one to an incident with a cannon), and his heads never agree about anything, including what their agenda is with all these pesky humans. Bottomhead is basically a feral cat who is in it for the food; Centerhead is seeking vengeance for their lost head; and Upperhead is delusional, believing he’s a human being and this is all a dream. Each head has dealt with the trauma of their lives differently. Garrodigh has been shot out of the sky, and his wings are so torn he expects to never fly again.

What none of his heads expect is the rider they’re assigned: Rania, an optimistic, unyielding ball of energy who believes in them more than they believe in themselves. They might just be in it for the food, but she believes she can help this monster fly again. And Rania has almost as many secrets as Garrodigh has. Together they might save this place, or burn it down.

It’s a book for monster lovers, but also for dog moms and cat dads and tortoise uncles. If you’ve ever cared for an animal? If you’ve ever been sure they cared back? Then I hope you’ll enjoy Garrodigh spreading his wings once more.

Which are some of your favorite monsters and creatures of SFF and how they influenced your work? I’d also love to know which one of Garrodigh’s heads is your favorite.

I’ve always been a sucker for villains and monsters. Give me Grimlock, Skeletor, or Godzilla. Give me the mountain creature in Fantasia. Let me hang out with Smaug in The Hobbit. I wish the best for the creature that Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein made together. Some particular monsters make indelible marks, though. It’s hard to ever fully get over Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. As much as I enjoy a good translation of Beowulf, it’s John Gardner’s Grendel that gives the greatest illumination, finding sympathy, anger, and even uproarious humor in a monster that otherwise just existed to make a folk hero look cool. Similarly, in John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In, the vampire Eli isn’t just compelling, but challenges the line between manipulation and empathy. I still wrestle with what the right thing was for those kids.

Ever since I was little, I’ve sought out the next book with a monster in it. I don’t want to catch them all. I want to get to know them all. When you’re young, a fascination with villains and monsters can come from a simple place, like wishing for the empowerment of a monster and how untethered they are from society’s rules—the same rules a child feels smothered by as they learn them. To the adolescent brain, the villain is an offer of freedom.



But as I grew up, I grew more captivated by what the darkness hid about the shapes that moved in it. The Universal Wolfman being haunted by taking lives, and seeking for any way to end his curse and get himself into control. The insecurities of dragons. What are the hopes and aspirations of an alien with a life cycle of five years? Dracula is immortal, and seeks to preserve that existence, so what is hundreds of years of life like for his psyche? If you’re a dream demon who sups on other people’s nightmares, what exactly goes on in your own head? I want to know the things the narratives elide. And stories about monster slaying almost always elide the complexity of the things that get stabbed.

In real life, we have millions of disabled people on Earth. I’m one of them! And we get treated as monsters. We’re undesirable to be seen. We’re taught to make ourselves invisible, and to shrink into darkness for the comfort of people who don’t want to think we exist. Many animals are disabled, too. You can visit a vet and see an animal getting physical therapy. So writing a novel that explored a dragon as complex, as a mirror for the wounded human experience and the wounded animal experience, as furious and insecure, and also as wounded and striving to learn to fly again? It felt like a side of a story that usually would get left in darkness.

You’re always talking about how important it is for authors to talk about their own stuff and those from their peers. I always considered it really great advice! So let’s talk about someone else’s work! What is a piece of fiction that you think didn’t get enough attention?

Genoveva Dimova published a pair of novels: Foul Days and Monstrous Nights. They tell a fantastic two-part story about a witch who loses her shadow in a card game, and has to go on an adventure to try to get it back, only to find it’s being used in a plot that imperils the whole country. It’s set in a distinctly Eastern European-flavored setting, full of folklore creatures that I’ve only heard mentioned in the fairy tales my grandmother used to tell me. It’s not just Baba Yaga, snow, and vodka—not some flattening of Slavic cultures. It’s robustly haunted. And it’s shockingly funny, too. There’s a bit about her first house guest encountering all the ghosts that had me laughing so much that everybody else on the train stared at me. I recommended the books to them! And I recommend them to you, too.

Show me an illustration that you love and tell me why!

One easy pick is Bree Paulsen’s “New Pumpkin.” Bree often deploys autumnal color schemes, and autumn is my favorite time of year. She’s great at explicit creepiness, but also gets how to make the implicit click. The leafless trees sticking up behind the fence. The overgrown grass creeping over the pumpkins. Look at that dress! It’s gorgeous, which is why our maiden behind headless is so creepy. This should be cozy, and yet you’re staring at the pumpkin in her arms and wondering if that’s her head. Then you notice two glowing dots of light above her neck, and you wonder: are those eyes?

You can see more of Bree’s art here: https://www.vampiresnwhimsy.com/

What is some advice you would give to authors coming from a short story background and shifting to long form fiction (or simply writing more long form since there might be no shift at all because short stories are already awesome)?

The first piece of advice is to only do this if you love it! If you want to write shorts, write them. If you want to write novels, write them. Short stories are not a common path to becoming a novelist, and trying to use it as a stepping stone is a mistake. Short stories excite us because your heart fits into them.

With that out of the way? Short stories and novels are not the same art form. They use the same medium—the written word—but they do not obey the same laws or use the same structures. We can talk about the MICE Quotient, but this applies way more cleanly to Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery than J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Short stories have little room to wander and are mostly forced to narrow their scope. Whereas novels are almost required to entertain many masters. A side character who wouldn’t even be named in a short story will have a full arc in a novel and be everybody’s favorite.

Both forms achieve many different outcomes. You have an extremely different experience of Samantha Mills’s “The Rabbit Test” than you do of P. Djèlí Clark’s “How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub.” Just because your short stories were tight didn’t mean they were homogenous. The skills you honed in one form can help you in another. So try to view novels as your next grounds to try something new.

It’s best to experiment. Now that you have several chapters before the Call To Action, how much character development can you do? You used to be concise about it. Now it can breathe. What can your skills do with that breathing room? I bet the answer is “Something different than I used to do.” Maybe you won’t master it immediately. I wrote something like nine novels before I published Someone You Can Build A Nest In. I grew with each project.

It’s dangerous to assume that your first book will sell and win every award and you’ll ride into the sunset. If you’ve been writing shorts, you know rejection is normal and feels arbitrary. If a book doesn’t work? Or if you finish it, and it doesn’t sell? Then just like in short stories, you just get to work on writing the next novel. And when your heart is sore from those hard days of novel query rejections, the short story will still be there, ready for you to come back.