Who am I?

I’m Laika Loveless, a transgender lesbian writer from the pacific northwest. since 2023, I’ve been writing short horror, erotica, and horror erotica stories on Tumblr. As time has gone on, I find myself writing more and more about current events, more essays about topics I care about, and more personal short fiction that doesn’t fall into the categories I created that blog for. Therefore, as of December 2024, I’m moving those things here.

As a note: my erotica stories are easy enough to find and I won’t discourage you from looking, but they are only for folks 18+, and they have heavy content warnings for a reason, so be prepared to curate your own experience and leave if they’re not for you.

What is this blog?

As mentioned in my little blurb, this blog is a collection of short fiction, essays, and think pieces about the state of life as a transgender woman in the US. It’s worth noting, as I’m in the urban pacific northwest, it comes from a place of relative safety and acceptance, and I do not share the same daily threats that my peers in many parts of the country do. I can only write what I know, what I experience, what I hear from others, and what observations and outside perspectives I can learn from. I do not yet know what all this will be, but I suppose we’ll find out together.

Will you publish on a regular schedule?

Yes, I intend to publish at least one piece per week on this blog, every Friday morning. I may also add supplementary writings in between, depending on inspiration and/or current events. Please bear with me as I get a handle on this. As someone with ADHD, publishing on a regular schedule is both a new experience and challenge for me. If you’d like to get notified whenever I post something new, please, subscribe!

Can I give you money?

No. Or at least, not yet. I’ll get that set up at some point but it seems like a whole ordeal, so until I get some pledges or a significant readership I’m gonna leave this as free. But hopefully yes, in the future, that will be an option. I don’t intend on putting the core of this blog behind a paywall, but I hope to either add additional paywalled content, or just add the ability to subscribe if you wanna buy me a cup of coffee.

Why did you name it… that?

Provocative as the title “Kerosene on Peaches” may sound, it’s a rather simple, if heavy handed, metaphor and reference to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. In the eponymous speech, Steinbeck describes truckloads of oranges being dumped in piles on the road, and people coming from miles around to collect them, but the men who dump them there spray kerosene on the oranges and set them alight, for if the starving people could simply collect oranges from the piles, they wouldn’t pay for them at the market, and the price of oranges must not be allowed to fall. He later goes on to describe how children would have to watch the oranges burn, and then the coroners would have to write on the death certificates of those children that they died of malnutrition.

In the US, transgender rights are being used as a bulwark for the right to pound against, and as a sacrificial bargaining chip for the left to negotiate away, in spite of the fact that when laws are changed and bans are passed, when transgender people are denied care and stuffed back into the closet, we die. Children die. Children die because we refuse to nourish their souls and care for their health, because transgender rights can be burned to maintain the status quo.

Like I said, it’s a heavy handed metaphor. As for the peaches, well, as fruits go I think it’s the one whose quickly ripening colors most transit those of the transgender pride flag, though I admit my color blindness may bias me in that regard.

So, here we are. Kerosene on peaches, with trans people, trans children, starving as they watch our rights, our protections, and even our people be sacrificed in the name of business as usual. That is the life I write about here. In short fiction, in think pieces, in essays. The life of a transgender lesbian whose soul grows heavy as she watches the pile of peaches burn.