Here's the pitch:

When Frank gives a hungry swineherd a ceremonial cake, his hometown ends up besieged by a herd of hogs who will stop at nothing to get more. And the cake's intended recipient, a mountain-sized giant with a temper to match, is ready to destroy the town over the slight. Caught between a rock and a hog place, can Frank sort everything out in time?

Set in a sun-baked scrubland where magic exists alongside the technology of recent decades, Power Frank evokes the irreverent humor and subversion of the fantasy genre found in Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne’s Kill the Farm Boy, and blends emotional character work with absurdist fantasy elements like Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece.

Power Frank features a diverse cast of characters, queer relationships, and explorations of intergenerational trauma. Additionally, the novel contains positive depictions of disability that are based on the philosophy of performance artist and disabled breakdancer, Bill Shannon. Frank is a crutch-user who does not seek to be an inspiration because he is someone who overcomes disability. His disability is only a facet of his experience, not a defining quality.

Frank uses a special type of crutch called a rocker bottom crutch that has a rounded bottom instead of ending at a single point like most conventional crutches. The crutch is based on the iterative designs by performance artist and disabled breakdancer, Bill Shannon. Check out the accompanying diagram created for the book that shows the various parts of these special crutches. 

Along with developing a vocabulary for the parts of crutches, Shannon also defined set of fundamental positions for a dancer to use that accounts for the dancer's relation to the crutch, weight distribution, and properties of the floor. Now known as Shannon Technique, the system is instrumental for developing and teaching new choreographies incorporating crutches.

Because of Shannon Technique's emphasis on communicating the relative position of crutch and user, it became a natural fit for describing both action-packed fight scenes as well as the more subdued movements in Frank's daily life!

You can learn more about Shannon Technique and see examples of it in action on Bill Shannon's website, WhatIsWhat.com.

Fish Davidson (he/him) is an author, game designer, and creative consultant living in the American South. His areas of focus are the development of non-traditional protagonists, disability activism, speculative fiction, integrating randomness into the creative process, and procedural generation. 

His website is www.fishdavidson.com.