Whew, another year? are we sure? yeah, I guess that’s what that adds up to, and it sure adds up to a lot. I signed contracts on another story sale today, I’m putting the finishing touches on a revision to send to my agent, and there’s a lot more stuff in the pipeline, so once again it’s probably good for me to take a moment to stop and breathe and review what I did this year.
I had the following stories come out, and they were a very mixed group in terms of theme and genre. There’s cranky dolphins, reluctant revolutionaries, aliens doing improv, :
Exiled to Gravity, Sunday Morning Transport (February)
Tourist Season, Nature Futures (April)
Monster of the Month Club, Haven Spec (August)
Spark of Change, Translunar Travelers Lounge (August)
Yes And, Nature Futures (August)
A Piece of the Continent, Uncanny (December)
I kept going with poetry, too, with a small clutch of poems. They’re just as varied as the fiction, ranging from a response to a beloved childhood series to science fictional feelings about the world we’re in right now to grief for nerds to fairy tale commentary:
Elegy for Another Hollow Girl, Not One of Us (April)
The Plural of Apocalypse, Strange Horizons (April)
Object Permanence, Analog (Sept/Oct)
Like Other Girls, F&SF (Nov/Dec)
Just the one essay this year, and I hope it encourages you to do things you enjoy:
Failing the Marshmallow Test: On Not Saving Books for Later, Uncanny (December)
I also had some fun reprints! “A Worm to the Wise” came out in Afterglow, and The Deadlands Year One featured both my poem “Oppenheimer in Valhalla” and my short story “Roots of Lamentation.”
That’s the year in publishing, though, which is not exactly the same as the year in writing. In the later part of the year I was more focused than usual on longer-form work, so taking a moment to write some poems and a short story in the last month has been a bit of a breath of fresh air, and I’ll want to do a bit more of that again early in the year. On the other hand I’ve liked doing two novellas and some novel work. Balance in all things? We know that’s not my strong suit. But looking for where balance might hypothetically be if I was another person completely? Sure, let’s go for that. Stranger things have happened at sea. And probably will happen on land in 2024, if the work I have coming out so far is any indication.