Tag: publishing

Every year Analog magazine runs AnLab, its readers’ choice poll that allows readers to select their five favorites in each of its departments. (Except I think the cover, the cover may be three? If this was relevant to me, if I was doing magazine covers, regular readers would know it already, I promise.) This year, my nerd grief poem “Object Permanence” has made their list! You can read it here along with the other finalists.

If you’re paying close attention, that’s the second magazine for which I’ve been in the “reader favorites” poll this year. I find this incredibly gratifying. I think most of all what any of writers wants is to be read and to touch readers–but particularly in speculative poetry. No one imagines fame, fortune, and glory will accrue from writing speculative poetry. We’re just trying to say something that will be meaningful to someone else. Analog’s readers, like Uncanny’s before them on the fiction side, have said that I did that this year. Thank you so much, readers.

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.

I have a poem out in the current (Nov/Dec) issue of F&SF, “Like Other Girls.” This one is a Little Mermaid poem, inspired by my thoughts about the original story’s sense of the main character as one of a group of sisters.

F&SF is not available online, but you can buy it from bookstores/newsstands or from their website, although that has not been updated with the current issue yet.

New essay today in Uncanny! Failing the Marshmallow Test: On Not Saving Books for Later. I know that some amount of book hoarding is inevitable because nobody, not even me, reads instantaneously. But this is about deliberately putting off something you know you want to read for “later”–and why I think it’s maybe better not to.

My poem Object Permanence is in Analog magazine’s Sept/Oct issue, and also featured on their website for the next two months.

A lot of writing about grief, including my writing about grief, is inspired by the loss of our nearest and dearest. This is not that, this is the next circle out–my dear little old great-aunt Bets, my ex-boyfriend’s delightful father Marc, all those whose pathways through the world were joys just one notch more distant from mine…until the day they weren’t, and I miss them still, in their own way.

Which is, of course, still a very nerdy way.