I’ve been quiet, partly because the news is overwhelming, but mostly because I switched web hosting providors and that plus my surprising web incompetence put my site out of commission for longer than planned.
While I was away, I’ve had some miscellaneous good news.
My story “A Spell to Retrieve Your Lover from the Bottom of the Sea” came third in the 2017 Strange Horizons Readers’ Poll.
JC Hoskins recently wrote a very kind review of this story:
Though I don’t know if the author intended it, personally I read it as a story about depression, and loving someone with depression, and the deep dark place that that can be.
From that reading, both the hope and the ferocious tenacity of the protagonist really connected with me.
(I was not, in fact, thinking specifically of depression, but I do think that the depression reading is a good one to which the story’s beats and details are well suited. The same goes for readers who have identified the story as being about addiction. I’m glad that readers with many different life experiences have been able to connect with this one.)
Fran Wilde included “A Spell to Retrieve Your Lover From the Bottom of the Sea” on her list of favorite works from 2016.
Nerds of a Feather added my other 2016 prose work, the “The Scrape of Tooth on Bone”, to their Hugo recommendation longlist for novelettes.
I’ve sold another poem to Liminality Magazine, so now I have not one, but two works forthcoming with them. We’ll see which one lands first and what happens with it.
Most excitingly yet, a work that I collaborated on with Merc Rustad has been accepted by Lightspeed Magazine. “I Sing Against the Silent Sun” is a novelette about poetry and resistance, and it’s set in Merc’s Principality Suns universe. I am a fan of the Principality Suns, in which everything is really weird dark passionate queer space opera all the time, and it was an honor to be asked to collaborate and create things for that world.
I’ll post more about “I Sing Against the Silent Sun” closer to its release.