2018: A year in review

Precis

There’s little to be said for 2018 that hasn’t already been said–most of it nooot pretty. For me, this year was marked by personal hardship, but also tremendous growth.

Writing was hard for me this year, as it was for many colleagues and siblings-in-arms. But I was a hungry-ass reader, and I took lateral risks with my art, when I could manage to do it. I beat down impostor syndrome and developed burgeoning badass syndrome (BBS) in several avenues of my life. In many ways I’ve grown into a surer self.

A formative relationship, one of those growin’-up-together-across-continents sorts of things, ended. In its wake I spent a lot of time examining the meaning of partnership, commitment, friendship, and what it means to love people and let them in, and whether it’s ultimately worth it.

It feels odd, growing up (and for the first time, maybe, ageing) at the end of the world. Sunflower in an apocalyptic desert type of weird. Glut of golden light from a fatally skewed planetary revolution. Something like that. All the sunflower seeds of my heart bristling/bursting with the need to be part of some pattern, some foodchain. Something like that.

What I wrote: fiction

I published two stories this year. I’m fucking proud of them both. They represent where I’m at artistically as a short fiction writer better than anything before–in particular my Anathema Magazine piece “The Calm the Love the Traceless Land,” which is and will always be my first and proudest Beckettian piece.

I’m also so proud of my first-ever appearance in the incalculably awesome Shimmer Magazine (now an emeritus magazine in the genre space), with “The Triumphant Ward of the Railroad and the Sea.”

One story for the ocean, and one for the desert. Landscapes of my heart. How it goes.

What I wrote: poetry

In February 2018, I sent out a poetry chapbook manuscript into the world for the first time ever.

I hit up five contests. This selection of seventeen poems was entitled BRICOLAGE ON SUNDAY, and it ultimately received a semi-finalist nod in the Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook Award and a finalist finish in the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Prize (selected by Carl Philips). I have a lot to learn, but I’m breathlessly proud of that.

I also had a poem selected for publication in a forthcoming issue of one of the great-aunts of London’s literary mag scene. I’ll announce as soon as I can.

I will spend a lot of 2019 focusing on getting a little bit better at poetry every day. Poetry is magic, yo, and who doesn’t want to do magic?

A first! gettin interviewed!

This was new and surreal! Please check out my conversation with spectacular person Milia Ayache over at Rusted Radishes, the American University of Beirut’s literary zine. We talked about a lot of shit. I made it weird. Milia vibed on the weirdness. It was a ball.

What I read this year

book covers of all my 2018 reading (so far!)

I read more long-form work than I’ve ever read before, this year. 51 books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry so far, with 2 more that should edge in before the year is out.

Here are some that I want to talk to you about:

  • Things We Found During the Autopsy by Kuzhali Manickavel: What a trip. I want to go on more trips like this, and I want Manickavel driving, with a phone on 5% battery and only google maps to guide us.
  • Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay: So far, everyone I show a poem to from this collection cries. Train yourself w/ a bevy of onions and see if you can withstand this brilliant and painful work, ‘cos I could not.
  • Don’t Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff: Politics. But important. Changed my brain, a bit.
  • Everything Under by Daisy Johnson: Weirdly sticky little subcultural Englandy story of identity and family. I enjoyed Johnson’s prose experiments a lot.
  • Monster Portraits by Sofia and Del Samatar: Need I say words? It’s a way better little book than you think. Don’t miss out. Foyles has a copy.
  • Amatka by Karin Tidbeck: Fruiting bodiesssss. And fungal everything. Read this. Great little standalone dark SF.
  • Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh: After this short story collection, I stan Ottessa 4eva. I will read all of her stuff, eventually.
  • Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Y. Davis: How have I never read Davis before? This tightened a few loose screws in my brain in the general vicinity of law enforcement and morality.
  • The Power by Naomi Alderman: I really disliked this for many reasons, and found it to be pointedly anti-feminist. Feminism is not a role reversal of the current power dynamic, fam!
  • The January Children by Safia Elhillo: Maybe my favourite poetry book of the year this year.

I try to keep tabs on what demographics I’m giving my reading hours to, and I didn’t do as well at reading women, POC, and LGBTQ+ folks this year as last year, because my audiobook selections tended towards cough/bland/ cough. Mostly because I have a hard time focusing on (better) literature through my ears. I will try to fix this in 2019.

I had a less impressive year of reading short fiction. After a few years of consistently reading 250+ short stories a year, I just got tired, and my discovery mechanisms were overall not doing what I needed them to. And this year I was sad to see some important venues shutter, in particular Liminal Stories and Shimmer.

I would like to balance things out and maybe read a handful of great short stories a month in 2019. I gotta figure out how.

What I listened to

Not an incredibly strong music year. I listened to A Black Mile to the Surface by The Manchester Orchestra basically on repeat. I also rocked Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer and Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy a fair amount.

What I saw

With all the hours I spend reading, working, and exercising, it’d be hard for me to be the biggest movie/TV buff. So a modest pool size, here. Nonetheless, standouts for me this year were:

2018 in one final thought

I took in a lot of beauty this year.

2019’s going to be the year to add a speck of new beauty to the world.

2017: What I Published

 

2017, a whiplash

year; on the personal front one of the roughest in my adult life, but on the publishing front one of the most bountiful. I am really proud of the work I put into the world this year—this world which feels in a lot of ways like a late-stage world. So herein a chronicle of the most worthwhile fruit of my having come to this weird planet, and stuck around for a time. 2017 edition.

The stories are

all eligible for both Hugo and Nebula nominations. If you were to read just one, I’d like to recommend my novelette with Jess Barber in Clarkesworld, “Pan-Humanism: Hope and Pragmatics.” If you would like to read something for the short story category too, a fork in the road: Hopeless romantic? Head to “Suddenwall.” Lover of the strange and macabre? It’s “The Barrette Girls” for you.

Complete list:

  • Novelettes:
    • Pan-Humanism: Hope and Pragmatics (with Jess Barberread online, Clarkesworld
      (12100 words : science fiction : urban design, sexy showering, Beirut, polyamory, water scarcity, Nantes, copious intellectual sparring)
  • Short Stories:
    • Suddenwall read online, Beneath Ceaseless Skies
      (4300 words : fantasy : love, genocide, the sentient city of Vannat)
    • The Barrette Girls read online, Liminal Stories
      (5100 words : dark : an unnatural group of girls, a heartless chaperone, personhood, trauma)
    • Twilight Travels with the Grape-Paper Man read online, The Dark
      (3700 words : dark : a dolma-mummy, gender, belonging, and summer vacations)
    • Immortal Still read online, Freeze Frame Fiction
      (1000 words : literary : mortality and love)

And whether you read all of my stories or zero of them, thank you for being someone who reads, writes, engages with stories. I think this will turn out to be important, even if we don’t yet know how.

2015 Awards Eligibility Post!

I’ve had a couple fictiony things out this year, and I’m in my 2nd / final year of eligibility for the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

If you’re curious about my 2015 fiction and only have time to read one thing, I’d recommend my SF short story In the Queue for the Worldship Munawwer (4100 words) in Clarkesworld. This story gave me feels to write, and still gives me feels to think about. I hope it shows.

If you can make time for another story, I’d supplement Hani’s: Purveyor of Rusks, Biscuits, and Sweet Tea (dark fantasy, 3700 words) or Rush Down, Roar Gently (near-future science fantasy, 4900 words). If you can’t get your hands on Interzone where you are, email me for a copy of this story!

2015 publications, in full

Here is my Twitter thread bigging up some of my favourite Campbell-eligible authors.

Here is my Twitter thread bigging up some of my Nebula recommendations (also goes for the Hugos!).

Short Bread – May 2015

 

Three plot-driven pieces this month, although I’ve read and loved a lot of unusual story shapes since last month’s review, like a collection of ragtag storyteddies, stuffing half pulled out, piled on a windowsill. I’ll tweet some stuff I liked but haven’t reviewed.

The Kingdom of the Blind by Maureen McHugh in After the Apocalypse (reprinted in Lightspeed #18)

I work in technology, so this story poked all of my 1’s and 0’s. A genetic algorithm that’s (maybe?) developing a personality, a software system that people count on for important shit, which must never go awry (hint: it’s going awry), a main character who’s battling both Impostor Syndrome and challenging personalities in the software field.

This is the best story I will ever read about fixing bugs. I loved it so.

A word about this collection, but first, a disclaimer–Maureen McHugh will be teaching at Clarion this year, and I’m attending (!), so I’m obviously predisposed to be in slight awe. That said, After the Apocalypse isn’t just a tightly woven collection of character-rich, setting-saturated stories. It is a collection that gave me permission to write–air quotes–Slice of Life stories. I’ve always known in my heart that not every genre story needs a clean cloven resolution, just like I’ve always known that not every literary story floats towards an introspective non-ending. But After the Apocalypse gave this newfound legitimacy for me, because it was THAT awesome. It showed me how goddam good a Slice of Life story can be in the hands of a professional.

The Selkie by David K. Yeh in Lackington’s #6 (“Seas”)

We meet our selkie narrator in trouble, dashed into a North Sea bobbing with mines in the middle of WWII. He’s been entrusted with a serious quest, one that could end the war with the Nazis. From this point, David Yeh’s story alternates the selkie’s own backstory, flavoured with gritty Northern myth, and the unfolding plot, as he tries to rescue himself and his mission.

I’m generally unlikely to enjoy stories based in folklore or mythology. My education (both as reader and student) and upbringing didn’t give me strong footing in world folklores, so reading stories like these, I always feel like I’m only half in on a secret. But David Yeh writes with such a compelling voice, one that’s strategic and harassed and reeks of desperation. The plot does a nice fold in on itself at the end, replacing one unanswered question with another, better resolved one.

Anna Saves Them All by Seth Dickinson in Shimmer #21

Ah, yes. So I’m now 2 for 2 on reading Seth Dickinson stories that absolutely bowl me over. Morrigan in the Sunglare was probably my favourite story of 2014. And now this. I am almost afraid to read another of his stories lest it fail to live up to the sky-high expectations I’ve built.

HOW CAN YOU WRITE WAR AND VIOLENCE LIKE POETRY? Every few lines there’s a gut punch, a perfect sentence, an absurdist tug that refracts your entire being through the space between the lines.

Anna Saves Them All is about vaulting, big things: morality and evil and the absurdity and tragedy of existence. And it’s also about a medusa-necked alien and a person called Anna in a room together. That’s all I’ll say.

 

Short Bread – April 2015

Sorry about the hiatus!

I continued to crunch through short stories in the first quarter of 2015 (holy shit, time is flying!), but haven’t had a chance to put together a review post. I’m now keeping a spreadsheet* listing every short story I read, and that’s helping me structure my thinking around these reviews.

Anyway, onto the good stuff.

The Land Baby by Natalia Theodoridou in The Dark #4

I mentioned last time that The Dark frequently hands out free epub/mobi subscriptions because they are quite awesome like that. I’m still working through back issues, and wanted to mention Natalia Theodoridou’s sun-soaked, Mediterranean-spiced ‘The Land Baby’ in Issue 4. Theodoridou got a lot of (well-deserved) praise last year for her Clarkesworld piece ‘The Eleven Holy Numbers of the Mechanical Soul‘–‘The Land Baby’ is a totally different character, but one with a distant family resemblance. The sea and solitude figure heavily in both.

A strength of this story is its solemn character studies–little Maria, who’s lost her mother, and her father Alekos, who could be on the verge of losing more than his wife. Theodoridou controls the POV expertly, with scenes told in tight third person from a number of characters’ perspectives.

But even more than that, the setting evoked here is just so melancholic and sultry, saline and seaweedy and sun-baked. The setting makes it even easier to mainline the encroaching sorrow, leaving you staring at the last words.

All That We Carry, All That We Hold by Damien Angelica Walters in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination April 2015

I’m not much of a crier, but yeah, goddamit. Walters is an author whose stories I make an effort to read, but I’m more used to her horror and dark fantasy offerings. I’m really glad I read this one.

(I must admit, I was pulled in by the fantastic story art, ETA: by Jay O’Connell — see Robert’s comment below.) It’s a story about love and family and death–aren’t all the good ones?–but it’s set to a backdrop of space exploration.

Put that way, the story’s themes seem familiar and well-trodden. But Walters’ treatment elevates them. The pacing is dreamlike; the prose is stylish and serves to heighten the emotional impact of the main conflict (conflict is a weird word for it), so that when the story gets dark and heavy and stabby, it tears you all the way down with it.

Remember I said crying? Yeah, crying.

What the Highway Prefers by Cassandra Khaw in Lackington’s #5 (“Beldams”)

Weird fact: I’m a huge sucker for stories about roads. Not metaphorical roads. Actual roads made of gravel and tarmac and stuff. So this little piece by Cassandra Khaw in Lackington’s had me by the eyeballs from the first sentence.

The story is cloudy, mysterious–we have Aunt Fatimah, a warden of the highway, protecting its travelers from an insinuated and terrible fate. To do this she must complete a ritual that grates at her faith.

The plot was intriguing enough, but it wasn’t the reason I loved this so much (and I really did). Rather, I fell for the gritty, slashing, don’t-give-a-fuck poetry of the piece; the bricolage of the words, the unrestrained metaphor, the prism-in-an-oilslick colour of the writing.

I’m so glad Lackington’s picked this odd little story up: it’s a story shape we don’t see often in SFF markets, and one that I wholeheartedly enjoyed.

*there’s nothing a spreadsheet can’t solve.

Short Bread – January 2015

Ogres of East Africa by Sofia Samatar, originally in Long Hidden (Rose Fox and Daniel Older eds, 2014)

I read this in Cicada Magazine’s Nov/Dec 2014 issue, and was in love with it from the first sentence. This is a story narrated in the margins (literally) of a catalogue of fantastic beasts, protected from the eyes of Alibhai’s racist and boorish employer by the serendipity of the latter’s bad eyesight. ‘Ogres’ is a perfectly executed musing on the way cultures and religions meet, and how power resolves at the intersections. And also, most delightfully, it’s a musing on where the mundane and the unexplained meet.

The thing is: in Samatar’s story, the mundane and the unexplained are twined together, fastened by the melancholy of hardship. This hardship wears different guises for each character, but is felt by our protagonist Alibhai; the curious, mysterious Mary, his primary source of information; and the ogres of East Africa themselves:

[Kisirimu] will be betrayed by song. He will die in a pit, pierced by spears.

I said ‘perfectly executed’ – ‘Ogres’ really feels like a master at work. The style is clean and limned with poetry, the words are neither too few nor too many, the pacing is flawless, and the story itself is one of the best I’ve read in ages.

A Universal Elegy by Tang Fei (trans. John Chu) in Clarkesworld #100

Man, Tang Fei’s stories are weeeird.

This is the second of her pieces I’ve read in Clarkesworld, both translated by John Chu. The first I read, ‘Pepe‘ (Clarkesworld #93), about two kids in an amusement park, was weird like a sensation you can’t decide whether you’re enjoying or hating–of a tattoo gun grazing skin, or a muscle stretch the moment it starts to burn. ‘A Universal Elegy’ is a completely different story to ‘Pepe’. It’s a far-future sci-fi, told in letters from the narrator to her brother back on Earth, but that same almost-uncomfortable weirdness permeated my reading.

The narrator drops hints about her mental health, is unreliable, and herself often confused; she meets an alien called Hull, who becomes her lover and convinces her to travel to his home planet, Dieresis. Here, she’s convinced to stay indoors and is fed a special diet to encourage her body to evolve. All is shadowy; conspiracy and foreboding seem to lace every word. The central mystery–of what it is that the narrator will become under Hull’s sculpting/tutelage, and what it is that everyone else on Dieresis already is–resolves in probably the strangest way of any published story I’ve read in the last two years.

At heart, this dark, discomfiting story is a story about relationships, and compromise, and falling in and out of love. Sound blahblah, rehashed? Believe me, it’s not.

It’s not just Tang’s weirdness I love though, because it turns out I do enjoy the weird sensation of reading her stories. It’s also the memorableness of her writing. I thought about ‘Pepe’ for months after I read it, and there is a particular scene from ‘A Universal Elegy’ I don’t think I’ll ever forget (no spoilers!).

Another Mouth by Lisa L. Hannett in The Dark #1

Every now and then, The Dark thinks it’s SFF Christmas and hands out digital subscriptions for free. I snagged one, and have been making my way through the issues, starting from the beginning. Hannett’s story in the very first issue, ‘Another Mouth’, was the first standout I hit: a dark, desperate horror story set in what feels like a rural eighteenth century Scottish coastal town.

Can I just say this about Hannett: I’ve heard her read a different story (‘Sweet Subtleties‘) and have now read this one, and based on this small sample, I’m building a hypothesis that food-slash-eating descriptions are a powerful device in Hannett’s stories. And it’s kind of awesome that she can make eating broth a mega-creepy plot device in a horror story.

Another thing I loved here was that the narrative moved beautifully even though the setting never changed from the protagonist’s small kitchen. Neat trick.

Stuff I read in 2014

I read 21 books (not including magazines) in 2014. This is the first year I keep count, so I can’t tell if this is impressive compared to a baseline. But next year, I’ll have a number to beat.

Here’s everything I read chronologically from the beginning to the end of the year, with notes.

  1. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green – this made me cry, and was just clever and personal and featured a fictional novel as a central plot device. I really enjoyed it *thumbs nose at haters*.
  2. Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness by Alva Noë – A fantastic slim new volume furthering an extended mind / embodied cognition hypothesis. Professor Noë is one of my favourites.
  3. Signal to Noise by Neil Gaiman – Moving graphic novel about mortality and art.
  4. Lapsing Into a Comma : A Curmudgeon’s Guide to the Many Things That Can Go Wrong in Print–and How to Avoid Them by Bill Walsh – This is one I knocked off my to-read list after having it on there for yeeears. It wasn’t as fun to read as I’d expected, but I picked up some useful tips on writing style and diction.
  5. Innocent Erendira & Other Stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Any short story collection by Gabo is my kryptonite. I particularly loved “The Sea of Lost Time”.
  6. Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul by Giulio Tononi – This was probably my least palatable read this year. A cognitive science theory put forward in the most overwrought, pretentious way humanly possible (under the excuse, I think, of making it ‘accessible’), to the point that the thesis itself is lost in the wash.
  7. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie – This was really good, although a bit ‘hard’ SF for my taste. I’ll read Ancillary Sword in 2015.
  8. The Melancholy of Mechagirl by Catherynne M. Valente – Fantastic collection of Japanese themed short fiction. My first exposure to award winning novella “Silently and Very Fast”, which I loooooved.
  9. English Breakfast by Jay Bernard – A poetry collection penned by London-based poet Bernard while living in Singapore.
  10. This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz – I really enjoyed this. Hauntingly prosodic, and just so sad and true.
  11. Half Life: A Novel by Shelley Jackson – Odd-as-fuck novel about conjoined twins in a world where this has become a common side-effect of nuclear testing.
  12. Collected Stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Another Gabo collection. Mostly re-reads, but some new ones.
  13. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt – A novel broad and deep enough that the protag feels like a best friend or a relative by the end of it. Ridiculously accomplished and humbling storytelling.
  14. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson – Eerie, just eerie. Great bit of gothic horror.
  15. An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine – Probably the book I was most looking forward to reading this year. Verdict? I needed more eau de Beirut in a novel set in that city — how can Beirut not fully permeate any story set within its borders? The presence of the city wasn’t as strong as I expected. The final 10% of the book was astoundingly moving, though.
  16. How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ – A sarcastic teardown of mansplaining and manframing and all other kinds of misogyny targeting women writers.
  17. Naming, Necessity, and Natural Kinds edited by Stephen P. Schwartz – Excellent, excellent collection of analytic philosophy essays on the Causal Theory of Names.
  18. Light Boxes by Shane Jones – An experimental short novel about depression. I was not as wowed as I expected to be.
  19. At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories by Kij Johnson – Varied collection of stories by Johnson. Standouts for me were “Story Kit”, “Spar”, and “The Man who Bridged the Mist”. The collection is worth buying for these stories alone.
  20. City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett – Clever, funny, intriguing fantasy set in a fictional city which is sure to join the ranks of the greatest urban settings ever written.
  21. The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison – I squeezed this novel into the last few days of the year. I’m not sure what kept me glued to this book, as the plot was not the central motivator, but something definitely had me hooked. Really enjoyed this.

Thoughts on my year in reading: I read some great modern philosophy this year, and managed to keep up with a few of the SFF novels generating big awards buzz. Pretty good mix of literary and SFF–I’ll try to continue to read widely in 2015. I also read maybe 300 short stories (mostly slush) so, yeah, not a slouchy year, words-wise.

Since my new Kindle arrived in late November, I’m reading much, much faster. Bodes well for next year.

 

Short Bread – December 2014

I’ve decided to do a regular roundup of short stories I’ve read and loved recently. They may not be fresh out the oven; they may not be gluten-free–but they will definitely have left me with something, an earthy taste, an indelible warmth or grain or moment.

This will also give me something to look back on for Nebula noms and end-of-year roundups in the future.

She Dances on Knives by Keffy R.M. Kehrli in Three-Lobed Burning Eye #26.

A gorgeous story told in an interwoven diptych–a small mermaid in the pitch-black of the ocean bottom, a bruised suburban relationship on land. The mermaid bits were swirling and inky, the small-town relationship striking in its realism. How is it that we drift so far from our lovers that we forget not just why we’ve loved, but also what excuses we’ve used to stop loving?

The Man Who Bridged the Mist (pdf link) by Kij Johnson, originally in Asimov’s Oct-Nov 2011

I’m near the end of Kij Johnson’s collection, At the Mouth of the River of Bees, and, by and large, it’s lived up to expectations so far. It gave me an excuse to re-read the exquisite and cringeworthy Spar, which is a massive personal favourite, and usually the first story I recommend to non-SFF readers when they show an interest in SFF short fiction. But this isn’t about ‘Spar’, it’s about my first read of ‘The Man Who Bridged the Mist’–Johnson’s Hugo and Nebula award-winning novella. This story. Man. I can’t say why I loved it so much. Was it the ever-present, bright, foamy, whorly presence of the mist, a capricious antagonist in the background of this vividly rendered world, sad and mysterious as the sound of wind in a canyon? Was it the humble, understated passion for both duty and masonry that bizarrely swept me off my urban feet? Or was it the strong women characters, both on-screen and off-? [Rasali Ferry is one of the best characters I’ve read this year.]

Another thing: this story had a strange, delicate, uncommon narrative shape. It progressed with the progress of seasons and bridge-building, set up more like a novel than a short story. It didn’t start urgently, and it didn’t have a central conflict, and it wasn’t busy trying to solve itself, but it was–hmm, beautiful. The word is beautiful.

I won’t forget this one in a long time.

How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps by A. Merc Rustad in Scigentasy 4

I followed this link after seeing recommendations from a few different people on Twitter. And OK, I had other things to do, and did not have time to read a story right then and there. But I did read it. I couldn’t help it. A story made of lists, about the guises of love. A story about ROBOTS. Apparently I love stories about robots. But with the foil of the robot (!) stopping this from short-circuiting into something terribly, frighteningly dark, it could say things that were personal and true and important. That balance is hard to get right on paper, and Rustad pulls it off.

Setting up, getting comfortable.

Welcome to my tiny opalescent tile in the mosaic that is the web!

I’ve set up this website to catalogue my published fiction and poetry. But I hope, sort of shyly, sort of obliquely, that eventually I’ll be writing froth-lipped essays here, or posting the odd picture of rush hour London, or retreating to these comfortable abodes when 140 characters become too stark and oppressive a medium.

In the meantime, thanks for visiting.