Once again, this post has reminded me that a) I hate doing these and b) I cannot spell either ‘eligible’ or ‘negligible’ without slowing down to a pace of one letter every thirty seconds, glaring suspiciously at the screen the while.
So! 2019! Not a real busy year for short fiction in Great Country Premonia. I told myself that this was because I was Working Hard On Novvles No Time For Short Ficshun, but the truth is, I just couldn’t concentrate or focus, and spent most of the year either going through the editing steps for my debut (‘Beneath the Rising’! March 2, 2020! Please pre-order!) or adding and deleting random thousands of words from unfinished stuff of various lengths. Crucially, too, I think, I didn’t make any kind of plan for 2019; the plan was ‘Get the debut back from edits and go from there.’ You gotta plan ahead!
(In the last two weeks though I did manage to finish two short stories so I could submit to venues with a November 30 and December 15 deadline! So that was exciting. I guess it’s still possible.)
Anyway, I only had two new pieces come out this year:
1. ‘The Moving Stars,’ at Drabblecast; I think I detailed previously the many, many problems I had with both the audio and the text not being the story I sent them, despite my repeated objections. (On the other hand: money!) The good, final version is up now at Curious Fictions though! This is about a young mother who’s not taken seriously by anyone, except the not-quite-visible aliens that made first contact with Earth years ago. I wanted this one to be a sort of cross between ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and some kind of ’50s utopian sci-fi, and I really liked the way it turned out, tone-wise.
2. ‘Us and Ours,’ in A Secret Guide to Fighting Elder Gods. Two kids, unable to convince everybody to bail out of their town when the old gods of the land begin to feud with the new, join up with a mysterious stranger and a local witch to fight for their home. This was a fun story to write and I was so thrilled for it to end up in an anthology alongside so many other cool authors! I mean, teens and elder gods, that’s sort of My Thing. This also got nice write-ups at Skiffy and Fanty and made it into the Lovecraft Reread at Tor!
Hm, I just noticed that both of those were solicitations. Hey editors! Keep soliciting me! You’re keeping food in the fridge and the lights on, no offense to my public service job, which I may not even have much longer. Ha ha yeahhhhhh.
Anyway! I’m hoping for big things in 2020, or at least one big thing, which is the debut coming out. And another trip to the UK to yell about the debut!
Plus, despite my relative silence and moping about stuff (for example, the Fireside debacle, which actually put me at negative works accepted for a little while), my brilliant, dedicated agent actually managed to make deals for two other things of mine this year! Neither of which I can talk about yet, you know how it is. And I just made another sale this week (of a solicited reprint), so. Things are looking up. And maybe next year I will even finish some of the things I started this year!