Forever playing catch-up, am I right? God, maybe I should switch to a monthly newsletter or something, so I don’t keep forgetting that I have a website.
I had a story released on March 13! ‘More Tomorrow‘ came out on Automata Review to, generally, from what I could tell on Twitter, delighted snickers. It was so nice to reply to people with “Thank you so much, I’m glad you had fun!” A nice reminder, too, that there is room for everything in spec-fic, including extremely silly stories like this one.
I must also give a shout-out to Automata for being super nice to work with, and enthusiastic about the story, and for the final presentation of the story. I loved the typography, the illustrations, just the whole setup. Whoever is on their graphic design team over there, they’re better than some other spec-fic online magazines I’ve seen.
With that said, I was kicking myself later for not even considering accessibility; there’s kind of a typographic gag in there (the {{}}< that represents a trilobite in the narrator’s journal) that comes across as gibberish on screenreaders, which one of my Twitter followers who uses a screenreader pointed out to me. It was unintentional, but still rude and thoughtless of me, especially because the line still works without the trilobites. I’ll have to remember not to do that in future stories.
‘More Tomorrow’ also got wonderful shout-outs from Maria Haskins on the B&N blog (” With a sharp and caustic sense of humor and a protagonist who is brave and resourceful even in the face of despair, it is a must-read.”) and Vanessa Fogg, who threw it in with some truly stellar company on her blog (” This story is by turns hilarious and harrowing, narrated by a character who shields herself in humor and wisecracks to survive. Fun, endearing, and utterly winning.”). As I always say on my Twitter, “GO GO GO LIL STORY!”
Lackington’s, which accepted my story ‘At the Hand of Every Beast’ for their Gothics issue, interviewed me via email, and that’s up here! I apologized repeatedly for the babbling, but people seemed to enjoy it too. Or maybe that’s how people think I sound already, so they were ready for it. (I mean, it’s true. God I hope I don’t get interviewed for anything ever again. Especially if there’s no delay for me to think about my answers. With that said, I had DAYS to respond to this one, and I just BLEUURRGGHHHED onto the keyboard and sent it out the next day, so maybe that’s not a panacea either. Sigh.)
The brillz Mimi Mondal also name-dropped me in an article about South Asian speculative fiction here at Tor, mainly to demonstrate that the diaspora is a) wildly productive and b) not always writing about South Asian characters or setting our stories in South Asia. I am dying to read everything recommended here, and it’s gratifying to see that there are so many of us out there!
Last thing: I set up a Curious Fictions page! So far it’s been a nice reprint aggregator, particularly for some stories I love that got into print anthologies or magazines rather than online, and I have a little handful of subscribers! The stories cannot be restricted to subscribers, but posts can, so it’s been suggested that I start making some subscriber-only posts so that they can get something special for supporting me every month, which I am totally on board with. I set up a Twitter poll and was surprised by the results when it ended:
Fleshing out ideas was the lead by like 25 percent when I last checked, so I didn’t expect to see query stuff lapping it. Maybe a ton of people voted at the last minute? Anyway, the people have spoken, and those posts will be going up in the next week or so!