2022 Writing Wrap-Up

What did I do in 2022?

In many ways, the past year has been a blur. Kelly and I had a couple of family tragedies and other lesser setbacks, and these often felt huge and all consuming. Interspersed with these challenges was a much more thrilling distraction–a return to the delights of travelling! There was quite a lot of it, as Kelly’s High Times in the Low Parliament was out, so we cautiously attended some cons and writing festivals. Worldcon, Windycon, CanCon, and the Celsius festival in Spain were among the events that welcomed us, and I was so grateful to be able to go, to see my various writing friends again, and to once again reach out to the wider world.

There were virtual cons, too! You can see my panel for Augurcon, “Stories for the Futures we Need,” which also featured Premee Mohamed and Charlie Jane Anders, by clicking on the Youtube link at the bottom of this post. There’s a whole day of programming there to enjoy!

When we weren’t on the road and sometimes even when we were, I was writing. Mostly I worked on novel-length fiction, but I did write a novelette called “Horsewoman,” which will be out in Uncanny soon; I’m very excited about that! My “The Hazmat Sisters, which was a finalist for the 36th Asimovs’ Annual Readers Award will also be featured on Escape Pod, in text and audio forms.

Finally and in a very Gamechanger-y plot twist, my House of Zolo poem, “Starring You in the Role of the Fourth Rider,” is going to be adapted into a presentation–still to be determined–in VR by Black Bag media.

Working on books can make it feel like you have nothing to show for the hours and hours and hours and look, more hours! that one puts in. This is emphatically not me complaining about writing a lot. I loooovvvveee writing. But the publication dates come few and far between, and depending on your process you can work on something for months or even years without putting it in front of someone. It can be odd, and it forces me at least to rely on inner resources when I think about how a project’s going. The time scale for sharing long form fiction can be innately discouraging. I suspect that’s why many new writers struggle to see their work through to completion. It’s a marathon not a sprint: a long way to the finish line!

All of which is to say I’ve probably written half a million words this year, and it may be a fair while yet before you get to read many of them. I do have high hopes of committing more short fiction in 2023–so encourage me, if you dare!

The Thrashing Stage of #amwriting

illustration by Allen Williams

Wild Things

Stories and books can have a figuring it out stage for me, a point – or, sometimes, several points – where I haven’t quite figured out how to proceed with some important piece of the work in progress. In some cases, if the problem is plot, it can feel like I’ve painted myself into a corner.

When I get into that space–this generally happens at least once with every short story and several times with longer works–I do a lot of walking  and thinking, as well as a certain amount of sitting around in the hot tub at my condominium, dictating my scattered thoughts thoughts into portable devices of some kind. It’s how this particular blog entry is getting written: with a phone dictation program as I bob among the bubbles. Truly, we should all have such problems.

My inner supervisor is never terribly impressed with this. Wondering around taking photos will always feel like lollygagging, and as for hot, luxurious soaks with a blurry view of the CN Tower? Well, that’s just decadent. Where do you get off having a hot tub anyway, it asks, who do you think you are? Go do some real work!

It never seems to cut ice with that particular slice of my brain to argue that it always works out; the faffing about and distraction do whatever they’re supposed to do, the answer comes, the story gets finished. And I hear variations on this theme from other writers: they get to the bashing the head against the wall phase and it’s strangely painful. For some of us, it can feel new every single time. Each time, we wonder if it really truly is some kind of brain breakage, or writerfail. Have we lost the old magic?

Fortunately for me, the lure of a good walk and the siren song of a bubbling tub are just plain louder than the internalized screechy voice that seems to think the answer will come if I sit at the keyboard until I bleed from the eyes. And I can look at pieces where I remember being momentarily mired. I scrapped “Wild Things” in its entirety and began again from scratch, with a very different voice and point of view, and it became something wonderful and surprising.

What do you do when you are stuck?

What did you do with your Monday evening?

imageMonday night: I am parked on the bed, tip-tapping away, with both cats lounging beside me as Kelly writes in the next room. It was a cool and sometimes blustery day, but now the sky has cleared and the evening light is pleasantly mellow. Our birch trees are putting out teeny tiny leaves. I love the spotted crepe-y look of birch trunks; I missed them when we moved away from Northern Alberta when I was eleven or so. I associate the look of them, somehow, with contentment.

We were at Ad Astra all weekend, seeing people and talking books, so today I mostly worked through a logjam of teaching tasks, as well as figuring out out the plotty heart of one of the three novel concepts I’m incubating. I am calling these concepts the stork babies, since some species of stork hatch multiple offspring, who then duke it out in a rather grisly game of survivor, the stronger voting the weaker out of the nest, kersplat, until only one remains. If I ever wrote a book called Things I learned from David Attenborough, there would definitely be a bird chapter entitled “Nature’s Most Beautiful Assholes.”

The storks’ current working titles, in birth order, are Tom the Liar, Glory Days, and Magic Fairy Sparkle Princess. I expect all of these titles to change no matter who outwits, outlasts and outwrites.

I am also pleased because I’ve realized the Poldark series is finally available via my preferred media vendor. We’ve been waiting for this to happen for months! Now if only iTunes Canada would unlock Grantchester S2…

Nither NanoWrimo, but I am writing steadily

write memeAs it says: I am not doing Nanowrimo this year; I have books to rewrite, and stories on the go. There’s no discrete 50K chunk of wordage I need to generate, and so many things to finish.

The finishing is pleasant, though I do love the mad plunge through a draft. And the November part of Nanowrimo usually appeals to me. I sometimes struggle to get writing done after Halloween, and having a huge deadline and braggable goal has sorted that challenge rather handily for me in the past.

What I am doing, now that the Child of a Hidden Sea* copy-edits are on their way back to New York, is skimming through book two, currently titled Daughter of No Nation, as preparation for buckling down to really polishing number three, Nature of a Pirate. I am also considering what I may set as my 2014 writing goals: what I want to do, and what I need to do. Glancing up from the project at hand, in other words, to look at the work and career as a whole. If there’s a short story you wish I’d tackle, or a universe you want me to return to, now might be the time to put in a request.

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*Yes, the book’s already available in ebookstores for pre-order, even though its release date is June. The above link is for Amazon – here’s Chapters Indigo. Cool, huh?

Mermaids, #BuffyRewatch, and a vintage pun

My latest Buffy rewatch ends Season Five with “The Gift.” I call it “Beware of God.

If you’d prefer a pre-taste of my upcoming book CHILD OF A HIDDEN SEA, which is set in the same world as “Among the Silvering Herd” or my next related Tor.com story “The Ugly Woman of Castello di Putti,” here’s a post on mermaids I did for
My World… in Words and Pages.

Toronto continues to be a completely fun place to explore: here’s a store called Da Vintage Code. I love a good pun.
DaVintage Code Vintage store, in Kensington Market. #yyz #toronto