Oh, the places I’ve been in 2016!

2016 has already been a spectacular year for me on so many fronts, the most obvious of which has been travel. Our recent Thanksgiving jaunt to Alberta was the latest in a run of delightful and exciting trips. In truth, Kelly and I have never gone as far or left home as often as we did this year.

Counting up chronologically and by city, here’s the list:

February: Vancouver, Portland, San Francisco. (I was on the A Daughter of No Nation book tour. Kelly, meanwhile, went to Boston for Boskone.)

March: Our London adventure!

(whee, it’s my Big Ben shaped friend!)

May: Chicago (Nebula Awards Banquet.)

August: Kansas City (World Science Fiction Convention.)

September: Ottawa (CanCon) and Los Angeles.

Cuddle break! Going nuts over art for hours on end is hard work! @kellyoyo

(Snuggle selfie at the Getty Museum)
And now, finally, October: Calgary, Hinton, Jasper (Family Thanksgiving.)

There were also countless short jaunts to conventions like Ad Astra, and readings in Guelph and Kitchener-Waterloo. There’ll be one or two more of those, but as the year winds down we’re going to settle into grooving on Toronto and saving up energy and resources for another big delightful thing, scheduled about six months hence. I’ll tell you all about that some other day.

Podcast interview with @JoelCornah

A. M. Dellamonica, 2014, photo by Kelly Robson

A. M. Dellamonica, 2014, photo by Kelly Robson

Sci Fi and Fantasy Network editor and podcaster Joel Cornah was kind enough to interview me about all manner of things: my new fiction, my older fiction, my process, growing up in a theater family, my queerness, and my inspirations, to name a few. The interview is here. He will be running one with Kelly soon too, I’m pleased to say.

The interview is about eighteen minutes long and doesn’t have any spoilers for any of my books or stories. Enjoy!

 

Upcoming Stormwrack story and @kellyoyo content now!

My story “The Boy who would not be Enchanted” will be up soon, in the October issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. (Right now, in case you haven’t had a chance to swing by, they have wonderful new stories by Claude Lalumière, and Jeremy Sim.)

My Boy is the fifth of the series I call The Gales, a group of stories about Gale Feliachild and Captain Garland Parrish of the sailing vessel Nightjar*. These are set over a decade before the events of my novel Child of a Hidden Sea. My other, more facetious name for them is the adventures of Doctor Who, at sea, with her very pretty companion.

This story is told by Tonio, the Erinthian shopboy who rises to become first mate of the ship. Its the story of the first time he stowed away on Nightjar, as a kid of 11. Now he’s 17 and, obviously, far wiser. He knows himself, and he absolutely understands love… or so he believes, anyway. (And he definitely does not have a crush on his best friend!)

Tonio’s good company, and this story is a confection for those of you who have been shipping Bram and Tonio. There’s a piece of bitter chocolate at its heart, too, about Gale’s prophesied death.

The first three stories in the series are Among the Silvering HerdThe Ugly Woman of Castello di Putti, and most recently The Glass Galago. They’re available at the Tor.com site for free reading, or as ebooks. The fourth, “Losing Heart Among the Tall,” will be up at Tor.com on February 22nd, 2017.

Yes, this means they’ll be going up out of order. It’s not a big thing; they are not that tightly bound together that you can’t enjoy them out of sequence.

Kelly, meanwhile, has a kickass essay about being a late bloomer up at Clarkesworld and a Locus Magazine spotlight interview!.

The two of us will be in Ottawa at Cancon in a couple weeks’ time, and I will post my panel info soon.

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*Nightjar, as it happens, was recently featured in an article by Fran Wilde on Tor.com, “It’s all about the Rigging: My Favorite Fantasy Boats.”

Worldcon, moderating, and the #wedeservebetter panel

imageI want to give you all a spoiler-free version of the Midamericon description of the panel I moderated:

We Deserve Better: Lesbians and Bi Women for Change

In March 2016 some show killed spoilery spoiler of an spoilery spoiler spoilers. Fans launched a Twitter campaign that became mainstream news. They objected to the “Bury Your Gays” trope, referring to the disproportionately high number of lesbians and bisexual women killed on TV. Two weeks later, one of some other show‘s only lesbian couple was killed. We discuss this disturbing pattern and ask how audiences can help prevent it.

My partners in crime were Jaylee James, Nina Niskanen, and Jay Wolf.

I’m not much for freewheeling moderation. I always show up intending to listen and direct discussion, rather than talking myself, and with questions in hand. What’s more, the four of us did a certain amount of predigesting of the topic, checking out things like this (also-spoilery) list of 162 dead TV lesbians and talking about related topics like queerbaiting and fridging.

Like all good panels, we worked up more material than we actually got to discuss, circled ’round it in an order other than what follows, and we also didn’t get into one of my personal bugbears, the idea that the word “deserve” is actually quite a cruel concept. It’s an important and necessary word, but it has thorns: “You deserve this,” can be honestly intended or victim-blaming. “I deserve this” can be simple truth or blatant entitlement.

But I’m home now, and I’ve noticed that the list of questions I prepared for my panelists is interesting in its own right, a good orientation to the topic if anyone wants it. And so I decided I would post that here.

  1. Focusing first on TV, which lesbian deaths were most memorable and meaningful to you personally, both going way back and recently?
  2. Then there are deaths that aren’t necessarily canonical but that have lesbian freight around them. The fate of Ellen Ripley in the third Aliens movie comes after she’s been, to a great extent, masculinized–she’s not gay, but when she dies she has been made to look and act very butch.
  3. If a show queerbaits us and then kills one of the alleged lesbians involved, is that better or worse than if they hadn’t solicited queer viewers in the first place?
  4. Looking at the list of 150+ dead TV lesbians, I wondered: were any of those surprises, or did they trigger any Aha! or Uhoh! moments?
  5. How gender-skewed is this phenomenon? I mean, we all remember how Brokeback Mountain ends. Is it just a woman-on-woman version of fridging?
  6. I’ve mentioned fridging because it’s another common story development that we, as more sophisticated and politically savvy audiences, have become aware and critical of. All of these tropes have been the subject of discussion and debate within fandom and the writing community. What do you think of this?
  7. Now, since I’ve glided on to cinema, what about this phenom in comics and prose? In the past, there were the 1950’s bad girl lesbian dies books… does anyone know how this is playing out now?
  8. As writers, how do you balance the need to occasionally kill off characters with an awareness that every queer character is precious?
  9. If we add in characters with implied deaths, including incidental victims or even crazy killer lesbians who aren’t part of the main cast (guest star deaths, in other words) then I wonder if the question shouldn’t be: Who’s done it right? Who has survived? Who do we love who hasn’t been killed off?
I shall end off with a link offered by one of the above wonderful and lovely panelists, to Jo Chiang’s “Women who love women aren’t Tragic.”

Worldcon, aka #MAC2, we are in you!

imageKelly and I spent most of yesterday in transit, either getting ready to go or actually going to Kansas City, Missouri, for the World Science Fiction convention. Despite Air Canada’s having trouble closing the door of our aircraft (!!) we arrived in plenty of time for my six o’clock panel and then hooked up with friends to attend the Sturgeon Awards Ceremony. Kelly Link won in the short fiction category; I found I was most excited for two second-place winners, though: Eugene Fischer for “The New Mother,” a story I absolutely adore, and Linda Nagata, whose work is luminous and beautiful in every way.

The rest of the evening amounted to chasing around to various points in the hotel to see friends and babble at people. I met, in person, a number of delightful souls whom I’ve known for a long time online. And, naturally, I got to see several lovely people I’d met at previous events.

I haven’t gone far from the hotel and convention center yet, but KC clearly has many photogenic buildings and art installations, and I plan to make a ludicrously ambitious effort to shoot them all.