I will be attending Arisia for only one day in 2025: Sunday, January 19. Originally, I had planned to attend for the full weekend, but our application for tables in the dealer room was declined and the hotel filled up too early for me to arrange lodging so, although I’d been scheduled for panels on Saturday, I had to decline two really interesting panels and will be unable to offer a reading. But I’m really looking forward to participating on Sunday.
Everyone I know is worried. They’re wondering what they can do, given the incoming federal administration that will put immense pressure on marginalized people and the norms and values of our country. There is no simple answer to this question. Recently I wrote about strategies my university is considering. These are all well-and-good, but what do they mean in terms of action? There’s a lot we can do.
My first suggestion is to do no harm. The biggest challenge to maintaining a fragile coalition is to avoid turning on one another. Our opponents will look for ways to divide us. They know, for example, that Israel/Palestine is a fracture plane in our coalition. They will use inflammatory language to try to get different sides to turn on each other to destroy our coalition. Does that mean we can do nothing? No: But we need to not attack one another for holding the “wrong” idea or for not supporting any one particular thing.
We should try to amplify voices calling for positive action. In 2016, the Straw Dog Writers’ Guild organized Voices for Resistance, a project that brought celebrated writers together to offer a reading on the theme of resistance. I was able to invite Kelly Link and was very gratified when she participated. With current events, our committee is discussing how to organize going forward.
Finally, we need to play the long game. We shouldn’t try to do everything. Pick a few things that are important and commit to working on them personally. There’s a lot we can do. But pace yourself! It’s going to be a long four years.
For myself, my primary goal is going to be to defend the LGBTQIA+ community. I don’t yet know exactly what I’m going to do, but I will continue being visible, writing fiction that features queer stories and characters, and offering myself up for panels that discuss issues of gender and sexual identity. Are those the most important concerns? There are going to be many, many fronts in this struggle. But these are the issues I’m going to focus on and, even if only from the sidelines, I will try to support people that choose other hills to die on.
Recently at the Faculty Senate, there were calls for the Chancellor to make public statements about what the University will do in response to changes implemented by the incoming Federal administration. A number of people were dissatisfied with his reply. They seem to want him to just come out and say, “We will break the law.” They don’t seem to understand that it would irresponsible and short-sighted make performative statements like that prospectively.
I was given the opportunity to attend a presentation by consultants advising about strategies the University should consider heading into the new year. Some key take-aways: We should avoid getting drawn into speculative debate about what might happen, redouble our efforts to maintain internal solidarity, and look to build external partnerships.
The incoming administration will make a lot of noise about things they want to do, but the actual changes they can make will be more limited. It’s distraction to spend a lot of time trying to respond to everything they throw up against the wall and instead, we should try to work in partnerships to find ways to ameliorate the worst effects of the things they can actually change.
We can expect to see concerted efforts to keep us divided and off balance. They will look for points of division among us and try to exploit them to get us to fight among ourselves. We need to resist the temptation and show solidarity around the things we can actually agree on, regardless of whatever points of division may exist.
Finally, we should look to partner with other organizations that we can ally with to maintain solidarity and support our goals: the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), other universities, etc. There are a lot of things we can’t do as an organization. But we can ally ourselves with other groups that can.
It’s going to be a dark time for our country. The incoming administration is antithetical to many of the things we believe in, like the rule of law, equal rights, and social justice. We’re going to be challenged as never before to find ways to move forward even while the rest of the country goes backward. I see the same pressures being bought to bear on other organizations I belong to. But we should focus on what we can do.
My year in writing has been a year of transition. During the spring, I negotiated with my employer to begin a phased retirement. I was distracted during much that time trying to figure out all of the ins-and-outs of this huge life change. There’s a lot to learn and a huge number of details. Luckily, my life partner is good at this sort of thing — much better than me — and she did the lion’s share of the work. I’m so lucky to have her. But starting this fall, I began teaching half-time, which has freed up a lot of time for writing.
I attended several events related to my writing. I was both a participant at Arisia in January moderating a panel on gender and sexual identity in media and serving on several other panels. I was a participant at Boskone during February where I served on panels about evolution and romance. I ran the Small Publishing in a Big Universe (SPBU) Marketplace table at the Watch City Steampunk Festival. I also ran Water Dragon and SPBU tables at Readercon in July.
I offered several readings as well, at Arisia, Boskone, and for Straw Dog. I mostly did readings from Better Angels: Tour de Force with selections from Military Morale Mishegoss and all of The Super Sticky Situation.
To support sales of the signed edition, I made a Better Angels ‘zine similar to the Revin’s Heart ‘zine with snapshots and descriptions of each of the Angels with their vital statistics and “three measurements.” I was really pleased with how it turned out — especially the pictures of the individual Angels. They’re really kyuto!
I continued to offer Straw Dog Writes for the Straw Dog Writers’ Guild. Roughly forty people have signed up or attended at some point, The average attendance was four with a range of 1 to 9. Attendance was lower during the summer but a few loyal attendees came nearly every week.
I set up and ran Wandering Shop Stories beginning in 2024. I have written a story fragment almost every day as a warm up exercise. We have four or five other participants nearly every day. In December the server we had used to operate the bot was scheduled to shut down, so I migrated to wandering.shop. Nearly 100 people have signed up for the feed. And in late November, I created a bot to offer the prompt on Bluesky as well.
I had two works published in 2024. The collected edition of Revin’s Heart came out from Water Dragon Publishing with the original seven novelettes plus three “side quests” — short stories from the perspective of other characters. I also had a short story, Always a Destroyer, selected for the anthology Romancing the Rainbow by Knight Writing Press.
I have signed the contract with Water Dragon Publishing for A Familiar Problem. A young man desperately wants a strong magical familiar but, instead, is captured and made the familiar of a powerful demon that intends to train him up for something. But what? The book is tentatively scheduled to be released in January 2025.
I did a lot of writing. I finished writing a new series of six novelettes: Lady Cecelia’s Journey with a seventh omake novelette for the extended edition (totaling 74,000 words). I’m calling it a sapphic romantasy road story:
Love blossoms between two young women, aristocrat and commoner, who risk everything to pursue a life together in face of parental and societal disapproval. Their hope takes them from their small town, across the island, to the Capital following the passionate dream that they can be together openly.
I also have written tens of thousands of words of The Ground Never Lies another sapphic romantasy about a geomancer with an anger problem who thinks herself unlovable, but discovers a capacity for love she believes she had lost. I had developed an original outline and when I finished writing it, I realized I only had about half a novel. But then I realized that I could write another timeline of the events that led to her disillusionment and intersperse the two timelines. At least that’s the plan.
I have several other works in progress. I have two novellas written as sequels to Revin’s Heart with a third in in progress. I’ve written several other short stories set in the same universe as Always a Destroyer.
In the fall, when the candidate for Secretary of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) dropped out, I proposed myself as a write-in candidate. In October, I was elected and took office on November 1. It’s been an interesting experience and a good fit for what I can offer to an organization. It’s been a steep learning curve to get up to speed with the current challenges and culture of the organization. But I’m very happy with the rest of the leadership team and feel appreciated for making a useful contribution.
Not everything went well in 2024, however. I was very disappointed when I was not offered a participant role at Worldcon in Glasgow. I had already purchased plane tickets and lodging. I ended up deciding not to go. I was able to recover some of what I had spent, and it turned out that many many people got COVID, so it was perhaps for the best.
I have some exciting plans for 2025 that I look forward to sharing soon.
When I joined Water Dragon Publishing, my first publication was The Third Time’s the Charm. It is a steampunky fantasy adventure with pirates and airships and a trans protagonist. An 8000-word novelette, it was published as part of the Dragon Gems program. Especially during the pandemic, Water Dragon had discovered that small books seemed to sell well. Now the rest of the world may be catching up.
In Short Books are Perfect for Our Distracted Age, Margaret Renkl describes finding short novels and novellas are rewarding because you can read them in a single sitting. Enough to immerse yourself in but not something you’ll need to return to day after day to finish.
When I wrote The Third Time’s the Charm, I imagined it as part of a series of connected stories: each with its own arc, but connected to an overarching story that linked them all. After writing the second, For the Favor of A Lady, I was able to persuade my publisher to let me serialize them as Revin’s Heart. Five more stories followed in which the protagonist goes from obscurity to the heart of a kingdom and shakes its foundations.
After, Rewriting the Rules came out, we created a collected edition that includes the seven novelettes plus three “side quests” that tell background stories about the characters, including Riva’s Escape, that describes the transition of the protagonist. In the stories he’s only ever described as an man with his transition simply an established fact. But I thought readers would be interested in learning more about his history.
It was a surprise to me to discover that the bundles of the individual stories was actually easier to sell than the collected edition. Another author was envious of how at conventions, the bundles seemed to fly off the table.
Soon, I’m hoping to see if lightning will strike twice. I’ve written another series of novelettes set in the same world, but twenty years earlier. A minor character in Revin’s Heart is Lady Cecelia, who is the curator of a botanical garden. She shows up just a couple of times. But I was interested in telling her background story.
In Lady Cecelia’s Journey, two young women, aristocrat and commoner, fall in love and struggle against societal norms against same-sex relationships and the difference in their social status. In order to live together openly, they flee their backward town to travel to the more cosmopolitan capital. I’m billing it as a sapphic romantasy road story. I’m hoping for it to be serialized as six novelettes, with a seventh omake novelette, Lady Cecelia’s Temptation, that will be part of a collected edition.
Many years ago, I was a doctoral student in science education… (Pro-tip: Always call yourself a “doctoral student” rather than a “graduate student” because the University staff will treat you way better) Anyway, I was taking mostly Biology classes, but also some classes in the Geology Department.
Geology tends to be a much more blue-collar science than Biology. At least, this department was. And a number of the more blue-collar students pegged me as some egghead intellectual that was slumming in Geology and gave me the cold shoulder. One was a non-traditional student — my age or older — who had worked for years as a well-drilling operator and was going back to school to finish a bachelors degree.
One night, we were running a pump test out in the field. For this test, you run a pump for like 24 hours or longer to create a cone of depression in the water table and then, when you turn off the pump, you monitor how quickly the water table returns to baseline. This can yield useful information about the nature of the permeability of the soil, etc. Anyway, I was one of 6 or 7 students out in the middle of a field at night with a huge generator truck monitoring a pump from like 2-4am.
The guy was chain smoking and holding forth with the rest of the students. They were all traditional late teen or early 20’s undergrads and they looked up to him. He was joking with them and telling stories. Then he looked around at them and said, “If you don’t get a job before sundown… Anybody? Anybody?” There was silence. Into the silence, I said, “You get a goddamned job before sundown or we’re shippin’ ya off to military school with that GODDAMN FINKELSTEIN SHIT KID! SONOVABITCH!” It’s a quote from Cheech & Chong’s movie Up in Smoke.
The guy was stunned. He’d had me pegged for some goody two-shoes academic and had no idea that I was a former stoner and had come of age in a blue-collar environment. He was ecstatic to discover me as a fellow-thinker. “Right? Right?” he crowed. After that, I was officially OK and was welcomed into the bosom of the Geology student community.
Almost all rejections you get as an author provide no feedback. Clarkesworld, which has rejected everything I’ve sent (often within hours) says, “Unfortunately, your story isn’t quite what we’re looking for right now.”
I used to think that more feedback would be useful. But I’ve come around. One place that still gives feedback rejected my story today with a message from the slush reader that was, in essence, that he didn’t think magic would work like that.
I mean, what? What does that even mean? You can tell me that science doesn’t work like that. Or any fact-based domain. But magic? Give me a break!
In the end, all you can know from a rejection is that this editor didn’t like your story. It tells you little about whether or not a different editor might like it. So just tell me you didn’t like the story and keep your weird opinions to yourself.
Still, that’s plenty for a publication. The editors know (or should know) what their readers are looking for.
Things might be different for beginners. Especially, if their problems are related to the practices of authorship and craft of writing. It might be helpful to have someone remind them to follow the submission guidelines, spellcheck their manuscript, write in paragraphs, use punctuation correctly, etc.
It’s very useful to spend a few hours on the other side of the table. I did some slush reading a couple of years ago and it was astonishing to see what people submit. I remember one story that had, in essence, 5 or 6 pages of exposition — basically a really long preface setting up the action. And then there was about two paragraphs of “story” right at the very end.
It was not what we were looking for.
Yesterday was the last day of Writing Month. During November, 2024, I wrote 23,100 words. I did not reach the goal I had set of 50,000 words. I knew the goal was probably unrealistic even in the beginning. But then my mother was in the hospital for the first week in November, which explains part of my lack of progress. I was also simply too busy with work. In the end, I was still satisfied with the progress I made.
Writing Month was a hack put together by a guy to replace NaNoWriMo. He had grander ambitions, but managed to only create a very bare-bones site by the beginning of the month. But he did! And the site worked flawlessly for me — at least in terms of tracking my progress. It didn’t really have any mechanisms for discovery or social networking, so I only found one other person as a “buddy” and never figured out how to see how they were doing.
The final statistic showed that 44 authors wrote a total of 40,174 words towards a total goal of 1,427,380 words. That suggests that maybe only one or two other people entered word counts. (Or maybe several did for a few days and then dropped off.)
I spent Writing Month working on my manuscript for The Ground Never Lies. This is a sapphic romantasy about a geomancer with an anger problem who has given up on love, but who then discovers a capacity for love she didn’t realize she had. I wrote a pilot for the story a couple of years ago, but shelved it because I couldn’t decide if a shorter version worked or if I should commit to writing it as a novel. I had this idea that the geomancer has a day job doing land assessments for properties in a karst region, where people want to be sure that a sinkhole won’t open up wrecking the property. But that the geomancer also moonlights as the crime-scene assessor for the local constabulary. But, as I wrote the story, I didn’t see any way to work in scenes of her doing other crime-scene assessments. Then I realized that there are two stories here: one is the original arc. But the other is how she became the person she is at the beginning of the story: embittered and disgusted with herself and life. So once I finished writing the original arc, I spent a week writing this second arc. Then I’ll have to figure out how to stitch them together.
I might using the Writing Month structure again in January, when it will be Intersession and I’ll have more free time to write.
I’ve served in leadership and Board roles in non-profits a number of times over the years. I’ve been a Secretary, Vice President, and President, in addition to serving on boards. I’ve learned some things about what makes a Board work.
Foremost is that the primary goal of the leadership should not be to make decisions, but rather to defend the power of the Board. I’ve served in organizations where tensions develop between the Executive Director and the elected leadership. And sometimes Presidents bring their own agenda that they would like to push through. It can feel simpler for the leadership to try to push their own agendas and treat the Board like a rubber stamp. But the leadership needs to resist that. The Board should remain in control and the leadership should only decide when the Board cannot.
Second, any decision you make as a Board is going to make some people unhappy. In dysfunctional organizations, the leadership can become paralyzed because it can feel like only way to avoid making people angry is to do nothing. Of course, doing nothing will also make some number of people angry. But it also guarantees the organization will founder and drift, rudderless.
A former Chancellor at my university had a saying about leadership that’s stuck with me. He said, “Money matters, quality counts, and time is the enemy.” Point being, money matters, but it’s not everything. Quality counts. If something is worth doing, it may be worth doing badly. But you need to prioritize, make tradeoffs, and not try to do everything if it means that everything is bad. Finally, the more time you spend deliberating and deciding will put the organization behind.
Since my recent election to SFWA, I’ve been reassured to find that the Board and leadership are aligned and prepared to work on addressing the real challenges that exist. I have great confidence that we are well positioned to more forward together as an organization.
One more observation: Shortly after I assumed a leadership position for the first time, I discovered an interesting phenomenon. The moment you step into the role, it’s like a target gets painted on your back. You assume ownership of all of the problems of the organization. And people who bear some grudge against the organization immediately start targeting you. So it has been here.
You can’t let it stop you.
This year, the fixup for Revin’s Heart was published, which included three short stories. And I wrote a short story that was published in an anthology.