Writing

Right. I have been encouraged to make one of these so here we are. My awardeligible stories from 2014.

I didnt publish that much last year. Mostly I had three stories out in the places that people knowmy first pro sales and Im very glad of them. Some people have said very nice things about them too for which Im grateful. Yay my little babies have found places in peoples hearts

All three of my works published this year have been scifi and are eligible for the Hugo the Nebula and as was just brought to my attention today the BSFA.

I am also eligible for the John Campbell Award For Best New Writer. Its the first year Im running.

Storytelling For The Night Clerk at Strange Horizons My first pro sale My baby. It was favourably reviewed by Lois Tilton and later made her list of favourite stories in 2014. It also made Nina Allans list of recommended 2014 fiction.

Harvestfruit at Crossed Genres My first flash sale to CGs special flash issue. I know flash is a hard sell at awards time but I listed it here for completeness of portfolio since Campbell etc

Patterns Of A Murmuration In Billions Of Data Points at Clarkesworld aka Why the hell couldnt I have picked a shorter title Seriously though if I had to pick this is probably my favourite story that Ive sold this year and thus far. Lois Tilton also liked this one and it also made her favourite stories list. It was tipped as noteworthy on Fantastic Stories of the Imagination and the Verge and also made Usman Maliks and Nin Harris 2014 bestof lists.

Seriously everyone thank you for your consideration thank you for reading and thank you for your support.

I dont feel Ive read enough in 2014 to come up with a good bestof roundup list but my picks for Campbell award nominees Usman Malik Alyssa Wong Natalia Theodoridou Rachael K Jones Carmen Maria Machado. Every story of theirs Ive read has blown me away. Highly recommended.

Can we talk about anthologies Lets talk about anthologies.

In the unlikely event that youve been following this blog you may remember that I once mentioned having a story in Athenas Daughters vol 2 as a stretch goal author. Well GREAT NEWS The project funded and hit all the fiction stretch goals so this book is coming out and Im going to be in it Give me a moment to octopus flail about this.

Right octopus flailing done.

Now the Kickstarter for this project is still running and Id like to get more backers for it. Because at this point the KS is basically a book preorder and I want more people to buy the book because I want more people to read my story darn it

The story I have in the anthology is titled RED IS THE COLOR OF MOTHER DIRT. I originally wrote it for the open call for Body Boundaries a Singaporean anthology of feminist fiction. I wrote two stories. The second one was a fictionalised account of my short ultimately doomed history of dating men. The editors told me they liked both stories but they could only publish one. I thought eh at least the SFF story I can sell to other markets. So they took the confessional piece and its in there a neat little tale about how pickling spiders in formaldehyde is a more worthwhile pursuit than having sex with men. Go check it out if you like. Theres plenty of amazing subversive Singaporean feminist writing in it

RED IS THE COLOR OF MOTHER DIRT now is set on a Martian colony where women are barred from socalled sterile areas when theyre on their period. It centres around the story of Mian a menial worker arrested when she breaks the rules to visit her dying sister in hospital. It was partly inspired by a dream I had and partly inspired by the ridiculous aesthetic requirements Chinese female astronauts apparently have to meet. Also the patriarchy. I tried to write Chinese poetry in it. I shouldnt try to write Chinese poetry. I shouldnt try to write anything in Chinese at all given how bad I am at anything outside of ordering food or telling taxi uncles where I want to go.

The story has been kicking around for a while I wrote it while on monthlong leave from work in 2012 because thats a thing that happens when youre a journalist you rack up so much overtime and unused annual leave that you can vanish for months at a pop. In later drafts I injected unhealthy doses of my work as a journo at a national paper into it that happens. The story has been rejected from markets for being too much of a polemic which was exactly what it was meant to be. Because it was so political I thought a feminist anthology might be a good place to submit it to. Back to its roots. And Im very very glad the story found a home here.

I have a lot of love for this story. It formed the bulk of my successful application to Clarion West in 2013. Yes folks this was the story that got me into Clarion West. And CW was not just a singular experience that changed me as a writer and a person but it also altered the entire path of my future. I wouldnt have written all those stories last year and I wouldnt be headed to Norwich for my Creative Writing MA this fall if not for Clarion West. I owe this story a lot. I want yall to read it.

So yes. If anything Ive written has tickled your fancy in the past please do consider putting in a preorder for the anthology They have ebook editions and also lots of different perks further down the reward levels

TLDR Please support the Kickstarter for this anthology because this story means a lot to me and I want as many people as possible to read it. Kickstarter runs till 15th Jan

Can we talk about more anthologies And not selfrejecting

The Table of Contents for An Alphabet Of Embers is out and its one of the anthologies Im most excited about in 2015 Not just because Im in it but because look at all those people I share the TOC with. Nisi Shawl Zen Cho YoonHa Lee Vajra Chandrasekera Oh my god Im about to just sit here and yell names of about 70 percent of the TOC in excitement. Theres a bunch of reprints from writers that I admire hugely and first prose sales from people whose writing Im very excited about. Also the fantastic M Sereno who is an amazing artist on top of being a wonderful writer and a sweetheart is making illustrations for the anthology. Its not just a cup of squee its an entire smorgasbord I could eat for days.

It almost never came to be where I was concerned. Although I shared supported the Kickstarter for the anthology very enthusiastically I thought its asking for lyrical almostpoetry prose. I cant poetry. I dont think I can write something good enough for it. Ill read the pretty when it comes out I wrote off the submissions call in my head.

But then out of the blue editor Rose Lemberg approached me and encouraged me to try sending in something saying that she had enjoyed my story in Strange Horizons and thought that sort of thing would be a good fit for the anthology.

So I thought well maybe its worth a shot.

I wrote the story during and after my travels in August to London cons Scandinavia. The hotel at NineWorlds was next to Heathrow next to one of the runways and as you walked back at midnight you would be pushed along by planesong that sank into your heart and bones. And I thought you know what I love the sound of planes taking off its the best sound in the world I want to write about the sound of planes taking off.

So it went from there.

The result Transfers From Connecting Flights is really not about airplanes at all. But I like it and Im glad I wrote it and Im glad Rose told me that writing it or anything for that matter would not be an futile exercise.

A lot has been said about not selfrejecting on Twitter recently particularly for people with marginalised identities who have to struggle with the aftereffects of poor media representation while growing up and tend to get hit by Impostor Syndrome hard. I honestly thought I was immune to this but Ive come to realise that I do this. I do this a lot. Id have selfrejected for this anthology if Rose hadnt prodded me.

Now that Im more aware of it I try harder not to do so. Its one of my goals for 2015. Try for markets that scare me. Try for markets that are too big. Try for markets that make me think I have a snowballs chance in hell I probably do but try anyway.

Im also very grateful to Rose for her editorial commitment to showcasing a wide variety of voices. She clearly reached out to a number of different folk and encouraged them to submit something Im sure I was not the only one. She has some wonderful essays here and here on encouraging diversity from an editors POV. And thats why the Alphabet of Embers TOC is GLORIOUS. With open subs final products can only be as diverse as the slush it gets and Rose clearly did an amazing job in encouraging that diversity. Im glad such spaces exist.

Another anthology Im really excited about it Michael Mathesons reprint anthology The Humanity Of Monsters. Aaahhh Look at that lineup

Time is an ad hoc measure of the physical universe invented by our soft and limited mortal minds to divide the infinite into chunks we can reasonably digest. It is a thin and feeble guiderope to anchor us to sanity as we scale the ineffable unfathomable face of the endless universe. As someone who struggles often with the vicissitudes of globespanning timezones I know how little meaning the human measure of time holds. Dates mean NOTHING. Hours mean NOTHING. The calendar is a fiction invented by fools who thought the Earth was the center of the universe. The New Year of my ancestors doesnt arrive until February.

Yet if one were to take a breather to powder your fingers to look down at the wormtrail youve left behind and consider the miniscule progress youve made before climbing up and on what more convenient moment than at the boundary between the arbitrarilydefined years

So one of those usual yearend roundups for 2014 then.

It was a watershed year for me SFF writingwise. In 2014 I started to write and submit stories regularly. An experience new to me. I sent out a grand total of eight submissions in 2013. In 2014 I sent out enough that I sold eight submissions. I wrote more stories this year than I did for the past five. Im a slow writer it was hard. Several times I thought of giving up.

But I stuck with it and I think it paid off. I qualified for SFWA. I broke into at least four markets I had been dying to break into. People sometimes told me nice things about the stories I had published and Lois Tilton liked my stories enough she called me this years new author of promise in her 2014 review roundup. Neowhoa moment. MAJOR Neowhoa moment.

As running starts go I think I did alright.

There were other things about my 2014 which were cool like attending cons being on panels for the first time finally getting out of the newsroom being accepted into a pretty good grad program Creative writing at the University of East Anglia. But who cares about that silly reallife stuff really

Apparently yearly submission stats are a popular thing to do these days. Ill show you mine if etc etc etc

My 2014 In Submissions

Submissions 38
Acceptances 8 22.6 percent
6 to prorate markets 2 to semipro markets
Personal rejections 12 31.6 percent
Form rejections 12 31.6 percent
Pending 6

Three of the stories I sold were published this year har har och har the other five will appear in 2015.

I shopped around a total of 15 stories this year. 6 of them were written this year 2 were complete overhauls of old story ideas.

Of the 24 rejections I received in 2014 a single story accounted for a whopping 12 of them 6 form 6 personal. Thats 50 percent of the rejections I got
The secondrunner up took 5 rejections 20 percent. 3 forms 2 personals.

Of the stories I sold 4 sold to the first market I sent them to while I had one outlier which was rejected by 7 markets before it sold. The others had 13 rejections each.

My quickest sale was 4 days to Strange Horizons. Slowest sale took 99 days to Apex.

The fastest rejection I got took 2 days from Goldfish Grimms Spicy Fiction Sushi. And it was a personal The longest wait for an R took 99 days to a form from Nature Futures.

And there we go. 2014 summed up in a number of pithy lines. That was fun lets do it again

PS Due to perfidious things called deadlines and more deadlines the December edition of Fiction Nuggets will be combined with Januarys meaning itll show up around the start of February.

PPS I still need to blog about the story I have in Athenas Daughters vol 2 before the Kickstarter closes on January 15th. Kick me about it if I dont.

To tusinde fjorten af bedommelsesudvalg is what Google Translate told me 2014 in review is in Danish. This is however also the Google Translate that told my friend I heard you like potatoes translates to jeg horte dig som kartofler. Which actually means I heard you as I would potatoes. Moral of the story GOOGLE TRANSLATE IS NOT YOUR FRIEND.

ETA I have been reliably told by an actual Danish person that bedommelsesudvalg actually means REVIEW COMMITTEE. It has been suggested that En gennemgang af 2014 or Et tilbageblikk pa 2014 would have been a suitable alternative.