An Amazing Year

It’s been so fun to read everyone’s end of year eligibility for SFF awards posts this year. Personally, though, I’ve had nothing published in 2017. I’m off the hook (well, I’m Campbell-eligible, but probably very very unlikely to be nominated for that). But even though I’m not eligible, I think it’s good to state out loud how 2017 has been going for me as a writer. Because it’s been awesome!

I have officially finished all of the writing that I need to do to get my Stonecoast MFA – my thesis has been accepted. I still have a presentation to give and a reading to do, but the stories that I have spent the last 2 years of blood and sweat and tears on are done. One has already been sold (it will be in The Dark in 2018 – yayayay!), and one helped me win what is pretty much the greatest honor of my writing career so far, the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Diverse Worlds Grant and Diverse Writers Grant. I applied thinking maybe maybe maybe I could get one of them, and somehow I won both. I knew this year that I would be focused much more on writing than on selling (though I tried to get a few flash pieces out to meet the 12 stories in 12 months challenge, it was ultimately too much for me by April/May), but even when you know you’re on a journey and nowhere near your destination, it means so much to see some heartfelt cheerleaders along the way.

But that’s not all! I have started to dip my toe into not only non-fiction (highlighted by a post on Tor.com that let me go down the rabbit hole of dystopic fiction), but game writing (I’m working on a super fun Choice of Games project that is just what I need to lighten the mood when the stories I’m writing start seeming a little dire), and even slush reading (with the amazing folks at Escape Artists, where I’m an Escape Pod Associate Editor and was a Guest Associate Editor for Psuedopod‘s Artemis Rising call, and my smart and deeply talented fellow students at the Stonecoast Review, where I was a Fiction and Non-Fiction Editor for issue #8). The number of incredible people that I get to work with all the time is pretty amazing.

At the end of the day, though this isn’t something that can be measured or linked to, one of my great joys of the year is that I really feel like part of the Speculative Fiction community now, which I absolutely love. I’ve gotten to speak on a few panels and give a talk, but more than that I’ve gotten to have conversations with fun, smart, engaging writers (and absorb all of their knowledge I possibly can). I’ll be going to a bunch of cons next year, starting with Boskone, and I’m already smiling thinking about it.

Finally, on a personal note, I got the amazing opportunity to travel to seven different countries this summer and try to absorb just a little bit of their setting and life so that I can think back on it when I’m trying to create worlds and cultures and people for my stories. I think that one of the best ways to put life on the page is to go out and live it, and I’m glad I had a chance to do that in a few beautiful places, even if I only got to know them for a brief moment in time.

Okay, enough bragging. Because it does feel like bragging. But writers as a whole (and I in particular) have a tendency to climb a mountain and then act like it was a molehill, to keep looking forward at where we want to go instead of looking and taking a deep breath and acknowledging where we’ve been. So here’s to the journey.

I can’t wait for 2018.