TRAVERSING Z

Process

An autumn update

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I am trying to be better about this space, so to kick things off again here is an update from my end. I should say, first off, that many of you already know my updates because you subscribe to my newsletter, or to the Prima Materia serial, or even both! My newsletter is still the best way to get all my updates.

So: I have books in the pipeline. The first Prima Materia prequel, Seeds of Truer Natures, is dropping on November 16th and is now available for preorder. The last Chase & Daniels book, A Shining Path, now has a mostly-solid launch date of March 15th. I don’t know why I keep gravitating towards mid-month launches but there you go. I’ve also seen preliminary sketches for Open All Night, my forthcoming chapbook with Dim Shores, and am thrilled by the direction it’s taking. And with the writing gods willing, book 1 of Prima Materia might just be out at the very end of May ’22 – but there is a lot of work that has to happen between now and then, so I’m not going to beat myself up if I don’t hit that.

I have a novelette freshly out in G Is for Ghosts now, and a flash forthcoming in 99 Tiny Terrors, and I’ve got a short novella on submission … and that’s kind of it for shorter stuff for now. Moving between Chase & Daniels and Prima Materia has been a lot harder than I expected; too, though, I’m feeling tapped out shorts-wise, which I suppose isn’t surprising considering I’ve written well north of 40 short stories in the last 9 years. No plans to do another collection either, at least not in the next year, though I may look into doing a second Apple-like chapbook for the ’22 convention season.

… And I think that’s about it? I just booked my flights for Emerald City, so if you’re planning to be at the con keep an eye on my social media for the table number. After that it’s once again quiet at least through the end of January; the first major convention on my schedule at the moment is Wondercon.

end of the year 2020

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First of all this is long, so happy holidays to you and yours, and feel free to skip the rest!

After I type this I’m unplugging this computer and moving it to the living room, where it will be set up for family Zoom calls all day tomorrow. I’ll shift to writing on paper for a day or two, which is a new joy thanks to discovering fountain pens – my handwriting is still atrocious, but the pens have alleviated some of my wrist issues. (I had a bad bout of RSI years ago.)

I used to do a roundup twice a year, but writing less short fiction and an ever-shifting work situation has meant less to report. This year had begun no differently, with a work crisis that put me on temporary leave … and then just as I came back to work the city shut down, and we began hospice care for our beloved cat, and stimulus ran out … looking back now it’s all an unhappy haze. On top of it all I felt like I had finally gotten something I had longed for—time to write—and I’d done nothing with it.

But brains lie. They lie like rugs. Behold:

Published

The Painter’s Widow
Apple special edition chapbook
“An Elegy for Landings” in Truancy

Finished

Seeds of Truer Natures
Prima Materia revision
“Open All Night”
“In the Field”
“The O’Brien and Palmer Show”
“All This Could Be Yours”
“What the City Wants”
“In Her Mind a Darkness”
several microfictions

Started

A Shining Path
All Things in All Things
The Glorious and the Vile

Writing all this out has been kind of a big deal for me. To have done this much in spite of 2020 feels impressive to me; it’s also encouraging for the future, because it tells me that if I ever hit a point where book sales cover my portion of the bills, I can write at a pace to sustain that income. Which has been a nagging concern as I plan and re-plan the next five years (and will be re-planning again with unemployment running out next week).

I wish there was more talk among creatives, and for creatives, about this kind of strategizing, when you’re working around day jobs and financial uncertainty. Add that to the 2021 list? In the meantime, though, it’s taken the edge off the pain of the stalled stimulus bill, and given me a glimmer of hope for the year to come. I’ve got a number of seeds on that list. Let’s see what kind of harvest they bring.

And if you’ve read through all of this, thank you for listening, for reading, for just being out there. Happy holidays, again! See you in the new calendar.

some further thoughts on changing the narrative

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Earlier this week in my newsletter I wrote about this moment in history and the potential for writers and readers to change the narrative. I had more thoughts than what I included, but it was already long (“a moralizing screed” as one irate reader informed me, and damn right it was), so I compressed it to what felt urgent—to push for justice, to take care of ourselves and each other, to create habits of solidarity rather than short-term reactions—and put the rest aside.

I haven’t been sleeping much, lately. Even before the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests, I found myself waking in the darkness before dawn each morning, full of dread. I’ve taken to keeping something to read at my bedside just for these times, preferably nonfiction so my brain can chew on that instead of my overwhelming anxiety. Which is how I’ve been reading Warren Ellis: The Captured Ghosts Interviews. There’s plenty to chew on there.

I posted this quote on Instagram earlier today, without really knowing why it leapt out at me—I have no plans on writing superhero comics and if I did I would not write them this way, though it does explain more than a few I’ve read—but then I realized I was still thinking about narratives. Because I read a lot of comics as a kid, and I watched a lot of Very Bad cop shows, and much of the violence I’ve seen in the past ten days feels like a nasty echo of that childhood exposure. How many shows did I watch, how many storylines did I read, valorizing cops who didn’t play by the rules, who shot first and asked questions later, who sneered at due process ? How often was I presented with vigilantism as some kind of moral high ground?

And then I read this quote, this model of superhero stories. It may have been tongue in cheek, but just imagine taking the sex out of a story and replacing it with violence. “Hitting” those emotional beats, literally. Another thing Ellis mentions is how closed Americans are to sex, but I’m not sure if it’s that we’re closed to it or we’re just bad at it, we’re bad at vulnerability. We are, however, aces at violence. I can’t shake the image from my mind: of generations of children reading BAM and KAPOW when there should have been lovemaking or heartbreak. I’m imagining these children, and who they might grow up to be.