Honestly, I was gonna take a year off on this, but it is handy to look back on the year’s successes.
What did I do this year? I got my first-ever Nebula and Hugo nominations! Got my first ever unsolicited invitation to be on a convention program! Got invited to be a featured author on an anthology for the first time! Dang, what a year! Everything else is gravy!
First up because it’s easy to summarize:
Poetry
Only one poem came out this year. Yeah, been a while since my poetry output was so low. 46 poetry submissions this year. But my only publication was a sweet one – Positronic Effigy is one of my oldest poems. I wrote it over 20 years ago and always believed in it. Good to have it finally find a home at Abyss & Apex, the magazine that published my first SF poem!
Short Stories
“Cheaper to Replace” is getting the most buzz. “Cheaper to Replace” was in Clarkesworld in July 2023 – Hanh loves her robot graduate student assistant but the lab wants to get rid of him. This story explores the unique pain of loving inanimate objects and our throw-away culture.
Here’s the full list of this year’s short stories:
1. “The Caregivers” in Robotic Ambitions anthology – November 2023 – Pierre is an AI nurse and someone is messing with his memory. Meanwhile, his patients are struggling with predatory insurance. Can Pierre help them if he keeps forgetting?
2. “The Silver Dame and the Box of Mystery” on Zombies Need Brains Presents – Solving the theft of a time machine in 1940s St. Louis is bad enough without your killer robots’ passive-aggressive sibling rivalry. (behind a paywall.)
3. “Football on Mars” in Factor Four, October 2023 – This one’s about what it says on the tin.
4. “Cheaper to Replace” in Clarkesworld July 2023 – Hanh loves her robot graduate student assistant but the lab wants to get rid of him.
5. “Two body Problem” in Factor Four – a flash about post-graduate positions and space.
6. “Big City Girl” in Phenomenons 2: Season of Darkness – a shared world superhero anthology. My heroine from volume one, Lipstick Lilly, the somewhat insecure cosmetics scientist who solves crime with improbable lipsticks, teams up with her hero, Better Angel, when all the heroes with actual super powers start LOSING THEM.
7. “Sazerac for the Secret Mouth” in Apex book’s Strange Libations exclusive promotional anthology (only available as a kickstarter reward, sorry.) A flash fiction piece in the form of a cocktail recipe. “Start with five bridesmaids, each committed to single life and carrying a jigger of Catcher in the Rye with sarcastic notes in the margins.”
8. “Haunting the Docks” in Cast of Wonders February 28, 2023 – a lonely AI wonders why no one visits their dock anymore.
9. “The Subway Algorithm is Half Constructed” in F&SF March/April 2023 – Searching for love in a machine learning lab gets complicated when the lovely Kato shows up, training AIs to workshop novels.
10. “An Echo of a Will” in Analog January/February 2023. Zeke’s husband is in a coma, leaving him a chatbot for company as he struggles with making end of life decisions.
Other Categories
I did not publish a novelette, novella, or novel this year. Which, three years ago I had never published one of those, so who’s complaining?
I also did not publish any games, comics, or, well, let’s stop before I get sad.
OH! I do have one non-fiction publication this year:
In conclusion
I had my typical productive year, got some huge accolades. In addition to the Hugo and Nebula nods for “We Built This City”, it actually won Best Novelette in the annual Clarkesworld Reader’s poll! In addition, I was again a finalist for the Science Fiction Poetry Association Rhysling awards (“If I Were Human”) and on the long list for the British Science Fiction Award (“We Built This City.”)
I met my goal of re-focusing on short fiction after three years of novelpalooza. I added four new stories to my submissions queue this year, not counting two purpose-written flash pieces. As of right now, I am only one submission short of 150 short story submissions this year, crushing my goal of getting back up to my pre-pandemic submission rate of 100 a year.
Overall, I’m in a good place, an enviable place, though I will say my rejection rate is high this year – you’ll learn that in my upcoming Year in Rejectomancy post. 🙂
Goals for next year:
- Submit at least one of my trunk novels to a Big Publisher
- Submit my short story collection more places
- Submit my poetry chapbook more places
- Continue querying agents in the hope of getting one
