Word Jenga
Dear friends,
Today Lightspeed magazine's March issue is out for purchase here, with my story "Islands of Stability" in it. You'll be hearing more about this story in next month's newsletter, because it'll be free to read or listen to then, but if you just can't wait that long or want to support the magazine, there's the link to purchase it now.
This month was a really good month for hearing about last year's success in one of the most important things a writer can do: reaching readers. Two of the magazines who publish me ran reader polls about which works their readers enjoyed last year, and in both cases the readers said they liked mine. Uncanny's reader favorites listed my road trip fantasy "A Piece of the Continent" as tied for fifth place--thank you for your love of that quirky story. It meant a lot to me, and I'm glad it reached you too.
Analog magazine's reader poll ("AnLab") was more extensive, awarding favorites for each department rather than just stories, and my poem "Object Permanence" placed there. Analog is a print magazine, so going to their AnLab page allows you to read stories, poems, and nonfiction pieces that would otherwise not be available. I was again very touched that this very personal and nerdy grief poem managed to make its way into the hearts of others.
This is what we're here for, friends. Nobody writes science fiction poetry for the fame and the glory. Nobody writes short fantasy stories because of the vaults of riches or so that they'll get mobbed by screaming fans in the grocery store. It's about whether the work connects with the reader. You've said that it has. That means more than I can say. Thank you.
Sometimes as I've been doing revisions, I've found sentences that made me think, "good grief, has no one ever looked at this book before," which is funny because I have, my first reader has, and my agent has. But also--in some sense no one has ever looked at this book before, they've looked at previous drafts that were similar. As the revisions happen, things shift around; weight falls differently on a sentence that doesn't have another sentence leading up to it any more. It's Word Jenga--the block that seemed loose is now load-bearing, the block that didn't have any give to it can now wiggle a little.
I think this happens to us in a larger sense as readers too. I reread Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven for the first time since high school for one of my book clubs last month, and the weight of all the other books I've read, all the other things that have happened in my life, had shifted the meaning of some of the sentences, some of the plot elements, since last I visited it. It was the same book, but it was different because I was different. Even the act of having been assigned it as a high school student looked different from nearly thirty years' distance--I could see some of what my beloved late English teacher Ron Gabriel hoped to show us about stillness and action, authority and responsibility, with this work--and also what an astonishing thing it was for him to bring it into our worlds in the context in which he did, with the curriculum pressures he had at the time. Different ideas come free, others seem load-bearing...as the game of Word Jenga goes on.
I'm not cooking tonight, I'm ordering pizza. For lunch I had a little cup of chili out of the freezer and an orange. In general I've been cooking, but it's generally been "that easy thing I've cooked before." So no recipe this month. I hold out some hope for next month. In the meantime, feel free to do the easy thing yourself. Sometimes it's just that time.
Excelsior,
Marissa