What’s new?

I’m thrilled to be a Nebula Award Finalist for the third time! “Because I Held His Name Like a Key” is nominated for Best Short Story, on a truly stacked ballot of terrific work from last year. My heartfelt thanks to the SFWA members who voted for it, as well as to Strange Horizons for giving it a home, and to my friend Simone Heller for helping me carve out the best version of this story (not least by insisting I get a better grasp on some of the math questions involved). If you haven’t read it yet, and if you like stories that deal with connection, power, identity, and the erosion of all those things, I hope you’ll check it out, and, if you’re nominating for the Hugo Award or voting in the Locus Awards, give it your consideration.

In other recent news, my novelette “Hollow in the Hope” came out in the Science Fantasy special issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies in February. For a long time I’d wanted to write a story about the biblical story of Seila, whose father, the Hebrew judge Jephthah, had boastfully promised God to sacrifice the first thing he saw emerging from his family’s door — which then turned out to be his daughter. But on its own, that wasn’t the story. It wasn’t until I was listening to a podcast that touched on Greek mythology that I re-encountered the story of Iphigenia, sacrificed by her father Agamemnon to pay back the offense he has caused the goddess Artemis. The stories of these women take place hundreds of years apart, but I wondered what it would have looked like if they could have spoken to each other somehow: what they would have had in common, and where they might find what shreds of agency were left to them.

What’s up with that?

Lately I’ve been thinking about sex a lot. Partly from writing a book with a point-of-view character who finds comfort and reassurance in the face of his life’s many hardships from the sexual relationships that he has over the course of the story, and partly from reading a very popular book reputed for its steaminess, whose sex scenes alternately annoyed and bored me. I am a little annoyed with myself to still be thinking about that book (I try not to trash-talk as a broad rule, but I think Sarah J. Maas is far enough outside my orbit that I can say that the book was “A Court of Thorns and Roses”; I’m sure it scratches the right itches for some people, but I found it a frustrating read for a number of reasons) but it’s also been useful to elucidate for myself why those scenes failed so hard for me.

I enjoy a good sex scene—reading one and writing one—and for me, a good sex scene cannot be just the blocking from a movie script, a list of movements and body parts applied to other body parts. Or worse, an Ikea manual: insert Tab A into Slot B. A good sex scene, for me, is absolutely specific to the characters involved in it; you should not be able to replace the names with those of other sexually involved characters from the same narrative and have the scene still make sense. Such a scene might inform the reader about the characters or about their relationship, it might create tension in one form even while resolving it in another, it might progress the plot and build momentum toward the next events. Maybe it even finds a way to accomplish all of the above! But above all there is nothing truly sexual about a scene, to me, until it offers me something to anchor me to the specific people involved: in the same way that I find certain plenty of real people sexy but have never gone “hey there” when looking at the featureless plastic mannequins in a department store.

This week, KJ Charles wrote about characters doing things out of line with their established behavior/mindset for no other reason than that those things serve the plot (and thus make the writing easier for the author). I think the Sexy Ikea Manual comes partly from a similar place—characters having sex because, narratively, it’s time for them to have sex, with little more development than that—and partly from a tendency like the one described in this Bluesky thread from Joel Morris about the identification of the audience with the character. If the sex being examined is as generic as possible, a theoretical reader can more easily disappear into the participants. This platonic ideal of PIV sex could be my PIV sex! Without detail, without distinction, the eye can slide uninterrupted over this scene. The same kind of smooth, generic perfection on display in a Barbie doll. Speaking for myself, I prefer some friction.This snippet comes from one of the sex scenes in my novel in progress; you can decide for yourself how well you think I’ve achieved my own goals here.

I startled when Yanizh set the comb aside and said, “I’m sorry.” I could think of too many things for which he might be sorry, and wished them all a thousand taassu away. But he touched my temple and told me he might yet learn, but he absolutely could not yet braid my hair one-handed.

“Tell me instead what thou canst accomplish with one hand,” I suggested.

“I’d rather show thee,” he said, “if ever thou canst manage to get thyself out of that bath.”

He cheated, of course, for what he accomplished required as much use from his mouth as his hand, but some rules beg their own breaking. Once my pleasure had come and faded again, I knelt before him. Kneeling--that was the posture of a man at his prayers in the House of Hallows, I think, and among the worshippers of the Great God himself. I took him into my mouth, and that was a prayer too, or a confession, for I couldn’t say aloud what I wanted to.

What’s good?

Recently I finished Pip Adam’s novel AUDITION, which is an absolutely compelling book about power and violence and incarceration that starts with three giants trapped in a spaceship flying away from the Earth. It asks the reader to sit with discomfort in many interesting ways, from the disorientation of what is happening and why and the absence of any meaningful past or memory in the book’s first section, to the question of what our society does with those it deems unworthy or unwanted.

THE IRON BELOW REMEMBERS by Sharang Biswas is a very fun novella about superheroes and history and academia and being good at your job but also kind of a hot mess. It also does a great job of exactly the kind of sexy content I was talking about above: scenes that absolutely could not be swapped to a different character without falling apart.

Thoraiya Dyer’s story in this month’s issue of Clarkesworld, “You Are Invited to Our SPRING CELEBRATION” is a wonderful view into an alien mind and alien civilization and alien love, in this first contact tale. Dyer does an exquisite job twisting the knife; this story brought tears to my eyes.

Who’s a good girl? Who’s a good girl??

Tilly, as always. Thanks for reading this far.