what are you doing new year’s eve
a year in review
this year started off spectacularly poorly. (yes that’s an adjective modifying an adverb which is modifying the verb. i think. maybe they’re both adverbs. i’m a professional wordsmith but i don’t actually know any of the parts of speech. don’t correct me if i got it wrong. i won’t retain it, but i might feel lousy toward you forever.)
in the first week of january i was fired from a terrible job i should have quit years earlier, lost out on a great job i'd been a finalist for, and got a kind but vague and ultimately discouraging rejection from an agent who’d had my full manuscript for several months and who i’d been quite optimistic about. it was far from the first rejection i’d gotten, and not a particularly bad one, but it was a lousy way to start the year. it really felt like i was just never going to get where i wanted to be. (spoiler alert: i’ve had my best year yet.)
fast forward to march and i got the worst rejection of my life. well, no, it wasn’t as bad as the time an agent told me i am bad at writing on a craft level and have no business querying, but that was so absurdly and demonstratively untrue that this one felt worse: she loved my pitch, she loved my writing, she would buy my book in a bookstore, but she didn’t want to represent it as my agent. (i can only assume she doesn’t know how books get into bookstores in the first place.) friends, i spent the next two days very seriously considering whether i really wanted to be a writer after all. i was so upset that i didn’t tell anyone about it.
that was a friday; on sunday, i got a full request from an agent i had only queried because lyndsie made me. i fully believed that she was out of my league. on wednesday she asked me to get on the phone with her to talk about it further, and the following monday she told me how much she loved the book and offered to represent me. (i realize this is sounding an awful lot like a “how i got my agent” post, but i can’t do anything about that. i hate those and will not tell you any tips or tricks, because those don’t exist in the way those posts suggest they do. if you want tips and tricks, read my agent’s newsletter.) also that week, i got into the tin house summer workshop…and had to turn it down, because i’d applied for a scholarship and didn’t get it.
while i waited for a dozen other agents to decide if they wanted to compete for me (one of them did), i made my final decisions as the interstellar flight magazine guest editor. (okay, i don’t actually remember the exact timeline, but it was around the same time.) selecting and editing those twelve pieces of flash fiction was one of the best things i’ve ever gotten to do. i tried really hard to balance the stories (and, to a lesser extent, their authors) to show the breadth of possibility in speculative flash fiction, and i think i was successful.
so i signed with kate and spent a few months editing my book with her. recommendation: get a partner who is very good at seeing what is missing in a book to edit yours with you. the final product is absolutely the book i thought i wrote in the first place.
in july, i got an email informing me that my 2023 fusion fragment story “six meals at fanelli’s,” which i wrote about my father dying, was a finalist for the wsfa small press award. i was invited to the ceremony in september, but travel is tough for me and i decided not to go. in the end, i didn’t win, but i'm not actually sure winning is the point of being a finalist. (don’t get me wrong, it would have been nice!)
i have also been reading submissions for fusion fragment, because about a month after i finished reading 1300 flash subs i got itchy to read more (no, i do not know what’s wrong with me), and i've been invited to judge a prize so i've been reading subs for that, too. this just in: there is such a thing as too much reading. my brain hurts.
in august, my husband rescued a kitten, who i named theo and refused to consider not keeping. in october, we had to put sweet baby ray to sleep and theo became our only cat. i miss ray so much that sometimes i can’t breathe. i'm also anxiously waiting for the cat distribution system to bring me another cat. i liked having two. (yes i am fully aware that shelters exist! i cannot adopt another cat as a deliberate action until i figure out how to pay for theo to be spayed.)
not much else to report! i’ve had some stories published. two more are coming next year, and potentially more, but i have stopped actively submitting shorts so probably not. i’ve joined the team at the deadlands as a copy editor. i’d love to do more of the other kind of editing, but copy editing is how i pay for cat food. also i love the work the deadlands and their publisher, psychopomp, are doing! i’m pretty delighted to be associated with some of the best magazines there are.
i haven’t mentioned my kids, so i guess i should say that i still have them! they are eighteen and about-to-turn-fifteen, so there’s less to say than ever because they are whole people and deserve privacy. when they were small, i was comfortable talking about my experience of parenting them, but even then i tried to give them as much privacy as i could.
i’m also still married, and he is still a thousand times more fun than me so i can’t recommend that you go follow him anywhere, because you, too, will realize he is preferable. (i’m kidding, but also i’m not.)
i finished one writing project this year. it’s my lowest output since probably 2015! that’s wild! but as you can see, i was a little busy otherwise.
there’s no particularly tidy way to wrap this up. it’s weird—i had a mostly amazing year personally while the world slid further into fascism, which is difficult to reconcile. i remain staunchly pro-abortion, pro-palestine, and anti-fascist. i’m not making any new year’s resolutions, although i am thinking about adopting that one where the person tried every pasta shape they could find. (okay, also i plan to write another novel.)
see you next year, space cowboys.