July 2025 Newsletter
Camp season is over, but con season is about to begin! My wild ride of 2025 continues and has many projects ongoing.
Camp season is over! I get my brain back, and I get to return to the many other projects on my plate — but, at the same time, I know I’m going to miss it. I already miss my kiddos, so many of whom are just so incredibly smart and creative and generous and earnest.
Yesterday ended on an absolutely wild and ludicruous note, as we attempted to save the powers of storytelling from some creativity-eating bugs; I lost control of the situation somewhere and there’s a 45 minute span of time where I’m still only like 35% sure I know what happened — but it was exhilarating, the kids were happy, and the day ended with many hugs and signed t-shirts.
Anyway, the scramble to finish other projects or at least get them to a pre-determined marker before camp started (with mixed success) is why newsletters have dropped off. I did get a decent blog post up in June, though, about the glories and pleasures of traveling solo, and of course you can always find more frequently posted content on my Patreon.
News
There are just a couple of days left to vote in the Hugo Awards! All ballots must be received by Wednesday, July 23, 2025, 11:59 p.m. PDT.
And if you’re not yet registered to vote, there’s still time for that, too: You just need a WSFS membership, and here’s a great round-up of all the goodies you get in the Voting Packet!
It is, of course, always an honor just to be nominated — truly, particularly when we know how wide open the longlist in this field tends to be. But… we at Worldbuilding for Masochists would really love to win this year! 😅 And here’s why I think you should vote for us:
We’re consistent! A new episode goes out every other Wednesday, and we have stuck to that schedule throughout the podcast’s history.
We’re pretty funny. We take on a lot of serious subjects (alongside some frivolous ones), but we try not to take ourselves too seriously. We’re capable of offering incisive commentaries on the cultural contextualization of media and history right alongside our jokes about inappropriate statuary and our rants about bad undergarment tropes.
Episodes in 2024 included guest authors like Fonda Lee, Melissa Caruso, Gwenda Bond, John Hartness, Paul Weimer, John Wiswell, Preemie Mohamed, Hana Lee, Rebecca Roanhorse, Cherie Priest, M.J. Kuhn, Nalo Hopkinson, Ken Liu, Chloe Gong, Rowenna Miller, and more!
Topics in 2024 included monsters, history and generational shifts, romance tropes, magitech, mythology and folklore, tools for creating and tracking your worldbuilding, the philosophy of translation, and a back-to-basics series where we looked at some of the foundational considerations of worldbuilding. We try every year to offer a wide variety of concepts and viewpoints!
2024 is also the year we published Traveling Light: Tales of the Magical Gates, an anthology with stories drawn from the world we’ve been co-creating on-air since the podcast’s inception, featuring stories from 12 different authors.
Finally, if we actually win one, I will stop begging you to vote for us every year. 😂 Vote for us now to shut me up! And we have seriously been so, so close in past years. Truly, a few votes could make all the difference.
Upcoming Events
Good heavens, the rest of my year is set to be a wild ride.
First up will be WorldCon Seattle, August 13-17. I’m currently slated for two panels there: “Why Interactive Media Matters”, Thursday at 3pm, and “Worldbuilding through Structures of Society”, Saturday at 10:30am.
In September, I’ll be headed to Austin, TX for ArmadilloCon, Sept 12-14. This will be a bit of a whirlwind trip, programming schedule TBA.
And, of course, we are now less than three months out from Halcy-Con, Oct 16-18! I did such a good job being organized and on-the-ball back in June that my programming schedule is pretty well done, though we won’t be releasing it until closer to the con, which means now I get to turn my attention more fully toward creating Crescent Station and the in-world game we’re crafting for the convention’s immersive narrative framework. It’s all been tumbling around in my head for months, but it’s time to really start putting all in action!
Then in addition to all of that, I’m going to Disney World in September to celebrate my 40th birthday, and then going again with my parents right before Christmas! They haven’t been at all since 1995, and I haven’t been during the holiday season in a good long while, so we’re all excited. We’re even staying at a Fort Wilderness cabin so that we can bring the dogs.
Like I said. The rest of 2025 will be a wild ride. Good thing I hate being bored and love being busy!
What I’ve Been Reading
Shield of Sparrows by Devney Perry
Imzadi by Peter David
The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
Rogue Protocol and Exit Strategy by Martha Wells
Voyage of the Basilisk, In the Labyrinth of Drakes, Within the Sanctuary of Wings by Marie Brennan
Heartless Hunter by Kristen Ciccarelli
Network Effect by Martha Wells
Fugitive Telemetry and System Collapse by Martha Wells
As always, these are affiliate links from which I will earn a small commission should you use them.
Of all of these, I think The Incandescent was my favorite. I absolutely tore through it, and as someone who works with children… yeah. Yeah. The protagonist’s observations, working in a magical school, are spot-on. I also enjoyed my Murderbot binge, although now I’m a little mad that I’m out of both books and TV.
I am also really, really ready to find a romantasy book that actually makes me want to pick up the next one in the duology/trilogy. I am so ever-loving tired of barely-legal heroines being fiesty and petulant and too naive for the situations they find themselves in even if the narrative is telling me how tough and worldly they are. Just… please??
Wrapping It Up
So now, it’s… back to work! Back to so many works, really. At Mythik Camps, incredible though it is to believe, it will be time for us to start working on next year’s material, even as we wrap up Summer 2025. I have a manuscript to finish, which I would really, really love to do in a timely fashion. And the stuff I’m ramping up for The Crescent is… it’s gonna be real fun, y’all. This is such an opportunity to play.
Next newsletter will likely come in August after WorldCon!
