I missed updating you all in May, mostly due to the speculative fiction writing conference for which I was on the executive, TriCon: The Trident Conference for Speculative Fiction. It’ll be mid-May again next year, but we haven’t nailed down the dates yet. And then I got a new temp job and visited Montreal. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind.

News on Aether and Ego:

1. You can enter to win an advance reading copy (“ARC”) at my publisher’s IG.

2. You can get an ebook copy of the pre-proofread version of the book at NetGalley. You’ll need to write a review in exchange and post it to the usual places.

3. I am most of the way through the long editing process, having finished developmental editing and copyediting and now working our way through proofreading. I took advantage of the proofreading stage to remove the hellos from my book! I happened to fortuitously read Eight things The Other Bennet Sister got wrong: Part II at Musings on the Long 18th Century, which mentioned that “hello” wasn’t used as a greeting until the advent of the telephone. Interestingly, although I didn’t know that, I don’t think I had it in dialogue anywhere, but in sentences like “they said their hellos”… something about having Fitzwilliam Darcy say, “hello!” felt absolutely wrong, though I’m surprised I didn’t have Bingley saying it anywhere.

Currently reading: Everyone in This Bank Is a Thief by Benjamin Stevenson (on my phone) and Ravenous by Sara Cooper (paperback). Both recommended, so far.

New writing: I did a 30-day submission challenge (well, 29 days of it, I need to do one more!) which, if you’re a writer, I recommend. I took the pressure off by not worrying about missing the occasional day week, but made a rule for myself that I should send two submissions if I missed a day, so I’ve sent something like 45 or 50 submissions.

Two stories have come out as a result: “The Candy Aisle” in Citywide Lunch and “Water Rights” in 50-Word Stories which is, as you might guess, very short. I had a few poems accepted, which will be out later in the year. Look for “Facial Deficits,” a story about facial allotransplantation and the failures of marriage, at Blood+Honey on 29 June, and “Possible Purposes of Plastic Buttons,” a story set at Vanderbilt in Nashville, where I worked for so many years, about grief and caregiving and aliens being inconvenient, at Fiction on the Web on 3 July.

_{For full disclosure, if you buy any of the books linked above from Bookshop, I’ll get a tiny commission, which I promise to spend irresponsibly.}