Good yurt and good luck.

I rented a yurt, just to get out of my bedroom for a minute. It's almost been a year that I've lived and worked and written and slept and danced and paced and sat through meetings and usually eaten my lunch all in this same room. I wanted to be somewhere else, and we cannot travel. A hotel room wasn't going to cut it. I wanted something I couldn't wholly predict. 

This yurt sits on a deck in someone's backyard in El Sobrante. The family who owns it is from Mongolia, and I can't speak to anything like authenticity, but I can tell you that every detail of it was hand-painted. The hides beneath the poles of the structure were taken from real animals. I lay in bed and stroked the grain of hosehair, of a small cow. I looked up through the oculus and watched the clouds move, and then the stars. 


Many hotel rooms and small vacation rentals lack a place meant to work or to write. Maybe that's by design; maybe the fact that I'm always working is the actual design flaw here. But I managed like I always do. I sat in a low, gorgeously-carved wooden chair with a horsehair seat and pulled a bar stool in front of me to be my table. I wrote, breathing some different air. Something inside me unkinked. It's been a month of good news. 

The good news is: I sold my next book. It will probably be out in 2022, and I am so pleased to be working with a new publisher. The process of selling a new book takes a long time and a lot of luck. I'm going to ask you for something here: I need you to be my luck. You got five minutes?


The best thing I wrote last year is online for free for three more days. 

The piece is a novelette called "The Pill." It's in my collection, "Big Girl," which many of you have already bought and read and been so kind to me about, and I appreciate it. 

I appreciate it most because "The Pill" represents some of my most combative writing, the stuff that was hardest for me to find in myself and harder still to put out into the world. It is fat and unfriendly and comes from some of my own most hellish experiences. It's been moving to receive letters and DMs and tweets about this story, from people who connected with it. 

The part where I need luck is: "The Pill" and "Big Girl" are both eligible for the Locus awards. "The Pill" is an eligible novelette, and "Big Girl" is an eligible collection. Anyone can vote in this poll; it costs nothing and it takes a few minutes and a little back-and-forth. You can do this until February 28, and your sacrifice of time will change my luck for the better. If you've read the story or the book and feel moved to vote, please do. 

I hope your tranquility and your relief are close to you, as close as a fantasy hide-palace in your own back yard. I hope your luck holds out, that you get vaccinated soon, and that you have moments to appreciate the little hand-painted details of your life. I hope your luck shows up for you.

We're almost there. I can smell spring coming. 

With luck, 

Meg