Hello friends, and welcome to 2026.

I hope you are well, and staying safe from the flu (and the COVID!), and the fascism. If you are going to protests, wear a mask, it’s good for all three. I trust that wherever you are, you are doing what you can in response to The Horrors, wherever that falls on the not-particularly-linear continuum from “staying alive minute to minute” to “putting yourself personally on the line for others”. We need the whole range. We keep each other safe; the way we get through this is “together”.

In this newsletter, the first teaser for A Singular They and a premiere update(!), and a wrap-up of stories and books I read in 2025 that you might enjoy.

A Singular They

Oh my gosh we’re actually doing it! I am working on nailing down the virtual world premiere date (March?) and presentation partners. (Do you want to help? Email me!) In December I recorded the audio description for the full work, as well as for the trailers and the pre-show “tour” (sets, sites, props, etc). I showed an excerpt - the opening segment of the film - for Dark Room Ballet’s event, “Yeah, it was good!” which marked the first time any of the footage was seen by someone outside the project, and let me field test the audio description for the first time. It was met with great enthusiasm and good feedback and I’m so grateful for such a welcoming soft launch.

The first teaser has hit social media!

I learned vertical video for Instagram purposes and this one actually looks exceptionally good vertically. You can watch that version here (or on instagram).

I haven’t edited together the audio description for the trailers yet, I am only one person and speaking all the audio messed my ribs up pretty bad, so progress is slow and for right now please wait. But that’s coming very soon. I plan to drop the described versions of this and the second teaser later this month and maybe I will do a bonus newsletter then. Both teasers and the longer trailer are available on Patreon already ;)

It’s happening!

Reading Wrap-Up

This was the first year I’ve tracked my reading since approximately the third grade. Turns out, now that I have good library card access again, I read a lot. 171 books in 2025; 63 were re-reads, and 48 read with a buddy, including taking said buddy on their first tour of Discworld. Almost all of the first-time reads were library books. I didn’t keep track of how many short stories but given how many I bookmarked as good I can tell you it’s “a lot”.

Here are some favorites!

(Not necessarily 2025 releases, just things I read that year.)

Novels:

• The Cautious Traveller's Guide to The Wastelands, Sarah Brooks: if Annihilation had wonder and curiosity to it and a giant transcontinental train…!

• Catfish Rolling, Clara Kumagai: when an earthquake breaks time itself, and grief warps your world, how do you live and grow?

• The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina, Zoraida Córdova: when the matriarch dies, her past surfaces and brings the already-strained family a bunch of magical problems, and cycles to break. Also, a circus.

• Always Coming Home, Ursula Le Guin: how the heck did I not read this until now????? Imaginary anthropology, only kind of a novel, kind of a textbook, kind of a poetry collection and musical recording, simply extraordinary thing to exist as a text. Far-future, low-tech, exploration of societies and meaning. I am not doing this description justice.

• Bangkok Wakes to Rain, Pitchaya Sudbanthad: multigenerational stories linked back to the same ancestral home in Bangkok, really beautifully woven.

• Babel, RF Kuang: every bit as good as everyone said it was. Linguistics, and colonialism, and resistance, and the tarnish of the ivory tower, and nuanced, flawed, real-life-recognizable characters.

• The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett: fantasy political murder mystery in a weird world with rampaging leviathans. I am impatiently awaiting the sequel from the library!

• Wearing the Lion, John Wiswell: a retelling of Heracles’ story from his point of view… and Hera’s, in which he’s trying to help people and she’s trying to take vengeance, and stumble her way toward accountability. Big thoughts on what it means to make amends, and how hard it is to break cycles of harm. Plus, a sweet wacky queer found family along the way.

Novellas:

• Sisters of the Vast Black, Lina Rather: space nuns in a sentient bug ship and so many secrets. Has a sequel, though imo the first book is better.

• Automatic Noodle, Annalee Newitz: a bunch of robots decide to make noodles, and maybe accidentally become a family and important parts of their community. Very sweet.

• The Transitive Properties of Cheese, Ann LeBlanc: a single personality spun off into many, one of whom is really, really into cheese, except someone threw the cheese asteroid into the sun, and complications ensue. Goofy but thoughtful!

Poetry:

Two people I know put out great crip poetry this year, Liv Mammone’s Fire in the Waiting Room collection and Eli Clare’s Unfurl, which combines poetry with essays, in “a queer disabled love song to trees and beavers, tremors and dreams”.

I didn’t read much online poetry this year because most of my poetry brain was spent on facilitating Infinite Branches, the poems of which will start appearing this month!

Short stories:

• Never Eaten Vegetables, HH Pak: a generation ship has a problem and must improvise imperfect solutions alone to save what she can of her children

• The Magnolia Returns, Eden Royce: a teleporting butcher’s shop might have just what your soul needs

• Bloodless, Emily Woodworth: waking up bloodless in a strange place; what rituals might bring you peace? Without giving too much away, an indigenous story; CN residential schools and associated violence.

• Wilayat in Seven Saints, Tanvir Ahmed: saints and stories and survival; in it for the telling.

• Woman Like Stone Like Water, Malda Marlys: this one surprised me! A woman works primitive tools from magic stone behind a waterfall… until…?

• St Dymphna’s School for Borderland Girls, Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece: strange things happening to reality at a convent school; unsettling, weird horror

• The Tale of How You Were Born, Eleanor Elizabeth Fog: a witch, a mother, and a child born with a tale.

• Nian: A New Year Story, Leeyee Lim: year-dragons through the ages… into space??

• Tea for Truth, Mango for Memory, Nicole L. Soper Gorden: a cloud-witch in the desert, a merchant, a price.

…I could go on, but I’m out of being-upright energy, and that is probably enough of a reading list to keep you going a while ;)

Take care, dear hearts. Stay warm, stay safe, stay fervent.

Love,

Toby

Did this get forwarded to you? If you got this far, why not subscribe?