podcasts and photons
Gentle readers,
I have a new poem, a podcast, a review, and a meditation on small presses to offer you!
The poem is "Beyond the Standard Model". It's in the January/February 2025 issue of Analog magazine, and in a tiny bit of time travel, you can read it right now on the Analog website. (If you want a physical copy to admire, an old-fashioned newsstand is your best bet--try your local Barnes and Noble--or you can email the good people at Analog itself. For a single digital issue, check out Magzter.)
This is a science poem--it's only speculative in the sense that lots of theoretical physics is speculative--and the towers are real towers. One is a church tower in Cambridge, England; the other is a lighthouse on the coast of Lake Michigan. Here's the view from the top of the lighthouse:
The podcast is the worldbuilding episode of the gloriously named Wizards and Spaceships. David, Rachel, and I talked about worlds we'd like to visit and worlds we'd like to live in, my favorite big fat historically inspired fantasy series (hint: it's not Game of Thrones), and some of the layers that went into writing North Continent Ribbon.
North Continent Ribbon has been getting some press lately! Roseanna Pendlebury wrote a long, thoughtful critical-in-the-sense-of-Criticism review at Ancillary Review of Books. She talks about how the book works as a mosaic, the role of small presses in exploding publishing categories, and where the story's ideological sympathies lie. Meanwhile, Molly Templeton wrote another meditation on small press books that takes North Continent Ribbon as its jumping-off point.
I hope you're finding some time to curl up and read. Here's some feline inspiration for the curling up part.
Yours,
Ursula.