Another year has passed! That means even more fascinating poetry, short fiction, and essays across the breadth of fandom have emerged!

I haven’t done a great deal in 2019, mostly because I’m incredibly busy working on things that are not yet finished–but I can’t wait to share more of those! I also can’t wait to take it a little bit easier with myself, which is also a big reason why there isn’t a good deal more poetry or fiction on this list.

Regardless, here’s what I’ve been up to in 2019:

The Magazine (eligible for the Best Semiprozine Hugo):

🔥 FIYAH: Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, executive editors Troy L. Wiggins and DaVaun Sanders, editors L.D. Lewis, Brandon O’Brien, Kaleb Russell, Danny Lore, and Brent Lambert

FIYAH is eligible in the Best Semiprozine category. Both Troy L. Wiggins and DaVaun Sanders are eligible in the Best Editor, Short Form category. 🔥🔥🔥

Poetry (eligible for the Rhysling Award):

🌌 ‘Elegy for the Self as Villeneuve’s Beast’, Uncanny Magazine Issue Twenty-Eight, May/June 2019

It’s funny how nobody asks about the spell,
who uttered it, or why; or why, pray tell,
we guess the boy-turned-beast was always beast-as-boy.

(Some) Other Poetry (That May Or May Not Also Be Rhysling-Eligible):

🌌 ‘Traveling Trini at Magic Camp 2019’, Patreon, August 31 2019

Every escalator is the first line of a portal story,
each queue its unwieldy next sentence,
but each of us is engrossed, all made of witness…

🌌 ‘Wolf’s Luck’, Twitter, October 17 2019

We came to play games.
Or to howl—to howl against
the pixelated woods, the pale woods,
the woods where we cannot be seen
as often as we howl…

Prose (eligible for the Hugo and Nebula Short Story categories) :

🌌 ‘Due By the End of the Week’, Fireside Quarterly January 2019 (available online February 2019)

“My problem? My problem is that I can’t afford to fail Sociology, or else I won’t be able to do any more of this.” I gesture at the dead slimy centipodal alien angrily, then lean my hair into the only clean sink in the room.

Nonfiction:

🌌 ‘Getting Out of the Cold: Revisiting Toxic Masculinity in Lethal Weapon’, Fireside Quarterly October 2019 (available online December 2019)

Sometimes the things that teach us how to be men also turn men into tools.

🌌 ‘If You’ve Heard This One Before’, Uncanny Magazine November/December 2019

Often enough there is a paradox where the work that deliberately seeks to take people to task for the hostile ideologies that breed violent actions are also the works that make those ideologies and those actions seem trendy and fascinating to impressionable consumers, not because those consumers are ignorant or undiscerning, but because they’ve been primed. And there is no better example of that priming than—
—well, there are so many examples, it’s not even funny.

Podcasts (eligible for the Best Fancast Hugo):

🌌 The Skiffy and Fanty Show, produced by Jen Zink and Shaun Duke, hosted by Jen Zink, Shaun Duke, Paul Weimer, Alex Acks, Elizabeth Fitzgerald, Trish Matson, and team

Alongside making literal dozens of rad things on a monthly basis, such as Reading Rangers and Torture Cinema, The Skiffy and Fanty Network is responsible for producing Righteous Kicks, the podcast where Iori Kusano and I talk about Kamen Rider! But if you’re going to put it on a ballot, definitely credit the whole team—Skiffy and Fanty does so many amazing things, and all of them are deserving of your attention.

Stuff The Eligibility Of Which Still Eludes Me:

Here’s a reminder that I make tabletop games! You can get some of them at my itch.io page! Considering that they are all very small, I am not going to assume their eligibility for stuff like the Nebulas, but it would be really nice if you checked them out all the same!

And that should be all from me! Thank you for your time, and I hope you are the best at everything.

Another year brings with it another crop of radical stories worth reading from all across the speculative fiction landscape. It’s also been a kind of a hard year for all of us, one where what we read and write has become in a lot of ways the truest shape of extolling who we want to be and rebutting who we are afraid of becoming. 

A lot of that has particularly come from many of the things that I’ve read, which I want to turn into another post where I can truly talk about the length and breadth of good SFF that came out in the year 2018. 

It’s also been an intensely busy one for me creatively. Lots of things were either published or cooking this year, which I’m somewhat glad for. If I’m being honest, it’s rather ironic that I wrote so much in a state of such mental and emotional flux that today, in another one of those valleys, I find it hard to just write the blog post about the stuff I wrote so people can read them and possibly consider them worthy of a statue. But ultimately, I’m proud of my output. That I can use my work as a channel for some of those valleys, and at least work slowly through the words when the valley fills with water, is a marked improvement from just last year. And ultimately, I came out with some things that I’m really proud of, and I hope I can make more things like those next year. 

But since I should also mention the things themselves, here are some stuff that fell out of my brain this year: