A Year in Review
Happy End of 2021!
What a fricking year. Wow. That’s a good wow and a bad wow. It’s been a kick-in-the-teeth year, an on-your-knees year. It was full of major life changes and major life accomplishments and major life pains, so, inspired by Malinda Lo’s recaps, I just wanted to take the chance to look over them and maybe voice what I hope to do next year.
This year, with your help, I released my debut novel! The Unbroken is doing well by all visible accounts (so much is invisible, alas, and behind magic publisher screens that I only see every six months). Even now, I can see people recommending it for the latest book meme (12 books in 12 months—here’s mine) and that makes me feel amazing. Thank you for reading, thank you for reviewing, and thank you for telling your friends! Thank you for sharing your art! It’s almost award season, and obviously I’d love to make some shortlists next year, but that’s one of the 80% of things I can’t control. (If you have nomination or voting power, though, you can help!)
My main goal at the time was juggling finishing The Faithless and starting Book 3 of the Magic of the Lost series, as well as working as co-editor for PodCastle and editor for SFWA. I also edited a queer Best Of anthology with Charles Payseur that came out this year. Sounds like a lot, right? It was too much, in fact, so I spent the year saying goodbye to places I adored so that I could focus a little tighter in. I haven’t managed to start Book 3 yet, but that will be highest priority for 2022.
There were also some surprise-yet-secret opportunities the popped up! Some range from the very secret (i.e. I had to sign an NDA) and some are just…unannounced announcements about a forthcoming novel I proposed this year. Hopefully I’ll get to talk more about everything soon, but again, they made for extra busy-ness I hadn’t quite planned for.
I did finish The Faithless! And I really can’t be more proud of how it turned out. I. Love. This. Book. I think it’s funny and painful and sexy complicated and I love the characters I got to shine a brighter light on. I had to do major rewrites twice, but hopefully this version is good to go on to the next stage of production so that we can get this out to you as soon as possible! (At the moment, that’s looking like sometime late 2022, but as you all probably know by now, publishing is a fickle beast. It’s definitely worth the wait, though. Trust me. 😉)
I also did about a bajillion interviews on blogs, streams, and podcasts, all in the name of publicity, which took a ton of time. I’m not sure how much of that will happen again when I launch The Faithless. There were also a couple of essays and a short story—my essay on war narratives in SFF and my essay on redemption arcs, featuring Xena, Warrior Princess.
It’s been a year of trying to figure out how my brain works as a writer, how I want my career to look at this stage (and the next), and how I can best spend my energy to manage all of that.
To that end, for next year I have a few early things on the docket but after that, I’ll probably spend my brain on finishing a trilogy, which is no mean feat in the best of times. My authorial plans:
- Write Book 3 of Magic of the Lost (a good first draft and probably at least 1 revision; the rest will likely bleed into 2023)
- 2 short stories: one for Uncanny Magazine and one for an anthology
- wrap up and (hopefully) launch The Faithless
- write an essay on butch lesbian masculinity in SFF
- teach 3 online classes: a query courses and 2 fantasy writing courses
- some narrations!
- Bonus: start mysterious new book (Codename: Warmongers)
Hmm. Well. That sounds really fricking optimistic, especially given that most of that is in the first half of the year. So. Uh:
- Figure out what you can and can’t do, then guard those boundaries
Non-authorial plans:
- Run my first half-marathon race! In Paris, COVID-willing.
- Really devote time to studying the blade (aka playing with my new longsword for fun)
- Read a lot more! Maybe a bit more widely than I did this year. Maybe knock off some of my nonfiction TBR, my French/Arabic TBR, and basically all the books I’ve been buying now that I have a bookshelf.
- Stretching
ICYMI:
- Nebula Nominations: Nebula nominations are OPEN for members of SFWA, and I’d appreciate your consideration for both The Unbroken and “The Captain and the Quartermaster.” (for a full list of my eligible works and what they’re eligible for, as well as other worthy candidates for other categories, go here, on my shiny revamped website.)
- I got a new microphone to do narrations with, so I tested it out with a reading of my flash fiction story, “The Cook.”
Thanks again to you all. This year wouldn’t be the amazing year it was without you all. Thank you so much for your support, those of you who are new here and those of you who have been here since the olden days.