Getting Good Distracted

Stories Read (in no particular order)

1. "Marginalia" by Mary Robinette Kowal from Uncanny, 2024
2. "Five Views of the Planet Tartarus" by Rachael K. Jones from Lightspeed, 2024 (flash)
3. "Rogue Farm" by Charles Stross from Live Without a Net, 2003
4. "A Family" by Jamel Brinkley from Gulf Coast, 2018
5. "Air to Shape Lungs" by Shingai Njeri Kagunda from Africa Risen, 2022 (flash)
6. "Beginnings" by Kristina Ten from Fantasy, 2022
7. "Follow the Drinking Gourd" by Charles Johnson from The Kenyon Review, 2018

Also read but I won't list above, for purity sake, a micro memoir and some narrative longford journalism. Both were in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019 which I didn't realize until I was in the middle of them were not short stories and I didn't realize the collection contained non-fiction prose. No objections or criticisms. I enjoyed Jane Wong's "Curse for the American Dream" and Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling's "Barbearians at the Gate" more than many of the stories above. Any instructor creating a reading list around the theme of the American Dream should definitely include Wong's story, and "Barbearians" absolutely engrossed me and I couldn't put the book down.

Quick thoughts: My favorites were "Five Views of the Planet Tartarus," "Beginnings" and "Follow the Drinking Gourd." I want to say it speaks partly to the value of a story being timely (something that seems impossible to me as a writer, with how long it takes for something to go from idea to publication) with those stories being about ruthless incarceration, a queer relationship, and the harsh realities of slavery (respectively). But I'm not sure that's really what I liked about them. Each of those stories intrigued me, pulled me and kept me wondering where they were going. And they delivered on their promise. They stuck the landing. "Five Views" with the perfect Chekov's Gun surprise ending, "Beginnings" with beautiful prose, and "Drinking Gourd" with powerful sacrifice that reminds me of A Tale of Two Cities or The Grapes of Wrath.

As for my own writing and why it took me so long to update this blog since last time, well, I got good distracted with novels. I read Someone to Build a Nest In and I think I was reading it as it won the Nebula for best novel. Well-deserved though I can't say I read all the others on the list. I am, however, on track to read all of novels nominated for the Hugo by those ceremonies in August. I also read The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry without knowing a thing about that book going in other than Zevin wrote it and I loved Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. It was so sweet! I would like to do a special Short Story Summer post where I read (or reread) each of the stories Zevin uses to title the chapters.

I also made progress on another round of querying my own novel. I always hate to count that as writing time, but it takes a lot of effort and I often have to work at being kind to myself and acknowledging how hard I work. So, yes, I count it as writing. I'm going to pause on that now though. I've got the book out to a lot of agents (probably not something to brag about) and it's time to write another short story of my own.

See ya between the pages and outside the margins.