Odds and Ends: Winter 2023 Edition

There’s been a bunch of small but significant things happening in my little writing world these past few months.

For starters, Chromophobia: A Strangehouse Anthology by Women in Horror made the 2022 Bram Stoker Award preliminary ballot! The anthology, featuring my story “Gray Rock Method” was spearheaded by editor Sara Tantlinger and published by Rooster Republic Press last summer. Ebooks are now available in addition to print paperback copies in case you haven’t had a chance to check out all the fuss. Fingers crossed it makes it to the next round of consideration! Actually, it made the final ballot too! Ahh, how exciting!!


Next, results for the 2022 Critters Annual Readers Poll were released a few weeks ago, and I was thrilled that two of the anthologies I had stories in were shortlisted in the Best Anthology category.

Strange Religion: Speculative Fiction of Spirituality, Belief, and Practice took the top spot! Edited by Andy Dibble and published by tDotSpec, it features my story “The Life that Comes After.”

Third Flatiron’s After the Goldrush anthology, edited by Juliana Rew and featuring my story “The Front of the Pack” was also in the top 10!

Be sure to check both anthologies out if you haven’t already!


In other anthology news, the amazing cover dropped the other day for Android Press’s Fighting for the Future: Cyberpunk and Solarpunk Tales, edited by Phoebe Wagner and featuring my story “Root Cause” which just so happens to be set in the storyworld of my debut novel Implanted. Behold:

There are some great contributors so be sure to check out the full table of contents. AND be sure to sign up to stay informed about the upcoming Kickstarter.


Preorders are now being taken for the Solar Flare anthology, edited by Patricia Bray & Joshua Palmatier and to be published by Zombies Need Brains after their successful Kickstarter to commemorate 10 years of ZNB anthologies. I’ve just turned in edits for my story “Trial by Fire” that will be included and am looking forward to seeing the rest of the collection come together!

Cover art for Solar Flare

Finally, I want to congratulate friend and colleague Sara A. Mueller for being shortlisted for the 2023 Compton Crook award for best first SF/F/H novel. I went to Taos Toolbox back in the day with Sara and beta read her fantastic novel The Bone Orchard. It’s so wonderful to see her work nominated for the same award my debut novel was. Fingers crossed for her and the other finalists this year.

That’s it for me. Stay tuned!

Where You Can Find Me @ COSine 2023

For the first time ever, I’ll be attending COSine 2023, Colorado Spring’s science fiction convention, on January 20-22. I’m looking forward to getting to know this regional con better and the First Friday Fandom that hosts the event.

The Guest of Honor is the Martha Wells (!) plus Science Guests of Honor Drs. Louise & James Gunderson (experts in robotics & artificial intelligence, Artist Guest of Honor Kyle Crutcher, and Special Guests Connie and Courtney Willis.

If you are in the area, you can find me on the following panels:

  • Friday 4pm: Best and Worst MacGuffins
  • Saturday 1pm: Trust Issues (on-line)
  • Saturday 2pm: Adding Romance to Your SF&F (M)
  • Saturday 5pm: Author Reception & Mass Autographing

Hope to see you there masked and vaxxed!

Whew, 2022

This year was a lot. And not all in a bad way as things opened up and it felt safer to go out and about and be with other people. I was able to travel for the first time in over two years to visit friends and family. I did two conventions this year and am doing another in January. I saw movies in theatres and dined in at restaurants. I saw shows and went to events that had people there from outside our pandemic bubble. As others have eloquently said before me, all this socializing felt like exercising a muscle that had fallen into disuse, and as nerve-wracking as it was determining what was safe to do with reasonable precautions, I’m glad I was able to do these things that I enjoyed and made me feel more connected to the larger community.

But there were downsides as well. Despite being vaxxed and boosted, we finally got Covid at the start of summer break after our daughter was exposed on the last day of school. A good friend from college was struck and killed by a driver while riding his bike with his family. A drunk driver crashed into our fence with a stolen car, and we simply haven’t had the time or energy to repair it. And I haven’t even gotten to the writing piece yet.

Then I got surprise pneumonia in early November. We are still not sure how, but what we do know is the antibiotics I was put on burned the lining of my esophagus and stomach. Navigating the health system in New Mexico can be difficult at the best of times and after two years of accumulated pressure from Covid plus the combo of flu and RSV this year, it was even worse. It didn’t help that my symptoms mimic those of a heart attack, which have risen exponentially thanks to Covid, so that added a new dimension of panic and anxiety to an already fraught process. The good news is, after three trips to the ER and an endoscopy, I’m fine and have a plan to manage all this now. But getting to this point, and knowing there are so many others out there who are in worse shape and/or face steeper hurdles in our medical system while the tripledemic rages on, well, it’s a lot.

Writing-wise, things this year felt a bit like a reset in a lot of ways. I wrote and submitted more short stories in 2022 than I have in years. I’m proud of both stories that came out in Third Flatiron’s After the Gold Rush anthology and Rooster Republic’s Chromophobia: A Strangehouse Anthology by Women in Horror for different reasons. “The Front of the Pack” in After the Gold Rush is a flash piece, which is a length I’ve always struggled with. “Gray Rock Method” in Chromophobia is my first foray into horror, which was a fun way to dip my toe into the genre. I have more short fiction forthcoming in 2023 and other stories I hope will be picked up soon—hope springs eternal!

Some really great in-the-trenches things happened this year as well, but they are the kind of thing that only I can say, “Hey, this is a real milestone,” even when it doesn’t manifest into something tangible I can point to on a bookshelf or a table of contents somewhere. So I’m forced to come back to the iceberg metaphor and how so much of the creative life is sublimated, rendered invisible to outside eyes, and that we only have ourselves to accurately measure our progress, and to not let that metric get corrupted by outside influences.

I’ve done a lot of that work this year, and I think the results of having two new book ideas start to take shape are evidence of that. This year I also discovered there’s still life in some of my older projects that I’ve sweated and grieved over not finding a wider audience. I can’t tell you how affirming that is to know that sometimes it isn’t you or your work, but the capricious luck in finding the right moment, the right call, the right person instead. Some things can only be learned by going through them and persevering. And I plan to persevere all the way through 2023 as well.

I hope you’ll join me!

My MileHiCon 2022 Schedule

MileHiCon is nearly here!

MileHiCon54!

On October 21 to 23, you can find me along with lots of other amazing regional authors at the Denver Marriott Tech Center in Denver, Colorado, for a weekend of SF/F/H fun. There’s a robust Covid policy to protect participants and attendees alike, which I’m grateful for. I’m on a bunch of panels and look forward to digging in on these topics and more throughout the convention:

● Friday 5pm: You got your Punk in my Story! (M)

● Friday 8pm: Body Modification – Science can take us farther than ever, but
should/can we?

● Saturday 11am: Building a Sustainable Future (M) 

● Saturday 12pm: Making your Characters Names Memorable and True to Them (M)

● Saturday 8pm: The Future of Food 

● Sun 11am: The Future of Work (M)

I hope to see you there — masked, vaxxed, and boosted, of course! To learn more, check out the convention’s website at milehicon.org.

New Story Alert: Android Press’s Cyberpunk Solarpunk Anthology

I am so pleased to announce I’ll have a story in the forthcoming anthology Fighting for the Future: Cyberpunk and Solarpunk Tales, which is edited by Phoebe Wagner and published by Android Press.

When I first saw the call for the anthology, I knew I needed to submit a story since they were specifically looking for stories at the intersection of Cyberpunk and Solarpunk, and of course, that is exactly the same energy I brought to my debut novel Implanted.

How it started:

How it’s going:

“Root Cause,” my story for the anthology, is set in the very same world of Implanted: that of a high-tech society rewilidng the land outside a domed city, their refuge from the changes wrought by climate change. While it introduces new characters, the story’s blend of hyperconnectivity, environmentalism, and rebellion will be familiar to readers of the book and hopefully entice new readers to check it out as well.

I am very grateful to the people in my writing group (you know who you are!) who helped me get this story ready for submission. I am also glad to be working with the people at Android Press, given their mission to showcase environmentally-focused speculative fiction.

The full table of contents is a banger, and I’m thrilled to have my work alongside everyone:

Introduction by Andrew Sage

“Nano-Vibration” by Brent Lambert

“Property of PAUSE Ltd.” by Ai Jiang

“The Galaxy’s Cube” by Jeremy Szal

“Do Anarchists Dream of Collective Sheep?” by Izzy Wasserstein

“Tomorrow Is Another Day” by Louis Evans

“The Promise” by Rona Fernandez

“Root Cause” by Lauren C. Teffeau

“Broken Threads” by Kevin Wabaunsee

“The Robot Whisperer” by Holly Schofield

“The Strength of the Willow” by Commando Jugendstil and Tales from the EV Studio

“Solarpunks” by J. D. Harlock

“Materiality” by Cory Doctorow

“The Scent of Green” by Ana Sun

“Cloud 9” by Christopher R. Muscato

“The Holiness of Light” by Cynthia Zhang 

There will be a cover reveal in the weeks to come, along with a pre-order campaign, so stay tuned for more about this project!