GirlWonders

Dragon.

This post has been a long time in coming. The reason I have been away from my blog for so long is that I appear to have developed a repetitive strain injury. I haven’t wanted to use my hands for writing blog posts when I can barely use them for writing stories. Why am I wasting these words on a blog post, then? I got a copy of Dragon dictation on an education discount and it runs (barely, sub optimally) on my laptop. It’s better than nothing.

The good news is, I managed to complete my submission for novel workshop. The bad news is, I hurt myself pretty badly in doing so. My right Pinkie no longer bends very well, and it hurts when I use it to type anything. I’ ve been using this bizarre, contorted typing method involving using my index finger to do the work of my wounded Pinkie finger, and that’ s making my wrist hurt, and I pretty much feel like I can’ t win.

This is a whole lot of whining. At least technology like Dragon exists, and once I learn how to use it a bit more effectively, I’m hopeful that will change my life. I’m only 31; my body shouldn’t be breaking this badly just yet. I’m a little concerned about what the technology change is going to mean process wise for my writing, but it’s not like I have much choice in the matter. I’m still planning on attending the novel workshop, but my critiques will be shorter and I’m unlikely to be marking up pages with my usual thoroughness. Hopefully my Clarionmates will vouch for me that I’ m typically a conscientious critiquer; I hate how everything has become just a little bit more difficult, difficult enough to make everything I do sub par.

Add to this that I have two new course preparations for the fall semester, one of which is a class taught partly online, and I’m absolutely terrified that I won’t be able to get everything done thanks to this injury. I’ve made an appointment to see a doctor, but the likeliest scenario is repetitive strain, in which case all I can do is not use it. I’m a writer, a graduate student, and teacher; telling me not to type, to not use my hands, is like telling a fish not to swim.

Apparently my similes are crappier on Dragon. Apologies. I can’t predict how the next few months will look. There’s a chance I’ll be blogging more as I learn how to use this software; there’s a chance I’ll be blogging less, because if it winds up being usable for my writing, I’ll still be trying to balance writing blog posts with writing stories. Still, the fact I’m able to write this blog post gives me hope. Interesting fact: Dragon can still understand what you’re saying through pathetic tears of frustration. Also it thinks the sound of a person blowing her nose is the letter I.

If I’m late returning an email or behind on a deadline, please know I’ m terribly sorry and that I’ m trying to get my feet (or at least my hands) underneath me after what has been, given that it’s still my dissertation leave, a devastating setback.

Enough whining. I’m going to try writing a story on this thing, and then we’ll know exactly how screwed I am. Although if it goes anything like writing this blog post, I’m going to be okay. Turtle slow, but okay. Sigh.

Head down, keep going.

I have ten days remaining to get my submission together for the novel workshop.  It’s coming along in fits and starts, always less quickly than I’d hoped, and with more screaming and gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair.  That said, when it’s good, it’s very very good.  Not the words themselves (those are still awful and messy and new) but the falling into trance-state where your fingers can barely keep up with the story your mind wants to tell — keep going faster faster more more!  And then three hours have gone by and your butt’s numb and it’s time to get up and stretch and pace and plot the next bit.  Like that.  Sometimes it’s hell, and other times it’s the perfect drug, and all you can do is show up at your desk at the appointed time and hope.

I’ll blog the process after it’s done, when I can see it (the novel, the process) clearly.  Both are still fragile and unformed, not yet ready for scrutiny.

Mad drafting (and an unfortunate bout of illness) has kept me away from social networking, and will probably continue to do so, possibly until after novel workshop, although knowing me I’ll start blogging once the workshop itself starts up.  My fellow novel-workshop-goers all seem smart and kind and well-published, and I’m looking forward to spending two weeks of wrist-breaking labor with them.

Below, my schedule for Wiscon.  I’m excited and terrified and I have an insane amount of prepwork to do in too little time.

The Author Is Dead, The Author Is Among Us

Michael Marc Levy, Bessy Gokey, Jeanne Griggs, Eileen Gunn, Brooke Wonders

Sat, 10:00–11:15 am, Conference 4

The “Death of the Author” school of literary criticism holds that the intentions and biographical experiences of the author should not be considered when analyzing and critiquing creative works, that the impressions and interpretations of readers matter more than the intentions of the writer. But, on the Internet, the author is not only very much alive, but may be only a click and a comment away. How do we reconcile this argument against authorial privilege within a community where the author is often a participant in the critical conversation? Can we talk about the author being dead, even as the author sits among us?

Beyond the Genre v. Literary Debate

Richard Chwedyk, Ben Burgis, Jeanne Griggs, Michael Marc Levy, Brooke Wonders

Sat. 1-2:25pm Room 629

Arthur Krystal of The New Yorker harps on the “limitations” of genre fiction; Lev Grossman insists in Time Magazine that literary fiction is a genre just like any other genre, and that lots of genre fiction is actually very good by any literary standard. People, is there a way to make this debate less frigging boring? Let’s talk about what those apparently polar opposites, pulp fiction and literary modernism, might have in common; about what it takes for critics to read genre fiction well; and about the class issue that looms over this topic but hasn’t made its way into either The New Yorker or Time.

Steal Like an Artist

SN Arly, Kater Cheek, Alexander Erin, Michael Underwood, Brooke Wonders

Sat. 4-5pm, Conference 4

In March 2011 Austin Kleon posted a concise presentation on artists and ideas on his blog. The central focus was that there are no truly new ideas, just new and different (and sometimes not so new and different) mashups of old ideas or combinations of existing things. How do you steal like an artist? What’s safe or okay to steal? When is something not safe, off limits or even illegal to steal? How does this make fiction more realistic or believable? When taking ideas or elements from cultures other than your own, what’s okay to use and at what point does it cross the line into unacceptable cultural appropriation?

Also, a new publication to announce!  My short-story “Memoir” will appear in Wreckage of Reason II, an anthology of experimental women’s writing, out in 2014.  I am tremendously pleased this story has found a home.  It was one of my Clarion application stories, so it has a soft spot in my heart, since it won me seventeen lovely writer-friends plus James.

And finally, my story, “The Entomologist’s Three Ballgowns,” which I read at Wit Rabbit back in September of 2012 (the day after Worldcon ended.  I was SO tired), will go live as part of Electric Velocipede 26 on May 2.  The cover teaser is out, and it’s going to be gorgeous.  I’ll once again be appearing alongside E. Catherine Tobler, whose work I adore.  I feel like I’m following her around the web.

Sheesh, news piles up when I’m away from the blog for too long.  Happy springtime, Chicago!  And now, back under a rock with me.

Slight case of overwhelm.

I have been scarce about these parts and am like to get scarcer.

I’ve been accepted into this for summer 2013.  Am terribly excited and terribly terrified.  Is a tremendous amount of work needs doing between now and June 2, and pages are due to the other seven workshop members by May 15.  Given that my current process involves slamming out a fugly down draft before I can even see what I’ve got, that means an insane amount of words need to get written between now and then.  I’d prefer to nighttime logic a down draft, then outline * what I’ve actually written * instead of murdering any enthusiasm I might have for the project by overthinking it to death.

The good news is, this means that I’ll be using my dissertation leave to the utmost extent.  Can’t imagine I’ll look back at these few months and think, “only two book drafts completed?  What a slacker I was!”  I’ve heard so many stories of people going on diss leave and proceeding to watch All of Television and/or read the Entire Internet, only to turn around and wonder where the time went.  This will not be me.

Although, to be fair, I did just lose two weeks to vacation.

Arizona was too lovely.  James had never been to that part of the country, so we did all the tourist-y things: hiked West Fork in Sedona, Campbell Mesa and Buffalo Park in Flag, a bit of Bright Angel at Grand Canyon.  We tried to hike the Grandview, but the switchbacks looked like this:

Sheet ice all the way down, so we had to turn back.  Still, I got a shot in the arm of gorgeous nature, which is the one thing I miss about the Southwest, now that home base is Chicago.  I didn’t make it to the gym much what with the perfect weather and the beckoning outdoors.  So yesterday I went down to campus and spun, and my brain felt much less death-y afterward.  Hopeful that part of my vacation-related writing malaise was 1) burnout from the insanity of February production and 2) insufficient exercise.

I did read Bettleheim, Propp, and Kim Stanley Robinsons’s 2312 (which had more aesthetic theory imbedded in it than either of the other two…if it doesn’t win the Hugo it’ll be a crime), so it wasn’t like I got nothing done.  Just less than I’d hoped (as usual).

Have had a small pile of personal rejections accrue on some of my favorite recent story drafts, so I’m feeling a bit low ebb in terms of faith in self and work, nevermind the mental clobbering that was AWP, so getting in to the workshop has been a much-needed pick-me-up in the face of Wall of Failure.  Just keep swimming, Girlwonders.  Just keep swimming.

(This post has an All Caps Thing going.  Sorry about that.)

Belated AWP post.

Oh, AWP.  This was my third time attending, and I suppose I both prove and disprove Rahul’s theory of social spaces.  I knew a slew of people.  I’m familiar with most of the big-name panelists, and many of the up-and-comers as well.  I even had a few meetings set up with friends.  And yet instead of being sociable, I hid in my room like a shut-in, and/or silently tagged along with other people’s groups (sorry, Bryson).  I ate a lot of peanut butter sandwiches alone in the room.

If I’m going to go again, I need to go with a better ‘tude or a conference buddy who’s less morose than I am, because this time I walked away disillusioned.  I think it’s because my time in the PhD program is coming to an end, and the vast nothingness on the other side gets more grim with every passing year.  I don’t know what world of bright-sided-ness the majority of AWP-goers live on, but I definitely do not live there.  Twenty-five jobs v. 12K attendees.  We are approaching lottery-level luck, here.  But I’ll be playing the lottery next year, like it or not, applying for any and all jobs that I seem remotely qualified for.  I need a book, or a major award, or a gas station seeking night-shift attendants.

The good bits of AWP: coffee with Rahul and surprise guest Nick Mamatas, who speaks brilliantly even at a million miles an hour (plus with snark in spades).  I met the folks at Dzanc books and said thank you for picking up one of my pieces for Monkeybicycle.  I heard Kate Bernheimer speak, not once but twice (recently read Ketzia Gold for prospectus research, so I was interested in hearing her discuss her theoretical commitments).  Got a few good leads on new fabulist books forthcoming, so hopefully I can submit a few reviews to American Book Review over the coming months.  Wrote on my own stuff three of the four days I was at the conference.  Heard Lily Hoang and Alissa Nutting speak.  Ran in to Nicole Walker and got to briefly exchange a flurry of news.  Caught up with Brian Oliu at the Fairytale Review table.  My roommates’ panel on poetry pedagogy was remarkably practical and exercise-driven, as opposed to too many of the other pedagogy panels I attended, which were content to trade bromides.  Oh, how difficult it is to teach genre!  Cry me a river, person with a Real Job.  How about this:  I’ll teach your students, you can pay me, and then you’ll never have to teach genre again.  Problem: solved.  (Snark is catching.)  Had several fabulous conversations with Megan Milks and Tyler Mills and Brianna Noll about the recent turn to the grotesque/fairytale/the fantastic mode, and about which devices are commonly conceived as fabulist, and about how Todorovian hesitation plays in to that, and about how all of this fits (or doesn’t) into the intentionalist arguments happening in literary criticism.

The bad bits: 12K people = miasmic desperation.  The fact that despite having worked with both Dinty Moore and David Shields, they were so mobbed by MFA’ers there was no way to so much as say hi.  Creative nonfiction remains ascendant; the nonfic panels were so packed that I went to the experimental and genre fiction panels instead, where I mostly I heard the same definitional arguments regurgitated, same as the last two times I went.  Give me formalism over these fluffy accounts any day.

And now I’m in Arizona for Spring Break.   March has been devoured by travel. Can’t wait to get back into my usual writing groove in April.

I’m just gonna put this out there.

If anyone will be at AWP and wants to connect, hit me up.  Leave a comment here, poke me on Facebook, leave me a Tweet, shoot me an email (brookewonders777 at hotmail).  I have no idea where I’ll be or what I’ll be up to — reconnecting with old mentors and friends, mostly.  Some panel attendance, some offsite readings.  I’m not giving a panel myself, but I’ll definitely be at Brianna Noll and Tyler Mills’ poetry panel.  Beyond that, all is fluid.

I’m trying for Zen AWP.  My first AWP I acted like it was a full-time job and ran myself into the ground paneling and meeting up with people and buzzing around the bookfair, to the point that my third day at the conference I wound up sleeping through two panels I’d very much wanted to see because I just.  Couldn’t. Wake.  Up.  Last year AWP was in Chicago, but it was held the week before my preliminary exams (whhhyyyy?).  This situation forced me to chill the eff out, and lo, I was actually able to enjoy the conference, plus I met some fantastic people: Anna Joy Springer, Alissa Nutting, Steve Tomasula, etc.  I’m hoping to stick to that model, rather than reverting to the former psychosis.

I may mass blog AWP post the conference, like I did with Worldcon.  Or not, I haven’t yet decided.  Depends how much writing I get done while I’m gone, and how many amusing anecdotes pile up.  At moment it feels like there are too many projects cluttering up my brainspace.  I actually want to keep up my daily writing while I’m there.  No idea if I can make that happen, but I plan to try.

This blogpost is brought to you by Amanda Palmer’s TED talk.  And yes, I know we all hate TED talks with their feel-good lack of crit and promulgation of error-ridden and oversimplified talking points.  But for those of you who are not hollowed-out shells of people, let this briefly make you reconsider your faith in random strangers:

But yeah.  You.  Yeah, you.  If you want to grab a cup of coffee or a drink or something, lemme know.  The whole point of conferencing is the people, not the panels.

New flash, short month.

New flash story is up at Mirror Dance!  I’m a sincere admirer of Megan Arkenberg’s work–this Lightspeed piece is particularly stunning—and I’m very happy “Never Sever” found a home in one of her magazines.  I’m in good company, too; the rest of the issue is Weird in the best way.  Shelley Bryant’s prose poem “Irruption” (also in the issue) is particularly lovely.

In other news, February was madness.  Too short a month in which to do too many things.  But.  Major life milestone: I submitted my very first book-length manuscript, a short story collection, late last night, barely getting in under the wire for a March 1 contest deadline.  I’ve been working on the collection (discussed in the Next Big Thing post below) all month.  It will likely be my dissertation.  I sincerely doubt it will get picked up by this particular contest, as historically said contest favors straight realism, but may as well try, right?  It gave me a deadline to work toward, which is apparently a thing I need.

And now I have five new stories to submit.  (Where did they all come from?)  But oh, February was rough.

Week one of February, I knew I was close enough to a manuscript-length work that it was worth trying to complete.  I burned through three major story revisions in a week.  It felt good.  I was going to do this thing.

Week two, I knew I needed to redraft one of the weaker stories or I wasn’t going to make the page-count threshold.  But I had a solid first draft I was excited to return to, so that’d be fine.  A quick redraft to tighten the story thematically, and it could go in the manuscript.

Oh no.  No, that was a bad decision.  I wrote some absurd, hideous amount of words—6K? 8K?  A bunch of it was handwritten…—on the redraft before throwing up my hands in despair.  The story was dead and I’d wasted half the month.

It was awful.  I haven’t had a story die on me that badly in…oh, a year or so at least.  Worst possible timing, too.  I gave up making the March 1 deadline.  I slumped around the house.  I read a bunch of brilliant short stories that made me hate my work even more.

Then James gave me the raised eyebrow of shame and I started a new story with twelve days to go.  It was complete at 5K words in eight days(ish), and then I spent my few remaining days begging my (lifesaving, irreplaceable) first readers to give me speed comments (I love you people so much.  Thank you thank you thank you).   I mean, no question it was a rush job; burn drafting is NOT my favorite way to write a story.  But it’s very much the lesson of Clarion: yes, you can write this thing in a week.  It will not be the perfect flower it is in your head, but it will get written, and sometimes that’s the best you can do.

“Never Sever” coming out today is the cherry on the sundae of having survived February without Quitting Writing Entirely.

March is a chaos of travel.  I head to AWP in a few days, and then on to Arizona to visit my family.  I have another pile of deadlines incoming this month, but nothing quite so paralyzing as the stack of stories I had to complete before March 1.  I don’t know what other people do on their diss leave, but this month I wrote like a hellbeast (probably 20K words; 13K new, the rest revisions).  So that’s something.

Today, I’m going to read a novel.  Because I have earned one.  Also possibly a nap.

Anthologized.

I want to blog about this but it’s still too recent for me to process so this is me attempting to process the unprocessable on the blog.

My Clarkesworld story, “Everything Must Go,” will be reprinted in Prime Books’ anthology The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror.

Here is the TOC:

Laird Barron, “Hand of Glory” (The Book of Cthulhu 2)
Peter S. Beagle, “Great-Grandmother in the Cellar” (Under My Hat)
Peter Bell, “Glamour of Madness” (The Ghosts & Scholars Book of Shadows)
Joseph Bruchac, “Down in the Valley” (Postscripts #28/29: Exotic Gothic 4)
Jim Butcher, “Bigfoot on Campus” (Hex Appeal)
Mike Carey, “Iphigenia In Aulis” (An Apple for the Creature)
Terry Dowling, “Nightside Eye” (Cemetery Dance #66)
K. M. Ferebee, “The Bird Country” (Shimmer #15)
Jeffrey Ford, “The Natural History of Autumn” (F&SF, July/August 2012)
Neil Gaiman, “The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury” (The Shadow Show)
Theodora Goss, “England Under the White Witch” (Clarkesworld, Issue 73)
Maria Dahvana Headley, “Game” (Subterranean, Fall 2012)
Robert Hood, “Escena de un Asesinato” (Postscripts #28/29: Exotic Gothic 4)
Stephen Graham Jones, “Welcome to the Reptile House” (Strange Aeons #9)
Caitlín R Kiernan, “Fake Plastic Trees: (After)
Ellen Klages, “The Education of a Witch” (Under My Hat)
Marc Laidlaw, “Forget You” (Lightspeed, June 2012)
Joe R. Lansdale. “The Tall Grass” (Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations)
John Langan, Renfrew’s Course (Lightspeed, April 2012)
Helen Marshall, “No Ghosts In London” (Hair Side, Flesh Side)
Tim Lebbon, “Slaughterhouse Blues” (Nothing As It Seems)
Alison Littlewood, “The Eyes of Water (The Eyes of Water)
Good Hunting, Ken Liu (Strange Horizons, October 2012)
Sarah Monette, “Blue Lace Agate” (Lightspeed, January 2012)
Ekaterina Sedia, “End of White” (Shotguns v Cthulhu)
Priya Sharma, “Pearls” (Bourbon Penn 04)
Robert Shearman, “Bedtime Stories for Yasmin” (Shadows & Tall Trees 4)
John Shirley, “When Death Wakes Me to Myself” (Black Wings II)
Cory Skerry, “Sinking Among Lilies” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issue #92)
Simon Stranzas, “Go Home Again” (Fungi)
Rachel Swirsky, “The Sea of Trees” (The Future Is Japanese)
Melanie Tem, “Dahlias” (Black Wings II)
Karen Tidbeck, “Arvid Pekon” (Jagganath: Stories)
Genevieve Valentine, “Armless Maidens of the American West” (Apex, August 7, 2012)
Brooke Wonders, “Everything Must Go” (Clarkesworld, Issue 74)

I used Kiernan’s Drowning Girl in my PhD school preliminary exams.  I’ve read I’m pretty sure every word Goss has ever written except her dissertation which I should probably request through Interlibrary loan.  I was too afraid to ask Peter Beagle for a signature at Worldcon because, Peter Beagle.  All my recent reading obsessions (Swirsky, Valentine, Headley, Tidbeck, Tem) are on here.  I have a story in the same book as Neil Gaiman.  Neil-mother-effing-Gaiman.

Deep breaths, I am taking them now.  Why did smelling salts go out of style?  This is the moment for smelling salts.  Can we bring them back?  And then maybe bring them over to my house.  In bulk.  I am in need of intensive revivification.

Do not know what to do with this information.  Have drink?  Have multiple drinks?  No, too early (even if appropriate).  Have espresso drink?  No, bad idea, will jitter with happy.  Clean house?  House is already clean.  Read a book?  WITH WHAT FOCUS YOU MUST BE JOKING sorry just kidding okay, not read a book (although if you are in need of a book, I recommend Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove read back to back with Saunders’ 10th of December because taken together they will wreck you.  If I could read right now, which I can’t, that’s what I would be reading).  Hug James?  James at work.  Will hug James later, as soon as he is home from work.  Then we will read Saunders and/or Russell out loud to each other while having a celebratory glass of wine.  But not for several hours.  Too many hours…

Write new story?  Yes.  That’s what I’ll do.  I will write a tiny story, and it will be the happiest story on earth.  It might even have a happy ending.

Yeah, that’s a reasonable facsimile of what my brain sounds like on a heavy hit of dopamine.  And now I will go take my own advice and write things.  Ecstatically.

Interview.

In which I nerd out over speculative fiction over on Have You Nerd, which is a great Internet space dedicated to women writing about nerdy stuff.

I watched the whole recent fracas about Fake Geek Girls explode the Internet and felt even less inclined to blog about anything more controversial than kittens.  In such a world, I very much appreciate having a safe space to love what I love and damn the torpedoes.  Thanks for having me, Terra!

I am in awe.

This is amazing and coalesces all of my mixed feelings about the post below.  I like the idea of a crowd-sourced, pay-it-forward means of discovering authors I might not have heard of otherwise.  And I sincerely love the writers I linked to, and was linked to by — I’m still negotiating how to effectively toggle between “wannabee author myself” and “terribly sincere fan.”  But for blogging authors, TNBT is also blatant self-promotion, and self-promotion always feels a bit painful and awkward in its cringing desperation (at least it does to me…I feel like a dog asked to tap-dance).  Incisive, gently critical whimsy is the best of all possible responses.  Thank you for this, Helena.

The Next Big Thing

Because Sacha Siskonen is not my real friend, she tagged me in this self-interview project called The Next Big Thing (link will take you to her Big Thing post).  I think she did this so she could make fun of me for not yet having a book when her (awesome) chapbook (that you should read) comes out this year.

TNBT is a remarkably neat idea, a sort of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon for contemporary writers.  I lost several hours of my life clicking back through links to see who’d tagged who, and I added about a thousand titles to my “Want to Read” list.   At any rate, here are my responses to the boilerplate.  I decided to write about my (almost complete) short fiction collection rather than my dissertation, because it’s closer to the finish line.

What is the working title of the book?

The Noble Art of Falling.  It’s named after a still-unpublished bit of flash fiction, but the title coalesces the three themes that drive the book: economics, relationships, and the making of art.  I suppose it should be “the dismal art of falling,” given that econ is the dismal science (how much do I love that moniker?), but it’s not a depressing book and therefore couldn’t live up to such a sadface title.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I blame Sacha. We exchange stories weekly, just to give each other deadlines to work toward.  When she critted the Noble Art of Falling flash, it had a terrible working title (“The Hollow Girl and the Boy Who’s Always Falling”); she told me said title had to go.  Anyway, we were out to lunch (chilaquiles, naturally…yes, I am obsessed) when I told her I’d retitled it to “The Noble Art of Falling.”  She said, “That just gave me chills.”  Sacha hates most things, so when she actually likes something, I pay attention.   The title locked all my stories’ themes into place.  That was the moment when the work changed, when I stopped thinking of my stories as a series of Word files and started imagining them in book form.

What genre does your book fall under?

Fabulism?  Magical realism?  What are we calling it today?  Eh, let’s just go with fantasy.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

I’d want Chicago people.  Tracy Letts and Amy Morton, plus Improv Olympic’s TJ & Dave (who would be encouraged to stray from the script).

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

There are three themed sections: 1) Free-market capitalism is a beast, 2) relationships are entropic, and 3) making art will take everything you have, then give it all back, only it will be so transformed as to be unrecognizable.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Some of the stories in the collection are redrafts of terribly old pieces that I thought had good bones.  The earliest draft of the earliest story dates back to 2004, but I only began seriously working on my short fiction after Clarion, which was summer 2011.  So, about two years.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Every story has a different antecedent.  I tend to write through other people’s stories.  The novelette at the end was written through Micah Dean Hicks’ “Butcher’s Chimes.”  Another piece was written through Helena Bell’s “Robot.”  A few stories were written through Kij Johnson (At the Mouth of the River of Bees), another few through Cat Valente (Ventriloquism).  It’s definitely the sum of my recent influences.

What else about your book might pique a reader’s interest?

One story involves a girl who is also a wall.

One story guns for Lovecraft.

Many stories have pets, especially ugly pets or evil pets.  In one, the story is itself a pet.

Across the collection, more people have wings than don’t.

One of the above is a lie.  (Which is what happens when you let a nonfictionist write fiction.)

Will your book be self-published or presented by an agency?

Oh question, how funny are you.  When Sacha originally offered to tag me, I said “sure, that’ll make for an amusing blogpost.”  Then I scrolled through other people’s TNBT posts, had a panic attack at the brilliance on display, and sent her a midnight email along the lines of “I am a fraud please don’t tag me I don’t have a real book because it has not yet been validated by publication.”  She mocked me very sweetly, as she is wont to do, and so I’m writing this post against my better judgment.   I haven’t even started subbing the thing yet, although I have a loose deadline of March 1, when I plan to begin that process.  I have three stories left to revise.  Wish me luck!

My tagged writers:

This meme has been making the rounds in indie lit circles but I haven’t seen it crop up on too many genre writer blogs (I use both those terms, “indie lit” and “genre fic” in the loosest possible sense; I know such categorizations are absurd).

So, Brooke Bolander.  You went to Taos Toolbox Kij Johnson’s novel workshop and outlined a novel, no?  Also, your stories have been doing brilliantly this year.  I’d love to know what you’ve been up to lately.

Rahul Kanakia, you post briefly when you complete a book-length project, but I’d love to see an extended take on one of your many projects.  (Apologies if you’ve already been tagged and/or have no interest in this project.)

Helena Bell, I secretly hope you are working on something longform, because I will be first in line to buy it.

Micah Dean Hicks, I will also be first in line to pick up your collection, Electricity and Other Dreams, out from New American Press this year, and I know you have an agent shopping your novel.  If one of those works isn’t the Next Big Thing I’ll eat my hat (and it’s a very fluffy hat).  Apologies if you’ve already been tagged.

I’m going to steal a page from my poet-friend Annah and add that if any of my other writer-friends decide you also want to try this out, just let me know and I’ll be happy to tag you!