Ada Hoffmann's Blog, page 29

Faves from 2017, part 1: Books!

I suck at reading books in the year they come out, so although a couple of books on this list are award-eligible, this isn’t an award recommendation post. This is just a list of the speculative book-length works I read in 2017 and absolutely loved.

Lois McMaster Bujold, “Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen.” Some of my queer friends had problems with this book, so YMMV, but I was just like: ANOTHER CORDELIA BOOK THANK YOU! Older protagonists having a proper, Bujold-style romance! CANON POLYAMORY ASTFGHJKKL and bisexual characters getting to be bisexual (even if only in flashbacks, sigh). The whole thing was (to me) a delight.

Gemma Files, “Experimental Film.” Full review here.

N.K. Jemisin, “The Killing Moon.” Gorgeous, sensuous, and menacing, like everything I’ve seen N.K. Jemisin do. Has a very cool magic system that I want to see more of. Deals with some potentially uncomfortable topics (two of the POV characters are basically assassins who are taught that what they do is “merciful”) in a nuanced and multifaceted way that stays true to the characters above all. Fortunately, there is another one in the series after this one!

Yoon Ha Lee, “Ninefox Gambit.” I… might be doing a full review of this one later. Watch this space.

Rose Lemberg, “Marginalia to Stone Bird.” Full review here.

A. Merc Rustad, “So You Want to Be a Robot and Other Stories.” Full review here.

Catherynne M. Valente, “Radiance.” I wasn’t sure at first if the old-timey silent film themes would win me over, but I love the glamour, I love the metafiction and found-footage structure, I love the retro planets, I love the callowhales and their timey-wimey secrets, I just love everything about this.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND: story notes, part 18 and 19

18. The Dragon-Ship

Half-alive, prow cruelly pointed, undulant through the slow currents of spacetime: these were the ships that slipped like sea-snakes into galaxies no chemical thruster could reach.

A science fiction prose poem, never before published. This one is what it says on the can.

19. The Screech Owl Also Shall Rest There

Your love is mine, even if you don’t know it yet. Your life is mine. And, darling, new darling, I take what is mine.

This story was my first collaboration with my friend Jacqueline Flay. We’ve since collaborated on two other stories – one that is set to come out in Persistent Visions next year, and another that is still out on submission.

The nice thing about working with Jacqueline is that she nudges me to take more risks, and to explore territory I wouldn’t necessarily have built a story around on my own. “Screech Owl” is a sexy, kinky, violent, angry story about a Neolithic vampire and her loyal pack of humans. The gradual development of cities poses problems for her and her way of life. How do you cope with a change so massive, when it happens so slowly that a mortal might not notice it happening?

I did some research for this one, but probably less than the topic deserves. The initial impulse to write a Neolithic story came from a chapter of Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s “Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years,” which I read on a whim. The temple that features prominently in the story is inspired by this one.

“The Screech Owl Also Shall Rest There” was intended for a small-press anthology about vampires and tattoos, but Jacqueline and I had a contractual dispute with that publisher and the story was dropped. (In retrospect, I… still think it wasn’t a good contract, but I could have handled the situation much more tactfully than I did.) It eventually made its way into a different anthology by an equally small press, “The Death God’s Chosen”.

There are no owls in the story; the title is an obscure Bible reference that probably makes sense only to me.

Song Pairing: Jacqueline says the theme song for this one is In This Moment’s “Bloody Creature Poster Girl”. Who am I to disagree with Jacqueline?

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.

Cool Stories I Read in November and December

Jess Barber and Sara Saab, “Pan-Humanism: Hope and Pragmatics” (Clarkesworld, September). I love so much about this. The setting is a beautiful, careful, solarpunk. But what I really like most is the polyamory in the story. The way that the relationships are given space to be difficult, to be complicated, not because they’re poly or because anyone is behaving badly, but because life itself is complicated. The way the characters get something approaching a happy ending, even though the complications, for them, will never go away. This was what I needed to read, relationship-wise, in November.

Melissa Moorer, “end at the skin” (Strange Horizons, October 23). Um. Wow. This is WEIRD – delightfully weird. It’s cosmic in scale and disorienting in a way that reminds me of Lovecraft, but it’s really not Lovecraftian fiction at all – not even horror. Just a very, very weird extended science fiction prose poem from a very, very tripped out perspective. I love it!

Carlie St. George, “Three May Keep a Secret” (Strange Horizons, November 20). A genuinely scary, emotionally gutting YA ghost story, with teenage characters who feel realistically confused and angry and sweet. This one, like many good ghost stories, is about what it means to be haunted, and how natural and supernatural hauntings can mimic each other. (Take the Content Warning seriously, please.)

Hayley Stone, “Caesura” (Fireside, November). I mean, my job description is literally “teaches computers to write poetry”, so I am all over this. The AI in this story is a tropey SFnal AI, not a realistic one. But it’s a super cute and sweet tale of overcoming grief with the help of a poetic AI friend, and is well told. (Although I wish that the award-winning poem at the end had been shown on the page!

MONSTERS IN MY MIND: story notes, part 15 and 17

15. Turning to Stone

Time flees,

and when the sound begins, you’ve run too far

ahead to hear.

A poem about an actual real-life autistic meltdown/catatonia thing that happened. Nor is it the only time I have had catatonia. Catatonia is a Thing.

I went through an unusual number of drafts with this poem. Folks on the poetry forum I was using at the time didn’t seem to get it no matter what I did. (Was it a drug trip? A lot of people seemed very intent on the idea that I was writing about a drug trip.) But they did have many useful suggestions, and they made the poem a stronger beast.

Putting the verses of the poem into first person was a very late development; earlier drafts were more distancing. The refrains in parentheses are also very altered from what they were in the early drafts. I wanted the people around the “stone woman” to be ironically admiring, expecting there to be something magical and powerful about her when in reality it’s just that she can’t move or talk right now. But that version of the lines didn’t connect with anyone. Adding some more realistically harsh external comments made them more powerful. It was also surprisingly painful to do.

The poem’s rhythm, which I rather like, was with it from the beginning.

I eventually worked up the nerve to stop posting drafts on the poetry forum and send it to Stone Telling, where Rose Lemberg and Shweta Narayan had yet more suggestions for edits (mostly about the enjambment). The published version is up here. Rose has told me that it’s still one of their favorite Stone Telling poems.

17. The Self-Rescuing Princess

Did you expect this: matted hair,

dress in the unsexy kind of tatters,

holes at the elbows and filth in the seams,

fingernails black, face scarred?

In 2013, and in the thick of processing some of my own traumas, I decided that the phrase “self-rescuing princess” made my hackles rise. It’s a common term of fan approval for female characters who don’t wilt around waiting for A Man to rescue them. It made me think thoughts about what it is to be rescued, to be in need of rescue, to have the need for rescue be presupposed but the idea of who is responsible for it to be in question. About the idea that, whatever horror might enter into a person’s life, a Good Person must remain self-sufficient in dealing with it and its aftereffects. (A relative of this idea is that the idea that these horrors are “for a therapist to deal with” and must never under any circumstances become an inconvenience to one’s actual friends.)

The resulting poem says a lot of things that I’m not sure I entirely agree with. Clearly, some part of me did at the time. (One thing I would certainly do differently if I was writing it again is the line that references Wonder Woman. I don’t think I really understood what that character was about at the time.) It’s still a fun rant, though – good enough for the editor of Lakeside Circus in 2014, though, and now good enough for MONSTERS IN MY MIND.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.

Small bits of 2017 wrap-up

I wasn’t the best at updating this journal in the second half of 2017. Here are some little bits of news that never quite got shared:

Xan West was kind enough to include me in this large (and good) Storify: What we love about being neuroatypical.
“The Scrape of Tooth and Bone” was named as a Notable Story (i.e. an honorable mention) in John Joseph Adams and Charles Yu’s Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017. (Yes, even though it is Canadian. Apparently “American” means both Canada and the U.S. now.)
I was named as one of the authors who’ve agreed to have work featured in Augur Magazine as part of their Kickstarter. Look for more on that in 2018.
Autistic Book Party also earned an honorable mention for the first annual D. Franklin Defying Doomsday Award for promoting disability representation in speculative fiction. The winner was the very worthy Disability in Kidlit.
Interviews with me appeared on Alyx Dellamonica’s Heroine Question blog (where I talk about my favorite astronauts) and on the AutPress website (where I talk about authors who inspire me) – the first parts of a small Monsters In My Mind blog tour that I hope to make bigger in mid/late January.

MOSTERS IN MY MIND: story notes, part 13 and 14

13. Evianna Talirr Builds a Portal On Commission

Here’s the thing. Atoms lie.

First published in the 2014 HWA Poetry Showcase, this is the first official appearance of a character of mine who’s bounced around through a number of different settings and plots, including my out-on-spec novel. She’s one of two characters whom I built the novel around, and who existed before the rest of that setting did.

Here, you can find her luring an unnamed character into a portal to another universe in which he (?) will immediately cease to exist because the laws of physics no longer support his molecular structure. As one does.

14. The Mother of All Squid Builds a Library

“Foolishness,” said the whales again, and they swam back to the upper worlds, eating two of her bodies on the way without even saying thank you.

I wrote this as a birthday present for Bogi Takács; it’s the first and only story I’ve ever successfully written as a present. (Unless you count the rambling, badly spelled tale I once free-wrote for A. Merc Rustad, in which Elric of Melniboné meets Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid and Lovecraftian sea-witch hijinks ensue.)

Bogi was kind enough to make the process easy by listing story tropes that e liked: these included cephalopods and hive minds, especially if the hive minds were not presented as a bad thing. I ended up with a strange, almost fairy-tale-like flash story about a hive mind of squid. (At least one beta reader mistook it for a children’s story, which… Please don’t do that. There is flaying. A child who likes death and creepy stuff would probably enjoy it, but otherwise… don’t.)

After I showed the story to Bogi, I submitted it to the Friends of the Merrill Collection Contest (which it won) and then to various magazines, including Strange Horizons, which published it in December 2013. It’s free to read there. Out of all the stories I have ever written since then, this is still the one with my favorite title.

Song Pairing: Even aside from the fact that the literal voice of a literal whale is important in the story, there is no better accompaniment for this weird little undersea story than George Crumb’s beautifully weird piece of undersea chamber music, Voice of the Whale.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.

2017 in review / award eligibility post

Wellp. That was a year.

It was a strange year, and the world was stressful, and I am not sure if I’m happy with the amount that I outwardly produced. But, looking back, I did do a lot writing-wise this year:

Had two stories come out in magazines/anthos, and two poems out online.
Started a Patreon!
LANDED A BIG NAME AGENT for my space opera novel, although it remains to be seen if we’ll sell it.
Wrote two year-long plots for my local LARP, plus a couple of auxiliary things.
Made enough sales to know that at least two more stories and two more poems are due out in 2018, and hopefully much more.
Published my first collection, MONSTERS IN MY MIND with NeuroQueer Books.

I was also still doing graduate school full-time this year, and published several papers – one conference paper, one journal paper, and one REALLY BIG survey paper that isn’t out yet, but was accepted to go into a journal next year, and I’m very excited about that.

Since MONSTERS IN MY MIND contained so much new work, my actual list of new stories/poems out this year is a little bigger than I expected:

Short Stories

The Company of Heaven –  Monsters In My Mind  (October).
Under the Clear Bright Waters –  Monsters In My Mind  (October).
What Great Darkness –  Monsters In My Mind  (October).
Zori Server –  Monsters In My Mind  (October).
Minor Heresies –  Ride the Star Wind  (September).
As Hollow as a Heart – LampLight, Volume 5, Issue 2 (January).

Microfiction

Ribbons –  Monsters In My Mind  (October).

Dwarf (1-10 line) Poems

Atavist – Monsters In My Mind (October).
Baku – Monsters In My Mind (October).
Crocodile Tears – Monsters In My Mind (October).
Hippocamp – Monsters In My Mind (October).
Unicorns – Liminality, Issue #12 (June).

Short (11-50 line) Poems

The Dragon-Ship – Monsters In My Mind (October).
Nightmare I – Monsters In My Mind (October).
A Lover, Asleep – Liminality, Issue #11 (March)

I didn’t publish any long (51+ line) poems, non-micro flash fiction, or novelettes this year, except as reprints that went into the collection.

Shortly, I’ll also do a roundup of stories and poems by other people that I read this year and loved. I was a little more careful keeping track of such stories this year, so I’ve got a big list!

MONSTERS IN MY MIND: story notes, part 11 and 12

11. A Certain Kind of Spider

The male of the species knows we want him.

This is an early poem from the point of view of a black widow spider. Pretty self-explanatory, really, and a good thematic pairing for the murderess protagonist of “Lady Blue and the Lampreys”. It’s also the only poem I ever had published in Star*Line, before I decided that I wasn’t very interested in Star*Line or the SFPA, really.

(The sign-language aspect of the poem was added rather hastily, when a beta reader asked how the male spider was still talking after the narrator had already eaten his head. Oops.)

12. The Siren of Mayberry Crescent

She snaps her jaws together.

Silence is golden.

A poem about the domestic life of a siren who, Little Mermaid-like, has gone on land with a lover who cannot deal with her voice.

The inspiration for this one came from a minor D&D NPC who was a siren (actually a “sirine”, which, in typical D&D monster fashion, is rather different from the original myths). I started wondering what her home life was like and how she felt about it. Inevitably the poem wandered from that starting point and went somewhere else, and some uncomfortably personal stuff also crept in.

This poem was published in Mythic Delirium #29. It was nominated in the long category for the Rhysling Award that year, which was my first-ever Rhysling Award nomination. (The second, “The Giantess’s Dream”, was in the short-form category, and was published too recently to go into this collection.)

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.

Autism News, 2017/12/01

Rose Lemberg is making a cool series right now about writing while autistic, and I am linking to everything in the series because it’s wonderful.

On rules and guilt
On productivity and stimming (This advice is about writing, but it might be usefully applied to many other stimmy, potentially unproductive tasks which one feels pressurd to make “productive”.)
On ending a story when transitions are hard
On reclaiming hyperfocus (I… need to think about this one some more. Oof.)
On writing a story in multiple sessions

Politics and government:

Betsy DeVos, the U.S. Secretary of Education, rescinded 72 documents outlining disabled students’ rights. 
In Canada, it’s becoming more difficult for mentally disabled people to access disability tax credits and other financial help.  (CN: “sufferers of autism” and other unfortunate word choices.)
Terrence McCoy on the agony of waiting for a disability hearing in the US (CN: There’s… um… I want to warn for a thing that’s in this article, but I don’t know what to call it. Really depressing situations happen and people are depressed by them. I don’t know. Also, slurs.)

Sexuality and relationships:

Chrysanthe Tan on why it’s hard for queer autistic people to access most queer spaces – and what the queer community could do to fix it. 
Dani Alexis Ryskamp on weird flirting

Pan-disability posts:

More than half of disabled Black Americans have been arrested by the age of 28
Frances Ryan reports on the everyday lives of disabled people in the UK
Annalee Flower Horne on disability representation in the X-Men and how to make it better

Posts about safety and crisis situations:

ASAN releases an Autism and Safety toolkit addressing bullying, abuse, and many other issues that affect autistic people’s safety.
Maxfield Sparrow on dealing with a crisis when you don’t have reliable oral speech

Misc:

Chavisory addresses autistic people who want to be cured
Alyssa Hillary on pain tolerance
Shannon des Roches Rosa on valuing intense interests
Reese Piper on autistic women and executive dysfunction

MONSTERS IN MY MIND: story notes, part 8 and 10

8. Goblin Love Song

I want to suck the marrow from your bones.

A short, sexy, violent poem. I would probably have sent this to Twisted Moon if it’d been around then. Instead it ended up in a horror zine called The Literary Hatchet.

10. Lady Blue and the Lampreys

The lamprey stomps to the bar and orders a Jim Beam, Bloody Tom’s favorite. Benny’s the kind of bartender who doesn’t say anything. Just slides the glass across and takes his money.

Back in 2013 or so, I kept toying with the idea of writing a gender-flipped Bluebeard. Eventually, I wrote a gender-flipped Bluebeard villanelle, called “Bluebells”.

My beta readers agreed that “Bluebells” was pretty, but it lacked something; villanelles are lousy for depicting a sequence of events, and so, for what the villanelle did manage to describe, context was missing.

Shortly after that, A. Merc Rustad and I were talking to each other about how horror stories have both an “inner story” and an “outer story”. I realized suddenly why the fix to “Bluebells” was eluding me. “Gender-flipped Bluebeard” sounded like a full story prompt, but it was only the inner part of the story. And that meant that the outer part of the story could be… anything I wanted.

I’m not sure anymore how I got from “anything I wanted” to “INVASION OF SOUL-EATING LAMPREY PEOPLE”, but Merc liked the idea.

“Lady Blue and the Lampreys” ended up being a rather un-fairytale-like weird horror story with a femme-fatale protagonist and a noir feel. Appropriately, it was published in The Exile Book of New Canadian Noir.

Lady Blue appears again in the story “As Hollow as a Heart”, which is possibly a prequel but more likely a slight AU, and was published in Lamplight earlier this year. “As Hollow as a Heart” doesn’t appear in MONSTERS IN MY MIND, as its publication date is a little too recent. You can look for it, probably, in a future collection.

Song Pairing: Lady Blue spends an important scene in this story listening to various parts of Verdi’s Requiem. In my mind, the part that is linked most indelibly to her is the “Libera Me”.

That soprano, though! Those high, wailing notes! Those totally gratuitous reprises of other parts of the Requiem! That fugue! That ENDING! *dramatically swoons*

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.