Sarena Ulibarri's Blog

2023 Awards Eligibility

It's that time of year when people within the Science Fiction and Fantasy community are considering which works to nominate or vote for in various important industry awards, such as the Hugo, Nebula, Otherwise, or British Fantasy Society awards. This year, I published two novellas, two short stories, and one non-fiction essay. Whether you are looking for works to consider in these categories, or just looking to catch up with what I've written recently, here they are, along with a brief excerpt t...

Steel Tree is Out Now!

​It’s ironic that I’ve published a Christmas book because… I don’t like Christmas. Or at least, I didn’t. For years, I would put my head down and suffer through the season, every festive jingle from retail speakers triggering negative associations. A few years ago, I worked through the roots of that negativity, some of which came from my own life, and some from generational trauma that has trickled down from my grandparents. I decided the best remedy would be to overwrite those negative memorie...

Another Life is Out Now!

Finding out who you were in a previous life sounds like fun until you’re forced to grapple with the darkness of the past. Galacia Aguirre is Mediator of Otra Vida, a quasi-utopian city on the shores of a human-made lake in Death Valley. She resolves conflicts within their sustainable money-free society, and keeps the outside world from meddling in their affairs. When a scientific method of uncovering past lives emerges, Galacia learns she’s the reincarnation of Thomas Ramsey, leader of the Plane...

Cover Reveal: Another Life

Cover Artwork by Wang Xulin Finding out who you were in a previous life sounds like fun until you’re forced to grapple with the darkness of the past. Galacia Aguirre is Mediator of Otra Vida, a quasi-utopian city on the shores of a human-made lake in Death Valley. She resolves conflicts within their sustainable money-free society, and keeps the outside world from meddling in their affairs. When a scientific method of uncovering past lives emerges, Galacia learns she’s the reincarnation of ...

2020 Awards Eligibility Post

This year has been a hell of a decade, right? I published three short stories this year, plus one non-fiction essay. On the off-chance that you feel inspired to nominate my work, or the stories in the anthology I edited, for whatever awards or lists you might be nominating for, here's the list of my 2020 accomplishments. "The Dragon's Lake" published in Dragon Bike: Fantastical Stories of Bicycling, Feminism, and Dragons, February 2020

"a fresh take on epic fantasy, complete with giant...

"Sick and Tired" is in The Gamer Chronicles

Samuel Peralta's "Future Chronicles" anthologies are always fantastic collections, and I was thrilled to be invited to participate in this one, especially after I leaned I would be sharing a table of contents with authors such as Ken Liu, Seanan McGuire, and Jake Kerr. It's actually my second one with Jake—we were in the same issue of Lightspeed years ago. I've never been much of a video gamer, but I've long been obsessed with virtual reality, and that's the type of game I wrote about in "Sic...

"The Spiral Ranch" is in DreamForge Magazine

My solarpunk western story "The Spiral Ranch" is part of the Founders Issue of DreamForge Magazine, a new pro-level science fiction and fantasy market devoted to optimistic speculative fiction. They even commissioned original illustrations for my story! DreamForge launches on February 14, 2019, and they're currently running a Kickstarter to fund their next several issues. The Founders Issue also includes new stories from Steven Brust, Jane Lindskold, Lauren C. Teffeau, and more.  Supp...

The Horrors of the 2010s: An Analysis of Halloween (2018)

I enjoyed the film Halloween (2018) far more than I expected to, but one aspect of it continued to bother me after I left the theater: the film’s focus on guns. Many films and TV shows use guns, but they're usually either just props/tools, or they're presented as glorified extensions of the action hero. Something about this presentation felt different than either of those. “It’s kind of NRA propaganda,” I joked to my husband on the drive home, and we talked about how Laurie was a model conse...

Solarpunk Winters Writing Prompts

From January 1, 2019 to March 1, 2019, I will be accepting submissions for an anthology of optimistic science fiction stories set in winter—specifically, solarpunk stories, which means stories that engage with climate change, renewable energies, or other environmental issues through an optimistic lens. This will be a followup to my anthology Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers, which took the same approach for stories set in summer.

To break it down, the story must be:Science Fiction (s...

Interview with Lauren C Teffeau, Author of IMPLANTED

This book was originally being marketed as cyberpunk, but the publishers, Angry Robot, switched over to calling it solarpunk just a couple of weeks before release. It is definitely both: it has the cyberpunk technology of the neural implant, which is sort of like an instant messenger in your brain, controlled by eye movements, that also allows you to feel the emotions of the people you're connected to. It also has the fast-paced race-against-the-clock feel of cyberpunk, and the focus on infor...