what I published in 2020
I didn’t think I would have enough to put together an annual round-up post. Like many writers, I found it very hard to write during much of the year, which was rather inconvenient because I had quite a lot of work to do in spite of everything falling to pieces around us. I didn’t publish a novel this year, although I did spend most of the year working very hard on two novels (one is Dead Space, coming out in March 2021; the other hasn’t been announced yet).
But I guess I did actually publish some stuff this year. A couple of dark fantasy short stories, both of which I am very proud of, and a handful of essays on media that helped me get through the year. All of it is listed here:
Short stories
Her Cage of Root and Bone in Beneath Ceaseless Skies (April 2020)
The river freezes after nightfall. I feel it in the deepening cold that slithers under the door and whispers down the chimney, in the spears of ice that cling to the eaves, in the scrape of the thick icy slurry coursing past the base of my prison. The river’s ceaseless murmur becomes a chorus of creaking, crushing, and snapping, the maudlin groan of ice against stone.
The Salt Warrior in Lightspeed Magazine (December 2020)
Angela found the saint at the base of the cliffs beneath the old watchtower. She had followed his trail from the village: a line of footprints braided with the chaotic, black-stained tracks of the raiders, leading to the cliffs. There he must have fallen, or leapt away in fear. The crumbling stones of the watchtower were marred with scars from the raiders’ lashing claws and teeth, striped with their fetid black ichor, but there was no sign of them on the switchbacks that wound down to the beach.
Essays
Comfort, Connection, and Community in Martha Wells’ Books of the Raksura on Tor.com (March 2020)
I’ve been thinking a lot about comfort reading lately. I know I’m not alone in this. We are, after all, in the middle of a socially isolating global pandemic with no end in sight, and we spend too much of each day worrying about everything from the health of our loved ones to the fragility of our institutions. The uncertainties of daily life have been compounding for a good long while. The value of a comfort read lies in its familiarity, in the way sinking into its pages removes some of that uncertainty from our increasingly frightening lives.
The Reality of Writing in Uncertain Times on SFWA Blog (April 2020)
By now everybody who spends any time on the internet has seen the quarantine memes. Isaac Newton invented calculus during a plague outbreak–what are you doing with your time? Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when stuck inside during bad weather–why haven’t you invented a literary genre yet? Look at how Giovanni Boccaccio used his pandemic–have you been as productive?
Sometimes you think you’re talking about an invading army when you’re actually talking about a swarm of locusts. Not in the real world, mind you. Metaphorical rhetoric aside, we can (or should be able to) tell the difference between bipedal primates and six-legged arthropods. But in speculative fiction things get complicated. Sometimes the army looks like the swarm—a favorite trope of SF going way back in many classics of film and literature—but that’s fine, that’s cool, we can handle our Arachnids and Buggers and Xenomorphs just fine.
Anxiety, Empathy, and Making Sense of the Senseless Through Storytelling on Tor.com (June 2020)
But as this mad spring has rolled into the mad summer—as we spent several weeks furiously sewing a few hundred face masks, as we cancelled much-anticipated trips abroad, as we swung wildly between anxiously devouring the news and avoiding it entirely, as the publishing industry flailed and faltered and left us with giant question marks over both our immediate and long-term careers, as a Postmates driver named Linda shamelessly stole our pizza that one time, as the Covid-19 death toll crept upward and upward, as an angry man at the grocery store huffed and shouted about being asked to wear a mask, as we’ve dealt with far-away family members enduring medical scares and natural disasters (both in the same week!), as our friends lose loved ones and jobs and security, as nations around the world struggle and flail, as more people are subjected to more terrifying police violence, as frustration and grief and fear erupt into unrest, as everything spirals farther and farther out of control—through all of that, the one comforting constant in this uncertain and frightening time has been sitting down every evening to play Fire Emblem: Three Houses. It’s a nightly activity that’s grown into something between a coping mechanism and an obsession.
Inside the Cult of Fear: Finding Humanity in Horror Fiction on Tor.com (August 2020)
The unveiling of the central story in The Magnus Archives is gradual, but it doesn’t take all that many episodes for it to become obvious that everything is connected in some awful, hidden way. And, to be absolutely clear, by “everything is connected,” I don’t mean “mostly monster-of-the-week with occasional arc episodes.” I mean everything. Everything that we hear, from the events described in each episode to the manner in which the statements are recorded to the emotional impact each event has on the characters, it’s all part of a much bigger story. Dig down beneath the surface and it turns out this isn’t quirky, episodic creepypasta at all, but is instead pure cosmic horror, the kind of high-concept storytelling in which every element conspires to make you feel small and lost and powerless in a monstrously uncaring reality.
