Odd little memory from the middle of March

I got to go in to the office yesterday. (I say “got to” because when I found out about it, my reaction was similar to the reaction of the dog if you ask her if she wants to go for a walk. I like where I work.)

So I went in and said hello to reception from a safe distance and through the plexiglas shield, and then went up to the fourth floor where I was the only person, and turned on the lights, and filed stuff and restarted my computer and packed up some things from my hutch that didn’t come home in the first emergency wave. And I left after 45 minutes.

(The sign-in sheet said that there was one other person in the building, but they were on the second floor so I didn’t see them.)

I have missed work. I like everyone there, and I love being part of what we do. I’m working from home, so I’m still doing something, but I really miss seeing people and saying hello and listening to conversations in the kitchen while I knit and… just people.

I called in sick on Friday the 13th, so my desk was very “this is the middle of the work-week”. The calendar pages for March and April (because of course I put current-month and next-month there for tracking at a glance) were still taped up to my hutch.

It was very much a reminder of what-was-normal-before that I wasn’t expecting, and it’s left me a bit melancholy.

Of emptiness and salvage.

My story “The Draw of Empty Spaces” is out now in issue 3 of Cossmass Infinities, which you can get here (although if you subscribe it should already be in your inbox, which is very nice). It is a story of someone doing salvage work in a ruined city, alone and then not alone.

This is my second time appearing in the magazine and I am honestly very pleased to be there again, and to be in the company of those other stories. I hope you enjoy them all.

Things I was extremely pleased to hear.

This is slightly belated, because I got the news and then came down with something icky, but:

“Ink, and Breath, and Spring” (initially published in issue 40 of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and reprinted in episode 637 of PodCastle) will be appearing in The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2020. I’m in the TOC and everything.

Cover of the Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2020

I am over the moon.

Pencil points and nail polish.

In what is probably not the first thing that comes to anyone’s mind upon reading that title, I have been cleaning and repairing window screens today. (You use the pencil points to poke the broken screen wires back into place, and the nail polish to seal the hole.) It’s not the only thing I’ve done, but it’s definitely what I can point to as a concrete accomplishment.

I have definitely hit that point of the pandemic where decluttering has turned into a Thing. That said, I have also hit the point of decluttering where I’ve run out of boxes to put stuff into, so it’s a little harder to measure how the progress has been going lately.

I’m reading again, which is nice, and I started writing an odd little thing today. I’m not entirely sure where it’s going, but I don’t think it’ll be long to finish a first draft.

And in other news, I am seriously starting to wonder what Hallowe’en is going to look like this year. I don’t think trick-or-treating is going to be at all recognizable.

August. How did *that* happen?

I have to say I am very glad that today is the start of a long weekend.

I got some edits in last week, I decluttered a bit yesterday, and today I appear to actually be getting my browser windows under some kind of control. I’ve nearly reknitted the part of the sweater I had to frog. And also I’ve gotten the first submission of the month out!

A tale of ashes and ink, spoken soft.

My technically-a-novella “Ink, and Breath, and Spring” is now available as episode 637 of PodCastle, so now you have the option of reading or listening to my tale of a dead body found in a rather odd library!

(This work initially appeared in issue 40 of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.)

As always, I very much hope you like it.

Words in the world

Cossmass Infinities has accepted another one of my stories! “The Draw of Empty Spaces” will be appearing in issue #3, coming out in September; in the meantime, you can check out their site here.

In addition, I am very pleased to say that PodCastle has accepted “Ink, and Breath, and Spring” as a reprint; that is the novelette which got a couple of favourable mentions in Locus when it initially appeared in issue 40 of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, which I am extremely proud of.

(I’ve never had one of my pieces done as an audio version before, and am very curious to see how it goes! Writing the pronounciation guide was interesting; not difficult, exactly, since I knew what things were supposed to sound like, but an aspect that I hadn’t considered would be necessary.)

Knox, from SerialBox

KnoxKnox is available on Serial Box. The last chapter there comes out next week, so this review is still spoiler-free.

Disclaimer: I received this product for free in exchange for an honest review.

In fact, I was offered this product, and when I read the message part of me thought something like “oh gosh, I have so much I’ve been meaning to read and I’m really not getting to most of it. Maybe I shouldn’t?” In the meantime, the rest of me had parsed “Mythos”, “noir”, and “partly by Bolander” and was typing back something along the lines of “Yes, please, thank you.”

(To be clear: the chapters from Rivera and Iglesias and Moraine are absolutely stellar, I just didn’t know as much of their work going in.)

Knox is a serialized novel set in 1930s Manhattan. Morgan Knox was a nurse in WWI and is now a PI with a knack for dealing with the weird. When the man who committed a series of murders gets shot and falls to his death in the East River, she’s hired to look into who might have set him on the spree, and from there the story unfolds beautifully.

It’s a beautiful blend of noir and horror. We meet Morgan Knox in an extremely dynamic introduction that makes it clear that she is one tough-as-nails bad-ass PI. I’m holding off on getting into spoilers, but I cannot overstate how much Morgan’s reactions to everything she dealt with anchored the world. Both her present-day visions and the past experiences that underpin her life are horrific without being gratuitous[1], and while she keeps going in them, her doing so never feels easy or cheap. Her world-weary familiarity with horror spared me needing to sit through a protagonist who just can’t believe what’s going on as the case takes on more ominous tones; her battered stubbornness and principles made me want to see her succeed so badly. And while the general thrust of an ominous villain was made clear in the beginning, I genuinely was not expecting the details of the reveal, or how the arc of the antagonist progressed. It was creepy and chilling and ultimately damn delightful, for values of delightful that cover horrific entities from beyond our world.

Then there’s the other characters – the people already in Knox’s life and the people she runs into during the investigation (there is some overlap here). I liked reading about all of them, and even those in more antagonistic roles or who only showed up briefly were clearly drawn and distinguishable from each other. Having Knox surrounded by so many well-realized characters keeps the story from being a grim and lonely one, and really brings home how much she holds back. I deliberately took breaks between reading each chapter, and I never had any trouble slipping back into the story or remembering who people were to Knox, and judging by my own reactions at a couple of points I was really invested in them being okay.

(This is my first serial, and I wasn’t sure what to expect in terms of the story being broken up that way. I will say that each episode felt well-balanced; the focus differed as the story moved along, and the ending always made me look forward to more, but I was never irritated at the stopping points, if that makes sense.)

As a final note, the story is mercifully not whitewashed or Hollywoodized. I find that when reading or watching noir, especially written-to-be-period noir, there’s occasionally a tendency for the story to have a lot of white straight folks. Knox emphatically did not do that, and I was glad to see that 1930s New York had actually been portrayed as a melting pot.

Recommended for fans of the Mythos (you won’t find name-checks here, but you’ll find some great descriptions and lovely horrific scenes), fans of noir with a rich setting, and anyone who wants a combination of the two with a solid and satisfying character arc.
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[1] Please note that I may have a slightly high tolerance for descriptions of the effects of violence done to others, but this is a blend of Mythos and noir, and I think the descriptions work perfectly in that context.

Ashes and ink, redux.

“Ink, and Breath, and Spring”, which was originally published in issue 40 of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, will be appearing in Podcastle!

This is the first time I’ve had one of my works done in audio format (I am morally sure that reading it aloud to myself as part of the editing process does not count), and I’m really looking forward to it. Writing the pronunciation guide was interesting; it’s not something I’d ever really thought about doing before, but of course it makes sense.

So that was a nice piece of news, today, and I’m pleased to share.

Fixing the quiet.

I keep trying to draft this, and I keep coming back to what other people have said that I admire. “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” “Not caring about politics is a privilege.” “Silence is a message.”

This feels like the kind of thing where I should be owning my own words, and not bouncing off those of others. Also it feels like the kind of thing where I should really stop delaying until I have near-perfect words. It’s fine to do that for my fiction when no-one’s waiting on it; it’s not fine to do that now.

Racism is a real and living thing. I am white, and was raised with that privilege; I have been trying to undo some of the things I’ve learned, and it’s pretty clear that I need to both try harder and make more of an effort to fix systemic issues. I’m going to try harder, because the current state of things is just not tenable and needs to get better. I am sorry I didn’t do more already.