2019, a smol

Now that I have officially lost a World Fantasy Award, it appears time to post eligibility information for next year's awards, and--

It really is an endless circle, isn't it? Didn't we just do this?

2019 has been an interesting year. It has been the least successful in my "career" when it comes to sales. It has been the most successful year in terms of previous work landing on ballots. Basically, never try to figure out publishing, because nothing makes sense.

Here's what I did in 2019:

"Kill the Darlings (Silicone Sister Remix)" appeared in Do Not Go Quietly, edited by Jason Sizemore and Lesley Conner.

They say Nany Mars is a cunt, and they’re not wrong, but her hands are steady as she severs the last bit of flesh binding the three women together. Nany Mars makes careful stitches, sewing them back into their skins, their solitary skins, where once men had made them into one joined vessel for their pleasures.

It is hard, slow work, and when Nany finishes, she’s dripping sweat down her body, clothes soaked with it, and she sinks against the compound wall, staring up at the slice of sky that’s visible through the broken skylight. She ought to get that fixed, she thinks, but she’ll be gone come morning, and she only came to fix the women. There are so many women to fix.

The Ebon Jackal, from Apokrupha, concluded my Folley & Mallory series of novels. It has two (2) reviews.

Eleanor Folley walked slowly, yet with purpose, through the city market, still not having adjusted to the idea that its glory existed, that she could, and did, walk through its treasures. Everywhere she looked, Waset overflowed with life and activity, though in her mind she could still envision what the city had been in her own time, Luxor and a shadow of its former self. Crumbling into dust, rather than standing firm and sure.
 
Every morning when she woke, she expected to find herself back in her proper place, nineteenth century Paris, under crisp covers with coffee soon to percolate, but through the windows came the sounds of a different city entirely. Of a different time. Every morning it was not Paris that woke her, but New Kingdom Thebes as it would be called, flourishing under the rule of Queen Hatshepsut. It was Homer's Thebes of the Hundred Gates, only Homer had yet to be born.

And that's literally all she wrote! A reworked essay of mine appears in The Writer's Book of Doubt, edited by Aidan Doyle, so maybe you'd also like to consider that as you make your year-end tallies.

Of course, we've a month and a half of quality work ahead of us, so don't forget those stories and creators either.