I thought it best to put together a few notes about how I go about making my short fiction and book recommendations, especially as I will treat them a little different on social media. Read on for what we’ll call my current policies on how I go about making recommendations.
Continue readingA (not The) History of Twitter and Short Speculative Fiction
About a week there was a discussion happening on Twitter about the importance of Twitter. Actually, there were many such conversations happening and many probably are still happening. One of these discussions was of specific interest to me, however, as it was focused on the importance (or not) of Twitter to the current era of short speculative fiction consider by many to be a golden age1I would consider myself one of these many people., at least in content if not in its contributions to writers’, editors’ or publishers’ bank accounts. In response to that discussion I wrote a long thread about the very important ways I had personally seen Twitter contribute as an important tool to the creation of this golden age. The rest of this post is a cleaned up adaption of that thread posted here so that it will continue to exist if Twitter doesn’t and for anyone else interested in this history.
Here is the quick and dirty version: do I think Twitter has been important to the development of the current golden age of short speculative fiction? Yes, absolutely. Not question. More importantly, I think it’s important to consider WHO it has been most important for.
Continue reading2022 Short Fiction Round Up 5
Well it’s Halloween (or All Hallow’s Eve, or Samhain, or even All Saint’s Eve for some) and it’s the climax of spooky season so I figured what better way to celebrate than an all horror round up of some short speculative fiction I’ve been reading and enjoying lately. I don’t recommend too much horror usually (though I do some, and do recommend a fair bit of dark stories), though I do enjoy it quite a lot. I simply feel that horror is hard to recommend broadly because by it’s very nature it is likely to be upsetting or uncomfortable to some, if not many, and require a fair bit of caveats. Tis the spooky season though, so it is the perfect time to go all in on the genre. I will try to call out specific content warnings for each story, and not all are equally disturbing or disturbing in the same ways (and that of course is a completely subjective opinion – the problem with horror!), but please consider this fair warning. Otherwise, if you’d like to cap off the season of celebrating ghosts and goblins and the macabre I have some great suggestions for you (with apologies to any authors who don’t consider their recommended stories to be horror, I feel that all the below are at the least horror-adjacent enough to fit a Halloween themed round up):
Continue reading2022 Short Fiction Round Up 4
Welcome back it’s time for more great short fiction! This week I’ve got another 5 stories I enjoyed, and think are great and worthy of your time! No single theme happening this week though we do have two stories of revenge, and there is definitely a lot of significant death and tragedy to be had here. It’s not all Doom and Gloom, but there is at least some of that to be sure. I promise though that there are also a lot of moments of human kindness and beauty and helping each other survive the things life can throw at us here too.
One thing I’ve don this week that I’ve never done before is feature two stories from the same magazine. It wasn’t on purpose at first, I was just going through my notes and realized I’d picked out two stories from Strange Horizons. I normally deliberately avoid doing this as I like to spread the recommendations around, but if there was ever a time to highlight two great stories from Strange Horizons now is the time as they are currently in the midst of their annual fund drive. Strange Horizons is a wonderful magazine that provides not only great international short speculative fiction, but poetry, reviews, and critical essays as well. They’re always pushing the envelope and are near-unique in the field. Well worth your support if you’re able.
But now, let’s get to the stories!
Continue reading2022 Short Fiction Round Up 3
And we’re back! Time again for another round up of stories I’ve read recently and liked so much I just had to share them with you all and shout them out to the best of my ability. There’s no real theme this week other than my genuinely enjoying all of these stories and wanting to encourage others to give them a try too and I’m afraid I find myself without the mental energy to say much more than that in this intro. I’ve been up since 4am as I right this because I had to get my kid to his school for his grade 8 grad trip by 5. So the brain is not at it’s best! There’s plenty more capable thought below though talking about the actual stories. Please, read on, check them out, see if something grabs your attention.
Continue reading2022 Short Fiction Round Up 2
Time for some more short fiction I want to share with you all. It’s been a couple weeks since the last post (which was the first of the year) and I figure I should make a note about the schedule I plan to keep as I try to once again not get derailed off this project. My desire is to make weekly recommendation posts, but I’m giving myself permission to not feel bad at all if it slips to bi-weekly at times. Too often when I start missing my own self-imposed deadlines I start feeling bad and then I start not wanting to think about it at all which makes it harder to get done which leads to more missed deadlines and more feeling bad and and and I think you see where I’m going with this, yeah? So that’s the goal: weekly, but not feeling bad if it isn’t.
Often when I’m reading and picking out stories for these posts I find themes and patterns start to emerge, and I always find that interesting and fun, but this week is a little different because I decided to actively seek out stories that fit a theme I wanted. That theme? I wanted stories that made me happy. That I would want to read again because they made me so happy. Every story I recommend is a story I like, and that I think are really good. That’s not the same thing as saying every story I recommend makes me happy. It’s been a hard couple weeks for so many people everywhere. It always is you might say, but these couple weeks have felt extra so.
And so I chose to look for the happy. That’s come out in different ways as you’ll see below. Not every story is funny or joyful, though there’s a good helping of that, but for me each of these stories left me feeling good. Made me want to read them again and let them put a smile on my face, whether that smile was the aftermath of a burst of laughter or bittersweet and tinged with memory. It is my sincere wish that you find something here that makes you smile and a little happy too.
Continue reading2022 Short Fiction Round Up 1
It’s been awhile (again) but I have returned to share recommendations for some short speculative fiction (SF/F/H) that I’ve recently read and enjoyed. I’ve got a notepad and spreadsheet and everything. I’ve got a proper desk and, most importantly, a proper office chair for a person of my size and these things have helped immensely with getting back to writing and now these roundups (and maybe some other blogging).
All that? That’s great and it’s the how of what I’m doing back here, but it’s not really the why, and you’ll have to forgive me, but I’ve been gone to long and I have a lot of thoughts swirling around to get out.
Continue reading