National Whatever Month!

It’s November, everyone, and you know what that means: year-end existential crises a newsletter update!

Tis the Season

It is that time of year where creatives everywhere are taking a look at what they have published over 2024 and putting together their award eligibility lists. Most of us find this more than a little awkward because we 1) live in a weird limbo between wanting to get our work out there and wanting to never ever be perceived, 2) want to win awards but also know that awards are not the point, and 3) are dorky proud parents of our little stories but also forget everything we ever knew about them the second someone asks us to talk about them.

It’s a trying time.

But it is part of the job, and I have made a page on my website detailing the stories I have that are eligible for your votes in upcoming SFFH awards. In particular, I want to highlight my story “They Will Dance Among Planets”, on the Nebula Reading List and one of my favorites I have ever written. If you consider it for award ballots and nominations, I would be most glad, and I have included a little behind the scenes look at it at the end of this newsletter to showcase why it is so special.

Bingo!

However, awards season is more than just authors boosting their own work. It is also authors boosting each other’s work! To that end, Stewart C. Baker, author extraordinaire, has created the Award Season Eligibility Post Bingo Challenge! Every time you promote your own work, turn around and promote someone else’s that fits one of the bingo squares! Not a creator? No problem! As you read awesome works, you can also promote them and fill out the bingo square. Are there prizes? Yeah! Get bingo or blackout and win all the warm fuzzies knowing you did your part to promote creators and lend hope to the hellscape that is modern living through the celebration of human-created, world-changing speculative art!

(It is legitimately a great feeling.)

Get your bingo card in either DOCX or PDF below, say thank you to Stewart C. Baker, and start playing!

Since I promoted my own work here, let me snag a bingo square and promote my fellow Codexian and amazing author P.A. Cornell’s story “The Life You’ve Given Me, Rusty”, published this year in Lightspeed magazine. Cornell’s story is about a boy raised by machines and the life he had, the life he could have had, and the life he chooses. It’s a fantastic piece, well worth your consideration, and has one of the best titles I’ve read to boot. Check it out, free to read, at the link below.

NaNo–Yeah, No.

Normally, November is a time to participate in a contest to produce an entire novel-length work in thirty days. Normally, I am a huge fan and participant of that contest. Normally, I spend all of November irritating people as I talk about and work on it.

Normally.

I’m not going to get into the gritty, disappointing details, but I’ve since cut ties with said contest and won’t be officially participating this year. However, the spirit of communities coming together to produce creative works is still something I believe in. I have other communities I can work alongside, and I encourage you to find new ones as well. The loss of a once-beloved community during this month is hard, and its absence is certainly going to be felt keenly, but there is absolutely nothing stopping me or you or anyone else from continuing to create together to center artistic projects.

I do have a project outlined. Whether I get 50,000 words written on it or 5,000 words, it is on my docket to work on this month, and I hope to be able to do so alongside some of my writing friends and cheer on their own projects. I encourage you to pick up that project that’s been tickling the back of your mind for months, dust it off, and find a buddy or two or three or a thousand and go do art together this month. Things are bleak. People and organizations disappoint us. But art and our fellow artists are never in short supply.

So, Happy National Whatever Month! May it be grand.

Behind the Scenes with “They Will Dance Among Planets”

Spoilers ahead. Read the story for free to avoid surprises HERE
Content Note: mild, non-graphic discussion of childlessness, childfree living, bodily autonomy, sterilization

“They Will Dance Among Planets” is about the complicated desires, fears, and feelings of parenthood, childlessness, and childfree living set in a futuristic sci-fi setting where Lindi, a woman whose decision to have children was taken from her by force as a child herself and then abruptly returned as an adult, has to now decide what to do with these sudden options before her. It is about a type of self-reflection I genuinely hope every person has in their life, and one that I wrestled with personally for many years.

I am childfree, by choice and later from health complications. But I was first inspired to write this story, not from my own experiences, but from a myth I read on the origin of stars. This myth contained the idea that stars are created from the souls of unborn children, potential children that existed only in the abstract, the road not taken so to speak. And I remember taking great comfort in this idea that, in choosing a different life path, I was gifting my own potential children not with life confined to a century on this earth, but an eternity among the stars, the planets, the edges of the universe and beyond. What a great and grand legacy to have! It dramatically changed my thinking about what I was giving up to instead focus on what I was gaining, what I was sharing with others as I walked a different path filled to the brim with different, equally great potential, and it blew me away this great and beautiful interpretation of choosing a different legacy.

After going through what I did and the many years of self-reflection, I took this myth and I wrote “They Will Dance Among Planets” to center what I have come to realize: that the beauty of this entire situation, with me, with Lindi, with everyone, is not in having kids or not having kids. Rather, the beauty is in the choice itself: in having the freedom to get to know yourself, who you are, what you want, where you feel called to live out your purpose, and following that calling with joy and confidence.

As you can imagine, this was a hard story to write, made all the harder by world events that have happened since, but it unlocked a new set of skills and desires in my writing that I did not have before. Prior, I almost exclusively used my writing as escapism, deliberately pursuing stories that were removed from myself. And I still do, and such stories are valid and have their place. But after writing “They Will Dance Among Planets”, I saw an opportunity to connect with my own writing on a deeper level, to use it to help me, to speak to things I care about, to tell stories that have greater depth, are more complex, and wrestle with hard truths and circumstances whether or not they result in answers. I’ve since written many more stories in this vein, some personal, some not, and I hope you get to someday read those as well. But this one will always be the first, the one that helped me learn about myself and the world and the stunning beauty that there is in each of us, no matter where life leads. I am so grateful to the team at Flash Point SF who took a chance on its publication. I love working with them, and I felt confident my little story was in good hands with them.

“They Will Dance Among Planets” is free to read on Flash Point SF’s website, available to upvote on the Nebula Reading List, and eligible for 2024 publication awards. I hope you enjoy it.

We’re in the home stretch of a tumultuous year, friends. Hang in there, read some awesome stories, and celebrate the good things that are out there. 

Keep on writing on.

—Catherine