Quick Sips 07/01/2022

Hey, so I guess I’m a Locus Award winner, huh? Or, to be more specific, We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2020, co-edited by C.L. Clark and myself is a Locus Award winner, with tons of thanks and credit to the authors whose works we were fortunate enough to help spotlight and promote. It really is an honor to win an award, and for a project that I am so happy to be a part of. Our very first year, and it’s phenomenal to see the support in this way. Wow. It’s my first award win in general, and my first as an editor as well, which is pretty fantastic. Just really really happy here. I’ll need to clear some space on my writing shelf.

In other news…shit, well, really that’s been the big thing. I am still knee deep in non-profit related business and plans, busily hoping to make some things happen that are also exciting, at least on a personal level. So that work continues. I think we’re getting closer to seeing We’re Here 2021, too, which is beautiful and for which I am super excited as well. Just lots going on in general.

In writing and publishing news, I think I might have…two stories out this year? Both in anthologies, which is interesting. One hasn’t been announced yet, but the other, “Ember Hearts in Ashen Bodies,” will be appearing in Dreams for a Broken World, edited by Julie C. Day and Ellen Meeropol. The story is one of a slim few I’ve managed to produce lately, and isn’t exactly a happy tale. It features a labor strike, an increasingly authoritarian city, and a character caught between a peace he wants and a conflict that can’t be avoided. This mixed with a magical burnout, sex, and resistance. I hope people like it!

In media, nothing much has changed. I have started watching the third season of Umbrella Academy and am a few episodes in. An interesting season so far, what with alternate timelines, a transition narrative, a sudden child, and everything else. Some of the decisions are a little ehh to me but that’s as has been the case throughout. Still mostly enjoying it.

I think I’m beginning to approach the end of the first Excalibur series. I…think I’m already past the point where Warren Ellis left, but it’s still very much his team. And I do like the team quite a bit, even as it’s a bit full. I do wish a little bit more was done with Wolfsbane and Douglock, not to mention the criminal under-utilization of Lockheed, but so it goes. The core of Kitty, Piotr, Kurt, and Wisdom is pretty great, even if I still don’t like Wisdom really at all. I’m not sure where I’ll go once Excalibur wraps up. It only kinda sorta had an Onslaught tie-in, so I might do all of Onslaught, or I might do something else. We’ll see.

That’s about it for me, though. Cheers!

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