Oh, hello! What a long, strange trip it's been. Like you, I've had a hell of a year+. And, maybe like you, too, it's been hard for me to see beyond the end of my nose as I roll with the punches. This is all related to the global COVID pandemic and the incredible tests to our democracy over the past year (four years) and accelerating climate change, of course, but there's been more. Just as there has been for you.
So I'm going to make up for lost time. I'm behind on a couple of blog posts! Since my last one in fall 2019, I've published a couple new stories and had two stories close to my heart nominated for Best Small Fictions, which was a huge honor. I owe a big debt of gratitude to Katelyn Keating and Tommy Dean at CRAFT Literary for believing in "How Loudly We Dead Howl" and nominating it for inclusion in the 2020 Best Small Fictions anthology. Big, big thanks to Jennifer Greidus and Chris Dankland for picking up "Our Lady Enters the City [In Three Attempts]" and then (nearly!) immediately nominating it for inclusion in 2020's Best Small Fictions, too.
2020 was a "quiet" year (yeesh) for me, publication-wise. I also stepped down from my role as Fiction Editor at my beloved Longleaf Review in the spring of that year, and have been really enjoying cheering on the Fiction editorial team headed by Lilly Schneider since then. They're publishing such amazing work, and I love seeing how the Review is growing and evolving under Kate Finegan's guidance and care.
I've been writing, steadily and quietly, and primarily focused on my longform novel manuscript. As someone deeply committed to the magic of writing micros and flash fiction, exercising and developing a whole new set of writerly muscles with a bigger, deeper, wider project is exciting, often confounding, and deeply humbling. More on that some other time, I think.
This year, as I work on my second draft of my novel manuscript (that I realized only recently is actually more of a true first draft than the first draft 😫), I've turned back to Twitter for writing community connection, and I've been enjoying Kathy Fish's new substack newsletter, The Art of Flash Fiction (which gave a nod to my flash piece "Sojourner, along the outer orbits of empire" in the 2nd Person in Flash letter!). I'm looking forward to seeing what the rest of 2021 brings. I'll have a Lizard Woman flash piece coming out in the upcoming issue of Storm Cellar (yes! I've continued writing one Lizard Woman story per year!), and have an exciting writing retreat/adventure trip to the land of fire and ice in the late fall. I'll keep you posted on here whenever something "big" happens, but, in the meantime, find me on Twitter 😉