Oh, hello there. Guess who’s back!
I realize that I will, in a sense, always be coming back—more on that below. But first, let’s get caught up.
Redundancies and Potentials is out now!
My debut novella—a quick, gory tale of time travel and sisterhood—is on shelves now (and holy shit, that sentence is thrilling to type).
Better yet, every copy of the paperback purchased directly from Neon Hemlock will include a copy of Agency Restricted Materials, a ttrpg set in the world of the novella, while supplies last.1 This is the only way to get your hands on the game, which will not be released in digital form. Run, don’t walk!
Reading at People’s Book D.C.
I’ll be reading at People’s Book in D.C. on Monday, March 31st, along with fellow Neon Hemlock author TT Madden. DMV-area pals, I hope to see you there!
“The Last Lucid Day” made the Locus Recommended Reading List!
This was another hoooooooooly shit holy shit holy shit moment, for sure. “The Last Lucid Day” is the kind of story that feels like pressing on a bruise. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever written, and I’m overwhelmed by how well it’s been received.
If you feel so inclined to vote for me on your Locus Awards ballot, I would be honored. Voting is open until April 15th; you can vote whether or not you’re subscribed to Locus Magazine, though subscribers’ votes are weighted more heavily.
Preorder Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity
The Amplitudes anthology, edited by the illustrious Lee Mandelo and containing a new short story by yours truly, is available for preorder! Y’all, this book has an absolutely stacked table of contents, has been a joy to be a part of, and recently got a starred review in Library Journal. I can’t wait for it to be in your hands.
Whew! That’s all the news I’ve got. Now, as promised …
Thoughts on always coming back
Publishing is a slow-moving industry. Every big announcement has months (or years!) of lead time, and that doesn’t even include the time spent doing the work. I started writing Redundancies and Potentials in early 2020. Neon Hemlock acquired it in the fall of 2022. That sale was announced in the summer of 2023, with the book being released in early 2025. This is the standard pace of things.
That pace separates the work from the results: you can have a great time career-wise while having an awful time creatively. And if you find yourself in that position, balancing an external high-point with an internal lull, knowing that your present creativity is your career’s future doesn’t help matters.2
All this is to say that I’ve been wrestling with writing, lately. It’s been disconcerting to feel so successful and so lucky and so grateful and so entirely stuck.
When the writing works, it works—for days or weeks at a time I am, as John Green would say, in Cheyenne, Wyoming. But I keep falling out of it! And finding my way back to it, and falling out of it, and finding my way back, and—
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said something along the lines of: I have got to find my way back to writing!
Immediately followed by: Good god, I wish I wasn’t always in the position of finding my way back to writing.
But hey, maybe that’s just how it is. Maybe writing isn’t constant. Maybe I will always have to find my way back into the game. What matters is that I keep coming back.
It’s spring. I have books to read. I have Formula 1 to watch (and a scuppered sleep schedule, after a doubleheader of race weekends in Australia and China). I’m taking lots of walks in the nice weather. I’m trying to sit in the present, which often feels like the past, without worrying too much about the future, which often feels like the present.
Writing will be there. I’ll come back to it. (I always do.)
New here? Subscribe to keep up with all the news that’s fit to print:
- You can find the ebook (which will not include Agency Restricted Materials) here. ↩︎
- Then add the social media promo rigamarole, which is maybe 30% sharing news and 70% reminding people that you exist, which I am so fundamentally disinterested in doing. If a consistent online presence is proof of life, please just let me fake my death until I have something worthwhile to say. I’ll come back. ↩︎
Dominique Dickey 