As we swing from spring to summer—from complaining about the cold to complaining about the heat—I have been quite a busy bee.

I’ve got lots of news to share, so let’s jump right in, shall we?

Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity is out TODAY!

This anthology, edited by Lee Mandelo, has an absolutely stacked table of contents—twenty-two stories by queer and trans authors firing on all cylinders. And it contains a brand-new story by yours truly: “Forever Won’t End Like This,” a love letter to queer characters on shitty prime-time fantasy shows.

You can pick up a copy at any of the links below:

Bookshop.org | Barnes & Noble | Amazon

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025

I’m honored to share that “Look at the Moon” was chosen for inclusion in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025! I’m exceptionally fond of this story, and eager for more readers to find it. You can check out the anthology’s full table of contents here, and read about the process of writing “Look at the Moon” here.

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025 comes out on October 21st. You can preorder a copy at any of the links below:

Bookshop.org | Barnes & Noble | Amazon

June Events

And lastly, here’s what I’ll be up to in the next few weeks!

Charm City Spec

For my Baltimore pals, I’ll be reading at Charm City Spec on Saturday, June 7th. This is an outdoor event at The Ivy Bookshop—a beautiful venue—with a sick lineup of authors attending.

Amplitudes launch at Books Are Magic

If you’re in New York City, come celebrate the release of the Amplitudes anthology at Books Are Magic on Wednesday, June 11th! I’m so excited to hang with my co-contributors, who are absolute gems.

Lavender Con

On Saturday, June 14th and Sunday, June 15th, I’ll be at Lavender Con in D.C.! Please do yourself a favor and peep the roster for this queer book festival—it’s going to be magnificent.

I’ll have more to share later this summer. The best way to keep up is to subscribe to this here newsletter:

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:

1. You can find the ebook (which will not include Agency Restricted Materials) here. ↩︎
2. 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. ↩︎

That’s right—I have another new story out in Lightspeed! “Look at the Moon” is a novelette about faith, fate, and stargazing. It’s a story that’s close to my heart: I wrote the first draft in 2016, and it grew along with me. I’m a completely different person now, and it’s is a completely different story, but both our bones are the same. I’m confident that “Look at the Moon” is the best thing I’ve written (thus far). 

I’m going to talk more about my inspirations for “Look at the Moon,” but let’s get the rest of the news out of the way first.

My short story “The Last Lucid Day” was featured in Gizmodo, which I am deeply grateful for.

For my folks in Baltimore and its surrounds: I’m reading at Proxima Arcanum tomorrow (Wednesday 8/14) as part of a kickass lineup. The event is at Current Space and begins at 7pm, with readings starting around 7:30. Friends of the blog Amethyst Alchemist and Neon Hemlock will also be there vending. Come through!

Alright, now back to astronomy!

The Grand Experiment

As well as I can recall, my love of astronomy began with the first verse¹ of Doomtree’s “The Grand Experiment.” To this day, I love that verse so much that I can’t put the track on playlists—I’ll rewind to hear the beginning again and again. I love it too much to move on to any other song.

We start with these planets waltzing through the darkness

Space is mostly … space. Infinite nothing, with rare clusters of stuff. Everywhere and everyone you’ve ever been exists due to very slim odds. We are here by happenstance.

For a sense of scale, I recommend Josh Worth’s model of the solar system, sized so that the moon is 1 pixel.

Tip the axis, that one’s ours

Relative to the sun, Earth has a 23.5° axial tilt. It’s why we experience seasons. Hell, it’s why life evolved on this rock in the first place. And while astronomers have theories, we might never really know what set us askew. 

There is so goddamn much that we don’t know. It is so difficult to sit with the not-knowing. But we exist thanks to the perfect 23.5° tilt of a planetary body in a universe that is mostly not planets. Isn’t that wonderful and terrifying? 

Zoom the camera in, cue lights up, dim the stars

Okay, only the first few lines are about the chronology of the universe. The rest of “The Grand Experiment” is about how all of those variables collided to create human life, and then we kinda ruined it with tech-centric capitalism. The universe is great. People often aren’t. 

I have only ever lived in cities. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen the night sky without light pollution. The only constellation I can identify is the Big Dipper, and that’s because it’s consistently bright enough to cut through smog. We have, indeed, dimmed the stars. 

In 2016, feeling claustrophobic in Los Angeles, I saw a flyer advertising a star party in Joshua Tree. Astronomers with telescopes, binoculars, and cameras, gathered under a clear, dark sky. 

I didn’t go to the star party. I did write a story about it, though. Go read it.

And if you want background music, here are more songs that kept me company while I worked on “Look at the Moon” in all its various iterations. 

1. In addition to sparking a lifelong curiosity about the cosmos, this verse is a masterclass in diction, alliteration, consonance, assonance, euphony, everything. “We choose a king, mine the metals for his forges / to better wage our wars” is such a satisfying series of sounds. I want the whole thing tattooed on the inside of my skull. ↩︎

I have a new short story out in Lightspeed! “The Last Lucid Day” is about who closure serves, and why we chase it so doggedly. This story is a heavy one. Take care of your heart while you read.

I also got to do an Author Spotlight to accompany the piece. It was a pleasure to talk through the artistic choices and hype up some books I’ve been loving lately. You may notice that none of the books mentioned are super current. That, my friends, is because I’m a wizard.

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The vast majority of the world’s books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It’s just numbers.

– Linda Holmes

I first encountered Linda Holmes’ “The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything” in 2011, at a deeply formative time in my life. This short and profound essay measures the volume of extant art against the length of a human life. There are so many books to read, movies to watch, albums to listen to—and so little time! The aspiration to be “well-read” is a useless one. Our only recourse is to cull—to preemptively toss out work that you do not anticipate enjoying—or to surrender—to live with the acceptance that you will miss out on very many things, no matter how hard you try.

I know the point of the essay is not despair, but I did feel a great deal of despair about this. Culling entire genres, authors, or mediums feels antithetical to curiosity. Though I’ve tried a fair few video games, I’ve yet to fall in love with one—but I will never say that I don’t like video games. That would be absurd! There must be a video game out there that will render me absolutely feral with excitement. I just haven’t found it yet, and that’s on me.

But if you do not cull—if you remain curious about and open to every piece of media that crosses your path—then, well … You have to accept that you are going to miss a lot! You are, in fact, going to miss almost everything!

I have had a very hard time being okay with that.

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A decade after Holmes’ essay, this Amal El-Mohtar tweet came across my timeline—and it has been rattling around in my brain ever since. A liberating sentiment, beautifully worded: it does not matter if what you’re reading is “current.” You do not owe anyone an apology for reading something “late.” So what, you weren’t there on release day? So what, you missed the preorder? You are here now.

I stowed this tweet in the same corner of my consciousness as “The Sad, Beautiful Fact,” left it alone for a while, and something wonderful happened.  

Wouldn’t you rather arrive “late” than not at all?

I know I would.

Wouldn’t you rather appreciate the books that delight you than mourn the stories you won’t get to read?

Yeah. I would, actually.

I’ll get to the art I’m meant to get to. I’ll get to it when I’m meant to get to it. A wizard is always on time.

Well, hello! It’s been an eventful few weeks, to say the least. I’ll just dive right in.

Second order of business: the love that’s been shown to “Slow Communication,” which was published in Fantasy Magazine last February, continues to overwhelm me. It was selected as a Notable Story in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023. It will be reprinted in We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2022. And on top of these amazing honors, “Slow Communication” is a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.

Allow me to very eloquently summarize all of this: HOLY SHIT! HOOOOOOLY SHIT! I am so beyond grateful for everyone who took a chance on this story.

But stick around! I somehow have EVEN MORE UPDATES!

Third: my novella Redundancies & Potentials hits shelves in 2024, published by Neon Hemlock. I’ve been sitting on this news for a while, friends, and it was an excruciating secret to keep. Redundancies & Potentials follows two cybernetically-enhanced sisters as they use time travel to prevent a war. It’s twisty, gory, and—if I do say so myself—a damn good romp. I truly cannot wait.

Okay. Are you still with me?

Fourthly: “Who The Final Girl Becomes,” which dropped in Nightmare Magazine in February, will be published in Spanish by Voces de lo Insolito. It’ll drop in a few months, right around spooky season. This story is one of my favorite things I’ve ever written, and I’m delighted that it’s becoming accessible to more readers.

Aaaand fifth of all: Big Bad Con is crowdfunding on Backerkit until July 7th. This is a truly wonderful convention that I’m really looking forward to and, though the funding threshold has been met, I want to keep the momentum going! (A certain someone you know might even be a stretch goal guest …)

Last but not least: I just wanted to remind you that Plant Girl Game is available to preorder on Gamefound for a limited time. CJ and I have gotten our hands on the print books and will begin shipping them to backers soon. This game is absolutely gorgeous, so don’t miss your chance to buy a print copy!

Whew! That sure was a lot! Thank you for reading my work, and thank you for reading this update. There’ll be more from me soon.

Happy Monday!

Popping in with a quick update: Plant Girl Game, my tabletop roleplaying game about a family of plant children working together to save their small town, is available for preorder on Gamefound. Just click “Late Pledge” to order the game in print or as a PDF.

Digital orders will be distributed via itch this week, and hard copies will be shipping in early June.