February 2024 Newsletter

It's almost spring!

For as interminable as January seemed, February has flown by for me. It’s almost spring! Not that we had much of a winter here in Virginia, but I’m looking forward to longer hours of daylight and temperatures that are more amenable to reading and working outside.

And I’m looking forward to things growing and the world having some color again. The above picture is a lie; it’s from March 2022. The forsythia here is not yet in bloom, though I did finally see some daffodils this week.

News

It’s getting to be busy season at work — well, busy pre-season, anyway, as we try to get everything finalized and ready for the training season to start at the end of March. So I’ve been writing and editing Quests, working on our pre-season engagement including a website revamp and the script for a trailer, and getting ready to start recording Season 2 of the Myths & Muses podcast!

On top of all of that, I’ve been in the midst of Halcy-Con planning, including launching our programming submissions earlier this week. And I’ve been (finally) editing short stories for the Worldbuilding for Masochists Traveling Light anthology, and actually trying to do my own writing. I did not catch up during February, as I’d hoped, but I’m still making fairly steady progress. March will be the real test, honestly. That’s when I will (hopefully) get beyond the point where I’ve gotten stuck on this project four or five times before. If I can push past the 40k mark and keep going, then we might actually have a real manuscript sometime this year!

Elsewhere in the world, y’all may have heard something about the controversy surrounding last year’s Hugo Awards. If you haven’t, I’m not going to recap here, but I recommend reading the report by Jason Sanford and Chris M. Barkley if you want to go deep, and if you want to go shallower, listen to or read the NPR story about it. Because… yeah… a nerd scandal broke containment enough to end up on NPR. The shortest version is that it seems one dude pushed last year’s admin team into applying censorship to the nominations just in case the Chinese government might take offense (even though they had given no indication of doing so), compiled dossiers on nominees, and arbitrarily struck a lot of nominees from the list as well as, it seems, supplanting Chinese-language nominees with English-language ones, with no explanation. Basically it’s a hot mess, and it’s a hot mess coming at a wildly inconvenient time, because it’s nomination season for this year’s awards.

It’s made it very awkward to push for nominations, but, well… I still want one! And the Glasgow folks really are doing everything they can to assure the community that they will be entirely transparent with no hijinks. So if you’re a member of the Glasgow 2024 WorldCon, I’d adore it if you’d give Worldbuilding for Masochists your consideration for Best Fancast.

Upcoming Events

We’re just two months out from RavenCon! I hope I’ll have a schedule to share with you all soon. There are some very interesting panel options, and I’ve also put in to do a reading and a signing. So if you’ll be in Richmond in April, come see me!

And there’s still time to vote for The Bloodstained Shade for RavenCon’s Webster Award! (I am, admittedly, not sure how much time — it may end tomorrow, 2/29!)

What I’ve Been Reading

• Tales of the Orishas, Hugo Canuto

• A Ruse of Shadows, Sherry Thomas

• Starter Villain, John Scalzi

• The Witch’s Heart, Genevieve Gornichec

• The Butcher of the Forest, Premee Mohamed

• A Coup of Tea, Casey Blair

(As always, these are affiliate links from which I will earn a small commission)

Tales of the Orishas is something I read for work and enjoyed tremendously. It’s a wonderful, action-packed graphic novel in exactly the style I’ve been looking for to introduce campers to Yoruba lore. The story has definite superhero vibes while still communicating a lot of history and mythology.

Starter Villain I listened to (the audiobook is read by Wil Wheaton) during a week when I was feeling about as low and despondent as I have in months, and it was the only thing (besides Oona) to cheer me up. It’s thoroughly charming and very clever in ways that had me snorting and literally loling.

The Witch’s Heart is a skillfull rendering of Norse mythology from an alternate angle, and while the story overall made me very melancholy, I still enjoyed it. I was also pleased to discover that although it’s adult fiction, there’s nothing so explicit that I couldn’t recommend it to my YA-reading demigods.

A Coup of Tea was just wonderful and engrossing, and I’m very much looking forward to getting into the rest of the series. It has elements both of cozy fantasy and political fantasy swirled together, and I really adore the blend.

March is going to be a race to finish up the last four books I need to fill in slots in the r/fantasy Bingo Book Challenge! Can I do it and fill out an entire card for the second year in a row? I’ll let you know in the next newsletter.

Wrapping It Up

So, I have plenty on my plate to keep me occupied through March! Honestly, at this point, my spring is a sprint until my Disney vacation in May, which is the carrot I’ll be dangling in front of myself as motivation.

Whether March comes in like a lion or not, I hope it brings you all that you wish!