astray in worlds and words.

Author: Simone

A Handful of Sky (Elly Bangs)

I love it when stories just place me into a world and a society, leaving me to figure out the rules, and with a protagonist whose mysteries I have to unravel. A Handful of Sky by Elly Bangs delivers on that and more. Don’t miss it if you like fascinating magic concepts and high stakes!

It starts like a gritty sword and sorcery tale with a hunting party bringing in a slain dragon for its parts to be utilised. But these tropes are soon subverted, the more you find out about the hunters’ destination, a city of whispered secrets and eternal youth. The latter is not for everyone, though, and it’s always a delight to see an older female protagonist like Jorren Borriwack, a down-to-earth tailor just getting by, her talent buried and tarnished and waiting to change the world.

The story’s magic has the best handmade flavor, it’s very tangible even when it should by all means be abstract and elusive, and the ending is perfect – that’s the kind of fantasy I’d love to read more often, hopeful and addressing relevant questions.

Read it here in Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #280 (June 2019).

Eugie Award

As promised, this bit of “news” gets an extra blog post, no matter how late I am: My novelette “When We Were Starless” is the winner of the 2019 Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction.

This makes me incredibly happy, not only because I’m still having trouble believing my writing was nominated for awards, let alone won one! It’s an award celebrating short fiction (yay!), and it boasts an incredibly fine selection of finalists and winners in the five years of its existence. Previous winners are Catherynne M. Valente, N.K. Jemisin, and Fran Wilde, so I’m clearly the odd one out here. And on top of that, it’s awarded in the memory of a truly brilliant short fiction writer.

I can only recommend you go and check out current and former finalists, and read Eugie’s work, too, if you don’t know it yet.

Plaque of the 2019 Eugie AwardI deeply regret I wasn’t able to be in Atlanta for the award ceremony personally – financial and health issues upset my plans to go. I celebrated two times, though – once in the middle of the night when I discovered on Twitter that my story had won, and a second time when the beautiful plaque designed by Tangled Earth Arts came in the mail.

And don’t forget to look at this year’s finalists, too. (Yes, my bad, there’s already a new round, and they’re amazing!)

Things happened …

… and things didn’t happen.
Most amazing among the things that happened was the fact that my latest story resonated with readers and was nominated for awards, to my utter astonishment. “When We Were Starless” went on to be a finalist for the Hugo and Sturgeon Awards, and it won the Eugie Foster Memorial Award (which deserves an extra blog post, even if I’m horribly late). Yay! I mean, YAAAAAYYYYY! I still can’t believe that happened!

But the fact that my latest story was, and is, still my latest story also serves as a hint to the things that didn’t happen.
I started a few new things and stopped in the middle of the process because I didn’t like where they were going. Some others simply refused to go anywhere. I dropped into that big black hole that keeps opening and swallowing me whole. I usually retreat and hunker down with (translation) work then, but last year was not great for translations, at least from my point of view. So the hole gave me some trouble this time around. Anyway, this is where I am. I haven’t given up; it’s just that my brain didn’t put out a lot of useful stuff these past months.

But things happen even when we sit in holes, and I’m lucky enough to have wonderful friends who keep nudging even if I’m at my worst holed-up self, and so the future doesn’t look all bleak: right now, a really wonderful (and challenging) translation is waiting on my desk. Friends have written amazing stories (and sometimes books) I want to talk about. And I might have been talked into doing a thing or two myself, one of them coming up right at Halloween! Which is, in the amorphous ways of 2020 time both forever in the future and sneaking up on us in a week or so.

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