… 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.