See, this is why I should be more patient about calculating my stats for the year. Add 2 more new poems to the count!
The Broken City just put out its video game themed issue, which includes my poems “Five Date Nights at Freddy Fazbear’s Mega Pizzaplex” and “Through the Screen (A Warped Abecedarian).”
FNAF stands for Five Nights at Freddy’s, for anyone who’s wondering. It should come as no shock that I enjoy arcade settings, and I really liked the sprawling location featured in FNAF: Security Breach and thus wrote a poem set there.
The other poem, my first abecedarian (a reverse one!), continues the celebration of digital environments and considers what it would be like to truly enter a game world. I had fun namedropping movies, shows, and such built around this trope. It’s captivated me since childhood.
I haven’t compiled all my annual writing stats since the year isn’t officially done yet, but maybe I’ll share some next month. For now, I’m doing the thing where I try to take time to reflect back on my accomplishments for the year. It’s easy to get swept up in the tide of rejections—trust me, I get plenty of those for every one acceptance. Or to feel like I haven’t been productive enough or have stagnated creatively. I got some sage advice from my mentor earlier this year that helped me reframe my thinking and recognize the myriad ways we can challenge ourselves in each new writing project. And I’m always grateful for the insightful feedback I get from my most trusted critique partner and the community I get with my writing groups. It’s important to celebrate the wins. Sometimes when we take stock of them, they add up to more than we’d recall individually.
New additions to my bookshelf in 2024.
Here are some stats I can share: In 2024, I had 5 new short stories published, 17 new poems, and 3 new pieces of nonfiction.
This past January, my first poetry chapbook came out (it was also my first standalone book). I’m so grateful to the team at Sword & Kettle Press who helped me make The Inca Weaver’s Tales a reality!
I’ve had a longtime goal to get invited into an anthology, and I was fortunate to get not one but two opportunities this year, almost back-to-back. Both anthologies will hopefully come out next year. One story is done and accepted, the other draft is chugging along.
One highlight for me this year was being a guest lecturer for two classes at my alma mater, Santa Clara University. The students asked such thoughtful, sharp, varied questions. I remember those days as an undergraduate, how hungry I was to learn, to better myself and my writing as art. I try to cling to that same hunger. I hope those students do the same.
I also spoke this year at StokerCon, the Willamette Writers Conference, and OryCon. I was a guest on the podcast Pages on the Tongue (hosted by Michelle Murray), and I did readings for the online series Speculative Sundays (hosted by Akua Lezli Hope) and Story Hour (hosted by Daniel Marcus and Laura Blackwell). My gratitude to all these hosts and organizers for supporting writers and helping us reach new audiences.
Looking forward to 2025, one big thing on the horizon is my first ever novella. I’m excited (and perhaps a little nervous?) to start on edits with the team at Of Metal and Magic Publishing. We’re hoping that Thrice Petrified will be ready to go sometime next year! I’ve been working on this story for years and years, and I just love these characters and their fantasy world and can hardly wait to share it more widely.
That’s plenty for now. Take care of yourselves and each other!
I have a few updates to catch up on. First is that I’ve had a story accepted for an upcoming anthology about claw machines! The Kickstarter will be launching early next year. You can sign up for updates now if you’d like to keep tabs on this project.
I (along with many, many other authors) have a microfiction story in 42 Stories Anthology Presents: Book of 42². As you may have guessed, each story is exactly 42 words long. My story, “Gallows Humor (Upon Finding Jimbo’s Body),” is part of the Clown chapter and features two circus clowns who encounter the work of a coulrophobic killer.
On the poetry side of things, I’m excited to have some more video game poetry publications on the horizon. The Broken City will publish two new poems of mine in their gaming-themed issue, and I’ll have a reprint in the anthology Dangerous to Go Alone 2 as well as one in Meow Meow Pow Pow.
I had a new fantasy poem in issue 47.4 of Star*Line called “Gla-Mer: The Fashion Magazine for Mermaids.” This one had its origins in a little booklet of stapled-together scrap paper I’d made in grade school—I probably still have it somewhere in my attic. Anyway, for this new poem I was reminiscing about that booklet, then I started having fun with headlines, and finally my adult lens took it in a more serious direction.
