Category: Uncategorized
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Drabble sale
My drabble “Pamplona” will be appearing in a future issue of The Cosmic Background. Which future issue? I don’t know, but they’re all in the future. It’s a very new flash market. Writers take note: They don’t accept a lot of stories, but they’ve been very responsive and, since it’s 2023 and…(gestures vaguely at dumpster…
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This anthology is now a toddler
Three years ago, Atthis Arts published Community of Magic Pens. It is a delightful anthology full of stories about, well, magic pens (for somewhat flexible definitions of “magic” and “pens”). This sale came only a few months after I’d started submitting stories, after I had managed to reset my brain to writing short and, not…
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“AI” is neither artificial nor intelligent
I write science fiction and I’m a fan of science fiction. I like thinking about non-human people and diversity of cognition within and across species (real and fictional). I like playing around with how concepts of personhood are defined, expanded, and abused. (That might be the social history background talking.) I enjoy reading about the…
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SFWA membership upgrade
I upgraded to a Full SFWA membership at the beginning of January. Finally. “Finally” because I’ve been eligible but under-documented for a while, under the current rules. And also because, even after I decided to just restrict myself to recent publications, I had a whole set of files sitting unsent on my hard drive since…October,…
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A nice evening perusing a manuscript
I have had a generally lousy day, at the end of an increasingly lousy week. But I ended up finding a bit of a bright spot doing a bit of copyediting. The anthology Darkness Blooms is in the final stages of production. (It was originally slated for last fall, then delayed due to a number…
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Good riddance, 2022
This year was A Lot. I know that’s the case for many people, and many of those had it worse than my household. But like the earlier pandemic years, it felt like we were in survival mode (with extra bonus gaslighting). COVID hit in the beginning of the year; I’m still feeling the effects, which…
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“In Transit, Beautiful” in The Antihumanist
My space junk story “In Transit, Beautiful” appears in the Third Edition of The Antihumanist. I was charmed a number of years ago when I learned about space archaeology as a field—I’d never thought of space junk in those terms, but obviously it makes sense to do so—and this vignette looks at that built environment…
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Award eligibility post
It’s that time of year again. Like so many other authors, I’d like to present a rundown of work that came out in 2021. If you are nominating for the Hugo, Astounding, Nebula, Stoker, Locus, or any of the other awards out there, I’d appreciate your consideration. For purposes of awards restricted by geography, national…
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National Science Fiction Day
It’s National Science Fiction Day, apparently because this is when we think Isaac Asimov was probably born, more or less. I’m not a big fan of policing genre boundaries. That’s partially because it’s an exercise in futility, partially because of the toxicity often motivating such impulses. (Counting FTL and psionics as science fictional, and shuffling…
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The obligatory awards post
As 2020 slouches toward its end, authors pause their doomscrolling and conscientiously abandon their works in progress for a few moments (note: this is career-related, and therefore absolutely entirely nothing at all like procrastination). They assemble links, quash their self-consciousness, and hurl self-promoting posts into the aether before diving under a blanket. It just so…
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Autumn
I am quite fond of autumn. I like the cooler weather—jeans-and-tee-shirt weather, light jacket weather, cardigan or sweatshirt weather. Today, however, it made it up to 90° (or so close as to make no difference). Following last Friday’s Climate Strike, today’s heat fills me with the impulse to despair and/or (metaphorically) burn something down. The…
A. P. Howell 