Nerd for Hire

Anthony Veasna So 260 pages Ecco (2021) 

Read this if you like: Karen Russell, Jennifer Egan, Alan Heathcock

Tl;dr summary: Various views of the day-to-day lives of Cambodian refugees in California. 

See the book on Bookshop 

Harvest deities are recurring figures in world mythologies—which makes sense. Food is kind of important for a civilization’s survival, for one thing. As a mediocre gardener, I can also understand why ancient people would have assumed the success and failure of crops happened at the whim of some capricious spirit, because the whole thing really does seem inexplicable sometimes. 

I’ve been going back through my mythology research for a couple of projects. I always find it interesting to track the ways different cultures viewed similar figures in their pantheon—the relative importance given to one area compared to others, or what other areas of responsibility were under that same deity’s domain. With that in mind, here’s a round-up of some of the harvest gods I’ve taken notes on in my research.

November is upon us, and with it the annual return of National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo, as the cool kids call it). For those unfamiliar, the idea behind NaNoWriMo is to produce an entire novel draft in a month, which is typically defined as writing 50,000 words. I’ve dabbled with taking part in these challenges in the past, but admittedly not for many years—and, the few times I did attempt the challenge, I gave up well before reaching that 50K word count aim.

I’m a very achievement-oriented human overall, so it bothers me more than it probably should when I fail to meet a goal—even an arbitrary goal that I set for myself and no one else cares if I hit or not. This is, honestly, part of why I don’t try to do the NaNoWriMo thing most years. My usual approach to long projects isn’t to just vomit all the words out at once in a torrent. I’m typically more inclined to write a few chapters at a time, bouncing back and forth between generating new words, editing earlier chapters, and stepping back even further to fill in details of the world or characters.

This year, though, I happened to have a novel idea that’s been sitting in my head waiting for me to have time to write it. I’ve already built a lot of the world, created several of my characters, and have a rough idea of where I want the plot to go. Because of this, it felt like the perfect opportunity to give this whole NaNoWriMo thing another shot. But this has also gotten me thinking about creative goals in general, and just what makes a goal valuable.

I’ve completed another novel draft, which means I’m at that delightfully terrifying stage again: pitch time. A process I’ve yet to unlock the secrets of; the last novel I shopped around has yet to find a home. Granted, the manuscript itself could be to blame—it’s a beast of a novel, around 173,000 words, which is a hard sell even in hard sci-fi land—but I suspect there are also still plenty of things I could improve about my query packet and process.

One strategy I haven’t yet attempted is doing live pitches. I go to a lot of conferences where this is an option but have always talked myself out of signing up. I’m enough of an introvert that just thinking about selling my project face-to-face in real-time makes me want to find some dark corner to hide in. The thing is, I don’t want to let myself miss opportunities just because something makes me uncomfortable. So I’ve resolved to start taking my shot with live pitches. 

Like the good Virgo I am, this means I’ve also been doing a lot of research into just what’s involved in live pitches and how to get the most out of them. I don’t have any first-hand advice to offer on the subject yet, but I have found some very helpful (and reassuring) advice from people who are actually experts in this whole thing. I figured I’d share them with folks here in case anyone else out there is in need of some live pitching pointers.

Ann Leckie 407 pages Orbit Books (2019)

Read this if you like: Kerstin Hall’s Star Eater, N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy, fantasy with unique voice & POVs

tl;dr summary: Fantasy-mystery-thriller narrated by an ancient god who shares highlights from his very, very long life along the way.

See the book on Bookshop

I love playing with cryptids, fae folk, and other creatures from myths and folklore in my fiction. For one thing, it’s just a ton of fun to research and write about these otherworldly beings or unconfirmed beasties. They’re also versatile in terms of what they can add to a story, as useful as a source of tension, terror, or danger as they are for whimsy and humor.

I recently went to the Albatwitch Day festival in Columbia, PA for the first time, which gave me a whole slew of new ideas for cryptid-adjacent stories (and at a very good time, too, considering I’m about to delve into writing a cryptid-heavy novel that’s been bouncing around my head for the past few months). 

In that spirit—and since we’re now officially in Spooky Season—I thought some cryptid-themed writing prompts might be a fun source of inspiration.

I’ve been publishing short stories for long enough that some of my early publications now no longer exist. That’s especially annoying when it’s an online journal. If it was a print publisher, or even an ebook, that’s still an extant artifact you can show to your friends, or readers could theoretically stumble across in some other way. Once an online journal goes dead, though, they often disappear from the web completely, and any stories or poems they published along with them.

Now, some of these early stories, I’m not too mad that they’re not available anymore because, in hindsight, they were…rough around the edges, I’ll say. But some of them are stories I still believe in and would love to keep sharing with readers—and not just the ones who happen to stumble across my website or blog.

Rather than get depressed over these publications disappearing, I’ve decided to take this as an opportunity to find them a second home—one that’s even better than the first place I published the story. I knew when I started that this would be a challenge since the majority of journals and anthologies won’t consider previously published work. That said, I’ve been surprised by just how many high-quality markets do consider reprints, now that this is something I’m paying attention to.

Here are a few of the places I’ve found that can make a great home for previously published stories (and poems or essays too, in most cases, although I was focusing on them from a fiction standpoint). It’s certainly far from a comprehensive list, but can at least give you a place to start if you’re looking for reprint markets.

Hilary Hauck 387 pages Olive Rose Press (2023) 

Read this if you like: historical fiction, unique POVs, intrigue-driven plots

tl;dr summary: Jilted British woman travels to Italy to find her suddenly departed lover, instead finds lies (and herself, natch)

See the book on Bookshop

I first got interested in constructed languages because of fantasy and sci-fi worlds, as I imagine is the case for many conlangers. Recently, though, I’ve been getting more interested in constructed languages unconnected to fictional worlds—ones invented for the creator, or other people, to use in the real world, not as part of the worldbuilding for a made-up civilization.

One of the intriguing things about these languages is the variety of reasons that people create them. These can be grouped into a few categories:

• International Auxiliary Languages (IALs) – Created to serve as a common language to enable clearer international communication. These languages tend to use simple grammar, often with vocabulary drawn from various existing languages, with the aim of being easy for people from any background to learn.
• Logical languages (loglangs) – Languages created to be free of irregularities that are common in natural languages. These are often created around specific hypotheses about language to explore the way languages work.
• Philosophical languages – Languages made based on a philosophical idea or principle, often with the goal of creating an “ideal language”, or to create a language that’s better able to express scientific or philosophical concepts.
• Mystical languages – Created to facilitate communication between the speaker and the divine, or to describe mystical experiences to other believers.
• Artistic languages (artlangs) – Languages created basically for the fun of it—fictional languages usually fall under this category, or any language created for humor or artistic effect. These are the least likely to be “functional” languages with a complete grammatical structure or vocabulary that would allow people to truly communicate using it.

I was doing some wandering this past week and ended up in Portland, Maine, a delightful town that, among its other attractions, is home to the International Cryptozoology Museum. While there are plenty of smaller museums dedicated to specific monsters and critters, the ICM is the only all-purpose cryptid museum in the world, so I knew I needed to make a point of stopping in while I was in town.

And I’ll tell you: I wasn’t disappointed. The museum is relatively small but jam-packed with very neat displays and artifacts. Even as an avid student of cryptids, there were a few creatures featured in the museum’s exhibits that were new to me. I also picked up a new reference book with even more new finds, Loren Coleman & Jerome Clark’s Cryptozoology A to Z: