Was feeling melancholy, but then I dug up Theoden with an undercut from my vault of memes

Eastercon adventures: I am done panelling for the day and have achieved the Bar.

And here's this again if you're looking for me today!

Eastercon people, I’m doing the very first ever reading for CALL ME TRAITOR (the sapphic winter soldier book) on Monday at 10:30! I would be delighted to see any of you there! I also on some panels as below:

Here’s my Eastercon schedule!

"On Monday, Oedipus ate through one apple. But he was still hungry. On Wednesday he ate a whole banana. On Friday he killed an arrogant man at the crossroads and married his widow. But he was still hungry." A section, there, from THE VERY HUNGRY PATER-KILLER.

I have achieved Eastercon!

Shocking and shameful: appalling ignorance on the part of school leadership, and a naked abuse of safeguarding processes. The Lowry Academy has successfully protected its reputation from any suggestion that they actually care about educating children.

sorry I'm like this y'all but you have FIVE MORE DAYS, is all, and because I have totally forgotten to mention it, let me just add that one lucky nominator will win a whole pile of books, which is to say the entire 2025 shortlist! could be yours! go forth and nominate!

fractured thumb life: I am five books into pern and I have figured out how to type fast with nine fingers specifically so I can yell about pern in @rebeccafraimow.bsky.social's DMs

I am an hour and a half early to my author event this evening so I’m sitting in a pub with a large glass of white wine and a book about dragons.

five books into my pern reread I am developing Opinions and also a horrible awareness that I cannot possibly read all the mccaffrey I want to in time for the panel

Is it a problem that Dark Lord of Derkholm often decides not to dwell on the darkness of its subject matter because it's instead busy fitting more jokes in? Perhaps yes. Are all the jokes very funny? DEFINITELY yes. zencastr.com/z/lClP6mCT

fractured thumb life: I read the first two Pern books yesterday for the first time in about twenty years. gonna see how much mccaffrey I can get through between now and Eastercon when I’m on a panel about her work.

Forgot to mention: I’ll be on a panel with Antonia Hodgson (author of THE RAVEN SCHOLAR, a book that kept me up till 2am) at the Oxford Literary Festival next Monday! oxfordliteraryfestival.org/literature-e...

fractured thumb life: I read a book. I played Slay the Spire 2. I did all the chores I can feasibly do one-handed (not many). I gazed forlorn at my very! nearly! finished! draft! this is hell nor am I out of it.

update: I have fractured my thumb 😔😔😔😔😔

I fell down the stairs this morning and hurt (a) my pride (b) my backside (c) my THUMB. Pride and backside have now recovered but the thumb hurts so much and everything I do is typing.

While I’m mentioning very nice things: Some Desperate Glory is a nominee for Best Translated Novel in the Seiun Awards! Many congratulations to translator Hiroshi Kaneko, and to all the nominees.

Really delighted that The Incandescent is a Nebula finalist For Best Novel. Congratulations to all the nominees!

After a month of buildup, may I present... The Queersar not an award 2020! 10 (+1) great queer SFF novels. V good year for queer SFF; I found it *really* hard to narrow down to 10. But happy with what's on here & more convinced there *is* a gap in the award landscape for books like these.

Thank you to my wise and wonderful friends for bringing me along for this ride!! I had so much fun digging into this book and I hope that comes through on the episode. Bonus joke: if DWJ was writing today about R. Venables, wizard and game developer, he would definitely be working in Unreal Engine.

Thanks for your patience as we got our Deep Secret episode out the door! We're thrilled to have @agbouskila.bsky.social as our guest consulting expert on game dev and magids on this week's trip back in time to [Definitely Absolutely A Completely Fictional Con], 1997 zencastr.com/z/WduuwZZw

"I crave books with enough specificity that I can say they are not for everyone; the alternative, I think, is books that are not for anyone. Books that are, essentially, for the algorithm."

The @clarkeaward.bsky.social judges said this would be a future classic of the genre. FT said it was one of their SF books of the year. Interzone said all kinds of nice shit. It is now cheap. Buy it, think about direct action and punk and the climate and hope wrapped round a brick

Of course they do... genius. On this basis, I'm assuming, there's a retired primary school teacher out there whose antibodies could do the childhood disease equivalent of walking into the Copland Road end at Ibrox in a Celtic shirt and offering to take on all comers.

It's time! Nominations are now open for the 2026 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, which will be given to a work of imaginative fiction, published in 2025, that reflects the concepts and ideas that were central to Ursula’s own work.

a lil prize thread, now with nomination form link!!!!

you just KNOW before the Darkening of Valinor that whenever Fëanor showed up at a feast someone was like "ugh there's that gaudy bitch in his PRECIOUS SILMARILS again"

keep seeing people talking about Hugo and Nebula nominations which means it is my professional duty to remind you that nominations for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize open on SUNDAY

2 - it's Hugos season! If you were thinking about nominating us: thank you so, so much but please don't -- we're officially recusing ourselves from consideration and are very excited to vote for some of the other amazing sff podcasts out there!

hello all! two quick announcements: 1 - due to technical difficulties, there will NOT be a new episode this week! Deep Secret will go up either 3/7 or 3/14 depending on how quickly we resolve them. as a taster to tide you over please enjoy @emilytesh.net's beautiful Lost Heirs Chaos Family Tree

i do not have a facebook, twitter, or tiktok account. i can't report the fake ones without creating a real one (nice try boys!!). i've already talked to *multiple* people who have lost money on these kinds of scams. be safe out there kids 🫡

Finally, we've made it all the way from Drowned Ammet to Crowned Ammet, and we do feel very lucky that, unlike readers in the 70s, we didn't have to wait 15 real time years for it zencastr.com/z/wv-F0dWm

we WILL be returning to Dalemark in bonus stuff so please do feel free to write in with your hot takes on who comes first in the Dalemark Bad Dads Pageant (Mitt's dad disqualified for blowing all the competition out of the water)

my copy of Ragged Band of Travellers: writing from the threshold of dungeons & dragons is here! I have a poem in this one about that mysterious figure, a fantasy of long, long life twice over — an elfin vampire.

just in case anyone needs reminding or a guide: reactormag.com/anyone-can-v...

Some Desperate Glory by @emilytesh.net is on sale today on kindle for only 99p! I really enjoyed the twists and turns of this book and its politics are only too relevant. I believe it was quite influenced by Hexwood, the discussion of which on @eightdaysofdiana.bsky.social I am currently savouring.

#UKSFFBookBargains offers a daily deal on Some Desperate Glory by @emilytesh.net. 99p. One of the best books of the last ten years. A very well deserved Hugo winner. If you've not read this you're missing out. www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/... www.amazon.co.uk/Some-Despera...

Career milestone: saw my own book in my local library!

Pre-orders for this edition are still available on our website! We are SO excited to see this book in person, and we hope you are too 🤭 *Please note this is a digital mockup, final product may differ slightly* litpinsandco.com/collections/...

We are so excited to reveal the hardcover artwork for our special edition of The Incandescent! 🐦‍🔥 This stunning artwork is by our very own @buttercupgrove.bsky.social and will be featured underneath the dust jacket (designed by RiotBones) 🥰 @emilytesh.net #LitPins #LitPinsAndCo #TheIncandescent

The only thing I've written in the last two months was my father's eulogy. Starting work on this book again feels impossible. But I reread what there is the other night, and you know, it's not bad.

Very happy to see The Incandescent on the list!

So what I want to do is, Gaylactic Spectrum style, ask folks to think back to the 6 years the award has not run, and think of what longform queer speculative fiction (novel or novella) you liked for each year from 2020-2025. I'll bung that together with my own reckons to a shortlist & a favourite.

here it is: the DWJ that has been most influential on Me Personally and the whole reason I wanted to do this podcast project. are you read for the greatest portal fantasy space opera arthuriana of all time. hexwood!!!

perhaps you'll say: was it really necessary for this to be a four hour episode? to which I say: look forward to at LEAST another hour of Hexwood Time in this season's Q&A. Happy Hexwood Day, everyone! zencastr.com/z/Y9k1q1AZ

does anyone else feel like SFF criticism is in a really good place right now? perhaps I just wasn't paying enough attention before. reading through the latest Strange Horizons and thinking about all the cool conversations I've seen and all the books I've picked up because of them. thank you critics.

My essay in the @strangehorizons.bsky.social criticism special is up! I muse about genre, vibes and the difficulty of pinning things down in an ever-shifting landscape.

new author photo! the old one was taken shortly before my wedding in 2018 and is the most femme I have ever looked in my entire life. people kept getting confused when they met me. (where did the long blonde hair go? I cut it all off with a sigh of relief two weeks after the old photo was taken.)