Cooking, Writing and the End of the World
Last I wrote was back in November after my novella, Ghosting, had come out in Giganotosaurus. Since then it made a few people’s best of the year lists, including from Nerds of a Feather, and from Charles Payseur, who had some wonderful things to say about it in his review in Locus:
GigaNotoSaurus provides another wonderful read with November’s “Ghosting” by Kelly Lagor, which follows Lydia as she attempts to reboot her life, and not for the first time. Thanks to a neural implant, Lydia can alter her own memories, erasing unpleasant ones in an attempt to reinvent herself every time things get too bad. And with her recurring issues around intimacy and self-sabotage, that happens more often than she’d like… and more often than she remembers. When a mysterious person starts contacting her, though, claiming to be the ghost of someone she’s wronged, it accelerates her self-destructive cycle and leads her into a confrontation with all she’s been avoiding. The story is at turns sensual and chaotic, messy and clever, weaving a mystery around what’s happening to Lydia even as she begins to realize that there are things she can’t just edit out of her brain – there are things she has to face and remember despite how unpleasant, painful, or shameful they might be. Only through that work can she come to terms with who she is, and who she can be. Lagor does brilliant work with Lydia and the cast of characters around her, keeping readers guessing while still eager for the next twist in this rollercoaster of a story.
I’m really proud of that story, so I’m happy that folks seemed to enjoy it. Writing that story really helped me work out how I might edit future long-form projects, and since December, I’ve started work on a novel draft which, just yesterday, I sailed past 50,000 words on. Part of the joy of this project is all the research reading I’ve been doing on exoplanets, astrobiology, and microbiology, and revisiting old first contact stories I’ve loved in the past.
In fiction news, I have another story out in Analog in the current May/June issue. “Making Gnocchi at the End of the World” is a science fictionesque tale about two women in the Scottish Highlands struggling to make homemade pasta while a chimerization epidemic is ending the world around them. I got interviewed about how this story came together, and you can read that over at the Astounding Analog Companion blog! Here’s an excerpt:
I wanted my apocalypse to be more Ballardian: one that’s biologically unexplainable and completely unavoidable, with a kind of intimacy to the fear it evoked. Inspired in part by a Rik and Morty episode involving characters spontaneously turning inside out (“Cronenberging”), and in part by the thoughtful body horror of director David Cronenberg (who adapted Ballard’s novel Crash into a 1996 movie), I decided on spontaneous chimerization as the driving force behind the end of the world, in which the genomes in some of our cells suddenly decide to crawl back in evolutionary time to recall some last common ancestor, then progress forward again down a different branch. It became a way to not only sew a deep sense of paranoia into my characters due to its spontaneous nature and monstrous results, but also how I could make the mythical inspiration behind the Loch Ness monster, the kelpie, into a real character in the story.
I also just found out today that I’ve sold Analog another story! I’ll save writing more about this one for my next post.
As far as essays go, I’ve had another few come out since November.
There are two recent installments in my Speculative Screencraft essay series in Asimov‘s. The first is on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the Hollywood Blacklist during the McCarthy Era, and the tactics that cultures (and their literature) use to dehumanize cultural Others. “Dehumanization, Un-Americans, and Pod People in Invasion of the Body Snatchers” appeared in the January/February 2024 issue.
The most recent installment appears in the current May/June issue – “Giant Monsters, Kaiju and the Bomb in Godzilla.” Pick up an issue to check it out! I’ll post the link to the archived version on my “Writing” page once it’s up.
I’m also super excited that my first essay for Analog has been published. I’ve been pretty stoked on starting to write Science Fact articles. I really love researching and writing about both hot topics in and the history of biology, so I have plans to write Analog a few essays a year about different biological topics. This first was about the history of the subfield of epigenetics, and the history of various aspects of that field’s portrayal in science fiction. “Genetic Memory, Clones, and Epigenetics” appeared in the March/April issue.
In more life updates, another Rainforest Writer’s Retreat has come and gone, and I managed to get about 6,000 words of writing in (in which I finished up a long-languishing short story about fungi and noise rock, and got started in earnest on the aforementioned novel). It was lovely to pod up with my fellow Bruisers and friends, especially that last night where it kept pooping down snow and we worried it might never stop.
My band played another show at Black Cat along with our drummer’s other band, Dream Burglar, after which i finally fired my old amp and acquired a new (secondhand) amp from my bandmate. We’ve gotten too loud and noisy these past few years that my old (perma-borrowed) one just couldn’t cut it anymore.
We also took a trip down to Coahuila and Durango down in Mexico to experience our first total eclipse, and it was so much more of a wild experience than we had thought it would be. My girlfriend had read that you don’t just see an eclipse, you feel one too, and man was that an understatement. We could absolutely understand why some people become eclipse chasers.
Otherwise, there have been books read, friends hung with, shows seen, bands danced to, and video games beaten. I’ve got some deadlines coming up again shortly, so the novel writing will be slowed down a bit by an essay on Clockwork Orange and another on the story of the most ancient life on earth of all. Life (and writing) continues apace!
I hope you’ve all been doing as well as you can be, considering whatever needs to be considered.