Writing

You know it’s been A Year when the thing you remember most is Story Land, which felt like two years ago until you looked up the thread about it and realized it was only a handful of months ago that you first went to the only currently-operating haunted theme park in the States. It’s called Story Land, and its champion is Humpty Dumpty, the only currently-operating theme park mascot with a human soul trapped in it pic.twitter.com/8JTpU3TwKp — Genevieve Valentine (@GLValentine) September 4, 2018 But Story Land wasn’t the only good thing that happened this year. There was also Face Jug! (2018 was eight years long; I’ll take joy where I can find it.) I wrote quite a bit this year, and did work on several projects, but that’s a post for future me. Here are some things I published this year.   SHORT STORIES “Abandonware,” about despair, video games, and deer, was published at Lightspeed. Mozilla’s IRL podcast asked me to write a story about what I saw as the future of elections. If… Read more »

This year has been terrible. (Not the beginning of a personal essay, just an observation on everything in general. I genuinely don’t know if there’s more to say; certainly I can add nothing beyond that, except that if 2017 felt like a boulder pinning you down, you are not alone.) This is some of the work I did this year. FICTION This year involved a lot of work on projects that aren’t out (some of which aren’t even announced yet), but I had three short works come out this year. Novelette: “Intro to Prom,” Clarkesworld (ed. Neil Clarke). Four teens, prom, a city underwater, abandonment, prom, the end of the world, and prom. Short Story: “Overburden,” Infinity Wars (ed. Jonathan Strahan). A Colonel of the Glorious Forces watches a foot soldier dealing with carp, orders people killed, complains about the coffee, thinks the enemy is someone else’s fault, and learns a few technical terms about mining. Short Story: “A Comfort, One Way,” Mad Hatters and March Hares (ed. Ellen Datlow). The Duchess, Alices and Mary… Read more »

Well, the live-action Disney Beauty and the Beast remake has come out! And it turns out, I must have been waiting my whole life for this day, because all of March was basically me being unable to shut up about Beauty and the Beast in any form, for several reasons. First up was the official review for Ars Technica; I had made a reference to “Something There That Wasn’t There Before,” but I appreciate that the actual headline makes no bones about my overall feelings. There are some bright spots (Luke Evans as Gaston is visibly thrilled to be breaking through at last, after stumbling through several other potential franchises), but overall it’s a flashy, echoing Disney experiment. Does any of it work? Well, all this modernized polish certainly demonstrates the effective leanness of the original. Nothing highlights the emotional heart of a movie more than surrounding it with so much filler you can barely find what you came for. But with so little substance at its center, the rest of the movie defaults to… Read more »

Well, this was a hell of a year. 2016 was illuminating on all levels. [I had some specifics here, but I erased them for being too personal. My reticence to talk about myself was definitely one of the things this year illuminated! And yet, here we are.] For that reason, I also find it hard to talk about how grateful I am for the people who read my stuff. I don’t tend to talk about it, because that means acknowledging feelings and if there is one thing my social media feed will tell you, it’s that I do not like having public feelings. But if you read my stuff, trust me: It means a lot. (Earlier this year, people wrote in to the AV Club about Elementary to the point that they revived coverage and asked me back to write recaps for this season; that felt pretty great, actually.) Anyway, work continued, and there’s some stuff I did this year that I’m really proud of. Below, some highlights of what I published in 2016! FICTION… Read more »

I wrote some fiction recently! We’ll start from the top. First, I’m very happy to have a novelette in Clarkesworld’s tenth anniversary issue! “Everyone from Themis Sends Letters Home” is a story about systems of power, also bread. (Also, generally speaking, don’t name your first settlement on a new planet after the personification of long habit, social stasis, and rightful order. That’s asking for trouble.)   Second, my story “Familiaris” is in The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales! It’s based on a very interesting Bavarian fairy tale that is extremely concerned with ambivalence toward motherhood. My story is about that ambivalence, and what stories about motherhood can do. It’s not pretty, but neither is the original, so it works out. I mean, if you don’t want to have one,” he says, that single line down the center of his forehead like his face is about to peel. “Someday,” she says. His hand is too tight in her hand. One of them is sweating. # The prince and princess had no child. Eventually, wolves. # Long… Read more »