Monday afternoon, I handed in my master’s thesis, the first third of a novel. The past few months have been a haze of cutting, tweaking, and deepening, going places I didn’t want to go the first time around. My dear friend Karen and I have been texting each other at 5:30 in the morning to get our asses out of bed and in front of the computer. We send each other terrible pictures of our coffee. Jen has been joining me downstairs to do her own writing, keeping me company during my long, private slog.

Monday night, I found out my story “Swift, Brutal Retaliation” was nominated for a Nebula award. I had just gotten out of class and started cursing in the middle of the quad. This is my first nomination ever. It is super awesome. As I’ve said before, science fiction has an incredible tradition of celebrating short fiction, and it’s an honor to get to be a part of that. And capping off that private slog with such a public celebration is a gift. I’m in incredible company, and I can’t wait to get fancy in San Jose.

Whoa, today is my 30th birthday. Originally, Jen and I were going to be in Marfa, but the car’s transmission kept us home. So I’m ringing in 30 in a more mellow manner. I got up this morning and rewrote the first two scenes of my novel. Jen and I will bake a cake, and do dinner and drinks tonight. I like the idea of stretching 30 out, anyway – my twenties demand a lengthy celebration/exorcism.

My twenties seem like they about more than anything else, of becoming. My teenage years left me with a mess of raw materials, and I spent the past ten years attempting to mold them into something I could work with, sometime like what I wanted to be. Nowhere is this more true than in my writing. I went to Clarion when I was twenty-one, and sold my first story that same year. When I was twenty-three or so, I did the publishing math and decided that if I was going to publish a novel before I was thirty, I had better get moving. I cannot begin to express how grateful I am that younger me wrote that book, and that she set it aside and kept going. It would be terrifying to ever stop becoming, of course. But I’m looking forward to more being and doing. To speaking with a solid voice.

Below the cut is a list of thirty books, songs, and meals I found memorable or formative. Not the best. Not even the most important. Experiences that have stuck around. Unfortunately, for books & music especially, the list cuts out at several years ago, since I’m not sure what that I encountered lately will “stick around.” I tried not to make any of it hipper than it actually is, and listed things in order, more or less, of when I encountered them.

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The year I worked in Hollywood – and by “worked in Hollywood” I mean “looked busy staring glassily at spreadsheets” – I was confused by the number of For Your Consideration ads in the trades. Um, yeah, I think we all know about Brokeback Mountain, you guys. Conversely, I have no idea what came out in science fiction and fantasy publishing last year. I do know, however, that I want to see lots of women up for Fan Writer and to vote for My Little Pony.

Let’s face it: “for your consideration” posts are weird. But science fiction is a literary community where the major awards are voted on by a large-ish number of its members, and short fiction is a bigger part of the ballot than novels are. That is really rare, and worth preserving. If a side effect of that voting structure means we all have to remind each other of what actually came out last year instead of crossing our fingers that someone connected passes on our work to closed a jury, I’m down.

In 2012, I had one story and one “novelette” come out. Both are available online and linked below.

NOVELETTE:

Swift, Brutal Retaliation - Tor.com. My editor described the story as “a haunted prank war gone wrong.” It’s been picked up for both Jonathan Strahan’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year and Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy.

SHORT STORY:

Lovecraft in Brooklyn – The Revelator. Charlie Jane Anders described this story as tackling “hipsters, racism and gentrification in a truly creepy, Lovecraft-inspired way” over at io9.

STORIES I’M REALLY EXCITED ABOUT:

Unstuck #2 came out in December, and it features some truly fantastic fiction from familiar SFF names and names that everyone who loves SFF should be familiar with. Plus, both the physical and e-book copies are gorgeous. Please check it out!

Allow me to belatedly suggest a new year’s resolution: changing your reading habits. I did at the beginning of last year, and it lead to the richest year of reading I’ve ever had.

I used to be a one-book-at-a-time serial monogamist. How this practice started, I don’t know. Probably at age eight I made up the rule and never questioned it again. Whenever I finished a book, I would sit around in a heartbroken heap for a few days (this also reflects my relationship to actual serial monogamy, if you switch out “days” for “years”) and alternate between not reading and obsessing about which book to pick next.

Many of the great readers I know, like Alice and Jen, are always reading at least three to four books at once. So I switched up monogamy for poly-reading, and it was glorious. I could start up difficult books and not worry about having to spend uninterrupted time reading difficultly, and I could read fluffy or blandly informative books without having to worry about being stuck in fluff for a week. Book grief happened much less regularly, and I was able to both chase obsessions and to branch out more in my reading.

I’m really no good at listing my “favorite” books, or making a list of the “best.” Instead, this is a list of the books that make me think “Oooo, yeah, that was great,” and that seem worth sharing with the Internet.

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A brief note: I’m extremely excited to announce that along with Christopher Barzak, I’ll be editing fiction for a new online incarnation of the acclaimed Interfictions anthologies, sponsored by the Interstitial Arts Foundation. The incredible Sofia Samatar will be handling non-fiction and poetry. Thanks so much to  Delia Sherman for bringing us all together. We’ll be launching spring of 2013, paying five cents/word. The website is still being built, but you can find more details on our submittable page. We will open for subs in February – please send us something weird, wonderful, and deliciously undefined.

Me & Alice Sola Kim at Clarion West in 2004

I was kind of a Clarion stalker this summer.

The stalking was unplanned. I follow Carmen on Twitter, and she went to Clarion this year.  Thus, my usual twitter feed mishmash of liberal fury, gluten free cupcakes, and jokes about comic books I’ve never read was punctuated by reports on life inside the Clarion bubble. Clarion, for anyone reading who doesn’t know, is an intensive six-week writing workshop held every summer for aspiring SFF writers – sort of like an MFA on crank, with more arguments about time travel paradoxes. The intensity that burns there is awe-inspiring, and the cliche is that it “changes your life.”

I went to Clarion West eight years ago. Not a particularly significant anniversary, but also kind of a long time. Long enough that I can say definitively that I am living the cliche: Clarion changed my life. When I say “changed my life,” I don’t mean “dramatically.” If someone had said, “Hey, Meghan, in eight years you’ll be living with another lady science fiction writer in Austin and rewriting that novel again,” I wouldn’t exactly have been surprised. But reading the semi-live reports hammered home how my life was rerouted by Clarion, if not dramatically, then completely.

I’ve been thinking about Clarion for another reason: I did the Clarion West Write-A-Thon. I signed up in a “what the hell” kind of mood, but I took my pledge really, really seriously. I had made a sacred oath not on, but to the internet. My goal was 700-1,000 words a day, and 300 words on “travel” days. I thought the game changer would be the 1k a day, but actually it was the 300. No way would I be closing in on the end now without them.

An example: back in June, I went to Sycamore Hill. I never used to write during Sycamore Hill. In fact, the workshop’s intensity knocked the wind out of me for weeks, writing-wise. But this year, after a day of workshopping, I stole a glass of whiskey from Richard & Christopher’s room and made three hundred terrible words. Most of them were cut a few weeks later. But I didn’t stop writing after the workshop. The three hundred words kept the novel moving forward, and they kept my head in the game.

To some writers, this is business as usual, but to me it was a revelation: the long game instead of the sprint. At Clarion, I learned how to write a story a week cloistered in a humid sorority house that never quite stopped smelling like Bath & Body Works. Now I’m finally learning how to write a novel wherever my ass happens to find a chair. Honestly, the latter seems more useful.

On the phone with a friend recently, we observed that the only thing writing really has to offer is the opportunity to make friends with a bunch of fascinating weirdos. We were both bitching about our novels, but now I could add one other thing: writing offers meaningful work. Or, to put it in a more Catholic context: writing offers a site of devotion. Publishing is awesome, and it’s a great way to make friends who will listen to you bitch on the phone about your novel, but I’m trying my darndest to embrace the long stretches where I have nothing else to offer but my quiet, stupid hard work.

The back roads between Bantry and Glengarriff

This weekend, I biked 56 miles and wrote 3700 words. I’d like to, in solidarity with other writers, say that the 3700 words was harder, but truth be told, the cycling was the thing that did me in. Thirty miles has been my upper limit for awhile, and doing two days of that in terrain more mountainous than I’ve ever attempted was, well, painful. By my second day on rollercoaster back roads, I was making sad, pathetic sounds whenever I saw another hill.

This is very pretty but I assure you it was also long, and steep, okay?

I’m not in the habit of finding my physical limits anymore. Even when I did push myself to that shaking, gasping place, it was mostly because I was too out of shape for field hockey tryouts. Feeling my arms and legs tremble, being ready to kill someone for a banana, ending the climb back up the house I was staying in with the mantra You don’t have to do this tomorrow - it was terrible, but it was also kind of awesome. It was a revelation: OK, at the moment, this is what I can do.

The guidebook did not mention this 7th.century Christian pillar was in a field full of cows.

The physical endurance revealed other things. For instance, how awesome it is to stop. Every historic thing, I stopped at it. The ancients liked to put things up on hills, but that was okay. I was not climbing that hill on my bike. I couldn’t stop myself from having an automatic “Let’s take a million pictures of this!” response, but after awhile I remembered that I should be, like, experiencing Ireland and sat down. The views ceased to be scenic, the monuments ceased to be historic. It didn’t matter that my ass hurt. I was there, in a place where people a really long time ago thought maybe it might be good to feel humble, or at least to pay attention.

Standing stone, post-marching-through-bog, pre-noticing-goats. It points right out to sea.

I don’t know what people thousands of years ago were thinking. I can be 100% sure they were not thinking, Why did I not put an easier gear onto my bicycle? But part of my fascination with old stuff is how it transmits a broad, garbled message to the effect of “This is important.” I have no idea why these places, or stones, were important. They might not even have been that important. And sadly they are important to me because someone very long dead found them important, so my own reaction is equally garbled. What I do know is, I’m glad I heard all the bumblebees and smelled all the cowshit on my way up, instead of passing through the landscape in a car. When I sat down, I knew where I was, and I knew I should be grateful to be there.

Writing: way less exciting in every way.

I don’t mean to knock the 3700 words. I made a near-impossible deal with myself that I could go abroad to Ireland if I still worked on my novel over the summer. I’ve been keeping up this bargain, but the writing has been unpleasant teeth-pulling, squeezed in around class at times of the day where I tend to hate, like, my face, let alone words I’ve produced. So the other half of this weekend was renting a stupid nice room in a gorgeous house** via airbnb and working all morning. I took time to read over old parts of the book and re-orient myself. I finally had time to digest the critique and advice I got at Sycamore Hill over a month ago. By the end of the weekend, the book had reverted back to being mine. A thing I need to keep making no matter how long and dumb and stupid the process is. Which is really long, and dumb, and stupid. Accomplishing what I actually want to accomplish is currently beyond my limits. But it was so pleasurable to work, and also to stop, and take a look around.

*I did read Wild this weekend. The book was both totally my thing and totally the thing I want to be way more than it actually can be. Definitely worth reading if you like fantastic moments of lady toughness.

**If you would like to see more pictures of cows, and also some teenagers staring at prom pictures, I made a set on Flickr.

For someone who blogs as little as I do, I think about it a lot. Back when I was on Live Journal, I enjoyed having a space where I could ramble on at will, but I didn’t like the way platform handled images, so I shifted over to Tumblr. I’ve tried doing some longer text posts on my tumblr, but I’m going to be honest: I barely read anyone’s longform post on Tumblr. Also, Tumblr is as shit at text and images as Live Journal. Then I remembered that I technically had another blog. It was just hiding out here, invisible.

Travel always makes me feel like I have Something to Say, for better or for worse. I’d like to have a perspective to offer no matter where I was. But the truth is if I were in Texas right now I’d be hiding out on the couch with my dog thinking about how boring I am.

But I am not in Texas! I’m spending five weeks studying abroad in Cork. Man oh man, do I have things to say about that. Ninety percent of them are “Whoa, it’s raining again,” or “Lookit that green mountain.” But there are a few things that don’t fit in a tweet. They do not even fit in a Facebook post. They are Long.

Look, the internet doesn’t lie. There is evidence scattered across it of me saying, “Guys, I am totally going to start blogging now” and then no posts for three months. But I think I can manage to tell you some stories about Ireland. Cool? Cool.

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Today, here is a story in pictures:

I decided to do something kind of crazy and shipped my bike to myself. The wheels had already arrived by the time I got here on Sunday. The frame arrived the next day, but customs wanted 224 Euros for it, and so they wouldn’t give it to the front desk. I took a cab down to the south post office, where they had my package – I could see it through the window – but it had to be sent back to customs to have the charge taken off. Basically, I had my wheels but no frame for five days.

Lo, today the frame arrived! I got these boxes from a bike shop in Austin after a series of emails with the shipping guy. He even cut down the size of the frame box to make sure they fit. Finally, my bicycle is whole.

After this picture was taken, I convinced Jene not to butcher me in the bike cage and instead to use her  knife for good to open the boxes Jen had so obsessively taped at the Austin post office.

I spent the next half hour or so feeling super-tough whenever I asked Jene to hand me the pedal wrench. Re-assembling the bike wasn’t hard, though I did call the rack a dirty motherfucker at least three times.

Now the bicycle is ready to go! Except that there’s something janky about the front break. But who needs front breaks? Surely there will be a sheep for me to fall on top of whenever I need to stop.