(You can also read this post on Buttondown.)
Or actually it came out a week and a half ago, but I’ve been avoiding my newsletter. But anyway, Thinking Ink Press’s anthology of alien encounter stories featuring neurodivergent protagonists is out now and you should buy it!
I’m honored to be one of the anchor authors for this anthology – it features my flash story, “Music, Not Words,” about a minimally verbal teenage girl who starts hearing alien messages that aren’t verbal at all. “Music, Not Words” was solicited specifically for this anthology. I’m even more honored that this puts me in a category with other anchor authors that include Tobias S. Buckell, Jody Lynn Nye, and Cat Rambo.
(I think of myself as midlist small potatoes, but when it comes to the very specific niche topic of Autism In Speculative Fiction, it looks like I still am that bitch.)
Even better, you can read the first page of “Music, Not Words” as an excerpt on the book’s website. (You’ll need to scroll down a bit.)
I’ve been writing less short fiction and less poetry lately so I can focus on novels (there is a lot of novel stuff going on behind the scenes; I will have a novel related announcement for you eventually I swear) but I still do enjoy these forms and it’s great to get something of them out in the world.
Meanwhile!
I said I owed you some more recommendations, especially for nonfiction/poetry/other formats, but then I never did it, partly because I was so comically behind that I found myself trying to put together thoughts about stale blog posts that I read months ago when they were already months old, and that was so cringe, I just could not do it. So I’m giving myself amnesty! Clean review slate! Next newsletter, you will get a fresh set of recommendations that are strictly for things I’ve read in the time since this current one. Everything else goes in the trash, sorry, bye.
(Although, speaking of poetry: How ‘bout that poetry Hugo. I am excited about this.)
In the meantime, though, I want to give a quick shout-out to two things I watched in the last couple of months that I’m still absolutely feral over.
The Acolyte (Disney+)
Everyone knows I am Star Wars trash, but I was honestly getting so bored with it after Ahsoka that I let my Disney+ subscription lapse. But then the trailer for this thing came out and it reeled my little Dark Side heart all the way back in. Look, there are certain ways of looking at and interpreting Star Wars that are very personal to me and that I don’t go around expecting the rest of the fandom to share. And it’s like Leslye Headland reached in and plucked those things right out of me and put them on the screen. I’m not even okay about it. I love this so much.
If you want a more objective type of review then I will say that The Acolyte intelligently questions some of the underlying assumptions of the rest of Star Wars in a way that no one else has been brave enough to do since The Last Jedi; it stands on its own merits as a twisty little mystery-thriller instead of putting all its emotional weight into tie-ins and callbacks; and it trusts the viewer enough to throw some really fun unreliable-narrator curveballs into the mix. It’s worth watching. I wish the hatey fanboys weren’t so loud.
The 2024 Paris Olympics
I know, I know. You all already know what this is, and you either watched it too, or are sick of the entire concept. Okay but here’s a fun fact about me: I really love the Olympics. For the rest of the year I do not really think about sports at all, but then every two years this thing happens and for a couple of weeks I get completely obsessed. I love the spectacle! I love the drama! I love how it’s all the countries in the world, competing at everything at once! RIP to everyone who tried to talk to me between July 26 – August 11, because it was nothing but Olympics Infodumps all day.
(Like: Did you know that every different cycling sport has a different style of bike helmet, and women boxers wear helmets but men don’t, because their different styles of boxing lead to slightly different types of head injury risks! Did you know how many different ways there are to score in freestyle wrestling! Did you know that they had to pause the women’s speed climbing competition because the climbers are supposed to hit a big button to register their time when they get to the top and the buttons stopped working! Did you know that the girl who got dogpiled for breakdancing badly has actually been breaking competitively for over a decade, but took time off so she could write a PhD thesis about gender in Australian breaking culture! Yeah? Yeah. Also Canada broke our record for the most number of medals at a non-boycotted summer Olympics, although given Russia’s conspicuous absence from every sport this year, I would question whether it is appropriate to call it “non-boycotted” for this purpose…)
Anyway, that’s all from me. Hope you are all well, and are also finding plenty of things to be excited about, despite gestures around you know, the world lately.
Best,
Ada