Author: Ada Hoffmann

(Content Note: This is a Disability Day of Mourning post, so there will be some mentions of filicide.)

As the Disability Day of Mourning nears, I’m thinking about who lives and who dies in the stories we tell.

I’m thinking about a movie I watched with my family as a tween. My brain is telling me it was South Pacific, but I just looked up the plot and confused myself, so I’m not going to say it was definitely that movie. It was an old movie in a jaunty wartime setting, without showing much actual war, and near the end, a character who had gotten into a fairly complicated personal situation ended up dying unexpectedly for war reasons before he could sort any of it out. (The character was an able-bodied, straight, white man. I’m not talking about disability yet.) I was weirded out; it seemed like an unsatisfying ending. I asked my mom why he’d died.

“Well,” she said, “at that point, he wasn’t going to have a happy ending anyway.”

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Two years ago, for Autism Month 2021, I set up a series of interviews with autistic writers.

This year I’m doing it again – but with a twist.

(Read the full post on Substack)

It’s old news now, but sometimes I still think about that study that went viral two years ago, purporting to show that autistic people are “too moral,” and that this was somehow a deficit.

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It’s been a while! I wanted to do this in late December / early January but things kind of got away from me with the Advent calendar and book promo. So, better late than never; I might as well do it now.

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As promised, here is a second piece of autofanfiction as a thank-you to my readers! This story may or may not be canon, but either way, it has a Sispirinithas.

NOTE: This story contains ENDING SPOILERS for THE INFINITE. If you’d rather not read the spoilers but would like some exciting book-launch-related news, you can jump to the end of the post. There’ll be a big graphic; you can’t miss it.

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I love making playlists and I make a point of creating one for every book I write. My book playlists aren’t music I listen to while actually writing – I prefer silence for that – but they’re songs I listen to at quiet moments in the day, like on the bus or while doing housework. They make me think of my book and smile, and maybe even get inspired a little about what should happen.

I’ve been working on keeping my playlists cohesive in terms of genre and feel. It’s not always an easy task, since I listen to everything from bouncy pop music to metal to classical and my books tend to involve a lot of different feelings. But I’m getting better at it, and THE INFINITE’s playlist turned out very consistent with itself. Get ready to raise your horns and bang your head as we finish off this trilogy with a FITE.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on YouTube

Below, I’m going to share a little bit about why I picked each song and what part of the book it represents to me – keeping things as spoiler-light as I can!

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Every once in a while I see someone complaining that the representation in a certain book, or a certain film or other media, feels shallow and cynical – that the author is merely “ticking boxes” of what kind of people to include, rather than engaging more deeply with marginalized readers’ concerns.

This kind of complaint isn’t always on the mark – sometimes it assumes things about the author’s motivations that aren’t correct. But it is possible to just tick boxes – even from a position of good intent – when you could be doing something more.

In fact – dramatic confession time – I used to approach representation this way myself.

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Only two more weeks until THE INFINITE drops into bookstores!

Today’s Advent Calendar goodie is a Pinterest board – or really, it’s that I updated the Pinterest board I use for the whole series. All the original pins for THE OUTSIDE and THE FALLEN are still there, plus I’ve added three new sections just for THE INFINITE:

• Cover references. (I adore the cover art by Fred Gambino for this book – it depicts a very special scene from near the end of the book and I won’t spoil the context or what it means! But I can share these reference pictures I assembled while we were puzzling out what to put on the cover – they’re early examples of just what kind of cosmic horror entity we’re encountering here.)
• NEMESIS-1. There are flashbacks in this book to the origin of the Gods, and this section assembles some aesthetics and vibes for those sections – both the supercomputer labs where the actual God-assembly is happening, and the dire climactic conditions outside.
• Battle of Jai. We all know a big battle is coming in this book! Here’s some of the coolest suitable battle art that I could find – including big orbital warships, things crashing and blowing up, and even Outside-style monsters flying through the skies.

Many of the earlier sections of the Pinterest board (such as “Characters” and “Ruins of the Chaos Zone”) are all still quite relevant to THE INFINITE.

Enjoy!

Meanwhile:

• Check out this sumptuous interview with me in Clarkesworld Magazine.
• I’ll be on the Glasgow 2024 virtual panel on Neurodiversity in SFF next Wednesday! Get your tickets here.
• THE INFINITE is on Every Book a Doorway’s list of unmissable Fantasy & Scifi of 2023 – and Reads Rainbow’s compilation of LGBT books of January.
• Want a review copy of THE INFINITE for your very own? There’s a sign-up form for that here.

I love to do yearly retrospectives / top 10s and this year I’ve done one using my own proprietary formula! (Not all that proprietary, really. Substack has its own idea of which are the “top posts,” but it strongly favors paywalled posts, doesn’t integrate with WordPress – necessary when my Autistic Book Party posts, for backwards compatibility reasons, are still posted there – and doesn’t automatically separate the posts by year, so I just ran my own numbers for the visible stats on each of my 2022 posts and guessed wildly at how to weight things like hits vs comments vs likes.)

So what were the best posts on Everything Is True this past year? Let’s count them down!

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