Eligibility Post

Eligibility Post — my first

I’ve never written an eligibility post before, but it’s that time of year and I decided that I wanted to highlight my 2020 short stories.

My two new stories out this year are:

Advanced Word Problems in Portal Math, Daily Science Fiction (January 2020)

This story is probably the closest to my heart of all the stories I’ve written. I took one thing I love (portal fantasies) and mashed it with something I always disliked (word problems) to create this story about who is considered worthy of a portal travel. As a kid, I hated how CS Lewis treated Susan because she "betrayed" the ideals of Narnia by (shock!) wearing lipstick and nylons. A lot of fantasies today portray girls and women as heroic because they take on traditional "male" traits like fighting skills. But it's not the portal worlds that are deciding what matters, it's us, of course.

I wrote this story before the pandemic, but I feel like it’s only taken on more resonance since then. So many people are doing heroic work by just holding it together, holding their families together, and trying to get through the day — it’s not sword fighting or great acts of bravery, but it’s courage nonetheless.

This story really struck a chord with people — one note that has stuck with me was from a woman in her 70s who said my story expressed how she has felt her entire life. It also received some nice reviews, such as Tor.com, which named it a “Must Read” story for January 2020.

It’s funny that a few people have asked me what the correct answer is to Problem 4. I hope it’s obvious!

Solo Cooking for the Recently Revived, Apocalyptic, July 2020
I was a slush reader for Clarkesworld for 1.5 years, which is known for its wonderful science fiction. But it also is known for its submission rules, including a ban on zombie stories.

As soon as I finished slushing for Clarkesworld, I got an itch to write a zombie story.

No one can sell a zombie story, plenty of people said.

Well … technically, there are no zombies in this story. The MC is a cured zombie, who is learning how to be human again. But the humans don’t really want to reintegrate with the cured zombies, and some of the post-zombies don’t want to live with humans. This is a piece about overcoming trauma, and how sometimes it’s the little things, like sharing a drink with someone who is different than you, that can be a first step toward reconciliation.