Bram Stoker Prize Preliminary Ballot, Sci-Fi and Poetry, Taxes and January Hibernation, and Two Books Coming Out This Year

Very grateful and happy to announce that The Robot Scientist’s Daughter made the preliminary ballot for the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Prize (check out the other authors on this ballot – Clive Barker? Guiellermo del Toro? What???) Now to wait for the final ballot vote, which happens February 15! I’ve only been part of the HWA for a year, so this was unexpected! Thanks, Marge Simon (also on the poetry part of the ballot) for encouraging me to join! Like the Science Fiction Poetry Association, the HWA is a group I wish I’d found earlier, writers who love the same things I do. I’m a poet, but the sometimes rarified air of the poetry crowd – who, for instance, don’t watch television at all, never idolized Buffy or had a crush on Mulder – used to make me feel lonely. I feel lucky to now not only have poet friends, but writer friends of all stripes who also self-identify as geeks.

Thinking a lot, as The X-Files returns to television and as I’ve been re-reading beloved books from my childhood, how much science fiction and horror, in book, film, and television serial form, have impacted the work I do as a poet and as a human. I’ve always lived in a world where robot arms and Geiger counters were a normal part of childhood, where fish might glow with radioactive waste, and as an adult, have learned more than I wanted to about the caprices of genetic mutation. So I guess speculative fiction never seemed as speculative to me as it might to some. The worlds of Madeleine L’Engle or Ray Bradbury, The Twilight Zone or yes, The X-Files, seemed closer to my truth than soap operas, police procedurals or romance novels (or, come to think of it, the work of Robert Frost, for example) ever did. This probably explains why I write the books I write. I remember in 2006 hearing that Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow were going to include one of my poems in 2007’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, thinking, “Is that what I write, after all? Fantasy and horror?” Because up to that time, I’d just thought of myself as a really out-there poet who wrote about comic-book supervillains and fairy-tale curses and science who didn’t really fit in anywhere, I certainly didn’t know that there were more like me out there. Anyway, weirdo-geeky  poets, unite, I say!

I’ve been both sick and commanded to stay off my feet as a foot/ankle injury heals, and during that enforced downtime I’ve managed to work on my 2015 taxes (dreary!), work on edits for my PR for Poets book, work on my NEA application, update my CV and Interfolio account and apply for a teaching job, work on essays and sent in the latest draft of my next poetry book for Moon City Press, Field Guide to the End of the World.  While staying in is not good for my social life – I missed a couple of friends’ readings – it is good for getting work done.

That’s one thing January in Seattle teaches us  – I can pretty much count on catching a couple of viruses (and, historically, at least one weird injury) and it’s not so inviting to go out in bitter cold rain and when it gets dark around 4:45 PM, but the opportunity to stay in, read and write are a given. In the summertime, when the blue skies can last til nine or ten at night and the mountains and trees and water around us look so inviting, it can be harder to create a lot of alone time. Seattle-ites shuck off their sweaters and lattes and basically become more manic (because Seattle-ites know their sunshine is only available for a limited time) Californians for three months, optimistic and outdoorsy. But January is a time for hibernation, wearing nothing but sweaters, yoga pants and rain-appropriate footwear, for computer geeks and for writers alike to get stuff done.

The reality (gulp) of having two books come out in a year – the Two Sylvias non-fiction book first and then my next poetry book in November – is starting to hit me. Have I signed on for too much? It’s a little overwhelming, but I hope I’m up to the task! Hoping the rest of 2016 is a little more cheerful, a little more sickness-and-injury free, but productive nonetheless!