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2020 Showcase

I have no idea why I haven’t thought of this before. Since it is award nomination season, I can do a showcase post!

As usual, the Hugo category that is most pertinent to me is the “Best Fan Writer”, which in my case would be in recognition of writing 250+ pieces of microfiction over the year and regularly bringing my readers (I hope) joy, food for thought, or a dose of silliness. If you like that sort of thing, and are qualified to nominate, please consider me for this category.

Unusually, I did not write any short stories that are publically available (there are a couple which I wrote as a little bonus for my patrons on Patreon and Ko-Fi), and no new Advent tale. 2020 was hard for productivity.

Here is a Twitter search for my stories over the year, though it only seems to bring back 60 or so – there is probably a cap on how many tweets they want to return. You can play with dates and number of faves to see what it yields.

And as a quick showcase, the most engaged-with tweet for every month, with some commentary:

January

This one came about after seeing yet another whine about it being “historically incorrect” to have black people or women warriors in period dramas or games. Given that there have been documented examples of both in at least Western and Central Europe for the last couple of millennia, it is just tiresome to see.

This story caused a lot of debate, which is always a bit scary to see. I am grateful that my readers tend to be reasonably polite and respectful to others.

February

I miss sword fighting practice. Not for flirting reasons, but simply because it’s a lot of fun. And I miss seeing my fighting friends.

March

All fiction, but especially genre fiction, builds on and plays with ideas and concepts conceived by earlier writers, used and told in new ways. “Spaceship Earth” was a concept first (I think) invented by Buckminster Fuller in the 1960s, and is by now a quite well-known trope, often used in pop-science TV programs.

A lot of my stories use genre tropes, because that saves space. So if you think you recognise an idea in a story from somewhere else, you’re probably right (or both riff off an older story).

Having said that, it is important to recognise that an idea does not make a story, and that how a story is told is generally more important than the idea(s) expressed by it, in terms of the impact the story has on the reader/listener.

April

Written after two weeks of the first UK Covid-19 lockdown.

May

Yeah. Some days it’s harder than others to get up and get going. Try to be kind to yourself.

June

Black Lives Matter.

July

By this time it felt like 2020 had been going for a couple of years. Now that it’s over, I haven’t changed my mind.

August

Don’t really have much to add to this one. I like public libraries. I think they’re one of humanity’s greatest inventions.

September

Hmm, yes.

October

Black Lives still Matter.

November

Everyone doesn’t always fit into neat little well-defined boxes. I made a comment about a story I wrote for Bi Visibility Day in September which also applies here:

Reading all the comments on this I can only conclude that “genre” is fluid, and a social construct.

December

Partially inspired by the Sotherans rare book shop, partially by Aziraphale’s shop in Good Omens, partially by some favourite book shops I haven’t been able to visit for far too long.

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