It’s that time of year again and I’m not talking about the holidays, though I’m excited for American Thanksgiving next week. (Four day weekend and homemade cranberry sauce!) Award season for the science fiction, fantasy, and horror community has begun, and it’s good practice to post a year end round up of your work and where to find it.
Also, since Twitter seems on the verge of collapse, I thought I’d mention that you can find me on Mastodon at @atgreenblatt@wandering.shop.
Also, I’m hoping to post on this blog weekly.
Okay, onto the stories. It’s been a bit of a rocky year for me in terms of writing, but three stories of mine were published and in some excellent venues.
Published March 2022 in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. 7,600 words (novelette)
“It should be noted here, at the beginning of the record, that the decision to invite such an esteemed and unknowable entity was not made lightly nor without a great deal of heated debate among the crew. [Addition: Upon reflection, Pilot Uma and Navigator Wilson conducted most of the debate and, ultimately, made the decision. The events that followed could have perhaps been avoided had they sought wider counsel.] However, it was agreed by all that the potential results were worth the risk. The crew was eager to
Published January 2022 in Slate Magazine. 7,000 words (short story)
“The open road is just potholes and misery, but Sabrina loves it anyway. Not that she has anything against the national train system, trains are great. But it’s the challenge, the potential to rebuild everything, that has her doing final checks on Gran’s old Jeep at the starting line of the Great American Road Race.
Not that Gran would’ve recognized her beloved car.”
Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo/Slate. Photos by Ruben Hanssen/Unsplash, Ravi Sharma/Unsplash, Brandon Green/Unsplash
Published June 2022 in the Bridge to Elsewhere Anthology. 4,000 words (short story)
“Tessa rubbed her face. Click, click went her teeth, but now, her only accompaniment was the ship’s deep hum. The junkyard man had warned her she was on borrowed time with The Castaway when she’d bought it, but there was something, something that Tessa couldn’t quite name, that whispered, Don’t give up on the ship. Not yet“
That’s it! What have you read this year that you’ve loved? Have you published something that you’re proud of? Please feel free to leave a comment!
I’m so excited to share this story with the world! It’s about a road race across America in a climate-wrecked future where the highway system has been abandoned and trains are the main mode of transportation. I’ve been working on this piece for several months now and it was definitely a challenge to keep it in the short-story word range. There’s a wonderful companion essay to the story “How Heeding Disabled People Can Help Everyone Survive a Crisis” by Damien P. Williams.
This story has several point-of-view characters, each with her own history and goals. One of the biggest challenges was to make sure each character had a chance to tell her piece of the story and to make sure she came alive against the backdrop of where she came from. So, it made sense for Sabrina, Jody, and Fern to have their own theme songs while I was writing this story.
I’m not sure what happened to 2021. Where 2020 seemed to drag on and on, 2021 flew by. I suspect the pandemic has truly warped my sense of time. It’s a little frightening.
In terms of writing though, 2021 was another amazing year. I had one novelette, four short stories, and one essay published. One of my stories from last year was a finalist for the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards. My work has been translated into a half dozen different languages, including Klingon. I got an agent and I taught my first writing related class.
I’m still stunned to be honest.
Anyway, if you’re catching up on reading from 2021, here’s my work that came out this year:
I’m excited to announce I have a new piece published in the November/December 2021 issue of Uncanny Magazine! It’s called “The Stop After the Last Station” and I still can’t believe I got away with writing this story. I always try to do something new with every story I write and in this case the experiment was “Can I tell a story that in reverse?” It took me a while to get this story right. If you’re curious, I chat about the process with Lynne Thomas over on Uncanny’s podcast.
Also, as a warning, 75% of my upcoming stories have a train or trolley in them. I don’t know why this is my current obsession, but it is.
My soundtrack for this story was “Georgia” by Phoebe Bridgers.
I need you to keep me honest. In the next story I write I’m not allowed to use my favorite props, i.e. body-less voices, ghosts, and characters whose lives revolve around making things. Bonus points if no one gets eaten.
In the meantime, I’ve created a monster.
This was an email I sent to my friends in November 2015 when I asked them to read a very early and very rough draft of this story. It was only a shadow of what this story would become, but I knew even then that there was something in it worth telling.
This is a story that took me five years to get right, partly because it was outside my skill level to tell until recently and partly because it took me a while to figure out what the story was actually about. It is one of the strangest stories I’ve ever written and one of my most ambitious ones to date.
This is simply a quick post to say that I have a new essay published on the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) blog. It’s called “A Million and One Different Ways to Find Your Artistic Voice” because apparently, I have a thing for long titles.
Here’s the description.
A. T. Greenblatt, a Nebula Award winning writer and mechanical engineer in Philadelphia, shares insights into her own journey in finding her artistic voice. Her essay includes plenty of nuggets for other disabled creatives about perseverance, introspection, and community, each important parts of the journey towards finding a unique voice as an artist. Greenblatt also shares about her internal dialogue over disabled characters in her writing and what meaningful representation means
AAPD Newsletter
I had fun writing this essay and hope it’s helpful!
2019, so far, has been a good year for me in terms of writing. Like an extremely good year. Like, I haven’t been doing a proper job of talking about which stories have come out, which ones have audio links, what’s been reprinted, etc.
So, this is a post to recap what’s out and what’s coming out soon!
As soon as I heard that there was going to be a Disabled People Destroy anthology series last summer, I started plotting.
If you’re not familiar with the Destroy project, it’s a series that started with Women Destroy Science Fiction when critics said that woman writers were ruining the genre. Since then, there’s been Queers Destroy Science Fiction and People of Color Destroy Science Fiction (As well as Destroy Fantasy and Destroy Horror editions). Everyone working on these anthologies, from the writers to the interviewers to the editors, are part of the marginalized group of that particular anthology. Most of the characters in Destroy stories are too, because the idea behind this series is not so much to destroy, but to normalize narratives that have often been left out (or worse, badly handled) in the genre.
Disabled People Destroy was a project I’d hoped to be part of for a very long time.
So, I’m pleased to announce my story “Heavy Lifting” is now free to read online. It took me many drafts and much pacing and wringing of hands to get this story right. But it’s important to me to create disabled characters who are well balanced, otherwise healthy, and are perfectly willing to go on an adventure.
Sort of like me.
I always write to music. Strangely enough, I never found the perfect song to be the soundtrack of the story while I was writing it, but settled on “Shadow Preachers” by Zella Day because of deadlines. Also, I liked the song.
Hope you enjoy!
P.S. My personal essay for the Disabled Destroy series is also free to read here.
I wrote this story a few years ago when I was feeling hopeless about writing and wondering if it was worth all the time and energy I was pouring into it. This story was a reminder to myself that art is important, unexpected, and unpredictable. And I hope that if you’re facing similar struggles now, it will encourage you of that too.
Soundtrack: I wrote this story to Sharon Van Etten’s “Serpents” on loop.
Curiosity Sometimes Pays Off 