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 can’t remember when I posted here last and honestly, I’m a little too lazy right now to check, but I think it’s been a while. I’m slowly getting used to living in a new city. Or at least getting a little less lost, which is nice. I’m really enjoying the springtime greenery and looking forward to summer.
Speaking of upcoming things, I will be at the virtual Nebula Convention next weekend (May 19th-May 22nd). I also have a virtual reading at NYRSF on June 7th. Here’s the information for both:
The Future of Disability Representation – May 20th at 3pm PST – with Effie Seiberg, Andi C. Buchanan, Nicola Griffith, A. T. Greenblatt, and Nalini Haynes
Description: Writers with disabilities prop up excellent examples of representation, discuss how to overcome harmful tropes and stereotypes, and explore, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the future of portraying disability in SFF.
The Second Person and You – May 22nd at 10:30am – P H Lee, Suzan Palumbo, Lauren Ring, Eden Royce, and A. T. Greenblatt
Description: The second person is often regarded as difficult, complex, or experimental. But it doesn’t need to be! Explore how your work could benefit from this technique with authors who have intentionally and successfully written from this perspective.
My second event is an author reading at the NYRSF series. It will be streamed on the internet free for all on June 7th at 7pm!
I’m a little late to posting about this new story because my life has been a bit insane. A little over a month ago I accepted a new engineering position and now, a handful of weeks later, I’m sitting in an apartment in Brooklyn with my laptop and other essentials, but with most of my belongings in storage.
I’m still reeling from all the changes, but I’m also excited.
But right before I decided to upend my life, I wrote this story. I created it very quickly – when I was extremely tired and my exercise schedule was messed up (hence my writing productivity was also messed up.) I wanted to tell a time-looping story, but I all my initial ideas feel too much like Groundhog Day. The idea of revisions and how a story can change over time has always fascinated me. How you can redirect a story by adding little details here or reframing a moment there. So I decided to try that on an extreme scale with this story.
At some point, I wasn’t even sure it made sense to anyone but myself – that’s how zoomed in I was to each sentence and every worldbuilding detail. I couldn’t see the larger picture anymore. So I’m eternally grateful to Beneath Ceaseless Skies editor Scott Andrews and my beta readers for their help on this one.
I figured a time-looping story needed a looping song as its soundtrack, so I was listening to Zoë Keating “Possible” on repeat as I wrote and rewrote this story.
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.
Is it too late to still be wishing everyone Happy New Year? I think January 19th is riding that edge, but since this my first post of the 2022, I feel like I can get away with it. So anyway, Happy New Year! May 2022 be full of happiness, success, and relaxation for you. Because what’s the point in welcoming a new year if not to hope for something a little better than the year before?
Anyway, the end of 2021 was crazy busy for me – full of projects I couldn’t talk about yet. I still can’t talk about a few of them, but I share a few things.
First off, I have a story coming out later this month in Future Tense Fiction! The theme was the future of transportation, so I reimagined the Great American Road Trip. It was a fun project to work on.
If all goes to plan, I’ll have another story out in February in one of my favorite magazines, but the details are still being worked out for that.
In addition, I have two stories coming out in two different anthology projects. The first of which is Bridge to Elsewhereby Outland Entertainment which is to be released in June. This anthology is all about spaceships and their crews. The second one is Luxcon Anthology with speculative stories based or inspired by Luxembourg. The anthology should be coming out in spring or summer 2022.
Lastly, I’m going to be teaching another class for Clarion West Online this spring. It’s called “Persisting as a Short Story Writer” and it’ll be held on April 10th, at 1pm PST. Spots are still available if you’re interested.
I’m not sure what my conference schedule looks like for this year yet. Honestly, any and all travel plans I had for 2022 are being reevaluated in the face of this never ending pandemic.
I’ve been under deadlines for the last few weeks and I’m only just getting to this post now. I’m literally sitting in the hotel lobby as I write this. Which is to say I’ll be at Discon III (aka WorldCon 2021) this weekend! In person! I’m excited to see people in real life again.
Here’s my schedule:
Thursday, Dec 16th, 11:30 AM – Kaffeeklatsch with A. T. Greenblatt – Suite 325 Side Room Thursday, Dec 16th, 1:00 PM – Signing – A.T. Greenblatt – Autograph 3
Friday, Dec 17th, 7:00 PM – Panel – Writing Short Fiction – Blue Room
Saturday, Dec 18th, 10:00 AM – Panel – Story Structures Besides the Hero’s Journey – Older Saturday, Dec 18th, 4:00 PM – Panel – Why Do We Love Novellas and Novelettes? – Cabinet Room Saturday, Dec 18th, 8:00 PM – Hugo Award Ceremonies!
The Hugo will be streamed on Saturday night and I’ll update this post with the link when I have it.
In the meantime, please feel free to come say hello to me if you are at the convention. Apologies in advance – I’m terrible with faces in the best of times, so if I don’t recognize you, it’s not personal.
As I write this, it’s almost the weekend and I’m settling in for a few days of story revisions and writing related work. I have a handful of stories coming out in 2022 if all goes well – two that are finished and accepted, one that I’m revising this weekend, and one that is only a few opening sentences in my notebook. (That last one is a problem child.)
However, one of the two finished stories is going to be in the Bridge to Elsewhere anthology, edited by Julia Rios and Alana Joli Abbott, published by Outland Entertainment. The anthology is centered around space exploration and daring crews. My story “The Music of a New Path” is about an AI ship that changes course without warning, while the crew races to figure out why before it’s too late. It was fun to write!
The project is currently running a Kickstarter and the list of authors included for this project is amazing. Please consider supporting the anthology here.
That’s it for now. I’ll be posting my year end eligibility post at some point this weekend. Probably.
In any case, thanks for reading and I hope you are staying safe and happy wherever you are.
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.
The nice thing about the pandemic is that I can have two readings in one week half a continent away from each other. The downside is I would love to be in both Toronto and Orlando right now. But either way, I’m excited for both of these events next week.
The first event is on March 17th, at 7pm for the Ephemera Reading series in Toronto. The theme is joy, which I think I can find a story for. I’ll be reading with Curtis Chen and Rebecca Hirsch Garcia. I’m thrilled to be a part of this reading series!
The second event is for the convention ICFA which is usually in Orlando every year, except this year it will be online. I’ll be reading with Richard Butner and Gregory Norman Bossert on March 20th, at 9 pm EST. I’ve always enjoyed reading at ICFA, so I’m looking forward to this event too.
I’m excited to announce that my story “RE: Bubble 476” is now available to read in the March/April issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Unlike nearly all my fiction publications, I can’t provide a link to the story because it’s in print. Like arrived-in-my-mailbox in print. Like it’s a physical thing I can hold and I have the pictures to prove it!
This is the first time I’ve had a story published in one of the Big Three (Analog, Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction), so that’s a good feeling. I’m not going to talk here about my process or the story behind the story because I did an author interview post on Asimov’s blog. (ETA: Interview is now live!)
As always, I wouldn’t be able to publish my stories in this fashion without magazines like Asimov’s. So, if you can, please consider buying this issue or a subscription. It helps us all continue to tell stories.
Curiosity Sometimes Pays Off 