Journal

When I was ten, I harboured a hopeless, torturous admiration for a girl in grade six. Praying we’d be on the same gym teams. Agonizing over how to become friends. One time, she sits beside me at lunch. It’s the best thirty minutes ever, even if I can’t untie my tongue long enough to actually talk to her.

One of the easiest ways to make your manuscript stronger is to practice assertive writing. Word economy can improve your writing, make your editors happy, and to create narrative drive.

I still find myself keeping on the lookout for niche street tech and unique adaptations to our changing climate—and wondering how Akuba and her cronies would make a quick dishonest buck off of them.

One of the things I love about genre is how we embrace our influences. We don’t feel that anxiety of influence Harold Bloom talks about when discussing literary fiction and literary writers. We take our influences and mix them up, throw them together, create new things out of the hodgepodge of what came before.

Novellas are interesting in that they’re expected to behave more like novels than short stories. I don’t think they should have to, but of course I’m not everyone; I think of novellas as its own format rather than some weird in-between hybrid (naturally I am biased).

Publishing in English is considered the apex of any writer born in a non-English speaking country. It is very much so.

Afrofuturism is hot right now. Ever since Black Panther made its seismic splash, the term has been bandied about and suddenly folks are “discovering” black writers who have been out there doing the thing for years.

Then, I read Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. Bradbury introduced me to the magic and wonder of traveling carnivals. That sense of wonder never left me, and so when the first of my circus stories arrived (“Vanishing Act”), I knew where its roots were. Around the same time that story came out, HBO was wrapping up Carnivale, a show I didn’t see until long after it had ended, but it too felt right when it came to the beautiful brokenness one might find while wandering a sideshow.