I have new fiction in the world today! My latest short story “An Invitation from the BildungsEssen Restaurant Group” is live at the wonderful Sunday Morning Transport! It is subscribers only, but you can check out two months free with this link. Many thanks to Fran Wilde, Curtis Chen, and Eric Brooks for their feedback on this one.
It was the shortest story inception to publication yet, though the prompt for an “excessively, bewilderingly buzzing meal” I received from Fran an unspecified number of years ago. I’d pinned it up on the corkboard in my office to let it percolate. I started picking at the idea a year or two ago, thinking about Mesmer and his “animal magnetism” hypnosis, and his war against the last exorcist Johann Josef Gassner in the lat 18th century (for a fascinating look at this snapshot in the history of psychology, you can check out this wikipedia page on the Royal Commission on Animal Magnetism); but the ideas just didn’t come together how I wanted them to.
Another aborted attempt at the story came earlier this year, this time about an AI sculptor responsible for making soulless corporate art, but I didn’t know enough about art history to do the idea justice, and the amount of time it would take to gain the expertise needed to even know what I wanted to do with it had me throw it out.
It was when I decided to take the AI sculptor idea and mash it up with the truly staggering amount of cooking-related media I consume that the story just sort of fell out of me in one mad draft on a flight to Chicago at the end of the summer after Worldcon. A couple revisions later and you’ve got the above story! I hope you enjoy it – it was one of the more fun stories I’ve written.
I’ve also got new essays out! The first is in the September/October 2025 issue of Asimov’s on The Shining, which is one of my favorite movies of all time. In this one I looked at Stephen King’s novel (which explored his own addiction issues, like much of his early fiction), Kubrick’s adaptation of his novel (which King hated), King’s TV miniseries done as a response/rebuke to Kubrick’s film. I also look at King’s sequel Doctor Sleep (which ignores Kubrick’s changes), as well as Mike Flanagan’s movie adaptation of Doctor Sleep (which he had to walk quite the tight rope on, as you can’t ignore Kubrick’s film if you’re making a film sequel to The Shining). I’m proud of this one, so check it out! (It’ll also eventually be posted to the Asimov’s Thought Experiment Archives, along with all my other Speculative Screencraft essays).
I’ve also got another installment in my Origins of Life essay series in Analog in the November/December 2025 issue! This one looks at the latest research on the Last Universal Common Ancestory (LUCA for short), in parallel with a discussion of Robert Charles Wilson’s BIOS. I’m fascinated by everything that we’ve been able to deduce about life through a combination of clever chemistry experiments (building theoretical proto life systems from the ground up), and in silico analyses of available genomic data to try and see what kinds of genes are universal in the most basic forms of life on earth: bacteria and Archaea. I’m going to start working on the next installment in this series soon.
Otherwise the novel is coming along. I hit a bit of a health roadblock this summer which has derailed a lot of progress, but I’ve been able to prioritize some shorter fiction projects and also some essay deadlines so I don’t feel like I’ve completely lost my momentum. Just yesterday I worked out two other short stories I’d like to get started this winter sometime, which has been heartening.
In other writing news, Worldcon was a joy! It was so good to catch up with folks I don’t get to see all that often and top off my inspiration stores for the coming winter. I wish I could do more cons every year, but having a full time job means I have to be a bit choosier in what I spent my time off on, but I do try to do, at minimum, one con a year. I’ll definitely be at the Worldcon in Anaheim next year since that’s practically in San Diego’s attic.
In personal news, after the con I went to Chicago for some quality time with the fam and started having a pretty intense bout of heartburn, which my gastroenterologist later diagnosed as a candida infection of my esophagus. We’re still trying to get a handle on all the assorted swallowing issues and medication side effects and recurring either heartburn or possible even more infection, so it’s turned the fall into a bit of a convalescent period.
I also found out that my dad died. It’s strange because he died ten years ago, but we didn’t find out until last month, thanks to some sleuthing from my brother. He and I had a complicated relationship, which is true of any child of a pathological liar and narcissist. We were estranged, but that didn’t take away that he was foundational in the development of my taste in books and music and film. And he always encouraged me, with my guitar playing in particular. I know now that it was because I was a little version of him – a version that might achieve all the things that he had lied about achieving. This didn’t take away all the ways in which he damaged me, too – the shaming about my weight, the incessant invalidation and mocking of my feelings that taught me feelings were dangerous things to have, the unbelievable guilt when he told me I had to save the family from falling apart (but was in reality due to his being a conman), even though I was twenty-three, struggling with crippling depression while trying to do my PhD, living two thousand miles away. My therapist later supported my decision to stop talking to him because he was “a dangerous person to have a relationship with.” He wasn’t the healthiest – always a chainsmoker – so I would look periodically to see if he had died, searching for an obituary that was never written.
So here’s your obituary, Erwin Lagor (1950-2015). Despite all that, and how angry I was at you by the time I stopped talking to you, I still loved you. You were my dad and I’ll carry those pieces of you that I got from you – your flair for the fantastic, your love of stories and music – inside me forever.
Kelly Lagor's Lagoraphobia 