A Bildungsroman BildungsEssen

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.

Photo of assorted Bruisers Curtis Chen, Lauren Hougen, Fran Wilde, Lauren Teffeau and Kelly Lagor, by Tom Wilde

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.

A veritable cornucopia of Klagor updates

Keeping this blog updated has clearly become less and less of a priority based on my last post being over a year ago, but I’m happy to say that I’ve become more remiss not because of a lack of productivity or happenings, but because I’ve been busy working on a book and on essays and new short fiction.

In fact, I found out just this week that my first two Science Fact essays published in Analog last year came in both first and second in the AnLab awards, which are a reader’s choice awards for the magazine! They’ve also got a Biolog interview with me (conducted by Richard A. Lovett) in this issue. It’s veritably bursting with Kelly Lagor content!

It’s wild that, thanks to this, I can consider myself to now be an “award-winning writer.” I’ll admit, when I was starting to focus seriously on writing, I always figured I’d only really shoot for fiction. There was a period of time when I was in grad school, trying to figure out what I was going to do that wasn’t academia, when I considered science writing (and was accepted to and attended the excellent, but now defunct Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop in 2008), but most of that work is freelance now and I knew I wouldn’t be able to make that work as a full time situation.

I’d even been writing essays for more than a few years by the time Trevor and I sat down for a conversation at the 2023 Worldcon in Chicago about me writing Science Fact essays for him. After all, though I love writing about science fiction, I do have a background in biology and my day job is also in biology.

I wasn’t even a stranger to writing essays about biology. I wrote an entire series of essays for Reactor when I was first stretching my legs as an essayist that was a parallel history of science fiction and biology. I guess I’m just saying I’m a bit of a dummy for taking this long to start writing essays about hot topics in biology. I’m really looking forward to doing more of it in the future!

I’ve got another essay in the can in a new essay series (I really do love a series) about the origins of life. The first essay appears in the above issues of Analog on the latest research on the RNA World hypothesis, and includes a discussion of the smart and misanthropic Rifters series of novels by Peter Watts. The next installment is due out later this year on Robert Charles Wilson’s BIOS and the latest research on the Last Universal Common Ancestor.

My ongoing series of Speculative Screencraft essays in Asimov’s will have it’s concluding installment in the upcoming September/October 2025 issue (and it’s one of my favorite essays I’ve written to date, on one of my favorite movies of all time). The rest of the series is available to read on Asimov’s Thought Experiment Archive site including one on Doctor Strangelove (September/October 2024), another on 2001 (January/Feburary 2025), and A Clockwork Orange in the May/June 2025 issue.

In other writing news, I also had a new story published in Analog back in the January/February 2025 issue – “As Ordinary Things Often Do.” I really liked writing this story about someone who really wants to tell someone that she loves him, made more complicated by the fact that she’s about to go on the first mission to an alien world and he is still back on Earth. I also wrote a short blog post called “Save the Oranges, Save the World” for The Astounding Analog Companion to go with the piece. A.C. Wise had some kind words to say about the story in her review for Locus!

“As Ordinary Things Often Do” by Kelly Lagor is a sweet story about a woman about to embark on a long space mission contemplating whether she will be able to sustain her relatively new romantic relationship. The story is an excel­lent example of quiet science fiction with highly personal stakes, keeping the story grounded. The way the couple uses shared recipes and cooking together virtually to strengthen their connection is lovely.

As for other updates – I’m about halfway through the revisions of the science fiction horror novel draft I wrote last year and I’m really liking how it’s coming together. As most of my writing energy has been going towards the book (or various essay deadlines as they come up), I’ve been slacking on my short fiction, but I do have a couple stories I’m hoping to get written (or re-written in the case of one story which hasn’t yet found a home) once I’m done with these revisions. Oh the joys of writing with a day job.

To close this out, I did want to take a moment to plug some books I’ve loved so far this year:

  • Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I’ve really loved his Children of Time series books so far, but always wondered how he’d approach a completely alien biosphere, and boy did he deliver. It was reminiscent of BIOS and of LeGuin for me, except with all the wonderful crunchy biology.
  • Book of Love by Kelly Link. I have loved her short fiction for a long, long time, and I was so excited to read her first novel. It did not disappoint. It felt like a dream logic, fae magic Ulysses.
  • The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennet. Who wouldn’t love a murder mystery set in a coastal civilization threatened by imminent disaster from invading leviathans from the sea?
  • Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon. My friend Natalie and I just happened to go to a reading she gave up in Seattle while I was in town, and I immediately got a copy of the book. It took her over a decade to research and write this book and everyone (not just AFAB folks, but particularly AFAB folks) should read it.
  • A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher. I will read anything she publishes. As a fellow middle aged woman who cannot even sometimes (most times?), her narrative voice speaks to me. Plus the way she writes animals is unmatched.
  • Horror Movie: A Novel by Paul Tremblay. I’m currently catching up on everything he’s written as he’s quickly become one of my favorite contemporary horror writers. It’s like he’s in my head, writing the tropes I love in a way I squee for. This is the book that started my binge. Loved it.

I know everything is really dumb and dizzyingly scary at times these days. Fight in anyway you can. With your words, with your time, with your money. Engage where you can, self-care when you can’t. Take care of yourselves, and take care of others.

Cooking, Writing, and the End of the World

Cooking, Writing and the End of the World

Last I wrote was back in November after my novella, Ghosting, had come out in Giganotosaurus. Since then it made a few people’s best of the year lists, including from Nerds of a Feather, and from Charles Payseur, who had some wonderful things to say about it in his review in Locus:

GigaNotoSaurus provides another wonderful read with November’s “Ghosting” by Kelly Lagor, which follows Lydia as she attempts to reboot her life, and not for the first time. Thanks to a neural implant, Lydia can alter her own memories, erasing unpleasant ones in an attempt to reinvent herself every time things get too bad. And with her recurring issues around intimacy and self-sabotage, that happens more often than she’d like… and more often than she remembers. When a mysterious person starts contacting her, though, claiming to be the ghost of someone she’s wronged, it accelerates her self-destructive cycle and leads her into a confrontation with all she’s been avoiding. The story is at turns sensual and chaotic, messy and clever, weaving a mystery around what’s happening to Lydia even as she begins to real­ize that there are things she can’t just edit out of her brain – there are things she has to face and remember despite how unpleasant, painful, or shameful they might be. Only through that work can she come to terms with who she is, and who she can be. Lagor does brilliant work with Lydia and the cast of characters around her, keeping readers guessing while still eager for the next twist in this rollercoaster of a story.

I’m really proud of that story, so I’m happy that folks seemed to enjoy it. Writing that story really helped me work out how I might edit future long-form projects, and since December, I’ve started work on a novel draft which, just yesterday, I sailed past 50,000 words on. Part of the joy of this project is all the research reading I’ve been doing on exoplanets, astrobiology, and microbiology, and revisiting old first contact stories I’ve loved in the past.

In fiction news, I have another story out in Analog in the current May/June issue. “Making Gnocchi at the End of the World” is a science fictionesque tale about two women in the Scottish Highlands struggling to make homemade pasta while a chimerization epidemic is ending the world around them. I got interviewed about how this story came together, and you can read that over at the Astounding Analog Companion blog! Here’s an excerpt:

I wanted my apocalypse to be more Ballardian: one that’s biologically unexplainable and completely unavoidable, with a kind of intimacy to the fear it evoked. Inspired in part by a Rik and Morty episode involving characters spontaneously turning inside out (“Cronenberging”), and in part by the thoughtful body horror of director David Cronenberg (who adapted Ballard’s novel Crash into a 1996 movie), I decided on spontaneous chimerization as the driving force behind the end of the world, in which the genomes in some of our cells suddenly decide to crawl back in evolutionary time to recall some last common ancestor, then progress forward again down a different branch. It became a way to not only sew a deep sense of paranoia into my characters due to its spontaneous nature and monstrous results, but also how I could make the mythical inspiration behind the Loch Ness monster, the kelpie, into a real character in the story.

I also just found out today that I’ve sold Analog another story! I’ll save writing more about this one for my next post.

As far as essays go, I’ve had another few come out since November.

There are two recent installments in my Speculative Screencraft essay series in Asimov‘s. The first is on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the Hollywood Blacklist during the McCarthy Era, and the tactics that cultures (and their literature) use to dehumanize cultural Others. “Dehumanization, Un-Americans, and Pod People in Invasion of the Body Snatchers” appeared in the January/February 2024 issue.

The most recent installment appears in the current May/June issue – “Giant Monsters, Kaiju and the Bomb in Godzilla.” Pick up an issue to check it out! I’ll post the link to the archived version on my “Writing” page once it’s up.

I’m also super excited that my first essay for Analog has been published. I’ve been pretty stoked on starting to write Science Fact articles. I really love researching and writing about both hot topics in and the history of biology, so I have plans to write Analog a few essays a year about different biological topics. This first was about the history of the subfield of epigenetics, and the history of various aspects of that field’s portrayal in science fiction. “Genetic Memory, Clones, and Epigenetics” appeared in the March/April issue.

In more life updates, another Rainforest Writer’s Retreat has come and gone, and I managed to get about 6,000 words of writing in (in which I finished up a long-languishing short story about fungi and noise rock, and got started in earnest on the aforementioned novel). It was lovely to pod up with my fellow Bruisers and friends, especially that last night where it kept pooping down snow and we worried it might never stop.

My band played another show at Black Cat along with our drummer’s other band, Dream Burglar, after which i finally fired my old amp and acquired a new (secondhand) amp from my bandmate. We’ve gotten too loud and noisy these past few years that my old (perma-borrowed) one just couldn’t cut it anymore.

We also took a trip down to Coahuila and Durango down in Mexico to experience our first total eclipse, and it was so much more of a wild experience than we had thought it would be. My girlfriend had read that you don’t just see an eclipse, you feel one too, and man was that an understatement. We could absolutely understand why some people become eclipse chasers.

Otherwise, there have been books read, friends hung with, shows seen, bands danced to, and video games beaten. I’ve got some deadlines coming up again shortly, so the novel writing will be slowed down a bit by an essay on Clockwork Orange and another on the story of the most ancient life on earth of all. Life (and writing) continues apace!

I hope you’ve all been doing as well as you can be, considering whatever needs to be considered.

Desert Fact and Fiction

Photo of the TV wall at East Jesus, photo attributable to East Jesus

Desert Fact and Fiction

I hope you’ve been having a wonderfully cromulent fall –

It’s been an eventful time for me since I last wrote back in July, both on the writing and personal fronts.

The biggest news I have is that first of the two stories I sold this year is up as of this week at Giganotosaurus! This one is a novella-length gothic cyberpunk story about forgetting, and I’m quite fond of it. This was a cathartic story for me to write, as I was trying to work out some feelings that kept haunting me from a relationship that took me years to accept I would never get any resolution for unless I made it for myself. It’s set out at a real place (East Jesus) out by the Salton Sea that I’ve been to a number of times, as a dear friend of mine is one of the caretakers (::waves to V from across the internet::). If you like the story and/or just dig East Jesus’ mission, consider donating to their flood relief campaign, as the entire museum is under threat from additional catastrophic flooding due to climate change. They are a charitable organization, so any contributions are tax deductible as well!

I’ve had another essay come out in Asimov’s slightly spooky September/October issue – this one about all three iterations of The Thing. It was super fun to dig into John Carpenter’s life and work, as he’s made a lot of my favorite horror movies, and getting to watch his entire body of work while researching the essay was a real treat.

Upcoming writing things to keep an eye out for – I’ve got another essay in the upcoming January/February 2024 Asimov’s on Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the Hollywood blacklist; I’ve got my first Science Fact article coming out in Analog, on the SF concept of genetic memory and the science of epigenetics; and I’ll have at least one more story coming out sometime next year, also in Analog about two women trying to make homemade gnocchi at the end of the world. Updates will happen as this is more to update!

Otherwise life continues to be eventful. Another successful Youtopia has passed, and my theme camp continued to be one of my favorite spots to hang out at. There was some excellent art, including an ersatz National Park sign and kiosk that some friends were responsible for making that came out even better than I could have imagined (I helped with a bit of prose-sprucing up for a few of the kiosk items).

My partners and I then took a trip out to Chicago (as neither of them had ever spent much time there) so they could hang with my family and see the city. The heatwave from Youtopia followed us home, and we had some wonderfully unseasonable weather for the duration.

I’m looking forward to the winter – I’ve got some fiction I’d like to get back to (at least one short story to finish up, and maybe I will actually get that novel I wanted to start this year started).

Hope you’re all doing as best as can be expected (better even, as is appropriate).

Of Laboratories and Workshops

Of Laboratories and Workshops

My relationship online sharing has really atrophied in the past few years. I’m still waiting to see where the best spot to hang out will be for life updates and various ephemera, but since the social media spell I’d been under since Friendster has been broken, it’s been nice to be largely doing my living offline. What does this mean moving forward for following what I’m up to? Probably a site redesign here at some point. Newsletters also seem pretty great. Otherwise, you can find me mostly posting things on Instagram out of (a very occasional) habit (@klagor there) and here even more sporadically. If you do follow me on the blue bird hellsite, I’ll be keeping that account open to update the bio to let folks know where I’ll be otherwise.

Now for the life stuff! I’m in my 40s now (as of last June), the band is still limping along (we’re working on a new album currently), I’ve got two new partners I love very much (::waves across the internet::), day job stuff remains stable and fulfilling, health remains fine and my colon continues to not make any attempts on my life, and both my to-read pile and plants continue to grow in a healthy fashion. I honestly can’t complain.

Writing stuff! Lots of stuff, actually.

I have a new story out! It was just in the May/June issue of Analog – “Of Laboratories and Love Songs.” For it, I was interviewed for their Astounding Analog Companion site (you can find the interview here), which covers where the story came from, how it all came together, and some writing advice, too.

On a related note, a few weeks back, the week one instructor for Clarion at UCSD (Andy Duncan, who’s a delightful human, whose recent short story collection you should totally check out – An Agent of Utopia) reached out to me about using “Labs” for a class discussion and invited me to sit in (since I’m a local). It was all a bit surreal – the reserved, free parking spot (which was surreal in and of itself), wandering through the bowels of Geisel library (where I remember poking through Clarion manuscripts when I was still a student there almost 20 years ago now), and sitting in the room with all that nervous excited energy. It reminded me of my time at Viable Paradise back in 2011, which offered me the same kind of life-changing experience Clarion does – the validation, the insta-community, the crash-course in managing a writing career. It was wild – the students talked about my story like it was literature, then they peppered me with questions about writing, about non-fiction, about managing a writing career with a full time job. I stuck around for lunch, chatting with a few of the students about tattoos, Godzilla, and more writing stuff.

Time is such a creep. Suddenly, I’m walking back to my car, realized that I’m not early career anymore. I’m firmly mid-career, even though everything still feels like it’s mildly on fire and I’m not doing nearly enough to get where I want to get to. But I do at least have a better idea of what I’m doing now than I did when I was 29 and stepping off the Woods Hole ferry onto Martha’s Vinyard.

* * *

I just found out that I sold my gothic cyberpunk novelette, “Ghosting” to Giganotosaurus!

This is very exciting. I really love this story, and I’ve been told that it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written – it’s full of sex, drugs, and self-destructive partying in the California desert. I can’t wait to share it with you all.

* * *

I’ve also sold and published a few more essays!

Since I last wrote, my Speculative Screencraft essay series for Asimov’s has officially gotten underway. Four essays have been released, and two more have signed contracts and will be coming out later this year and early next year. This one has been really fun – I’ve been examining the history of different SFnal tropes in the context of a classic SF movie. Here are the links to the currently published essays, and stay tuned for info on when my essays on The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers become available!

I’ve also started writing Science Fact articles for Analog, the first of which is on Genetic Memory, Clones, and Epigenetics, so I’ll update here once that’s published as well

* * *

Life’s good, writing is going, not much more I could ask for.