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.

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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.

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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!

• “Magic, Science, and the Moon in La Voyage Dans la Lune” (March/April 2022)
• “The Horror and Science Fiction of Frankenstein” (September/October 2022)
• “The Showing and Telling of Metropolis and Fritz Lang” (Jan/Feb 2023)
• “Shakespeare, Freud, and the Unconscious in Forbidden Planet” (May/June 2023)

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

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