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.