Ursula

2024 was an exciting year for fiction!

short story collection

North Continent Ribbon was released by Neon Hemlock Press.

novelette

The final story in North Continent Ribbon, "A Fisher of Stars," is an original novelette. (If you're reading for awards nominations and would like a review copy, let me know!)

short story

Frivolous Comma published Flannelfeet, a Wisconsin covid-era portal fantasy.

poetry

My poem "Hexavalent" was in Analog in January 2024, and "Beyond the Standard Model" is in Analog in January 2025.

essays about writing

• The Poet’s Toolbox: Three Strategies for a Vivid Prose Voice (SFWA blog)
  
• A Depth of Taste (writing about food in space opera), for Frivolous Comma
  
• My Favorite Bit of North Continent Ribbon.
  

essays about math

Elliptic curves come to date night talks about a fun result combining economics, number theory, and algebraic geometry.

I bought my eight-year-old niece copies of Bandido and Bandida for Christmas. These are card games that play like cooperative tile-laying games: the object is to prevent (Bandido) or aid (Bandida) the underground escape of a notorious criminal by constructing a maze with as many dead ends as possible.

I thought this worked really well as a game to play with both kids and adults. You can deal in a new player at essentially any time, which means it's easy to accommodate little sisters or grandparents who wander over and get curious about what you're doing, and since the cards are all segments of tunnels, the ability to read is not a prerequisite. (Bandida adds a few special cards that require a bossy eight-year-old or an adult rules reader for interpretation.)

However, these are not easy games to win! An ideal strategy would involve lots of coordination between players to block tunnels quickly. If you're pursuing a more casual "let's just figure out how to use this card" mode of play, the game turns unwinnable due to combinatorial explosion very quickly. The nieces and I got enough partial successes from blocking individual tunnels to keep ourselves entertained, but I'm curious about what an adults-only playthrough of this game would look like.

Age of Sail alert: I'm cataloguing a book for work called Beyond the learned academy—the practice of mathematics, 1600–1850, and it has multiple chapters about what sorts of mathematics members of the navy were supposed to know to pass their exams.

We Called Them Giants is a graphic novel with text by Kieron Gillen, art by Stephanie Hans, and lettering by Clayton Cowles.

Lori is a foster kid. She knows that sooner or later, everyone who says they care about her is going to disappear. When her adoptive parents vanish, along with almost every other person on the planet, she has the cold comfort of validation.

There are a few people left, including Annette, a friend from school with relentless Girl Guide spirit, and the Dogs, a group of stragglers who instantly form a postapocalyptic-style gang. There are also giants. Stephanie Hans renders them in flames of red or green, something beautiful and intense beside the grayed-out cartoonishness of the other characters.

The question, of course, is whether Lori is right. Can she trust anyone else? I can report that the answer is sometimes yes but sometimes also no, and that tension is where the story really shines. If "Can people ever be OK to each other?" is a question you've been turning over in your own mind, this might be a good fable for a dark November.

(I read this as a Netgalley ARC. The US release was November 12.)

My personal information was stolen during the recent AT&T data breach.

Today, I got an email asking me to call the writer back, in reference to a made-up account number, because I might be eligible for student loan forgiveness. There are two obvious problems with this message:

(1) Due to a bunch of undergrad scholarships and a generous postdoc fellowship, I haven't had student loans for more than a decade.

(2) The email included the address of an apartment where I lived for exactly one year, many years ago. Coincidentally, that's also the one year I had an AT&T phone plan.

Keep an eye on your business emails, especially if your life has been less peripatetic than mine! I have a feeling these fakes are only going to get more persuasive.

Quick thoughts on a couple of books I've been meaning to review.

Moniquill Blackgoose, To Shape a Dragon's Breath.

This is a delightful alternate history involving resistance to colonialism, chemistry, and dragons. It's my favorite discovery from 2020 Hugo voting. The nuances of power and the self-centeredness associated to power are very well observed. In particular, though he's only a minor character--the story belongs to a young woman named Anequs from the island of Masquapaug and her dragon--I was fascinated by the jarl. One of the prices of doing a lot of historical re-creation is spending a lot of time around men who are pretending to be Viking kings, and I very much appreciated the precision with which Blackgoose renders a man who is genuinely (by his own standards) a wise and effective ruler, and yet is incapable of creating justice.

Ben Aaronovitch, The Masquerades of Spring.

A music-loving Englishman in early 1920s New York is visited by his old schoolfellow Thomas Nightingale. This is P.G. Wodehouse pastiche. The last time I read a novel actually written by P.G. Wodehouse that was set in New York, I reached the horrifyingly racist interlude in the middle of it while stuck on an airplane. That makes it tricky for me to relax into a story that's mostly about a nice feckless Bertie Wooster clone and his much cleverer boyfriend from Harlem rambling around the city enjoying jazz. On the opposite tack, there is a sad lack of aunts; I feel all Wodehousian prose is improved by a suitably forceful aunt. However, it's clear that Aaronovitch is enjoying himself greatly, and is perhaps particularly enjoying (after many volumes of fantasy police procedural) writing a book where the cops are the bad guys. There's also canonically asexual Nightingale, if you're interested in canonically asexual Nightingale.

(This novella comes out from Subterranean Press on September 30, at least in the US. I read it as a Netgalley ARC.)

Thank you to a kind stranger and Dreamwidth's random algorithm for the year of paid time!

Here is a very important poll.

North Continent Ribbon comes out on August 20!

I'm doing a Zoom release event at 7 PM Eastern time on August 22 with Argo Bookshop in Montreal and a bunch of writer friends. We're going to knit/embroider/craft and talk about the connections between prose and other ways of making things.

sabotabby interviewed me for Night Beats! There's a little bit about the origins of Nakharat and some teasers about future projects.

My essay The Poet’s Toolbox: Three Strategies for a Vivid Prose Voice is up now at the SFWA blog!