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Posts Tagged ‘Writers’

Perhaps you remember the “Dear Aliens” contest? Maybe you even submitted a story to be shared with our alien visitors? 

Mr Man and I have had a lot going on over the past few months so I did not get a story together, but I’m glad that many of you did. And now, the winners have been announced!

To Those Arriving Soon by MacEagon Voyce

“You’ll know by now that we humans fear the unknown, and that we fill that chasm with stories, imagining endings we have some agency over.”

See the full list for the top ten stories, and enjoy!

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A little Star Wars-based humor to get you through your day. Because:

“…my task is to try and make you smile despite the state of the world. I will not pretend the world doesn’t exist.” — Scott Lynch

“They Would Never Use the Death Star on Us”: Alderaan Residents Reflect on Their Support for the Empire as a Large Imperial Installation Enters the System

MODERATOR: In one or two words, finish this sentence: “I’m feeling ‘blank’ about the Empire these days, now that the galactic superweapon I willingly supported hovers overhead.”

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This weekend, The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association presented the 61st annual Nebula Awards. If you saw the finalist roster I shared in March and thought, “Gosh, I wonder who will win?” well, wonder no more!

Just some of the winners of the Nebula awards for the best speculative fiction from 2025:

The Nebula Award for Novel

★ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga; Titan UK) ★ 

The Nebula Award for Novella

★ The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom; Arcadia) ★ 

The Nebula Award for Novelette

★ “Uncertain Sons”, by Thomas Ha (Uncertain Sons and Other Stories, Undertow Publications) ★

The Nebula Award for Short Story

★ “Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything”, by Effie Seiberg (Diabolical Plots 5/25) ★

For more, see the complete list of finalists and winners at SFFWorld!

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“One is not born, but rather becomes, oneself.” — Simone de Beauvoir

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I try to keep things fairly light here, so when I write a piece that is… not that, I can end up in a bit of a bind. 

Do I share because that’s where I was on that particular day? I don’t, usually. For example, I recently wrote a drabble that has not even a sprinkling of humor to lighten the mood. That’s how it goes sometimes.

I’ve been writing less than I’d like, and what I do write is darker than I’d like. It’s easy to get distracted by the world. But that’s also our context right now, and what we need to get through in order to move on to the next better thing. 

It’s like football great Rosey Grier’s classic song, “It’s Alright to Cry”

“It’s all right to cry

Crying gets the sad out of you.” 

So today I’m going to share one of my darker drabbles, because what is art if not a reflection of the maker’s time and place? (But I’ll add an extra step to view here in case this isn’t your thing right now.* I get it!)

Remember I Love You

“I love you,” she would say as I ran outside. 

Determined, I searched for water, scrap metal or other goods extricated from the rubble. Fuel, usually the kind that used to be someone’s house. Food, always.

Anything to keep the family going. I learned that from my mother.

She stayed with my little brother. He stopped crying two days ago.

“Remember I love you,” she’d say, her eyes turned away from the morning sun. She watched our last pot simmer, making stew with whatever she could find.

Her hand could still grasp the wooden spoon. 

She had three fingers left.

Told you it was dark. But if that’s the rain, I think we’ve earned a rainbow!

* With apologies to my email subscribers, who apparently get the unfiltered version.

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A little free flash fiction from Ada Hoffmann, in Lightspeed Magazine.

Ten Unsent Letters to the Dark Lord

The conditions in Good Queen Frida’s dungeon are strangely adequate. I sit on a tiny cot between clean stone walls by torchlight. The guards come by with wholesome day-old bread and pure water. They ask if I am comfortable. I do not know if all the Good Queen’s prisoners are treated so well. If she really is as kind and fair as she makes herself out to be. Or if it is because they have found out, through some means, what happened at the very end.

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“I think it’s important to remember that something that’s happening to you is not the only thing happening in the world. There’s always another story.” — Arundhati Roy

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“I don’t think fantasy really works except when Gandalf says, ‘You don’t get to choose your moment, you just have to live it… He was right—you don’t get to choose the moment—we’re here, we have to live it… by the time you are my age, a lot will have gone down. I want you to focus on the good and to try and make the good in a team effort.” — Kim Stanley Robinson, 2026 Middlebury College Commencement Address

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Today I want to share a fun non-fiction essay by one of my favorite fiction writers, T. Kingfisher. It’s about history and gardening and passion, real-life inspiration for fiction, and heroes saving one small but important thing.

History, Discovery, and the Quiet Heroics of Gardening – Reactor

So what does all this mean, for a writer? Well, it may not be holding the bridge at Thermopylae, but I keep coming back to how many gardeners end up saving a small piece of the world. Whether it’s a food from a lost homeland or a cultivar that is about to vanish from the earth, so often it comes down to one person who kept something small but important from being lost forever.

May we all be so heroic.

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If you’ve ever read a book and thought, “I will never write anything this good,” and feel the urge to give up your own creative efforts, this article may be for you:

The thing every writer needs to overcome – Big Think

It’s common to feel embarrassed, shy, and self-conscious when we are writing. It’s easy to feel the need to be different when someone else has done it so well already. But, as the saying goes, the woods would be very silent if the only birds that sang were those who sang best. So, sing anyway. Sing badly, sing well, sing as much as you can… The point was never to out-sing the nightingale; our “business is to create.”

What also helps? Not taking myself too seriously!

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