Howdy, folks!  Been a while.  Hope 2010 is going well for y’all so far.

2009 was one of the most intense years of my life.  In the realm of the personal this intensity took both scary and awe-inspiringly exciting forms.  But this is not the place for that.  This is the place where I talk about being a fantasy writer (and, semi-vestigially, a poet*).  2009 was my first year as a published fantasy writer, and it was a good one:

–Three of my stories ( “Where Virtue Lives,” “Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela,” and “Judgment of Swords and Souls”) appeared in high-profile markets.

–I sold a fourth story – a supervillain piece! – to another big market (Strange Horizons).  This one should appear in the next month or two.

–I read (and looked goofy) at the New York Review of Science Fiction’s reading series, Readercon, and the World Fantasy Convention.

–I was a guest on the hallowed Hour of the Wolf radio show, and people actually called in to talk about my fiction!

–One of my stories got nods in a starred Publisher’s Weekly review, Library Journal, SF Site, and elsewhere.  Another got props from eminent SF/F reviewer Rich Horton, both in the field’s paper of record, Locus, and in one of his end-of-the-year summaries.

–I was invited to join the simply awesome, invitation-only Rio Hondo workshop where I gallingly, appallingly pretended to be in a position to critique seasoned vets like Michaela Roesner, Walter Jon Williams, Karen Joy Fowler, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Maureen McHugh and others.

–I joined the excellent Writers group Altered Fluid.

–I became a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), the field’s professional organization.

–I finished a semi-polished draft of my first fantasy novel, set in the same quasi-Islamic heroic fantasy world as two of my stories.

Whew!  As I say, a good year.  I also, of course, collected plenty of rejection letters and a couple of not-so-great reviews and spent days on end despairing about my nascent writing career.  But why in the hell would I want to recap that?

*Though I don’t really write poetry anymore, I did publish a couple of poems (see my bibliography) and landed my most prestigious publication yet (in a forthcoming issue of Callaloo).  I also learned that my poems were being taught in a college course – which makes four college courses now (that I know of) in which this has been the case!  Yes, I’m petty enough to have kept track — poetry, like crime, doesn’t pay.  So one takes one’s satisfactions where one can…