Hi, everyone! This newsletter is a bit late because, alas, August turned out even more eventful than expected. I'm not sure how we're this far into September already, but we must be, because it's downright chilly out, and I'm writing this wearing a sweater and sipping a lovely black tea with heather that I bought in the Trossachs. 

My partner and I had a delightful trip to Scotland (despite the best efforts of United Airlines to make it otherwise -- that's a whole other saga) and an amazing time at Worldcon in Glasgow. More below about Worldcon, which was lovely and well-planned and organized... except for their extremely lackluster guidelines about masking. Several hundred people or more -- probably more, because that's just the self-reporting -- caught covid, including us. We're recovered now, but it was not a fun end to our trip, to say the least.

Covid is very much still around. It's killing fewer people than it was before the vaccines, but it's still highly unpleasant even if you're healthy. It's still dangerous, even deadly, for at-risk people. It still causes long covid, which is still poorly understood and can be debilitating. I wish this Worldcon and many other cons took it more seriously, because it's harmful not to, and excludes fans and creators who can't afford to risk catching it.

Writing updates and upcoming events

After taking several weeks off for vacation and then covid recovery, it's been very nice to get back to writing. I've been having fun and making good progress with my cozy fantasy novel. I also wrote a new, goofy little flash story, plus I'm revising one short story and noodling ideas for a couple new ones.

I want to get back into writing more short stories, alongside longer work. Novels are always more absorbing for me as a reader and a writer, and will always be my first love, but shorts are satisfying in a different way, great for a change of tone and pace.

Speaking of short stories: if you're a subscriber to Uncanny Magazine, I've got a story in the current issue! It'll be up on their website to read for free in early October, and I can't wait to share this one with you all, not the least because being published in Uncanny has been a dream of mine for a long time.

Also coming up soon are two events: On Sept 28-29th, I'll be participating in Flights of Foundry, a fantastic virtual con (highly recommended if you're a writer or creator), and the Baltimore Book Festival, one of my favorite local events that's happily back after a hiatus. I can't quite share my schedules for these yet, but I will when they're public!

Fun stuff from Worldcon

The programming at Worldcon was prolific. There were a couple dozen sessions per timeslot, and 4-5 times more sessions I wanted to attend than were physically possible. Times like this, I wish for one of those superpowers where you can clone yourself in order to do all the things at once.

Some favorite topics and insights:

• A reminder of how much I enjoy the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks (who was Scottish!). There was a lot of love for Banks and the masterpiece that is the Culture, a genuinely utopian (as long as you're on the inside) space empire that has fascinating tensions and conflicts boiling around its edges. I want to read Banks's non-genre work one of these days, as he famously spanned sci-fi and lit fic.
• So much science. The program had a whole section for talks by scientists who are also sci-fi and fantasy fans, spanning topics from cancer as a cultural metaphor (the Borg?), to reproductive futures, to farming vegetables in space (be careful what scented plants you introduce into a closed-air system -- imagine your whole ship smelling like mint or cilantro... constantly, forever).
• The multiverse as the new time travel: a way to explore new, wacky, improbable situations for our favorite characters without long-term consequences, which isn't unlike how mythology reinvents stories of gods and heroes over time. The multiverse kind of blows up the concept of canon... but is that a bad thing?
• A fascinating conversation on the differences between robots in Western vs non-Western stories. I didn't know that, while American writers were worried about robot uprisings and Asimov was establishing laws to keep robots from killing us, Japanese writers and storytellers used "robot laws" to establish robots' rights.

Worldcon is also host to the Hugo Awards, and all the winners (and nominees) this year were fantastic. The standout to me was best novel winner Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh. This book blew me away when I read it. It's a rough read, a brutal dystopian future for humanity, with a main character who truly struggles with her own indocrinated beliefs about the world -- but ultimately it's about community and hope in the face of fascism, and it is a hopeful story, in the end. Tesh had an amazing acceptance speech, well worth reading, which starts off with "Here is my hope for this book... I hope this book disappears" because she's calling on us to prove her dark future wrong.

I hope so, too.

Last but not least...

Please forgive me for not including a cat picture this month, but I can't resist sharing some Scotland photos. These are from a volcanic formation called the Old Man of Storr on the Isle of Skye, and if this isn't the entrance to some fairy kingdom, I don't know what is:

And yes, these are from the same hike, just a few minutes and a couple hundred feet apart. That's how fast the weather changed while we were there.

Until next time,

Jo Miles