In 2024 I had three pieces of fiction published.

“What Lingers in the Trench Depths” follows two entities attempting to clean up an ecological collapse while navigating new, alien feelings. I’d been shopping this story around for several years – I knew it was a hard sell with weird, purposefully obtuse language and vaguely described protagonists. I was super pleased, then, for Astral, Alien Fiction to open, as I thought a magazine devoted to fiction from an alien point of view, that wanted weird, strange, and thoroughly alien aliens would understand what I was trying to do with the piece. Being accepted to the publication was a delight for me, and I am extremely humbled and happy to be included in the first issue alongside several other really incredible stories of alien existence.

“Anthropocene Thaw” sees something from the ice age awakening from its melting tomb, filled with anger and vengeance. I wrote this specifically hoping to submit it the Horror Tree – flash pieces are considered donations to the site, which has been an invaluable resource to me as a writer in finding open markets. I was glad to give something back.

In “Feline Survivability Rating” a woman attempts to bring her cat on a long haul space mission, despite the best efforts of space travel insurance to rate the disaster-prone cat as unfit for space travel. A lot of the impetus for this piece came from my (admittedly fairly petty) annoyance at the “dumb orange cat” memes, and the realization that all the famous sci-fi cats (Jonesy, Spot, and Schrödinger) are orange, and survive to the end of the narratives (at least maybe they all survive, as fittingly, in the case of Schrödinger its more that we never see him die.). So I wanted to write a story acknowledging the high survivability of orange cats in space scenarios, and pushing back in a playful way against what the unfairness of labeling normal silly cat behavior as specifically dumb and locked to certain types of cats. Stop doing cat phrenology! You never know when your “stupid” cat might save you from an inter-dimensional alien threat through some normal cat behaviors.

I mostly successfully clawed my way back to updating this website monthly with some reading reviews. I really enjoyed returning to sharing my thoughts, and I think it helped me critically re-engage with what I was reading, from a writer’s perspective. In 2025 I’m hoping to focus more on magazines and journals, since when I initially started writing reviews it was to highlight short fiction, which is often overlooked in the review sphere. I know from publishing my own short fiction that it can sometimes feel like you’re just releasing your work into the void, hoping that someone reads it.

To end on a solemn note, as a separate year-end update from the above:

This past year I have been consistently donating to Palestinian aid, and will continue to do so this year. If you can, I hope you will join me and make a donation to an aid-providing organization like the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund or Thamra, or to an individual fundraising to save themselves or their family, like Raghad.

Thank you for reading.