I’m not going to attempt to recap 2020 generally — we all know what it’s looked like, and mostly the answer is “on fire, literally and figuratively.” But last year I made a post about my writing resolution for the upcoming twelve months, and it’s got me thinking about the last several years.

In 2017 I wrote three short stories that weren’t for L5R, all three of them solicited for anthologies (though one of the three anthos folded after my story was drafted). That was . . . not super productive. So in 2018 I set myself the goal of writing six, one every two months — again, not counting L5R work, since the goal here was to start actually submitting short fiction again. I managed five, which was at least an increase over the previous year, though two of those five were for anthologies (one of which again folded). In 2019 I decided to aim for the same target again, and thanks to some unforeseen angst over whether I could let myself count flash — a thing I hadn’t written in ages, but apparently my brain found that gear again — I wound up with nine stories, six of them full-length, three of them flash.

But for 2020, I changed my goals. See, I had a feeling that politics was going to trash my ability to concentrate, so between that and the novel work I was contracted for, I felt it was better to scale my expectations down. Three short stories only, and hopefully three specific ones that would help me finish off some collections.

. . . I wrote twelve.

Nine full-length stories and three flash fell out of my head this year. Not because the world was in better shape than I expected, but because there appears to have been a huge split in how people responded to 2020: either it destroyed their ability to get anything creative done, or that became their refuge from the stress. (This also seems to have been true of reading.) I apparently fell into the latter camp, with the result that this has been my most productive short fiction year since . . . <checks records> . . . 2004. That year I wrote a whopping twenty-four pieces — but eighteen of those were flash; the total wordcount was nearly 8K less than this year’s.

(Oh, and also two novels. Admittedly Alyc and I wrote a quarter of the second Rook and Rose book last year — but even if I count only half of the part we wrote this year, that’s still 75K. Which is not all that much shorter than Night Parade in its entirety.)

(And also my Patreon, which is like 60K+ every single year.)

Weirdly, my productivity has actually become kind of a problem. I am literally writing short fiction faster than anybody’s buying it, and at this point the submissions pipeline is saturated. I’ve got three drafts I haven’t even tried to revise, because there’s nowhere for me to send them. Even if I thought I could top this year’s achievement, what would be the point?

So my goals for 2021 are winding up about the same as last year’s, only for totally different reasons. I owe a long short story or (more likely) a novelette to an anthology; I have those three drafts that need revision. There are two stories it would be nice to write, one of which is left over from my 2020 hit list (the other two got written), but I’m not going to push.

Of course, I didn’t mean to push this year, either. So who knows what will happen.

Hard on the heels of announcing the (extremely belated) pre-order window, I now announce the publication of Down a Street That Wasn’t There! Another novella-sized collection of my short fiction (joining the ranks of Ars Historica, Maps to Nowhere, and The Nine Lands), this one collects my urban fantasy to date. You can buy it from Book View Cafe (the publisher), Barnes and Noble, Google Play, iTunes, Kobo, or Amazon US or UK.

But I want to reiterate what I said before: if you have not yet donated to some organization fighting for racial justice and an end to the rampant police brutality in the United States (or elsewhere), then please take the money you would have spent on this book — or more! — and do that first. I don’t want to think anybody bought my collection instead of doing that. Both is fine! Both is excellent! But if your finances are tight enough that it’s a choice between one or the other, pick that one. It matters far more.

I’ve set this up very much at the last minute — as in, it’s coming out Tuesday. But I’m putting out a new short story collection! Down a Street That Wasn’t There pulls together my urban fantasy to date — seven stories set in the real world or something very close to it.

Here’s the thing, though. I scheduled this before the most recent round of inexcusable police brutality took over the news (where it well deserves to be), and . . . I feel weird saying “hey, buy a thing from me!” when there are much more urgent needs out there. So let me say this: if you have already donated to a bail fund or Black Lives Matter or the ACLU or some other organization fighting for badly-needed justice, or if you’ve made purchases to support some local Black-owned businesses, and you want to pick up this collection, then thank you. But if you haven’t, I ask you to instead spend that money where it will do more good. I could say “all proceeds for now will go to X charity,” and there’s a sense in which that will be true, because my household’s been making a lot of donations lately and isn’t done yet. There are two reasons I’m not framing it in those terms, though. The first is that I don’t want to feel like I’m using a good cause to promote my book — it should be the other way around. And the second is that I think it’s more valuable to encourage lots of people to interface with these organizations, to take action directly rather than indirectly (i.e. through me).

So: please put the needs of the vulnerable ahead of this book. I’m still putting it out because I don’t want to leave Book View Cafe with a hole in its publishing schedule and because even when the world is on fire, we still need stories and diversions and entertainment; in some ways we need them even more badly in such times. But I really mean it. Donate if you can.

And if you’ve already done that, well, I have a new short story collection for you!

DOWN A STREET THAT WASN’T THERE

Step beyond the ordinary . . .

Beneath the surface of our reality lies a world of magic and danger — a world where buildings have guardian spirits, shapeshifting coyotes prey on the hopeful and the desperate, and ancient traditions prepare for an apocalyptic future. These seven urban fantasy tales from award-winning author Marie Brennan paint the everyday with a layer of wonder, inviting you to imagine what could lie just around the corner.

Half an hour before the end of 2019, I got an email notifying me that the magazine Daily Science Fiction wanted to buy my flash story “Cruel Sisters” (available to read for free at that link) — a story which may be glossed as “that continuity error had bugged me for years, thanks a lot, Loreena McKennitt.” Except it’s actual thanks now rather than sarcastic, because in the end I got a story and a sale out of it.

Well, would you look at that.

A bit of random curiosity led me to look something up on Wikipedia. A detail in the article led me to a bit of mythology I hadn’t heard about before (or had forgotten if I had). Something like two weeks later — certainly not more than that — I have a short story.

Dear brain: you can stop wibbling over metrics now. In this calendar year you have written three pieces of flash fiction, one novelette that’s going into a fixup novel rather than making the submissions rounds, and SIX ACTUAL SHORT STORIES. Like you set out to do.

As I’ve said before, there are stupid games I can play around what counts and what doesn’t. And I stand by what I said before, which is that I didn’t have to write another longer-than-flash piece this year in order to feel like I’d accomplished something. On the other hand, there was no good reason not to write the story, once I had the idea for it. Except for the bit where I fell down a rabbit hole of reading up on early bronze-working and watching Youtube videos of people making weapons and armor, because I’m not quite incapable of writing something that doesn’t require research, but I come damn close.

The only real problem is, now I’ve messed up the balance for a future short story collection I want to do. The only way out of that trap is to write another story based on some kind of Near Eastern mythology.

But that, I can do in 2020.

Back in September I wrote about the squishy metrics of my goal to write six short stories this year. You can read the details there, but the long and short of it is that last week I finished another story . . . ish. See, it’s flash. Again. Less than a thousand words long. Which, although it counts as A Thing I Can Submit, doesn’t quiiiiiiiite convince my brain I’ve hit the target.

Which is why I’ve decided that a different metric should apply here. See, in 2018 I set out to write six short stories, and managed five. In 2019 I set out to write six short stories, and managed five, plus a novelette that’s going into Driftwood rather than being submitted, plus three pieces of flash fiction. Whether that counts as “six short stories” or not is, by official decree, less relevant than the fact that I wrote more than I did the year before.

Of course, that’s dangerous in its own way. It risks engaging the gear in my brain that says so you should do even more in 2020! And it’s possible for me to play pernicious games around wordcount, fretting that writing more individual stories doesn’t count if their total length doesn’t add up to more than the previous year. Writers have a strong tendency toward neuroticism, and I’m no exception; I can always find a way to tell myself I ought to be achieving more.

So I’m also trying to shift my attention to something else more useful: my list of unwritten story ideas. That “six story” goal is the reason I prodded myself to write the most recent piece (and then sort of missed because it wound up only 640 words long), but there’s another reason as well, and that’s my short story collections. With the exception of Never After (which is a special case), I’m only collecting previously published stories, not new work. I (for slightly absurd reasons) wanted one more story based on some kind of Near Eastern source to go into an upcoming collection of works inspired by folklore and mythology, and knew I would feel much more satisfied if I managed to get that done this year. As of this most recent flash piece, I can check off that box, and move that collection one step closer to happening.

And that’s why I’m already casting speculative glances in the direction of another story concept. Writing that one (and selling it, of course) would complete the lineup for another collection — the last of the original set I had planned when I first started putting these together. So that’s high on my hit-list for 2020. In theory I could do it before the end of this year (and thus realio trulio achieve the goal of six short stories, no waffling about flash fiction required) . . . but I don’t think that’s likely to happen. It needs more composting first.

Goal for 2020: six short stories. Just like it was for 2019 and 2018. In the end, the final number doesn’t really matter, so long as setting that goal fulfills its real purpose, which is getting me to write more short fiction again.