2020 Dawns
2019 was, without contest, my most successful writing year to date. I made 69 short fiction submissions, published 14 articles, and made 5 short story sales—you can check out the WRITINGS section for details. Most of the pieces are linked there. This year, I fell in love, got dumped, fell in love again, and got dumped again—and since my engagement ended, I didn’t think I was capable of beginning new romances.
I don’t talk a lot about my personal life in these posts. I place a premium on my own privacy and on the privacy of my friends and loved ones. This year has been painful, exciting, boring, wild, sad, exciting, and beautiful. The fortunes of my family and friends have seesawed up and down. Amid the great accomplishments and the delight have been moments of profound pain and sadness—and it’s enough to cause what seems like permanent whiplash.
Dogfish continues to be my favorite project here in town. We’ve hosted so many great writers of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, at every stage of their careers. That show has helped me integrate myself into the fabric of the New Orleans writing community and to showcase work that I admire. Hosting old friends like Nisi Shawl, Chesya Burke, and Maurice Ruffin paved the way to host newer ones like Te V. Smith, Daniel Jose Older, and Ladee Hubbard. It’s also given me somewhere to read my own work and connect with audiences beyond my small personal circle.
I haven’t mentioned it much, but for many years, I experienced severe pain stemming from an inflammation in my gums. I’d had brief periods of remission in the past, but my dentists and doctors had no idea what was happening. My insurance company blocked efforts to get a CAT scan, and I had resigned myself to the idea that the pain would always be with me. Now, on the first day of 2020, I’m not entirely without pain, but it’s drastically reduced, and the lengths of time between flare-ups are greater and greater.
2019 saw the start of my first comics project. After searching in vain for several years, I had trunked the scripts for my eight-issue series, God of the Depths and assumed that it would never come to fruition. I dug it up again only to find that while I originally wrote it 13 years ago, the series was actually not bad at all. After some revisions, I started sending materials to an artist in India and work began—only to grind once more to a halt as my artist was diagnosed with bone tuberculosis (a malady I had never heard of) and had to leave the project. I mentioned this in conversation to my friend RJ, and he connected me with a brilliant local artist and financed the first issue. Now I’ve seen concept drawings and pages for issue #1, and by God, we really have something.
Last year, I got a chance to edit the WisCon Souvenir Book under communications chair Wendy Bolm, a good friend from the UNO days. The brilliant Phildelphia musician, visual artist, writer, and queer Afrofuturist fashion icon, Alex Smith supplied the cover to produce an artifact for which I’ll always be proud. I intend to edit this year’s Souvenir Book as well, with the help of another artist I dearly love. More on that later.
One of the most important things I have to remember is that this time in 2019, I was depressed over the fact that I had to take leave from my MFA program due to a financial aid SNAFU. As I came out of that depression, I resolved that if I was to be forced out of school for a year or more, I needed to kick my writing career into high gear—and I put every effort into it. My efforts were met with a lot of rejection, but that rejection wasn’t total. With it came more acceptances, and more attention than my work has ever had. I intend to capitalize on that momentum in 2020 and beyond.