The Horror Writers Association (HWA) just announced the Final Ballot for the  2023 Bram Stoker Award finalists, and my short story “If Someone You Love Has Become a Vurdalak” is a nominee!!

It’s my first time as a Stoker finalist, and it means the world to me – my love for horror and the horror community runs deep, and it’s so moving to be recognized by them for this weird dirty queer addiction tale.

Big big love to the incredible The Dark magazine, for publishing it in the first place!

THE BIG BOOK OF CYBERPUNK came out today, and it’s an incredible 1100-page compendium of genre magnificence – including my short story “Feral Arcade Children of the American Northeast,” originally published in The Southwest Review (yep, the Northeast meets the Southwest).

From the publisher:

“Award-winning anthologist Jared Shurin brings together over a hundred stories from more than twenty-five countries that both establish and subvert the classic cyberpunk tropes and aesthetic—from gritty, near-future noir to pulse-pounding action. Urban rebels undermine monolithic corporate overlords. Daring heists are conducted through back alleys and the darkest parts of the online world. There’s dangerous new technology, cybernetic enhancements, scheming AI, corporate mercenaries, improbable weapons, and roguish hackers. These tales examine the near-now, extrapolating the most provocative trends into fascinating and plausible futures.”

Editor Jared Shurin said of my story:

“Sam J. Miller’s “Feral Arcade Children of the American Northeast” (Southwest Review) weaponises nostalgia, bringing to life the misbegotten dark-side of a ‘more innocent time’. Although ultimately empowering, it punctures our myths of a 1980s childhood, far more Lost Boys than Ready Player One.”

I’m honored to be in the mix, alongside heroes like William Gibson and Janelle Monae and Samuel R. Delany and Ken Liu and and and and and…

…here’s the entire 108-story Table of Contents.

Yasser Abdellatif – “Younis in the Belly of the Whale” (2011) – translation by Robin Moger
K.C. Alexander – “Four Tons Too Late” (2014)
Madeline Ashby – “Be Seeing You” (2015)
Ryuko Azuma – “2045 Dystopia” (2018) – first translation by Marissa Skeels
Jacques Barcia – “Salvaging Gods” (2010)
Greg Bear – “Petra” (1982)
Steve Beard – “Retoxicity” (1998)
Bef – “Wonderama” (1998) – first translation by the the author
Bruce Bethke – “Cyberpunk” (1983)
Lauren Beukes – “Branded” (2003)
Russell Blackford – “Glass Reptile Breakout” (1985)
Maurice Broaddus – “I Can Transform You” (2013)
Pat Cadigan – “Pretty Boy Crossover” (1986)
Myra Çakan – “Spider’s Nest” (2004) – translation by Jim Young
Beth Cato – “Apocalypse Playlist” (2020)
Suzanne Church – “Synch Me, Kiss Me, Drop” (2012)
Samuel R. Delany – “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” (1968)
Paul Di Filippo – “A Short Course in Art Appreciation” (1988)
Philip K. Dick – “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (1966)
Cory Doctorow – “0wnz0red” (2002)
Candas Jane Dorsey – “[Learning About] Machine Sex” (1988)
George Alec Effinger – “The World As We Know It” (1992)
Greg Egan – “Axiomatic” (1990)
Isabel Fall – “Helicopter Story” (2020)
Minister Faust – “Somatosensory Cortex Dog Mess You Up Big Time, You Sick Sack of S**T” (2021)
Fabio Fernandes – “WiFi Dreams” (2019) – translation by the author
Taiyo Fujii – “Violation of the TrueNet Security Act” (2013) – translation by Jim Hubbert
Ganzeer – “Staying Crisp” (2018)
William Gibson – “The Gernsback Continuum” (1981)
William Gibson and Michael Swanwick – “Dogfight” (1985)
Eileen Gunn – “Computer Friendly” (1989)
Omar Robert Hamilton – “Rain, Streaming” (2019)
Karen Heuler – “The Completely Rechargeable Man” (2008)
Saad Hossain – “The Endless” (2020)
Gwyneth Jones – “Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland” (1996)
Richard Kadrey – “Surfing the Khumbu” (2002)
Khalid Kaki – “Operation Daniel” (2016) – translation by Adam Talib
James Patrick Kelly – “Rat” (1986)
John Kessel – “The Last American” (2007)
Cassandra Khaw – “Degrees of Beauty” (2016)
Christian Kirchev – “File: the death of Designer D” (2009)
Aleš Kot – “A Life of Its Own” (2019)
Nancy Kress – “With the Original Cast” (1982)
Naomi Kritzer – “Cat Pictures Please” (2015)
Lavanya Lakshminarayan – “Études” (2020)
David Langford – “comp.basilisk.faq” (1999)
Oliver Langmead – “Glitterati” (2017)
Fritz Leiber – “Coming Attraction” (1950)
Jean-Marc Ligny – “RealLife 3.0” (2014) – first translation by N.L.M. Roshak
Arthur Liu – “The Life Cycle of a Cyber Bar” (2021) – translation by Nathan Faries
Ken Liu – “Thoughts and Prayers” (2019)
Steven S Long – “Keeping Up with Mr Johnson” (2016)
M. Lopes da Silva – “Found Earworms” (2019)
James Lovegrove – “Britworld™” (1992)
Nick Mamatas – “Time of Day” (2002)
Phillip Mann – “An Old-Fashioned Story” (1989)
Lisa Mason – “Arachne” (1987)
Tim Maughan – “Flyover Country” (2016)
Ken MacLeod – “Earth Hour” (2011)
Paul J McAuley – “Gene Wars” (1991)
Sam J. Miller – “Feral Arcade Children of the American Northeast” (2021)
Misha – “Speed” (1988)
Janelle Monáe and Alaya Dawn Johnson – “The Memory Librarian” (2022)
Sunny Moraine – “I Tell Thee All, I Can No More” (2013)
Michael Moss – “Keep Portland Wired” (2020)
T.R. Napper – “Twelve Minutes to Vinh Quang” (2015)
Kim Newman – “SQPR” (1992)
Mandisi Nkomo – “Do Androids Dream of Capitalism and Slavery?” (2020)
Jeff Noon – “Ghost Codes of Sparkletown” (2011)
Brandon O’Brien – “fallenangel.dll” (2016)
Craig Padawer – “Hostile Takeover” (1985)
Victor Pelevin – “The Yuletide Cyberpunk Yarn, or Christmas_Eve-117.DIR.” (1996) – first translation by Alex Shvartsman
Harry Polkinhorn – “Consumimum Igni” (1990)
Gerardo Horacio Porcayo – “Ripped Images, Rusty Dreams” (1993) – first translation by the author
qntm – “Lena” (2021)
Jean Rabe – “Better Than” (2010)
Yurei Raita – “The Day a Computer Wrote a Novel” (2019) – translation by Marissa Skeels
Cat Rambo – “Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling Stars” (2006)
Paul Graham Raven – “Los Pirates del Mar de Plastico” (2014)
Justina Robson – “The Girl Hero’s Mirror Says He’s Not the One” (2007)
Pepe Rojo – “Grey Noise” (1996) – translation by Andrea Bell
Nicholas Royle – “D.GO.” (1990)
Rudy Rucker – “Juicy Ghost” (2019)
Erica Satifka – “Act of Providence” (2021)
Nisi Shawl – “I Was a Teenage Genetic Engineer” (1989)
Lewis Shiner – “The Gene Drain” (1989)
John Shirley – “Wolves of the Plateau” (1988)
Zedeck Siew – “The White Mask” (2015)
J.P. Smythe – “The Infinite Eye” (2017)
Neal Stephenson – “The Great Simoleon Caper” (1995)
Bruce Sterling – “Deep Eddy” (1993)
Bruce Sterling and Paul Di Filippo – “The Scab’s Progress” (2001)
Charles Stross – “Lobsters” (2001)
E.J. Swift – “Alligator Heap” (2016)
Wole Talabi – “Aboukela52” (2019)
Molly Tanzer – “The Real You™” (2018)
K.A. Teryna – “The Tin Pilot” (2021) – translation by Alex Shvartsman
Jeffrey Thomas – “Immolation” (2000)
Lavie Tidhar – “Choosing Faces” (2012)
James Tiptree Jr. – “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973)
Vauhini Vara – “Ghosts” (2021)
Marie Vibbert – “Electric Tea” (2019)
Corey J. White – “Exopunk’s Not Dead” (2019)
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne – “The State Machine” (2020)
Neon Yang – “Patterns of a Murmuration, in Billions of Data Points” (2014)
E. Lily Yu – “Darkout” (2016)
Yun Ko-eun – “P.” (2011) – first translation by Sean Lin-Halbert
Alvaro Zinos-Amaro – “wysiomg” (2016)

Way back in 2014, I won the Shirley Jackson Award for my short story “57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides.” A weird gay story from an unknown author – it had been my first pro story sale!

It was one of my proudest moments. And it wouldn’t have been possible without this awesome independent award, where the passions and perspectives of a handful of individual jurors could spotlight the oddball stuff that would be missed by the bigger awards, with their inevitable bias toward established names.

So I’m over-the-moon-honored to be part of the award jury this year, judging the short story and novelette categories.

And I want your recommendations! If there are horror / dark fiction stories that you loved (or wrote) (or published) in 2021, tell me all about them! Follow this thread for the dozens of amazing stories that have already been suggested, and to make recommendations of your own!

Beyond insanely proud and happy and humbled that I’m on the ballot for the 57th annual Nebula Awards!!

“Let All the Children Boogie” took a long time to gestate and finalize and find its way into the world, and it’s such a tingly privilege to receive this kind of recognition for my gnarled messy story of queer teen love and the transformative power of music – and Iggy Pop and David Bowie – and the very 90’s feeling of falling in love with a song you heard on the late-night radio and had no way of learning more about, might never discover again.

The short story category – and the ballot as a whole – is filled to bursting with incredible talent and brilliant writing. GO READ IT ALLLLLLLL

Tor.com just announced the Table of Contents to its annual “Best of” anthology, for the short fiction it published in 2021, and my story “Let All the Children Boogie” is included!

It’s about a bunch of my usual obsessions – queer teenage love and mysterious late night radio broadcasts and maybe time-traveling super-intelligences? But mostly it’s about David Bowie, and Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger,” and the lonesome magic way music can break you out of the bubble of your body.

The eBook edition will be available for free from all your favorite vendors on January 25, 2022. But in the meantime, you can click here to read my story – or walk this way to find all the other fabulous fictions!

I am super proud and profoundly humbled to have served as the judge for the 2020 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards.

And after many months of reading incredible books and agonizing over the decision I had to make, I am delighted to join the Institute staff in congratulating the winners!

Debut Novel Category:
Cadwell Turnbull, The Lesson (Blackstone Publishing, 2019)

Open Category:
Ted Chiang, Exhalation (Knopf, 2019)

I am so grateful to the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College for this incredible opportunity – and to Ted and Cadwell for their incredible work.

“Few science fiction storylines are more overused than tales of alien first contact and invasion, which makes Cadwell Turnbull’s achievement in The Lesson all the more astonishing,” said Miller. “He’s managed to make it fresh and alive and painfully relevant for a moment where our histories of colonization and exploitation are poised to teach us all some terrible lessons, and we should all be paying attention. It’s the kind of debut that makes me so excited for the future of speculative fiction.”

“Ted Chiang is simply the greatest living science fiction writer, and each new story of his is cause for celebration. It’s been 17 years since his last collection, and Exhalation is exactly the kind of brain-exploding, superhuman, profoundly human work we need right now. Far and away the best speculative book of the year, and probably the decade. Ted’s stories rewrite the rules of the world and widen the scope of our dreams, and we are all in his debt,” said Miller.

Check out the full press release here.

Honestly every one of the nominated books could plausibly have been a winner, and every one of them will reward your time… and make you feel a hell of a lot better about how fucked up our world is. I refuse to believe the species that produced books like these is past saving. I took to Twitter to shout them all out individually:

My short story “Shucked,” originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, has been chosen for inclusion in THE YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY, an anthology edited by Richard Horton.

The whole table of contents is incredible, and packed with some of my very favorite short fiction writers. I’m super honored that my weird little story found a second home here!

Anthology drops in December, from Prime Books. Stay tuned for pre-order details…

The world is a garbage fire, and I’ve felt weird celebrating any personal accomplishments while millions are suffering and dying from a global pandemic and tens of millions have lost their jobs and and police keep murdering Black people with complete impunity.

But my community of brilliant powerful writer friends and heroes has been getting me through it, with their books and stories and tweets that remind me hope is as powerful as rage and the future belongs to us, and in that spirit I am excited to celebrate all the excellence included on the Locus Awards ballot for 2020… And the fact that my novel DESTROY ALL MONSTERS has been nominated in the Best Young Adult Novel category just makes that celebration of community all the sweeter.

I wrote the book because I wanted to help young people find the toolkit I didn’t get until I was much older – how to fight the monsters that surround us, the ones that run the world or are in positions of power or respect.

We can fight. We will win.

In that spirit, I’m proud that the book is in such awesome company on this list, which includes so many fantastic books and stories by people I adore, who are making the genre and the world a better place.

GO READ THEM ALL.

Pretty excited to share that I am the judge for this year’s Neukom Institute Literary Award! Having been a nominee for this prestigious prize in the past, it’s fantastic to now be part of the process.

I’m also a little bit terrified. Because so many awesome books came out last year! HOW DOES ONE CHOOSE.

Here’s the full press release:

HANOVER, N.H – March 30, 2020 – Nebula Award-winning author Sam J. Miller has been announced as the judge for the 2020 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards. The awards are presented annually at Dartmouth College to honor and support works in speculative fiction.

Miller is the author of the Nebula-winning The Art of Starving. Miller’s second novel Blackfish City—a shortlist selection of the 2019 Neukom Awards—tells the story of life set in a floating Arctic city where rising seas have caused dramatic geopolitical changes. His most recent book, Destroy All Monsters, was published in 2019.

“The imagined futures of some of the best speculative fiction have always felt uncomfortably close,” said Dan Rockmore, director of Dartmouth’s Neukom Institute for Computational Science and creator of the award program. “We are excited to have Sam Miller, one of the most imaginative writers of our day, guide us through this year’s awards under circumstances that seem like they were pulled from the pages of a spec fic book.”

The Neukom awards program presents prizes in two book categories: one for a debut author, and another in an open author category. There is also a separate award for playwriting. Miller will serve as a judge for the book awards.

“We’re living in weird and terrifying times that rival the best speculative fiction in their outlandishness,” said Miller, a recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award. “My peers and heroes in the genre community are rising to the challenge by writing magnificent books that not only capture the true horror of how we’re destroying the world, but the hope and power we have to save it. We’ve seen some astonishing novels come out in the past year, and I’m excited to help celebrate some of them as part of the Neukom Awards.”

Each Neukom award comes with a $5,000 honorarium given as a part of Dartmouth programming. The literary awards will be presented during a panel scheduled for fall of 2020. The playwriting award also includes the opportunity to develop and perform the script, first as a part of the summer VoxFest program and then later with the local Northern Stage theatre group.

The short list of books for this year’s awards will be made public in May. The list will be decided by Rockmore, along with Dartmouth colleagues Eric Schaller, Tarek El-Ariss, and Peter Orner, as well as The Santa Fe Institute’s Jessica Flack. The awards will be announced in June.

Additional information on the awards may be found on the Neukom Institute website at: https://sites.dartmouth.edu/neukominstitutelitawards/

###

It’s been a rough year.

A lot of protests. A lot of phone calls to Senators. A lot of crying over awful things I can’t control.

Also, I had a book come out. That, and the fascist takeover of the government really kept me from doing as much reading as I wanted to do, even though good storytelling is more important than ever, in times like this.

But I did read some great fiction this year. And it helped me a lot.  I even published some stuff I’m proud of. So if you’re in an award-nominating kind of mood, or are desperate to escape this disappointing reality, or are just looking for something awesome to read, here’s my round-up of the best stuff written by other people, as well as the work of my own that I think is halfway decent.

CATEGORY: NOVEL; NORTON AWARD

The Art of Starving (HarperTeen). Young adult science fiction about a bullied small-town gay boy with an eating disorder (all of which I was) who believes that starving himself awakens latent supernatural abilities (which mine did not). Starred reviews from Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, & Booklist; Barnes & Noble called it “a novel with the power to change the world.” A Junior Library Guild selection. 

CATEGORY: SHORT STORY

 The Future of Hunger in the Age of Programmable Matter – Tor.com.  A group of friends, a pair of lovers, and the tussle between love, addiction, and what comes next…. “Plus there are giant kaiju that destroy New York. So it’s got a lot going on. It’s a moving piece about longing and desire and shame and abuse, and it’s very much worth checking out. Go read it!” – Quick Sip Reviews 

And here are my favorite stories by other writers, from the past year [list in formation]:

• A Place to Grow, by A.T. Greenblatt (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
• Afiya’s Song, by Justin Key (F&SF)
• Auspicium Melioris Aevi, by JY Yang (Uncanny)
• Bear Language, by Martin Cahill (Fireside Fiction)
• Microbiota & the Masses: A Love Story, by S.B. Divya (Tor.com)
• Mix Tapes from Dead Boys, by E. Catherine Tobler (Lightspeed)
• Monster Girls Don’t Cry, by A. Merc Rustad (Uncanny)
• Never Yawn Under a Banyan Tree, by Nibedita Sen (Anathema)
• Nine Tenths of the Law, by Molly Tanzer (Lightspeed)
• Police Magic, by Brent Lambert (Fiyah)
• Queen of Dirt, by Nisi Shawl (Apex)
• Red Threads of Fortune, by JY Yang (Tor)
• Say, She Toy, by Chesya Burke (Apex)
• Skins Smooth as Plantain, Hearts Soft as Mango, by Ian Muneshwar (The Dark)
• Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time, by K.M. Szpara (Uncanny)
• Some Remarks on the Reproductive Strategy of the Common Octopus, by Bogi Takács (Clarkesworld)
• Suddenwall, by Sara Saab (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
• The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, by Margaret Killjoy (Tor)
• Wendy, Darling, by A.C. Wise (Daily Science Fiction)

Finalists for this year’s Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best short science fiction have been announced, and I am deeply honored to see that “Things With Beards” is on that list!

Finalists for the 2017
Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award

Nina Allan, “The Art of Space Travel,” Tor.com, 27 July 2016.
Amal El-Mohtar, “Seasons of Glass and Iron,” The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, eds. Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe, Saga Press, 2016.
Carolyn Ives Gilman, “Touring with the Alien,” Clarkesworld, April 2016.
Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom, Tor.com, February 2016.
Ian R. MacLeod, “The Visitor From Taured,” Asimov’s, September 2016.
Sam J. Miller, “Things with Beards,” Clarkesworld, June 2016.
Dominica Phetteplace, “Project Empathy,” Asimov’s, March 2016.
Catherynne M. Valente, “The Future is Blue,” Drowned Worlds, ed. Jonathan Strahan, Solaris Books, 2016.
Kai Ashante Wilson, A Taste of Honey, Tor.com, 13 October 2016.

This makes three award nominations for my story, joining previous nominations for the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. But it’s an incredible line-up of amazing stories, and I’d be honored to lose to any of them.

From their website:

The awards will be presented during the Campbell Conference Awards Banquet on Friday, June 16, as part of the annual Campbell Conference.

The Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award recognizes the best science fiction short story of each year. It was established in 1987 by James Gunn, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at KU, and the heirs of Theodore Sturgeon, including his partner Jayne Engelhart Tannehill and Sturgeon’s children, as an appropriate memorial to one of the great short-story writers in a field distinguished by its short fiction.

The Shirley Jackson Award nominations were just announced, and I am up in NOT ONE BUT TWO different categories!!

• “Angel, Monster, Man,” from Nightmare Magazine, for Best Novelette
• “Things With Beards,” from Clarkesworld, for Best Short Story!

I’m honored to be included on this incredible roster of fantastic writers. Many of them are familiar faces, friends and idols of mine, but others are new to me, and I can’t wait to read their awesome work.

The awards are given out at Readercon, in Boston, in July. Gonna try my damnedest to make it!

This year’s Nebula ballot is out, and I am super proud and happy to see that my short story “Things With Beards” is on there!

The rest of the ballot is pretty incredible, with tons of friends and heroes on there. I would be super excited to lose to my BFF Alyssa Wong AGAIN this year, or to anyone else in my category, because they are all fucking fantastic writers.

I wrote this story after the thousandth time I watched John Carpenter’s The Thing, and started debating with some friends about whether or not the people killed and replaced by the alien actually knew that they were aliens. I think the general assumption is that the Things know what they are, and are consciously acting like humans in order to better isolate and then assimilate other humans  – but what if they didn’t? What if, as Blair says in the film, “here is an organism that imitates other life-forms, and it imitates ’em perfectly,” to the point that every memory and aspect of identity is intact? How would such a creature behave? And if you were one, how would you know the difference? And if you couldn’t tell… does that mean there is no difference? Besides the fact that maybe you were killing lots of people?

The result is a piece of gay fanfic that used an 80’s horror film to tell a story of AIDS, passing, masculinity, and Black resistance to police brutality! This nominations is ON TOP OF being included FOUR different best-of-the-year anthologies! Specifically: THE YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION, V.34 (edited by Gardner Dozois);  THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY OF THE YEAR VOL.11 (edited by Jonathan Strahan); YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY, 2017 Ed. (edited by Rich Horton); and BEST SCIENCE FICTION OF THE YEAR – VOL. 2 (edited by Neil Clarke)!!!

The Locus Recommended Reading List for 2016 is out, and I’m excited to see I’m on there three different times!!

• “Things With Beards” originally in Clarkesworld [Short Story]

• “Last Gods,” originally in Drowned Worlds [Short Story]

• “Angel, Monster, Man” originally in Nightmare [Novelette]

So much incredible science fiction and fantasy and horror was published in 2016, and this whole list is full of magnificence.

THIS IS MADNESS!

My short story “Things With Beards,” originally published in Clarkesworld, has been selected for inclusion in FOUR different best-of-the-year anthologies! Specifically: THE YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION, V.34 (edited by Gardner Dozois);  THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY OF THE YEAR VOL.11 (edited by Jonathan Strahan); YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY, 2017 Ed. (edited by Rich Horton); and BEST SCIENCE FICTION OF THE YEAR – VOL. 2 (edited by Neil Clarke).

Not bad for a piece of gay fanfic that used an 80’s horror film to tell a story of AIDS, passing, masculinity, police brutality, and resistance!

…. madness.

2016 was a rough year personally, and, uh, also, existentially. Prince died! And David Bowie! and… racist misogynist fascists took over the US government.

So I read a lot of fiction, this year. And it helped me a lot. And I believe that in the coming years, we’ll need fiction more and more.

If you’re in an award-nominating kind of mood, or are desperate to escape this disappointing reality, or are just looking for something awesome to read, here’s my round-up of the best stories written by other people that I read in 2016. I’ve also included the two pieces I’m proudest of, from 2016 – conveniently located in two separate award categories:

And here are my favorite stories from the past year [list in formation]:

This week the ballot for the 2016 World Fantasy Award was released, and I was totally magnificently flabbergasted to see that my story “The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History” is a finalist!

The seed of “The Heat of Us” was planted on the night Donna Summer died. I was walking home from work, feeling pretty blue – I think “Bad Girls” is probably the second-best album of all time – looking across at the sad lonely lights of the city coming on, all those people by themselves, all the separate sadness that a certain group of people would be feeling. And I remembered that the Stonewall Uprising happened on the night that Judy Garland died. And I thought “revolutions are born on nights like this.” But that seed didn’t break into blossom until I attended the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Workshop and I saw how exponentially my writing improved through being part of a community of writers and readers, how I could share their strengths and (hopefully) lend them mine. So this is a story about community – about how people are stronger together than separate, and how when we work together we can achieve things so incredible they’re indistinguishable from magic.

And lest we think of Stonewall as ancient history, the Bad Old Days when Homophobia Ruled the Earth, the recent massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando only serves to underscore the extent to which hatred and patriarchy still rule our world. The day after the mass murder, some people posted and tweeted that my story was helping them process the horror, which is probably the highest compliment I’ve received as an author. I can think of no more important role for an artist than to help people imagine a world where the tables get turned on the monsters who would roll up with guns on a crowd of people just trying to have fun.

Just as exciting as the nomination itself is the fact that I’m up against two of my favorite writers and people, Alyssa Wong and Amal El-Mohtar, both of whom I was up against for the Nebula this year as well, and against whom I FOUGHT AN EPIC SERIES OF MESSY, BLOODY, FIERY MAGICAL BATTLES, captured here for posterity.

Huge love to: Uncanny Magazine for publishing it, and for publishing so many other amazing stories – Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas & Michi Trota are truly doing magnificent work; C.S.E. Cooney for doing such a phenomenal job reading my story for the Uncanny Podcast; Holly Black & Cassandra Clare for critiquing the shit out of this in workshop at Clarion; my fellow Clarion 2012 Awkward Robots, who this story is ACTUALLY ABOUT;  all the people who read and reviewed and blogged and tweeted and talked about it, including, but not limited to, A.C. Wise, John Joseph Adams, Sarah Pinsker, Amal El-Mohtar, Charles Payseur, Sunil Patel, Rachel Swirsky, Jose Iriarte, Liz Argall, Wole Talabi, Emma Osborne, K.M. Szpara, Fran Wilde, Deborah Stanish, Shelley Streeby, Joshua Johnson, Bo Bolander, Fred Coppersmith, Tony Quick, K. Tempest Bradford, Magaly Guerrero, Deanna Knippling, Lara Donnelly, Didi Chanoch, Anthony Cardno, @genrebending, Brian at Nerdbrarian.com… [APOLOGIES to anyone I forgot/left off! contact me and I’ll add you]

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America released the ballot for this year’s Nebulas, and I was so pleased that my story “When Your Child Strays From God” is a nominee in the Short Story category! Because wow, what a lineup of wonderful writers who I’m honored to be able to call colleagues. And as the fabulous K. Tempest Bradford points out in this excellent video, it’s a big victory for marginalized voices – 79% of the nominees are NOT straight cis- white men!!

But this nomination is such sweet agony, because while the whole ballot is fantastic, the Short Story category is especially magnificent. As I’ve said elsewhere, Amal El-Mohtar’s “Madeleine” is one of the two best stories of the year (tied with Sadie Bruce’s “Little Girls in Bone Museums”), and Alyssa Wong’s “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers,” like everything Alyssa does, has a gorgeous ability to flay the flesh from the human heart.

But it wasn’t just homophobes!

A bunch of people said it wasn’t really genre fiction, that “Science fiction elements are all but missing,” or called out its “inattentive world-building,” or said that it “doesn’t really work as a piece of traditional genre fiction as its future is dated, derivative and poorly realised”

In the end, though, the story found its audience, and I was blessed with some truly incredible reviews.

Amal El-Mohtar wrote a crushingly kind and weep-inducing review, and said, among other wonderful things: “I loved this story unabashedly: Sauro’s voice and vulnerability, the generosity of his character, and the integrity of his engagement with the unflinching awfulness of the premise are tremendously effective. It’s a heart-breaking, harrowing piece, made all the more so by that near-future vision’s many intersections with the present: in his Author Spotlight, Miller expands on the realities of foster kids’ prospects and the gross systemic injustices they face. It’s also a desperately elegant story, combining a careful structure with a depth and intensity of emotion that puts me in mind of ivy bursting from a brick wall; the very controlled, deliberate punctuation of Sauro’s present with moments from his past is a mixing of mechanical and organic reminiscent of the cloud-ports themselves.”

I’d love to win, but my category is PACKED with truly brilliant stories.

If you’re a SFWA member, I hope you’ll consider voting for it. But you can’t really go wrong, with a roster of nominees this incredible, and I’d be honored to lose to any of these fine folks.

“We Are the Cloud” can be read in its entirety HERE.

The story is also available in a phenomenal audio version, read by Stefan Rudnicki.

AND HERE’S A PICTURE I DREW TO ILLUSTRATE THE STORY.

I bought the new edition of Rich Horton’s consistently-excellent “Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy” anthology because (1) it’s consistently excellent, and (2) it had a story by my hero/ine Alaya Dawn Johnson that I hadn’t read before. So imagine my surprise when I finished the story and dried my tears and browsed through the “Recommended Reading” at the back of the book, and found my story “The Beasts We Want To Be,” from the final issue of Electric Velocipede!

Now, of course it would have been awesome to have my story ACTUALLY be in the anthology, but this recommended reading list is some pretty exquisite company to be in! Especially considering that two of the very best stories I read all year – Ted Chiang’s “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling,” and Vylar Kaftan’s “The Weight of the Sunrise” – are also there. Other phenomenal writers that I’m honored to be listed alongside include Charlie Jane Anders, Indrapramit Das, Aliette de Bodard, Jeffrey Ford, Theodora Goss, Maria Dhavana Headley, Matthew Kressel, Ken Liu, Sofia Samatar, Ken Schneyer, Michael Swanwick, Rachel Swirsky, Genevieve Valentine, and Carrie Vaughn.

In two weeks, it will be two years since I went away to the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writer’s Workshop in San Diego. To find myself listed in a best-of anthology alongside TWO of my Clarion teachers (Jeff and Ted) is the kind of bizarre wonderful surprise that almost kinda sorta soothes the lifelong-sadness-burn of returning to the real world when Clarion ends.

A new Clarion class is about to embark on the same adventure. I can’t wait to see their names in the best-of anthologies of years to come!