It’s been a few years since I found the Twitch writing community, and in that time, I’ve made so many new friends and gotten a lot of co-working done. Even though it’s virtual, the body doubling helps me stay focused and motivated when I’m struggling.

One awesome event I’ve had the pleasure of participating in a few times now is One Hundred Hours of Writing (OHHOW). OHHOW is a writing streaming event on Twitch that started as a way to let writers write together virtually around the world during November 2020. It’s been running several times each year ever since.

The next OHHOW starts Friday, July 18th at noon ET and continues through Sunday, July 20th at 2pm ET. My stream is on Saturday, July 19th at 2pm ET.

It works like this: you go to the Twitch channel of whoever is currently streaming and write for two hours. Each stream then swaps (aka raids) into a new channel, so you can keep working continuously all weekend long (with appropriate breaks for biological needs, please). Moderators track how participants are doing with their writing, based on voluntary self-reported word counts or time spent writing/editing.

If that sounds fun, come write with us!

The 2025 WriteHive Annual Conference is a free online writing conference, and I’ll be there! If you want to attend panels, workshops, and readings, and maybe even pitch an agent or two, check it out.

Catch me live at a round table about fantasy on Sunday, July 13th, at 12:30pm ET, with Rachanee Lumayno and Shameez Patel. We’ll answer audience questions about any fantasy-related topics that strike your fancy.

Then I’ll be hanging out in the Discord chat for two pre-recorded panels. Writing Mental Health: When the World Mirrors a Dystopian Novel is at 2pm ET, and I had a great time moderating for Amanda Cessor, B.L. Brown, Camden Rose, Katta Kis and Marisa Noelle. At 6pm ET, Hopepunk: Writing with Empathy in Dark Times features me, Cait Gordon, Jesse Pohlman, and Matthew Phillion, moderated by S. Morgan Burbank.

There’s a ton of cool stuff happening, so take a peek at the conference schedule, and then grab your ticket now!

In case you missed the announcement, I’ll be teaching at Viable Paradise this year, in October. What’s that, you may ask?

Viable Paradise is a week-long workshop in writing and selling commercial science fiction and fantasy stories. You and your fellow writers spend time in lectures and workshops with best-selling and award-winning authors and professional editors currently working in the field. You learn, you critique, you get critiqued, you write… it’s an intense week entirely devoted to cramming as much knowledge into your head as possible in that short time.

This year, instructors include Elizabeth Bear, Max Gladstone, Daryl Gregory, Scott Lynch, Arkady Martine, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Sherwood Smith… and me! Also hanging out will be Editor-in-Residence Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

Check out the website for information on costs, scholarships, how the hell you even get to Martha’s Vineyard, and more! And if you know of someone you think might want to spend a week getting knowledge crammed into THEIR head, pass the link along, why don’t you?

Hope to see you there!

While 2024 is gone but not forgotten, I thought it would be cool to talk about what I’ll be up to in 2025—that I know of, because of course, new things are likely to pop up as we go. Or suddenly open beneath us like a pit trap, as the case may be.

This Wednesday, January 22nd, at 9pm ET, I’m going to read my stories “Lies Seek Shadows” from 99 Fleeting Fantasies and “Courier’s Honor” from Traveling Light: Tales of the Magical Gates by Worldbuilding for Masochists live on my Twitch stream. If you’ve already read them, come hear my take on how it all sounds; if not, come enjoy some cool fantasy fiction that’s new to you! You don’t need an account to listen, only if you want to chat.

On February 7th at noon ET, I’ll be reading a short excerpt from Where Peace Is Lost at the Strong Women, Strange Worlds First Friday QuickRead. 6 authors, 8 minutes each, this is a free “book tasting” reading from science fiction, fantasy and horror stories, also featuring Fiona Moore, Ioanna Papadopoulou, Jennifer L. Hart, Shveta Thakrar, and Anne E.G. Nydam. Register and come on by to find a cool new thing to pick up!

My next book, Witch You Would (formerly known as Mage You Look), is all done and edited and currently scheduled to come out on September 2nd. The cover is amazing! I can’t wait to show it to you! Is there a pre-order link, you may ask? Sort of… It’s available all over the place if you look for it, but this is supposed to be my first novel under a pseudonym (Lia Amador), and everywhere I see it, it still has my real name attached… So I have no idea what’s going on. But I’m going to find out and get back to you.

The Beating Hearts & Battle Axes anthology of sword & sorcery romance funded last year, which means later this year, my novelette “The Cold Curse of Drathe” is going to be published. Despite the title, it’s a hot, sexy trek through a hot, sweaty jungle, with monster fighting and ancient ruins and eldritch magic being eldritch. Did I mention the sex? That, too. No firm dates yet, no buy links for those who didn’t already order it from Backerkit, but I’ll also share that info as soon as it’s available.

I’m still streaming video games every Monday through Wednesday on Twitch, and usually hanging out in the stream on Thursdays and Saturdays when my husband is gaming or making music, respectively. We’re slowly working through all the Dragon Age games together since he’s never played them before, beyond a brief foray into Origins many years ago. I’m not sure how long it will take us to get to Veilguard, but we’re having a good time regardless! Also, you can spend channel points to make me say things using my best Leliana impression.

And I think I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: if you have any questions for me, any topics you’d like me to pontificate about here on the ol’ bloggerino, please feel free to let me know! You can ask in the comments to this post, or contact me privately here or on BlueSky, my most frequently used form of social media these days.

That’s it for now! This is where I should probably offer platitudes and positivity for a better new year, and sure, let’s be kind to ourselves as best we can. But also: rest, resist, rebel, repeat. It’s a dark timeline, but we can each try to hold a candle, and maybe use it to light one for someone else.

As noted in my previous post, life was A Lot last year. In putting this list together, to my shame and frustration, I had to do forensic work to even figure out what, if anything, I had to write about. Part of this is due to lag between writing a thing and it actually being published; part of it is that stress has turned my brain into a basketball hoop, where memories go in and then immediately fall right back out and bounce off into a bush somewhere.

That said, I did indeed make things that people can read, and here they are!

Novella/Serial/IP Story

Bloomburrow is a Magic: the Gathering serial that qualifies as a novella if it’s taken as a single story. It was released in July, and gave a lot of furries and Redwall/Mouse Guard fans a new world to explore and new characters to love. Both of the main characters, Helga and Mabel, let me show parts of myself in fiction, namely my (undiagnosed) AuDHD and experiences as a mom and wife. Being able to introduce readers to a whole new plane was both intimidating and awesome, and I was delighted that so many people loved reading the story as much as I loved writing it.

Novelette

My story “Courier’s Honor” appeared in the anthology Traveling Light: Tales of the Magical Gates by Worldbuilding for Masochists. Equal parts The Warriors and Mirror’s Edge but fantasy flavored, it’s the story of a courier trying to deliver a package in a city made of walled gears that turn periodically, opening and closing doorways between them. She’s pursued by members of rival gangs trying to steal the package, and she has to fight and run her way to her own gang’s home base. Action! Adventure! Sass! Check it out.

Short Story

“A Magical Correspondence, to the Tune of Heartstrings” appeared in Uncanny Magazine Issue Fifty-Seven in March 2025. This story let me process some of my feelings about hobbies and overwork and the ways that even well-meaning family and friends can stress us out, especially when we’re trying new things. It’s also a sweet love story with magic and musical instruments and dancing and little a smooching, as a treat.

Flash Fiction

“Lies Seek Shadows” can be read in 99 Fleeting Fantasies, an anthology of fantasy flash fiction. In this story, a particular kind of seer is asked to answer a thorny question, and the customer is definitely not always right. I wrote this one a long time ago, inspired by some events that were current at the time, and it was nice that it found a home in this great book.

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That’s it! Unless I memory holed something, which is entirely possible.

And of course, if you happen to be reading this for award eligibility reasons, may I humbly ask that you consider Escape Pod for best semiprozine or best podcast or whatever similar category it might fit, and Mur Lafferty and myself as best editors of the short form variety. We work pretty dang hard to bring you some truly awesome fiction on a weekly basis, along with our amazing teams of editors and producers, and so do all the folks in our sibling podcasts at Escape Artists.

What about 2025, you may ask? We shall see what unfolds…