 Every year at the end of the year I post a review of all the articles, poems, stories, and books I’ve published that year. 2019 was a big year for me in writing. While I felt like I wasn’t getting a lot done, I was surprised when I looked back and realized I really had written a great deal.
Most of my time was spent working on two novels-in-progress. But I did manage to send out some poems for publication too. I’m very honored by the editors who recognized and published my work. Here’s to 2020 and another year of writing. Books Glimmerglass Girl — Won the Elgin Award for best speculative chapbook Numinous Stones — To be published in Italian in 2020 by Kipple Press Poems The 2019 Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association Contest, Winner: Short Form Category: The Fox and the Forest (Erasure of Ray Bradbury) The 2019 Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association Contest, Winner: Long Form Category: The Mining Town Apparition Lit #8 (October 2019) — Belly of the Beast Mirror Dance Issue 44 (Spring 2019) — Farewell Dead Men Not One of Us #61 (April 2019) — A Book Is a Tomb and Words Are Souls The Avenue: Issue V: Music (April 2019) — Chopin Falls in Love with the Night (1827–1846) The Knicknackery Issue 6 (February 2019) — Bayou Dream Dreams & Nightmares Magazine (Issue #111, January 2019) — An Unknowing Breach of the Law Kaleidotrope (Winter 2019) — “All the Glory of Her Earthly Shell” On Writing: Medium (12/18/19) — My NaNoWriMo Was a Mess Writing Hacks (11/27/19) — Tricking Yourself into Writing Bulletproof Writers (11/28/19) — The End of the Year Sometimes Sucks for Creatives Storymaker (11/25/19) — Reluctantly Writing About Death Interstellar Flight Press (11/15/19) — Defying Genre in The Dream House Daily Muse Books (10/24/19) — NaNoWriMo Isn’t Just for Books Medium (10/15/19) — Does Publishing Short Stories Matter? Medium (9/4/19) — The Writing Life: An Infographic Medium (8/28/19) — 40 Writing Milestones to Celebrate Medium (8/21/19) — Queries, Contributors, and Common Terms: An A-Z glossary for submitting writing Horror Writer’s Association Newsletter (7/1/19) — Darkness & Light Medium (5/16/19) — Fighting Rejection & Imposter Syndrome Medium (5/3/19) — Switching Genres Medium (4/3/19) — Creating a Writer’s Mission Statement Medium (3/27/19) — NaPoWriMo: A Poet’s Challenge Dream Foundry (3/14/19) — The Cone of Silence Medium (3/11/19) — These are a Few of My Favorite Rejections Medium (1/31/19) — Forming a Critique Group 101
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 Do you ever think as humans we’re just afraid to get our hands dirty? That we’ve engineered our lives to be as perfect, pristine, and efficient as possible? And that maybe, if we aren’t perfect, then we’re failures?
I’m trying to abolish this idea from my creative life. The idea of perfection. Read the full article here . . .  I'm offering $150 manuscript reviews in the month of December only for NaNoWriMo participants. Here's what you get:
The normal cost for this kind of consultation is upwards of $500-1,000, so this is an utterly mad deal (and I sometimes feel utterly mad for offering it!) Finishing NaNoWriMo can feel really like a letdown sometimes. It's like the day after Christmas. But getting a second set of eyes on your manuscript can help you approach revision. How To Sign Up: To sign up, send me an email to hlwalrath (at) gmail (dot) com in the month of December with the following:
About Me I am a freelance editor with 5+ years of experience helping writers level up their words. I am based out of Houston, Texas. I am a member of the Editorial Freelancers Association, Codex, SFPA, and Writespace, a local literary non-profit where I regularly teach writing workshops. I love working with writers of all genres, experiences, and backgrounds, but I love new writers best. I have won NaNoWriMo once(!) but I always participate because it's my favorite writing event of the year.  Around November, Writing Twitter starts talking about the end of the year. It’s NaNoWriMo, so people are often talking about writing anyway. But also, it’s the time of the year when, if you’re a writer in science fiction or fantasy, you should be posting your “What I Published This Year,” or “Awards Eligibility” post.
A lot of writers use this time to celebrate the works they’ve published over the year and encourage others to nominate them for best of lists and prize consideration, like the Pushcart Prize or Hugo Awards. Journal editors on the literary side announce their nominations for the Pushcart around this time. 2019 is also the end of a decade, so now people are also posting encouraging writers to share what they accomplished in the last decade. We’re sharing pics of ourselves in 2009 and 2019 to show the passage of time. But I know that a lot of creatives struggle with all this. Read the whole post here . . .  I love the above image. It’s a photograph taken at Natural Bridge State Park, where someone has carved this quote from J.R.R. Tolkien into a walking path. J.R.R. Tolkien probably never imagined the life his work has taken on after his death — that someone would take the time to carve his words in a public space. In fact, I know he didn’t.
John Hendrix, an artist, recently posted a quote from Tolkien’s diary while he was writing Lord of the Rings. It reads: Friday 14 April: ‘I managed to get an hour or two’s writing, and have brought Frodo nearly to the gates of Mordor. Afternoon lawn-mowing. Term begins next week, and proofs of Wales papers have come. Still I am going to continue “Ring” in every salvable moment.’ Read more here . . .  A year and a few months ago, my father died. Today, I signed a contract for a small poetry book on grief and dealing with my father’s death that is going to be translated into Italian and published in Italy. The world spins in weird ways, I guess. Before my father died, I always looked on books about the death of a loved one in, I’ll admit, a pretty messed up and slightly dismissive way. I hated cancer memoirs, books that dived headfirst into the nitty-gritty details of death: bodies and hospitals and medicine and the grotesque humanity of grief. Also, there was a connotation with these books. When they were written by women about caring for loved ones, they often got lumped into women’s fiction, whereas a man writing about grief was somehow reinventing the wheel. Read the full article on Medium . . . 
Confessions of a Supermassive Black Hole
You can’t escape my body. I deform spacetime, invisible. I collapse, even as everything surrounds me. I am the center of you, of your galaxy. I sieve particles, radiation, light, searching for the ghost of my former self. My gravity is also my weakness.  I have a new early reveal post for subscribers at Curious Fictions. Last month I participated in Zinefest Houston — one of my favorite local events. In this event, local paper artists create zines to sell — small, hand-made, individual books, pamphlets, and other paper ephemera. I’ve participated twice and I always enjoy this well-crafted event (ba-dum cha). What I like about Zinefest is the audience. It’s mostly young people who are interested in meeting other writers and artists. It’s also one of the most diverse and well-attended events I go to every year. I always end up meeting some lovely folks!
Read the entire post here . . .  It’s my favorite day of the year, so I thought I’d share a poem from my back catalogue of published work. This poem is an erasure/blackout of Shirley Jackson’s book We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
In case you’re unaware of this form, erasures are a type of found poetry where you “erase” words from a found text and the words left behind form a poem. Read the poem here . . .
I have a new poem in Apparition Lit #8 (October 2019) - Belly of the Beast. This one is kind of romantic, which I felt like fit the theme of the issue, Euphoria. What is euphoric to you? For me, it's being with the person you love in the weirdest place you can think of.
Let’s live in the belly of the beast. You can bring a strong IPA so smooth it’s like milk frothed. I’ll bring Atwood and Ishiguro and Dickens. We’ll watch Netflix in the blood vessels and make love in the open mouth with the krill and saltwater pooling at our knees . . . Read the entire poem here . . . Add it to Goodreads Buy it on Amazon:  November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), an online community and yearly event where writers make the goal of writing 50,000 words in 30 days. This year, I’m encouraging you to burn the frigging thing down.
Read how here . . .  Stellar news today! My poem "The Fox and the Forest" (an erasure of Ray Bradbury) is the winner of the SFPA: Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association contest short form and my poem "The Mining Town," is the winner in the long form category! Very much bowled over by the judge's kind comments on my poems: "Hybridity brings in endless possibilities when it comes to crafting and interpreting creative work, and these short pieces showcase the complexity of hybrid, speculative poetry." "When the container for our work is expanded, there’s room to explore braided narratives. These longer poems convey multiple specific stories while still opening themselves up for the audience to imprint their own experiences onto the work."  The Mining Town by Holly Lyn Walrath is all bric-a-brac now. Tourists cram into houses-turned-stores, drink beer on the corners from the new microbrewery in the old mill, buy sweatshirts that say “I mined the deep and all I got was this stupid shirt,” but few take the walk up there, into the hills. It’s better to stay down here, safe among the ghosts of houses, to plunder their wares with big white thumbs and buy things, there are always more things to buy in a ghost town. What happened to this town? The Church bell rings at dawn and dusk. The men paint the white brick black and red roof black and burn the picket fence. They stand to survey their work, cigarettes dangling from their slack jaws, hands black with pitch. At home, they do not wash the darkness away with silver soap but place those hands on the bodies of wives and backsides of children and hips of back-alley lovers and blank pieces of paper longing for ink. You must remember, this was a different time. Why did they paint the church black? The General Store at first sold normal goods. Tack and seed, hay and hen egg. Slowly, strange objects appeared upon the shelves. A single deer’s antler, painted gold. Ant farms, pre-made, the little red bodies within tunneling deeper and deeper. A dozen wooden tokens carved with other Gods. Silver machines, alien in origin. Jars of body parts. Flower buds encased in glass. Japanese swords. The souls of men disguised in clock faces. Irony. Joy. Peace, if you could afford it. Where did the objects come from? The Library There is no library. It sank into the ground years ago. Perhaps an industrious young man might dig his way down, find it deep beneath the sod and worms, and crawl in through a back window, left open by the librarian on a summer’s day, to bring in a bit of the fresh mountain breeze, and there he might find her still, humming a bit, rocking in her chair behind the card catalog, waiting for someone to ask for a book. Why is there no library? The Abandoned Mine The most prominent feature being the stores of abandoned ore. Some piled in carts like great mounds of jewels, other still half-buried in the walls, their shiny faces masks waiting to be removed and to reveal the monster within. Once, the ore was necessary to the planet’s deepest life, and once, it was necessary to human life. Now, it’s merely lonely. It creeps out in tendrils, seeding its jeweled body through the earth, down the path, to the town. It puts out feelers in tidy bed and breakfast gardens, a blue-flame flower here, a ruddy weed there, in with the wheat in the farmer’s fields and creeping through the cracks of the brick on the cobblestone streets. Why is the ore no longer needed? The Trail Leading Away from the Mine is overgrown with brush and wing, birds hopping along moss-covered logs, blooming glens of clover where bunnies forage, deep tufts of ash from the death trees, who burn each night in twilight and then like the phoenix, regrow each morning. The ash is the bodies of those long gone souls—yet a bit of their yearning still remains. The fire is the mountain’s heart rained down. And every curse it whispers is made new again, every morning it awakes forgetting what it forgot. Why do the trees burn? The Tenement Roofs are where the miners went to smoke, and sometimes drink, when their wives didn’t want them around, which was often. Their feet dangled over the edges, all in a row. They said nothing to each other, nothing, except to whisper, “You see the blue light?” and one would say in response, “Aye, I seen the blue light, down in the depths, I seen it.” Who was the first to follow the light? The Drummer Boy used to play on the corner for ha’pennies, picking out a rhythm on his bone-cage banjo and tapping the beat with his foot on his man-skin drum. He made a deal with the devil before such things became unnecessary and then he got curious, and when a boy gets curious all hell breaks loose. He followed the men and picked out each one for the killing, and then ran to the bridge where the bats roosted to tell them the news. They listened, curious, and then swarmed out into the twilight on the hunt. What were they hunting? The Foreman was afraid of the dark. He sent his men down to the caves and tunnels with only a canary and other men for company and he expected no philandering with either, but he never laid eyes on the ore in his own life time. He watched them leave his little cabin, one by one, walk up the trail and disappear into the maw, and he turned away, turned the crank on his music box, and listened to Clementine over and over again. Oh my darling, he sang, oh, oh. Who gave the foreman his music box? The Devil tends the local pub. But he never seemed to have any purpose except to serve another round. He was lonely, dreadfully lonely. His lover died and he kept her picture over the till and dared any man to look upon it without weeping. He once lived in a brighter place, was once a wealthy man with bigger plans. But the devil didn’t realize that once he’d won out, he’d be bored. Now he poisons the well out back with his tears, only a few each night. It’s the least he can do. Who loves the devil?  I have a new article up at Medium today on the economics of short fiction, how commercialism is changing what writers write, & a bit of advice from Shirley Jackson.
“The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it, as long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were.” — Shirley Jackson (“Memory and Delusion,” Published in Let Me Tell You.) Read the entire article here . . .  What if you woke up tomorrow knowing without a doubt you could write a bestseller? Paint a picture worth a million dollars? Release an album that was guaranteed to go to #1 on the charts?
What would you do? This is the question behind Yesterday, a charming movie that pays homage to the works of The Beatles by erasing them from the world. Yesterday is a “what if” movie — What if The Beatles never existed? Himish Patel (best known for his work on the British soap Eastenders) plays down-on-his-luck musician Jack Malik, who wants someone to like his music other than his best friend Ellie (played by Lily James). Read the entire article at Medium . . .  I am honored to announce that my chapbook, Glimmerglass Girl, is the winner of the 2019 SFPA Elgin Award for best speculative poetry chapbook. I am grateful to the SFPA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association) voting members for supporting this little book of weird poems about womanhood. Get your copy here . . .  Today is the one year book anniversary of Glimmerglass Girl, my first chapbook. This little book taught me a lot about being a writer & learning to love what you do. I learned that chapbooks are just as much work to promote as full length poetry books. I learned that getting a lot of interviews doesn't necessarily mean sales. But mostly, I learned that it's really scary to promote something personal, something you love, and that the writing community is one giant group of amazing, supportive people. Won't you consider buying it? It would make my year to sell out the remaining copies.  This month I have a guest post up at the Horror Writer's Association on the theme of dark poetry called "Darkness and Light." if you're a HWA member, be sure to check it out! If you're not a member, you can read it on Curious Fictions for $1 or by subscribing to my feed.  I am beyond honored that my poem "Dead-Eye Girl" is nominated for the 2019 Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association Rhysling Award for best speculative poem of the previous year. This little poem first appeared in Liminality Magazine in 2018. Print copies are now available of the anthology on Amazon! Members of the SFPA can vote on which poem they want to win. Buy a copy of the anthology here . . .  I have a new post today at Medium on Switching Genres: How to move from writing “realism” to “speculative” genres. I love this topic because I love fighting back against the idea that a genre has to be one thing or the other. I hope these tips are helpful to writers who are looking to break out of a writing rut and try something new! Read the full article at Medium . . .  I'm stoked to once again be a panelist at Comicpalooza this year in Houston, Texas. Comicpalooza has grown to be a massive comic con with cosplay, celebrities, and of course literature panels! This year we host the mother of dragons, Emilia Clarke, and I for one will be waiting in line for her panel. If you see me around at the con, come say Hi! Panels for Comicpalooza 2019: Art & Writing Crossovers, from Comics to Artist Collaborations Room 370D Friday May 10, 2019 2:00pm - 3:00pm Art and literature have always inspired each other. How do visual art and writing inspire and reveal a creative process? What can emerge when one form is refracted through another? Has there been a different emergence of the combination in a reality that seems more visualized and surreal? Join us for a lively discussion of the mediums' crossover and influences. Speculative Poetry Deathmatch! Room 370D Saturday May 11, 2019 4:30pm - 5:30pm Join us for an entertaining and interactive panel on science fiction, fantasy and horror poetry. Learn a little about speculative poetry, hear poets read some of their works, and then participate in a lyrical death-match in which you, the audience, decide which poet walks away with a tinfoil crown and bragging rights. No Right Way to Write: Techniques for New Writers Room 370D Sunday May 12, 2019 12:00pm - 1:00pm There is no one correct way to write. One of the challenges of new writers is to find the way that works best for them. Some people require strict outlines. Others require just bullet points. And still others require nothing more than an idea and a few notes on a napkin. This panel is on writing techniques, from outline usage to writing organically, allowing your information to come out in a smooth fashion. Learn the way to write that is right for you! Beyond Earthsea: Ursula K. Le Guin's Writing Legacy Room 370E Sunday May 12, 2019 3:00pm - 4:00pm As one of the greatest science fiction writers, Ursula K. Le Guin explored politics, the environment, myth, gender, and their intersection with our reality. She was an advocate for social justice and women writers. Join us for a discussion celebrating and paying tribute to Le Guin's work and influence. 
I am on the radio today reading poetry! If you're in Houston you can catch my segment in the 2019 edition of Voices and Verses on Houston Public Media. Click above to listen!
In this sound portrait, Walrath describes how she fell in love with poetry in high school, her love of the weird and her inspirations. She reads her poem, “Blue Cadillac.” Blue Cadillac Oh, the way you sat in the drive, taking it all up. I climbed into your cool interior, sliding across the widest, darkest navy seats spread beyond me, beyond my vision. They seemed to expand and dissolve into a bright light on the driver’s side. We drove, through endless lanes of white picket fences, long green, green lawns, the Texas sun staccato in the trees, and it may be that I wore an Easter Sunday dress, all laced in white, and bows on my tights, or white slumping socks above black buckle shoes shining with polish. And in the heat of a Texas summer, how you could swallow me up in your blue dusty smell, that sweet sweet tobacco tucked into the glove compartment beside a lady’s silver lighter. For the sun merely seemed to enclose you, a line of gold light above the leather dash. But the very roundness of you, round seats and silver knobs and panels like porthole windows into another time, but mostly the round, stitched-leather steering wheel which was surely made for white driving gloves. And somehow in this memory of you, your massive lines like some primordial behemoth long since dead and buried in ice, the very blueness of you, I may have remembered myself, another classic beauty. This poem was published in my chapbook, Glimmerglass Girl.  I have a new poem up today at Mirror Dance called Farewell Dead Men. I also talk about why fantasy is a genre I love: While science fiction is based in science, mystery is based in the pursuit of a question, and horror is based in evoking an emotion of fear, I believe that fantasy is the only genre which is purely pulled from the author’s deepest dreams and imaginings. The ability to dream up fantastical beasts and worlds seems to me to be a peculiarity of the human condition—one that even the most mundane of minds can learn to cultivate. Where did the idea for a dragon first come from or the hero myth? They are deeply ingrained paths that we continue to walk, following our ancestors through the mists of imagination. Read my poem "Farewell Dead Men" here . . .  I have a new update for Interstellar Flight Magazine today. As Managing Editor, I’m excited to share with you some of our news for this month. We are working on building a staff of editors, slush readers, and writers! As a new indie press, it’s a lot of work getting started. Read my March Round-Up here . . .  Artwork inspired by my story, by Houston artist Marlo Saucedo, as part of the Color:Story 2019 exhibit I have a reprint up at Flash Fiction Online this month of my little boney, witchy story "knick knack, knick knack." This little story has seen a lot of love since it first appeared in Fireside last February 2018! It also appeared as part of a local art exhibit, Color:Story. The above artwork is the piece that Houston artist Marlo Saucedo made after reading this story. What I love about this story is that so many people have different interpretations of it. I first wrote it inspired by the kodama in Japanese film Princess Mononoke, and also the idea of wanting to tell a mother/daughter story about aging. Marlo interpreted the story as following the tradition of the Mexican holiday Día de los Muertos. The idea of skull spirits is not central to one culture, but many. We put a lot of weight in the dead as humans, and I've always been fascinated by the different myths we create about the spirits who guide us. So I'm grateful that people continue to enjoy this little flash story. Read the story at Flash Fiction Online . . .  I have a new poem up today at Kaleidotrope - "All the Glory of Her Earthly Shell." Big thanks to Fred for publishing this one. It's very personal to me, so I'm glad it found a home at Kaleidotrope. |
AuthorHolly Lyn Walrath is a freelance editor and author of poetry, flash fiction, and short fiction. Find her on Twitter @HollyLynWalrath
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