Today is a news day!

1. I have a story in Wilful Impropriety, a Kathy Sedia anthology of YA Victorian fiction featuring some amazing TOC-mates! My story, “The Dancing Master,” follows a young woman’s preparation for her first Season, and actual quotes from Victorian etiquette manuals that dispel any mystery about how hard the Victorian era wanted to stifle its ladies, because YIKES. (More on this later.)

2. Speaking of YA, I have a story in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s After (full TOC well worth looking over, I lucked out again in the TOC)! “The Segment” is about how the evening news gets made, and features a bear suit. (As happens.)

3. Thirdly, I am among some excellent company on this year’s Locus Recommended Reading List for both Mechanique and “The Sandal-Bride”. I’m honored and pleased.

There will be more catching up next week, especially a very belated return of Alan Alda, and with any luck, I’ll be talking about a very special Harry Potter knockoff. (Hoo boy.)

So, a few days back I got a phone call informing me I had won the 2012 Crawford Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. It might say something about how bowled over I was that I forgot to blog about it here for two days.

The ballot this year was incredibly strong, and the list of prior winners is intimidating, and I am truly honored to have been chosen.

Thanks so much to everyone who has offered well-wishes; I’ve been smiling for two days straight. I hope that events will conspire to allow me to attend ICFA this year (both so I can accept in person, and so I can squint at the sun and say things like, “I don’t know about all this…brightness.”)!

I figured a good way to start the year is by nerding out all over the place, so this week I have a guest post up at the blog of astronomy-camp alum and Affair-to-Remember-lover Marjorie Liu!

Since I know she understands deep and abiding love for fictional people, I took the opportunity to list ten movie relationships that should have happened, for values of “list” that really mean “talk about how you banged their invisible dolls together with more determination than you addressed many real-life things like calculus.” (In fact, cutting down the list was so hard that technically I squeezed in eleven, because it’s really difficult to watch Wings of the Dove and NOT think a frank conversation could have set up the best triad in a hundred-mile radius.)

The list includes some couples that would have gotten together except they died (Alice and Uncas!), couples that would have gotten together except Austen couldn’t bring herself to pull a switcheroo at the two-thirds mark (Elinor and Brandon!), couples that would have gotten together if Picard had ever, ever learned how to talk to a woman for like two damn seconds of his life (PICARD, GET IT TOGETHER), and couples that were clearly together and just never got the screentime they should have, like these two:

(The couple that trades unauthorized ammo together stays together!)

For those who enjoy some free books alongside their couples not quite getting together and/or pop culture, I’m also giving away copies of Mechanique and Geek Wisdom. So if you’re so inclined, head on over and check it out!

I don’t tend to do big year-in-review posts, but this year I wanted to take a second.

Behind the scenes, there were ups and downs (family, day job, work-life balance, and the like), but I came out the other side of 2011 all right. I even managed to get out of the house enough to attend some lovely cons where I hung out with some lovely people, and there were no champagne fights or anything!

Writing-wise: I published my first novel, Mechanique! It is a great feeling to hold a novel you wrote in your hands, as it turns out! I had some positive reviews which pleased me greatly (positive reviews tend to do that), and have really enjoyed hearing from people (strangers!) with whom the book resonated. But really, most aspects of it were rewarding in some way, right down to the book launch party, for which some friends (and a family member I tricked!) worked their asses off for nothing more than free snacks.

I also got a nonfiction book under my belt this year! Geek Wisdom, in which my co-authors, Stephen Segal, and I gathered geeky quotes and set out to talk about how being a nerd was like a philosophy course, only with more dice and movies and computers and stuff, was a blast.

Short-fiction-wise, I had a dozen stories come out this year (of which I am perhaps particularly fond of “Demons, Your Body, and You,” “Semiramis,” “The Nearest Thing,” and “Study, for Solo Piano”), and some reprints, of which I am particularly glad for “And in Their Glad Rags” in Happily Ever After, and “Keep Calm and Carillon” in Creatures.

Movie-wise, I saw some really great movies this year and some extremely questionable ones. Drive and Shame might be two of my favorite movies that came out this year; the bad ones seem too numerous to mention and often too painful to recall. I must say that, especially in light of some of the completely shit movies I saw this year, Red Riding Hood seems to be on a lot of people’s Worst Movie Ever Made lists, which I find a little suspicious. Don’t get me wrong, it is definitely a bad movie. However, its biggest crime to many people seems to be that it’s directed by a woman who found commercial success with a blockbuster teen-girl movie that also had a love triangle, and is now condemned to be accused of repeating herself forever for things like having helicopter shots of landscape in two movies in a row, which, seriously. Without defending a movie that is for sure not a good movie, the vitriol and content of the criticism is still a bit eyebrow-raising, I think. (I mean, I saw Beastly this year. BEASTLY.)

Tonight ends a year that was often fun, sometimes tough, often interesting, and awash in coffee. I’m at home for the duration, and have spent the morning cleaning up so that I can spend the evening writing, and start the year as I mean to go on. (I’ll also be honoring my family’s oldest and most hilarious tradition, banging a pan on your doorstep at midnight to keep the devil out. Since I live in an apartment and am not a total jerk, I will be tapping a wooden spoon against a pan for about five seconds and hoping the devil is a pearl-clutching sort and that does the trick.)

Wishing you and yours a happy start to the New Year!

Firstly, I hope everyone had or is having a happy nondenominational winter section of time full of some kind of delicious baked goods! (I tend to the Amateur Astronomer Nighttime Appreciation Celebration with iced sugar cookies, myself.)

Secondly, something extremely fun happened!

Recently, Esther at Fantasy Magazine asked if I wanted to write about dragons.

DID I EVER.

“Three Dragons” is the result of some serious nerding out and a refusal to cull quotes (they’re all awesome, I put them all in there, I regret nothing). The research was fun, and kind of dangerous, since now I have a whole separate research folder for a project that may or may not include “The Imprint of Her Foot Serpentous” in the title, because as soon as I saw that phrase I figured I either had to write something for it or start a band, and I’m all out of band.

Please also note that in the middle of an article that pretends to know what it’s talking about I still managed to fangirl Smrgol, because that dragon deserves it.

P.S. A close runner-up for the photo was this dude, who looks completely flummoxed by the stupid human who shoved itself into his mouth and insists on being eaten.