As you can see at the link above, I am in amazing company in this TOC; plus, every story is illustrated, which is great, and my story is illustrated delightfully Creeptown-ily by Molly Crabapple, which is even more great!

A little background on said story: “A Game of Mars,” focuses on Tara, the daughter of Deja Thoris and John Carter. In the series’ third book, The Chessmen of Mars, she was kidnapped (as per usual for Burroughs’ Barsoom ladies, all of whom could use better security staff and/or a world less inclined to use kidnapping as their solution for every diplomatic tiff) and used as a piece in a game of Jetan, which is just like living chess, if living chess also included big carnivorous animals and was played to the death for the amusement of floating-brain-on-a-zombie-body monsters (as per usual).

Tara was something of an NPC her first go-round (according to Burroughs, “The Princess may not move onto a threatened square, nor may she take an opposing piece,” which limits your strategic options to Weeping or Making Funny Faces at Opponents), but she came out of her ordeal a little savvier all around, and I immediately imagined her coming home to tie up some loose ends, and being given horrible news that means an unexpected shot to play the Game of Mars, and do some rescuing of her own.

For that, and many other tales of Barsoom, check out the antho, if you’re so inclined!

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.)

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.”)!

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!

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!