Tag Archive: writing


On the Nature of Non-Apology Apologies, or the 2025 Hugo Awards Incident, Continued

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September 3, 2025

It’s January 22, 2017, and Trump’s advisor Kellyanne Conway coins the phrase “alternative facts” during a TV interview while defending Sean Spicer’s blatantly false claims about the size of the inauguration crowd. The phrase goes viral. Within a week, the sales of Orwell’s 1984 go up by 9,400%. Conway gets mocked, becomes a meme, shrugs it off, and lives happily ever after.

It’s August 16, 2025. The two hosts of the annual Hugo Awards ceremony mangle many non-anglophone names, and giggle at least once while doing so.

It’s August 20. Host #1 makes a Bluesky comment, saying “For context I was high as a kite on pain meds.”

It’s August 21. My essay on the Hugo incident unexpectedly goes viral: 13,000 views and counting.

It’s September 2: 17 days after the awards ceremony, 12 days after the essay. The Seattle Worldcon Chair and the two hosts issue simultaneous non-apology apologies. They are… odd.

The easiest way to kill a lot of weeds or unwanted plants is to cover them with a tarp to cut off their sunlight. For best results, wait a week. Or two weeks. Or 17 days.

When you take 17 days to craft an apology, one would expect a masterpiece to rival Abraham Lincon’s Gettysburg Address, especially when those apologizing are professional writers. We did not get a masterpiece.

The Gettysburg Address was 271 words long. The hosts’ non-apology was 1,283 words long. The Chair’s non-apology was 401 words long. We are to believe that, on average, only 23.6 words of that statement were written every day.

Here is the shortest possible apology: “I’m sorry. I screwed up. How can I possibly make this better?” This took me 13 seconds to write. At this pace, working eight hours a day, for 17 days straight, my resulting apology would have been 451,938 words long, or only 6% shorter than Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.

A few hours ago, Jess Nevins posted an excellent Bluesky thread about the lost art of apologizing. Just like me, he chose not to name the hosts.

I rather enjoyed his point #4:

“#4) I’m truly surprised I have to type this one, but….

DO NOT EVER SAY ANYTHING THAT CAN BE REMOTELY CONSTRUED AS ‘WHO ARE YOU GOING TO BELIEVE, ME OR YOUR LYING EYES/EARS?’

It happens all the time that the offender and the offended remember events differently.”

This bit was also quite good:

“Because if you make your living crafting sentences and paragraphs and pages and chapters and entire books, you don’t need time to gather your thoughts or to articulate your apology correctly. You write for a living: putting together an apology shouldn’t be difficult for you or take much time.”

The non-apology from the hosts begins with, “We’re truly sorry that our work hosting the 2025 Hugo Awards Ceremony has caused anyone distress.” That is an unusual way to start, and is synonymous with “we’re sorry you got upset.”

The letter goes on to claim there’d been confusion with the pronunciation guides, all caused by the Worldcon staff, and that there’d been no time to rehearse the names. (But I suspect they’d found the time to rehearse the Hugo song. Priorities…)

Perhaps most interestingly, the apology states that host #2 (the younger of the two hosts) did not giggle while reading any names. Well, of course she didn’t. That was host #1. (For what it’s worth, I too hate watching videos of myself and have a hard time recognizing my own voice.) For posterity’s sake, here is that giggle once again. There were thousands of us in the audience. We all heard it. We all reacted instantaneously, turning to our neighbours, asking, “Did that just happen?”

But no, dear reader. No. Do not believe your lying eyes and ears. What good have they ever done to you? Don’t worry your pretty little head. Do as you’re told instead.

The non-apology apology goes on to say that neither of the hosts had felt comfortable insisting on a full run-through rehearsal, because they’d never hosted an awards show before. That said, they’ve both offered their advice and guidance to the future Worldcon organizers. Generous.

Their statement does not mention host #1 being “high as a kite on pain meds.”

Their statement does mention omitting Kamilah Cole’s name, but that section ends rather oddly: it says that host #2 has apologized to Cole, and that host #1 “needs to do that as well!” (I have not altered their punctuation.) That reads like an odd first draft. That does not read like a professional statement that had taken two writers 17 days to prepare.

I often wonder about the ratio of “time spent rehearsing the Hugo song” to “time spent rehearsing the names,” but it’s bad luck to divide by zero.

In their non-apology, the hosts repeatedly say that the pronunciation guide was either missing or incomplete. That is objectively false.

On April 6, 2025, the Seattle Worldcon released this video where professional announcers read out almost every name. They read those names without giggling. If you’re curious what the giggle-inducing name is supposed to sound like, here you go. (Egbiameje Omole, I do not know you, but I am so sorry.)

The list of the finalists was not secret. It had been released more than four months before the Seattle Worldcon took place. The full video is 22.5 minutes long. You could play it almost three times in one hour at normal speed. You could practice the names multiple times per day.

If you cared, that is.

That pronunciation video is cleverly concealed. To access it, one must go on YouTube and type in such secret, esoteric words as “2025 Hugo Awards.”

Verily, I say upon thee: there was no way for anyone to find it.

In their non-apology, the hosts complain that the title of Darcie Little Badger’s YA novel, Sheine Lende, also wasn’t in their pronunciation guide. It might not surprise you to learn that the title was also in that pronunciation video, just 78 seconds in.

The hosts chose to release their non-apology in a rather unusual format: not as a blog post, or a press release, or even a PDF. No, it’s a shared Google Doc file. Fun thing about those files: they cannot be archived by the Wayback Machine, and the people who own the document can go in and alter it at any time.

The internet is a complicated and chaotic place. It’s possible that something unexpected might happen to that file within, let’s say, a year. It’d be a shame if it disappeared. A real shame.

As someone who cares about the preservation of historical documents, I’ve gone ahead and saved a PDF copy. It’s timestamped and tamperproof. If some tragedy ever befalls that Google Doc, I’ll attach my copy of the PDF to this essay. Please, no need to thank me.

How to issue a slightly longer apology:

  1. Don’t start with “Sorry you got upset” or some variation thereof. Is it attention-grabbing? Oh yes. Is it conducive to your purposes? Oh no.
  2. Consider starting with a brief and honest summary of what had happened. E.g., “During the most important awards ceremony many of the finalists may ever attend, we…”
  3. Accept responsibility. E.g., “At least 50% of us were high as a kite. We did not prepare.”
  4. Acknowledge the other party’s pain. E.g., “I can’t begin to imagine how that felt” – but not “Sorry if our work has caused anyone distress.”
  5. Provide an objective judgment of your offense. E.g., “We failed at our main task” – but not “The staff failed us, and we were too shy.”
  6. State your regret. E.g., “We’re truly and deeply sorry. That will not happen again” – but not “[Host #1] needs to apologize as well!” Alternatively, depending on your mood and desire to shake things up, you may say “Yeah, I’ll probably do it again.” Not recommended, but hey – that’s an option. Free speech and all.
  7. Describe your future actions. E.g., “We will triple-check every name we’re not 100% sure about in the future.” Saying “we have a list of suggested remedies to pass along to the events team based on our experience” might not have the most impact.

Perhaps the most subtle aspect of this incident is the silence of the A-listers. Of all the bestselling authors I follow, to the extent of my knowledge, only Elizabeth Bear spoke about this entire incident. There were bloggers, of course: Cora Buhlert has made an excellent (as always) post on the nature of the two non-apologies. File 770 wrote about it here and here, though at one point the anti-name-manglers got referred to as “woke folk.”

There were many bestselling authors who sat in the same audience, and in better seats than the rest of us, probably, and who heard the mangling and the giggling, and then chose to say nothing. My best guess is that they didn’t want to make waves, didn’t want to upset their friends. Smile and clap and move on.

I suspect that by writing the previous essay, as well as this one, I might be sabotaging the odds of publishing my YA sci-fi novel, as well as any follow-ups.

Perhaps. But even if so…

Worth it.

When properly pronouncing people’s names becomes woke, only the woke will properly pronounce people’s names.

The non-apology from the Seattle Worldcon’s Chair, Kathy Bond, is much shorter – a mere 401 words. It’s quite good, and it almost passes for a true apology if you don’t look closely enough. It sure seems to follow the traditional format.

And yet… It has no mention of host #1’s odd admission of being high during the ceremony. It does not mention that host’s giggling while reading a non-anglophone name. It suggests creating a centralized “organizational structure responsible solely for the accurate handling of names” (or, in simpler terms, “name team”) without explaining why their own pronunciation guide video got ignored by all.

Perhaps the strangest part is that neither of the two non-apology letters even mentions the r/fantasy nominee for the Best Related Work. When the two hosts got to that slide, they saw the list of 20 or so names (as well as Reddit nicknames), and they both laughed in unison as they skipped it. That was not an ambiguous giggle. That was laughter. Was it nerves? Was it the same kind of classism that the AO3 folks experienced not long ago when the very nature of their platform wasn’t deemed serious enough? We’ll never know.

What to do if you didn’t rehearse any of the names and are faced with an unexpectedly long list of them:

  1. Read out the title. (Good job!)
  2. Consider reading the names.
  3. Consider asking for help.
  4. Consider treating the nominees with respect and dignity.

What not to do:

  1. Don’t laugh.
  2. Don’t goddamn laugh.

In my first essay, I asked the Seattle Worldcon these seven questions:

  1. How many times did they rehearse the Hugo song?
  2. How many times did the announcers rehearse the names?
  3. Was there ever a pronunciation guide?
  4. If not, why?
  5. If yes, what happened to it?
  6. Was there ever, at any point of the planning process, a voiced objection, or even a concern, that the popular awards presenter would not be able to pronounce foreign names?
  7. If so, what was the reaction?

I suspect the Worldcon people saw them while drafting their short non-apology. Only one of those questions got addressed, and even then, very briefly: “We provided insufficient organizational plans at the podium, including an inadequately designed pronunciation guide and other poorly designed materials.”

Translation: “We didn’t prepare.”

That admission is as much as you and I deserve, my friends.

If anyone ever decides to make a Fyre Festival-style documentary about this mess, it’d be pretty entertaining. I bet there’s at least one insider who doesn’t agree with the party line. I bet there have been some interesting Discord chats or text messages or even emails during those 17 days.

I bet I’m not the only one who likes to save things for safekeeping.

My blog will not fall prey to digital decay. I’ll keep it accessible for as long as I live – and then some.

You may be reading this in the future, in a year far beyond 2025. No, not you with the cat – you with the cyber-glasses. I hope you’ll find this essay useful, whoever you are. Maybe you’re bored. Maybe you’re insatiably curious. Maybe you’re working on a book (do you still have books in the future?) about the history of Hugo awards.

Perhaps, in whatever future you’re reading this, be it a week, or a month, or a decade from now, you’ll have more answers and more context and more clarity.

But meanwhile, here and now, in this slice of the time-space amber, this is the best bad truth that we mere mortals are allowed by our betters.

We deserve more.

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I once was…

Filed under: writing — Leave a comment
August 29, 2025

I once was a writer who wrote out of spite,
Converting the few free minutes
of long workweeks
into words.
That didn’t last.

I once was a writer who relied on a muse.
The words poured freely but rarely.
Rarer yet…
Then never.

And now I sit down
for a thousand
daily
words.
Time and again.
Habit and perseverance.

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When People Giggle at Your Name, or the 2025 Hugo Awards Incident

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August 21, 2025

It’s August 16, 2025, Worldcon, Seattle, and the main presenter of the annual Hugo awards butchers almost every foreign name on the list. When trying to pronounce an unusual African name, the presenter giggles.

It’s 1934, and Frank Lloyd Wright designs his masterpiece, Fallingwater. The beautiful house sits over a waterfall. To an outside observer, it’s a marvel of architecture, a fusion of engineering and nature. To the people who actually live there, it’s an endless nightmare of leaking roofs and cracked concrete. Fallingwater’s owner nicknames it “Rising Mildew.”

The 2025 Worldcon had hundreds of panels and thousands of attendees. It had fantastic freebies and fanfic fans and fun filking. It had authors and poets and filmmakers and podcasters. It had five full days of genre celebrations, of coming together as one.

It also failed at its most basic, fundamental purpose.

The cornerstone of this annual gathering is the Hugo awards ceremony. During the days leading up to the big event, the convention attendees engage in quiet discussions about the nominees. They wish their favourite authors the best of luck. They recommend the finalist books and art to all their friends.

And then… Then the esteemed Hugo awards host (as well as the secondary host) mispronounces non-English names, over and over. (Even Denis Villeneuve wasn’t spared.) They skip one of the nominees altogether, making the audience shout in unison, after which there is some awkward fumbling. (“Did we miss one? Oh no! Why aren’t they on the list? … Clearly they have to win because they were on the second page.”)

(That nominee did not win.)

The skipped nominee was Kamilah Cole, a Jamaican-born woman, whose only fault, it seems, was having her name on the second side of a page. (Typing on both sides of the page is a brand new technological development. Very few people have heard of it. We cannot expect mere Hugo awards hosts to keep up with such groundbreaking inventions.)

A house is supposed to keep you safe and dry, even when – or perhaps especially when – it doubles as a work of art. If it can’t do that bare minimum, it becomes worse than useless. It turns into a liability.

Likewise, an annual awards ceremony that fumbles that most basic of all tasks – pronouncing the finalists’ names – fails at its most basic purpose.

It’s May 2004, rural Nevada, high school graduation. The kind of school where many students get pregnant before they get their diploma. The kind of school where the biggest scandal of the year is the video of two boys kissing at a house party. The kind of school where the History teacher stops in the middle of a joke, chuckles, and says, “I’ll finish it later” when he realizes one of the school’s three Black students is sitting in the back of the class. The kind of school where all the students get lined up against the wall every few weeks, while a gigantic German Shepherd sniffs each crotch, presumably seeking drugs, and its handler, a gun-wielding cop, smirks.

It’s that kind of school. In a small desert town with one big street, one Walmart, and more casinos than libraries.

And as the graduation ceremony approaches, I worry that the announcer will butcher my name, just like most of my American classmates have during my sole year with them. The big day comes, and I’m beyond amazed when the announcer makes sure to ask each senior how to pronounce their name – and then gets all of them right, including mine.

Beneath the bright lights, on that stage, I get the ceremonial piece of paper and hear my true name. Few people clap: they’re so used to mangling my name that they literally can’t recognize me. No matter. I exit, stage right. Less than three months later, I leave for college. I never return.

The Hugo awards ceremony features a somewhat elaborate song number, with multiple people (including the awards presenters) singing in unison, at length, repeatedly. At one point, they even get the audience to join in.

There’s a very good chance they’d spent more time rehearsing that song than the names of the finalists, for whom this awards ceremony may well have been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

During the ceremony, both of the main announcers say – repeatedly – that they don’t have a pronunciation guide for the names.

Five days later, there is still no official statement from the organizers. The announcer who giggled at the African name is silent on social media.

Aside from a Bluesky post by Elizabeth Bear, there has been no discussion, no articles, nothing beyond social media rumours. This is being relegated to the dustbin of history. An unfortunate faux pas. An oopsie.

I shall not let it fade away.

In the global forum that is the internet, I rank just slightly above a street preacher with a megaphone. I don’t expect this essay to be seen by more than a few dozen eyeballs. But my blog will live on for decades, and so will this contemporary record.

It’s 2015, Seattle, tech industry. Many of my coworkers are from India. Their culture fascinates me, as do their names. I take great care to memorize each arrangement of syllables, to commit to memory the names I’d never before encountered. Suyash, Vairavan, Srinivas, and many others. The sole Indian woman on my team is named Vijayalakshmi Deverakonda, and I’m in love with the melodious sound of her name, the way the syllables cascade off my tongue.

The rest of my white coworkers don’t share my respect for people’s names. They routinely call her “Vijay,” which is a male name, and more than a little insulting.

Within two years, Vijayalakshmi and I become workplace rivals. Afterward, we don’t stay in touch. But for a few months, I knew I’d made a fellow immigrant happy because I’d gone the extra mile to learn her true name, to treat her like a fellow human being.

Every failure can be explained by one of these two fundamental explanations: evil or stupidity. Malice or ignorance. It’s often hard to determine which of the two is the main factor. When people make assumptions, and when they build further assumptions on such shaky foundations, their ultimate conclusions diverge from reality.

I make no assumptions. I can believe that a celebrity of the literary world, the main announcer chosen by the 2025 Worldcon committee far in advance, was merely ignorant, and maybe nervous, but not evil.

I say this to myself, and then I remember that giggle in the middle of that unusual name.

Here is how to pronounce “Grigory Lukin.” The first name rhymes with “story.” It has nothing to do with the name “Gregory.” The last name rhymes with “win.” It does not at all sound like “looking.”

For the purposes of brevity, this essay will not cover the pronunciation of my consonant-rich patronym.

It’s 2017, Seattle, the same stressful tech company where white and Indian employees mingle but don’t mix. In a work chatroom, a fellow white guy makes a dirty joke about an Indian woman whose first name is Sukdeep.

I submit an HR report, as do several of my Indian workers. They’re surprised that I would care. To me, that’s a matter of fundamental human decency.

My white male coworker is a successful programmer. He gets a chat with HR, but suffers no further consequences.

The Hugo awards presenter is neither white nor male nor a programmer. But they are successful.

I live in Québec these days. Either here or in America, I can pass for a local, as long as I don’t open my mouth or show my ID. My Russian accent will never truly go away, and for as long as it stays with me, changing my name to something more Western-sounding would be futile. I shall always be The Other.

We rarely speak of this – we who have made a life for ourselves in the West, we who have fully integrated, we who have found a niche in this world. We rarely voice that deep-seated anxiety: do our new compatriots actually accept us? Or are we still viewed as The Other? Do they chuckle and mock our names when we’re not around? Do they bother to view us as fully human even as they enjoy our writing, our films, our art?

We’ll never know for sure. It shall forever be unknowable. Probably paranoia, nothing more.

And then the host of the most prestigious sci-fi and fantasy awards ceremony giggles while reading a foreign name, and the deep-seated anxiety flares up, and I think that maybe it’s not paranoia after all.

The importance of names is an ancient concept, perhaps even eternal. Even today, some cultures give their children a fake name to ward off evil spirits. Religious Jews don’t pronounce the four-letter name of God written in the Torah. Some cults insist on changing their followers’ names to separate them from their past. Many cultures automatically change women’s last names to those of their husbands. Residential schools were infamous for changing Native American children’s names as part of the forced assimilation process. In fairy tales around the world, through the ages, a villain could be defeated only if the hero learned and pronounced their true name.

And at the annual Hugo awards ceremony, the host giggles when they read an unusual name during the highlight of someone’s professional career.

Most issues can fit on a spectrum from one to ten.

Refusing to rehearse foreign names and then mangling them during an awards ceremony is more serious than a playground microaggression.

At the same time, it’s far less serious than a large-scale cultural genocide.

At the same time, it’s still on the spectrum.

Things you should do if you’re overwhelmed and nervous while presenting the most prestigious annual science fiction and fantasy award:

1. Take a few seconds to refer to your pronunciation guide.

1a. If a pronunciation guide is not available, demand one. Have the singers come back on stage to fill the gap until the guide is procured.

2. If the pronunciation guide doesn’t exist, take a few more seconds to summon somebody (perhaps even one of the singers!) to help you.

3. Apologize to the audience, invite every finalist to join you on the stage, and have them pronounce their own names into the microphone.

4. Apologize even more profusely. Admit your nervousness and lack of preparation. Give the microphone to somebody more qualified. Walk off the stage. Don’t return.

Things you should not do:

1. Don’t giggle.

2. Don’t goddamn giggle.

You may mock this essay, as is your right. In these turbulent times, as the planet gets ever hotter, as war crimes get more horrific, as genocides get swept under the rug, this is what people complain about?

And yes, sure, you’d be right. Saving even a single starving child from a sniper is infinitely more important than this issue, now and forevermore. And yet, if your first reaction was to scoff, consider this: is your name conventional? Do people ever giggle when they see it? Are you aware of the concept of microaggressions? Would you say you believe in equality, that racism is wrong, that diversity is important? When you claim to be an ally to those different from yourself, do you accept (both intellectually and emotionally) that they have certain issues which you cannot comprehend but should believe?

If there’s ever an apology letter from anyone involved, it’ll probably blame stress, and anxiety, and growing up in a social environment that didn’t have such linguistic diversity.

Over the past five days, there has been no such letter.

I’m prepared to accept that the main announcer (and their helper) was an anxiety-ridden human being, with human biases, with imperfections. I understand. There are eight billion people in this world. Quite a few of them have sins that are far worse than laughing at foreign names.

I don’t demand perfection. I demand basic competency.

This essay isn’t about the Hugo awards announcers. It’s about the stunning incompetence of the ceremony’s planners.

Here are some things I’d love to learn, but doubt I ever will:

  1. How many times did they rehearse the Hugo song?
  2. How many times did the announcers rehearse the names?
  3. Was there ever a pronunciation guide?
  4. If not, why?
  5. If yes, what happened to it?
  6. Was there ever, at any point of the planning process, a voiced objection, or even a concern, that the popular awards presenter would not be able to pronounce foreign names?
  7. If so, what was the reaction?

I’ve been a lifelong reader of science fiction and fantasy. I can go to great lengths to suspend my disbelief. But if you expect me to believe that a racist, homophobic, rural high school in one of the poorest states can find a professional name announcer, while a giant annual convention held in one of the most prosperous cities cannot… I’m sorry. Even I cannot suspend my disbelief that much.

Was the awards presenter chosen on the basis of friendship and connections and good vibes? Were they chosen because they had decades of experience in speculative fiction? Was there no one else available who had a richer linguistic and sociopolitical background?

Would it be fair to say that even if any concerns had been voiced at all, the overall sentiment was to dismiss them and hope for the best? Let’s just do it and be legends, man. We’ll do it live. Fingers and toes crossed. YOLO, eh. What’s the worst that can happen?

A system that awards top jobs based on seniority and connections rather than competency related to the job at hand ceases to be a system. It becomes a joke.

This essay is not about the US politics.

Throughout history, one of the worst and most unusual punishments was to have your name struck from historical record, as if you never existed at all.

Call it petty. Call it poetic. Call it neither, or both. I deliberately choose not to mention the name of the giggling name-mangler in this essay. Likewise for their co-host. It’s a bit ironic, since neither of them had actually introduced themselves when they started the ceremony. (Nice song, though.)

The announcer’s name will probably live on through all their many written works, but this essay will do them no such honour.

Names have power. Deleting them, even more so.

Someday, I hope to be a Hugo finalist. I’ve got about 35 years left; 40 if I eat my veggies. If I ever do get that honour, when my turn comes, will the announcer mangle my name? Will I be afforded the most basic human respect of an identity?

In this genre of dragons and werewolves and rocketships, this is my wildest, most improbable hope: that someday, we shall have awards ceremonies where people with unusual names will be treated as individuals.

May we live long enough to witness such wonders.

Notes and video excerpts:

  1. The well-rehearsed Hugo song: https://www.youtube.com/live/py7MeV31ln4?si=0AklpGZtEfv5Cu07&t=965 
  1. “They’ve given us a script, but I cannot find it”

“Right, there’s supposed to be a binder, right?” https://www.youtube.com/live/py7MeV31ln4?si=yh96eRIiOFmtsOhO&t=1220 

  1. The mispronunciation giggle: https://www.youtube.com/live/py7MeV31ln4?si=_zCF83ds59z_JVpQ&t=3387 
  1. Khōréō name list: “There’s a lot of them” [skipping the entire list of names after painstakingly reading the two prior lists of names] https://www.youtube.com/live/py7MeV31ln4?si=0zVwe8T1eXf-JrNB&t=3403 
  1. Mangling Denis Villeneuve’s name: https://www.youtube.com/live/py7MeV31ln4?si=ZSYncwfYiwyK4Rgh&t=4969 
  1. “I’m looking for my cheat-sheet before I say something that is difficult for me to say… Let us see… I don’t know if I have any pronunciation guides. Okay, I’ll just – I’ll be corrected when I’m wrong, okay?” https://www.youtube.com/live/py7MeV31ln4?si=_7rZwfn-l5988LjF&t=6061 
  1. “And this – I do not know how to say this, but you know how to say this”

“What? I do? I do not know how to say it because nobody gave me the pronunciation guide.” [referring to “Sheine Lende” by Darcie Little Badger, who went on to win the YA prize.] https://www.youtube.com/live/py7MeV31ln4?si=dL34349j1IKwgQKK&t=7655 

  1. Skipping “So Let Them Burn” by Kamilah Cole entirely after the confusion with “Sheine Lende” pronunciation:

“Did we miss one? Oh no! Why aren’t they on the list? … Clearly they have to win because they were on the second page.” https://www.youtube.com/live/py7MeV31ln4?si=nVOK4Ivqe0IB9D5d&t=7671 

  1. Elizabeth Bear’s Bluesky post on this topic: https://bsky.app/profile/matociquala.bsky.social/post/3lwm66nrzjt22 
  1. Related to the topic of names: a very beautiful short film about a rural woman and an eccentric foreigner with a hard-to-pronounce name, and their resulting friendship. “Meeting Mr. Oscar”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcbPCcpzQ1I 

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In which the author vomits alongside Octavia E. Butler

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August 2, 2025

Most advice comes in parables. The kind that doesn’t is straightforward: “don’t eat the yellow snow” or “use the bathroom before going outside.” Anything more complex than that, though… Parables. Lots and lots of parables.

You may have heard the same damn piece of advice dozens of times before, but someday it’ll sneak up on you, shaped and phrased and packaged as something entirely new, novel, and unexpected – and before you know it, you’re looking at the same problem from an entirely different perspective, and everything clicks in place.

Ever since finalizing the edits on my YA sci-fi novel “The Patron Saint of Unforgivable Mistakes” in April, I’ve been more or less procrastinating on writing my next novel. (Also sci-fi, but – for once – without any time travel whatsoever! I know, I’m just as shocked as you are.) The last three months haven’t been unproductive, mind you. I’ve written tons of new stories, attempted (and then quit) a huge hiking adventure, and joined the SFWA. (Huzzah! The screening process took just two days.) But despite assembling an impressive collection of factoids, cool epigraphs, and citations for my next novel, I never actually sat down to write it…

A blank page is perfect by default: it is pure, unsullied by substandard words, and filled with glamorous potential. But you can’t make a novel out of blank pages. You must sit down and actually write.

Not long ago, I was procrastinating by reading the writing advice from some of the best writers of our time. Among them was Octavia E. Butler, whose work ethic was legendary: she treated writing as a job, and wrote four hours a day, every day. (By my guesstimate, that puts her in the top 1% of writers or thereabout.) This page of advice had a section called “Don’t Prettify Your First Draft.” It had this very interesting bit of advice: “To her, the first draft wasn’t art. It was a raw material dump. Only after that could real craft begin. She followed what they call ‘vomit drafting.'”

The phrase “vomit drafting” was so over-the-top vulgar, obscene, and hilarious, that it got past all of my mental shields, all the laziness and procrastination. We’ve all thrown up at some point. A highly unpleasant and purely physical sensation, that. When you link that simple, brutal word with “writing” (an activity that has more mystique and unmet expectations attached to it than just about anything else) – well, the juxtaposition is nothing short of hilarious.

And that’s what did it for me. I’d read lots of different variations on the theme before: the first draft’s job is to exist, every first draft sucks, etc, etc. But this simple, plain, funny brutality – “vomit drafting” – was what ultimately worked for me.

And so… I pretended to turn off the part of my brain responsible for shame or self-esteem, and I sat down, and I just started typing. The codename for my novel is “Inhuman Insurance Inception” (the actual title is much snappier, I promise), and it’ll feature two different points-of-view, as well as lots of interesting, world-building interludes. (A bit like in “The Watchmen” graphic novel.)

I started writing 11 days ago, on July 22. Haven’t missed a day thus far. The total wordcount (the first POV + the interludes thus far) is 15,146 words, which is pretty damn great. (I’ve also managed to knock out at least one new short story along the way. Yay side quests!)

I’ll leave for Worldcon in 10 days and I’m not exactly sure whether I’ll be able to maintain my writing streak of 1,000+ words per day, but I know I’ll add at least a few new words to ye olde manuscript. And the entire time I write, I’ll imagine the late, great Octavia E. Butler sitting in the same room, typing on her own computer, the two of us vomiting our first drafts onto the hitherto pristine – and pure, and empty, and therefore unsellable – pages.

Give it up for parables, eh?

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In which the author reels

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July 31, 2025

Well, using the non-traditional definition of “reel,” but still. I’ve spent the last couple of months building up my army of loyal followers (and book enthusiasts!) over at Ye Olde Instagram. It’s been a quaint little quest, going from roughly 200 followers (lazily assembled over many many years, mostly by accident), to just over 1,500 and counting. That’s not nearly as high as some of the behemoth influencer accounts, but should be high enough to – at the very least – show that I’m serious about book promotion.

Aside from the many handcrafted memes on writing I’ve shared with my new friends, I’ve also been making reels, aka very short videos. For the most part, they’ve been my reviews of different books on writing. (There are so very, very many of them out there!) Yesterday, feeling particularly high on life, I spent altogether too much time to craft this little reel that makes fun of popular book genres. That was the closest I’ve come to making a short film in about four months, and was a ton of fun to make. (And all the little “likes” keep rolling in!)

I already had all the props on account of having accidentally developed a hat collection over the years, across my many travels. (Don’t ask about the lab coat. Long story.) In retrospect, I’m surprised by the five genres I picked – because between them, they fairly accurately represent the five humours of my personality. (There ain’t a lot of Romance in this life, but I’ve still got 35 good years ahead of me.) Incidentally, the “Slipstream” bit is more or less my default mode these days, though my walk through the sunny streets of Quebec City is a bit less over-the-top exuberant than that. (But only a bit.)

It’s an odd art form, these reels. Ditto for the short videos on Facebook an especially TikTok. (I speak not of Pinterest, for that’s a dark, forbidden land beyond my socioeconomic status.) I truly and sincerely hope somebody out there is archiving all those little videos for the future. Some of them are creative masterpieces shot on essentially zero budget, such as this little reel right here. (That was some Rashomon-level retelling, eh?) But then again, I have this intuition that the digital decay will come for them all, that almost all of them will disappear within 10 years. Definitely within 25. Shame.

In any case, here are some reels I’ve made, in case you wanted to see what all I do to build a loyal geeky following. In chronological older, starting with the oldest:

How to tell when your money tree is happy

My index card system for short story markets

When a character has too much plot armor

My review of “On Writing” by Stephen King

A plucky little weed growing in the middle of the road, surrounded by rain

My review of “Writing Tools” by Roy Peter Clark

When Europeans try to write hardboiled noir…

Different literature genres

Huh. More reels than I would’ve thought. They sneak up on you!

And with that, it’s time to head back to doing absolutely nothing while, in the background, nurturing my imagination to see what else it comes up with.

Do all y’all have an all-time-favourite reel or short video to share? If so, drop the link in the comments!

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In which the author shares cool geeky updates

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July 26, 2025

I love it when a bunch of things I’m juggling pay off all at once. To outsiders, that looks like magic. To me, that’s the result of a lot of work.

I’ve heard back from a few film festivals, and they want me in! There are a couple I’m not yet allowed to announce (because they give the filmmakers the good news before posting the results online), but the one I can absolutely mention here and now is the 11th annual Ridgway Independent Film Festival (RIFF), held in the beautiful Ridgway, Colorado. Never really been to Colorado (in some alternate universe, I’d be hiking through it right around now…), but I look forward to visiting it! The festival will be in mid-October. If any of you are around those parts, drop me a line – let’s hang out, eh.

Yesterday, I signed the contract for my sixth short story publication, huzzah! The story is “Hard as a Mirror of Cast Bronze” and it’ll run in Bullet Points magazine this October. The title comes from a Biblical allegory that tried to convey how futile it would be for a mortal to comprehend God-level plans. The premise of my story is somewhat similar: what if there was someone so brilliant, so off-the-charts great at integrating and weaponizing different fields of science, that she’d be destined to take over the world? Not only here, but in every single dimension. And what if an assassin sent to kill her found not yet another version of a megalomaniacal tyrant, but… someone entirely different? Wait till October to learn more!

After I signed that contract, that set off the final stage of my internal Rube Goldberg machine, because at that exact moment, I became eligible to join SFWA! (SFWA stands for Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, aka the worldwide guild.) To join as an associate-level member, you need to prove you’ve earned at least $100 as a genre writer over the course of your life. Reader, I am very very proud to share that with this new story sale, my lifetime earnings equal exactly $100.78. Right past the finish line, woot! (It would’ve been funnier to land at $100.01, but I’ll take $100.78!)

And so… I filled out the long and detailed SFWA associate application yesterday, at long, long last, after many years of dreaming and planning and writing. It was a bit funny to encounter the “I am not a robot” checkbox during the application process. A very dry sort of pun, considering.

The form requested proof of earnings, of course. My sincerest apologies to the SFWA staffer tasked with reviewing and summing up all six contracts I uploaded. If you’re reading this, my SFWA friend, and if we ever meet, I’ll buy you a glass of water. (The annual membership fee is $100, leaving me exactly 78 cents. Heh. Good investment, though.)

Joining the SFWA will grant me access to what might be the most exclusive message board in the world, with decades-old archives of SFF writers talking about life, writing, and everything else. Also, access to SFWA convention suites. Also also, the ability to nominate (and vote) for the annual Nebula award. Also also also, a not-insignificant level of protection in the event something goes haywire with a writing contract. And much, much more… I hope my application goes through before this year’s Worldcon, which will kick off in just three weeks. As a filmmaker with a short film and a live screening, and as the (hopefully) newest SFWA member, that’ll be one helluva week!

And, to wrap this up with even more good news – I started writing my third sci-fi novel! (This one, in a surprising twist, will feature zero time travel. I know, I know.) I’ll keep the title secret for now, but the working title is… let’s call it “Inhuman Insurance Inception.” That more or less sums it up. It’ll be a multi-POV tale of the ethics of assimilation in general and first contact in particular. Aliens and humans. Hackers and webcams. The so-called civilized humans and the isolated tribes. And more…

So far, I’m 4,000 words in, with an outline and a lot of juicy quotable tidbits already prepared, and I’m going to shoot for 2,000 or so words per day. It’ll be easy, considering the plot has been boiling inside my brain for many many months. Should be fun, eh.

And with that… Gonna sign off, watch some surprisingly poignant reality TV (I know, I know…), and get ready for another day of writing.

Hope y’all are having a wonderful weekend.

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The Worldcon of Future Past (short story)

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July 13, 2025

WorldConputer-5000 reviewed the agenda. “Bring me Grrrr Martin!” it roared.

“But Your Highness, he perished in a tragic trampoline accident 27 years ago,” said Bobby the Intern just before his shock collar went off.

“Then bring what’s left of him!”

***

“…stupid Conputer. Stupid internship,” Bobby muttered under his breath as he pushed the gruesome cart through the dank tunnel.

“Shh. Someone may overhear,” said Inga as she stepped out of the shadows. Bobby liked her: she always decorated her shock collar with fresh flowers, a luxury from above.

They hugged the wall as a squad of Tesloids marched by. Each Tesloid was an LLC, and thus a corporation, and thus had more rights than a mere intern.

“Do you ever dream about, um, the future?” Bobby asked as he and Inga slowly pushed the cart.

“Only all the time,” she said with a rueful smile.

“I want to become a full citizen,” Bobby said, “but I can’t handle 25 more years of this.” He didn’t specify. He didn’t have to.

Inga put her left hand on his shoulder. “Well, we can always become writers.”

At that, a terrible shriek emanated from a deep tunnel.

“Someone missed a deadline again.”

“How did it ever get this way?” Bobby asked. Inga always knew things others didn’t.

“Ever hear of exponential growth?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Well, it’s when something grows forever, without bounds. It can get out of hand pretty fast…” Her voice trailed off.

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s say there were 673 short story nominees in 2025,” Inga said.

“Okay.”

“And in 2026, that number went up by 15%.

“Sure.”

“And then someone centralized the Worldcon by building that monstrosity, and it demanded 15% more output each year.”

“But that’s… That’s…”

“Unsustainable, yeah.”

Their conversation was interrupted by a wretched-looking hairy creature wearing a burlap sack. It ran out of a side tunnel, clutching a filthy keyboard.

“You’ll never get me alive!” the feral writer shouted as three Tesloids gave chase.

They disappeared out of sight. No screams followed.

“Things can’t go on like this,” Bobby said once his heartbeat finally slowed down. “There must be something – anything – we can do.”

Inga stopped and gave him a slow, appraising look.

“Tell me,” she said slowly, “have you ever heard of time travel?”

“Pfft. Fairy tales,” he said with an eyeroll.

Inga’s expression didn’t change. Could it be… Was it possible this wasn’t a prank?

“No way,” he whispered, his eyes wide.

“I’m with the Resistance, Bobby. We have a working prototype. Join us – join me – go back in time, change this timeline.”

“…I’m in.”

“I knew you would be.”

THE END

This short story (flash fiction, really, at 443 words) was written completely spontaneously, when I got visited by a muse. (The muse took the form of a bowl full of pasta with ketchup. Mmmm, carb rush…) I was reading this excellent Bluesky thread by Abigail Nussbaum, a Hugo Award-winning critic and author. In her thread regarding the future of the Worldcon, she wrote, “One thing that the reactions to this thread have really crystalized for me is how amorphous the demand to centralize the running of the Worldcon actually is. After years of having this conversation, I still haven’t seen even a vague sketch of what it would look like.”

The words “even a vague sketch” inspired me, the first skeet came unbidden, and then, well… It was too much fun to stop at just one!

And now, dear reader, there is at least one vague sketch of what the centralized Worldcon would look like. (A very very unserious sketch, but a sketch nonetheless.) You can read my original skeet thread over here. (Yes, we call them “skeets” over yonder. No, we won’t change.)

…it would be pretty funny if after everything I’ve written, after all the sci-fi films I’ve made, this got nominated for the Best Related Work. Heh.

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In which the author takes performance-inducing drugs

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July 12, 2025

…by which, to be clear, I mean caffeine and sugar. Mostly caffeine, really. So much caffeine.

I know this is ultimately unhealthy, and I know that Brando Sando (allegedly) doesn’t even consume coffee, but he’s the unattainable ideal of us writers. (The man wrote a bunch of full-length novels in secret while writing his regularly scheduled books during the lockdown.)

On the other hand, there’s Stephen King and Philip K. Dick, both of whom abused hard drugs with gusto. King said there are entire novels from that part of his life that he simply doesn’t remember writing, and PKD’s output was legendary – until he died of stroke at 53. (To be fair, even goody-two-shoes folks can get fatal strokes, and it can’t be proven that the drugs played a part.)

And then there’s me, chugging an extra-large black coffee with a Tim Hortons donut, which had been preceded by a passable cup of coffee and an above-average slice of chocolate cake at a fun little coffee date… The nature of my creative fuel is almost hilariously geeky by comparison, but hey, if it works, it works.

During the long walk home (the damn bus strike – still – but also, the weather was perfect), an old seed of an idea finally sprouted and, well, I aim to spend the rest of the night typing up the first draft of my first foray into a horror story. (With heavy sci-fi elements, of course, because come on…) Then I’ll sleep on it (after binge-watching a few more episodes of Alone), apply several coats of edits and shoe-shine – and then it shall join the ranks of my as-yet-unsold short stories and start the big bounce between the genre magazines looking for this sort of thing.

And now… Time to type, eh.

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In which the author experiments with ultra-minimalism

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June 26, 2025

Been sleeping on the floor these past five weeks. This has been due to a very logical set of decisions culminating in a pretty eccentric conclusion. I wrote about it a few posts ago, but briefly: my attempted thru-hike from Mexico to Canada ended prematurely, all my things were in storage, and I still had my empty apartment’s lease till July 1.

Ipso facto, didn’t make much sense to deal with a moving truck for just a few weeks.As of right now, my studio apartment has one small cooking pot (no lid), one fork, one pocket knife (mangos are hard!), a small pile of clothes, a laptop, a cellphone, a few chargers, some hygiene stuff, and two empty backpacks. Oh, and the sleeping bag I use on the floorboards (I’m not a barbarian), though without a mat (I’m not a king). There are also kitchen appliances (fridge, freezer, stove), but they’re more or less a default setting for rentals.

And… that’s pretty much it. Since mid-May, I joined a nice little anglophone library, attended a book sale, and have acquired a small stack of books that I haven’t quite read yet. In other words, the usual routine has been reestablished.I like to think of myself as a minimalist with a bit of an art hoard, but this is mighty minimalistic even for me, eh. This strange little lifestyle design experiment has had some interesting outcomes…

For example, I don’t miss my art, or my cool gem and mineral collection. Not sure if that’s because I’d gotten so used to them over the years, or because mentally, I’m still in a flux over the failed thru-hike adventure. (Not bad, just weird; a lot of compulsive walking.)

I have internet access through my phone’s frankly exorbitant data plan, and I use my phone as a hotspot whenever I need to do something on my laptop. I’m not streaming anything because I want to preserve all those gigabytes, and I rather miss Netflix. And gaming, even though I realize how addictive that hobby is. (I literally dream of Skyrim.)

Ironically and unexpectedly, the thing I miss the most is radio. Just a plain old little radio-clock cube thingy that can be set to a local station, to babble at me in that beautiful blend that is the Quebecois French, because, frankly, it’s impossible to learn from any app. (The continental French is an entirely different animal.)

One objective improvement has been my productivity. With my desktop in storage, I haven’t made any new short films, but now I have so much time (and so few distractions) to simply write. Over the pasy five weeks, I’ve written five short stories. They range in length from 333 to 5,400 words, and one of them has already been accepted by a Canadian anthology, woooo! (More on that later, once the contract is signed.) Also, I’ve just signed the contract for another anthology – this one will be about superheroes, and will feature my February story “To Fly or Not to Fly.” (Inspired by my experience with bureaucracies and the time I jumped into traffic to save a feral toddler.) The other stories I’ve written recently (and earlier) are awaiting replies from a wide variety of magazines. There’s one particular (and major) magazine that has been sitting on my new submitted story for quite a while now… I’m cautiously optimistic, given that their usual turnaround time is just a day or two.

All in all, this has been the most productive stretch of my life, writing-wise. Perhaps it’s the near-isolation, or the sheer emptiness of my living space (my studio isn’t big, but it looks huge without 97% of my stuff), or the fact that the weather is finally good enough to go on looong walks (think 2-5 hours) without being threatened by the elements – just walking and thinking and meditating on new plots and absorbing random new experiences. (Quebec City didn’t get its T-shirt weather till late May. I love this town, but I swear, the spring is getting colder every year.)

Or maybe it’s none of those things, and the wacky desert adventure, where each day had more new experiences than a fortnight in this town, reshuffled my brain and finally helped me internalize the way the narrative process works. I had so many stranger-than-fiction encounters in that desert… I miss it.

Or maaaaybe the secret factor here is that I’ve been doing a helluva lot of reading. In addition to going through my gigantic “to read” list (it’s in triple figures!), I’ve also been devouring the Wolrdcon finalist packet. Worldcon is the biggest annual sci-fi/fantasy convention (held in Seattle this year), and since they picked me for their short film festival, I figured I might as well go for the full event, not just for one day. $275 bought me full membership privileges, the convention pass (it’ll be so much fun to finally meet all my favourite authors), and the PDF versions of all the short stories, novelettes, novellas, and novels (and many other categories) that made it to the final round of voting.

I take my newfound responsibility seriously, which is why I’m reading all of them. Every last one. They are delicious, eh. Currently almost done with Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Service Model” – that novel is an absolute blast. (Think Wall-E mixed with Fallout.) I’ve literally laughed out loud – and often – while reading it. Five stars, highly recommended.

So, yeah, inspiration galore. About a week from now, I’ll move into my new apartment (it’ll have a balcony! but no bathtub…) and get all my things from storage, and my life will once again have Netflix, and video games, and other time magnets. Here is hoping the new habits will stick.

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On symbolism and lack thereof

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June 16, 2025

A while back, I wrote that I personalize my social media to absorb only interesting factoids or insights from folks who are experts in certain topics. That doesn’t always pay off (I’ve had to mute a lot of politicians’ names), but when it does, it’s beautiful. Today was one of those days.

Recently, there was a big debate about symbolism: someome made a webcomic where they mocked a Literature professor and implied that Poe’s raven was a happy accident, not a deliberate choice. I’m not going to repost the webcomic here because it turned out its creator was 16 when they made that cringeworthy (but surprisingly artistic!) masterpiece. What folks do before their 18th birthday ought to be a sealed record.

In the aftermath of that online debate, someone posted a link to a fascinating article on the topic. In 1963, a teen asked top writers about their use of symbolism. Here’s what they said…

The article, which is already great all on its own, also mentioned an amazing essay by Mary McCarthy, “Settling the Colonel’s Hash.” She’d published a non-fiction piece that sounded like short story: her train ride amd debate with an antisemitic colonel. Far too many people assumed her story was fiction, and proceeded to over-analyze it, hunting for clever symbols when there were none.

In her “Settling the Colonel’s Hash” essay, years later, McCarthy dived deep into the dangers of looking too hard for symbolism, even when the author’s intent is right there. Enjoy this PDF version of her essay.

Some of my favourite bits:

1. “from the Middle West” is such a posh way to say “Midwesterner”

2. “A surprising number wanted exact symbols; for example, they searched for the significance of the colonel’s eating hash and the autor eating a sandwich.” (I love this weapons-grade snark.)

3. “If the colonel had ordered a fruit salad with whipped cream, this too would have represented him in some way; given his other traits, it would have pointed to a complexity in his character that the hash did not suggest.” (The fact that it’s true makes it that much funnier.)

4. “He declined to be categorized as anti-Semite; he regarded himself as an independent thinker, who by a happy chance thought the same as everybody else.” (That describes folks – especially men – today every bit as much as 60 years ago…)

There are many more amazing bits, but I don’t want to spoil that beautiful essay for you. Enjoy that 10-page read, and take your time – it’s worth it.

…and as for me, sometimes I find so beautiful that I simply must include it in my short films. Other times, it’s only at the very end of the editing process that I find a tiny detail that ties in perfectly with my theme – but had sneaked in right under my nose. And then, of course, there are lots of tiny little jokes in my short stories. Some of them are more noticeable than others, but I don’t deliberately sprinkle symbolism all over the place. (Though, as McCarthy wrote, everything we do is symbolic, which means that’s ultimately inescapable.)

And now I’m off to put a couple of more layers of polish on my new short story. (Technically, this whole symbolism foray – both reading and blogging – has been procrastination on my short story, which is, in turn, a way of procrastinating on my not-yet-started new novel.) The story is my first attempt at fantasy, or at least urban-ish fantasy. “Some Notes on Becoming a God” will end up around 3,000 words, and it touches on some mighty topical modern issues. Let’s see who’ll want to publish it, eh?

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