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Throughout pretty much all of my twenties, I used to keep a public but anonymous online journal on a website where I’d become part of a tightly-knit community of other journalers. Do you remember those days? Did you ever have a place like that, before Facebook and Twitter? Before “brand-building”? I miss those days. God, there’s so much I don’t miss about those days. But I miss that journal, and that community.

I wasn’t going to do an awards eligibility post. Instead, I was going to write a post about my 2016 publications I’m proud of, but then I’d dropped the ball on even that for a while. The past year had its highs and lows (as it did for, it appears, everyone), and at one point, the lowest lows led to me not writing and submitting for a stretch of almost five months. But my lovely writer friends are lovely and are encouraging me to do this now, even though it’s late in the game, even if it’s just as a record of what I’ve accomplished this past year.

My first completed story of 2016 took me by surprise. It’s a little flash piece, not even 700 words, and as is often the case with such short stories, I had no idea where I would end up when I sat down to write it. When I was done, I was surprised to find that I’d made it to the end of the story without anything weird happening. This is unusual for me. This story was sad, and evocative, and maybe hopeful, maybe bleak, but it wasn’t weird. This is a thing that happens every now and then: I make it to the end of a story without an element of magic or fantasy, without even an allusion to something that is out of this world. I never know what to make of these works that are weird due to their lack of weirdness. Much of what I write falls under the umbrella of speculative fiction, if you like categories, but it’s stories like this one that stop me from identifying as a writer of a specific genre.