My 2025 story “The Oneiromantic Sheep” was shortlisted—no, hold up, hold up, make that in the ToC for ECO25: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction. That means it’s going to share anthology pages with many accomplished writers! ECO25 comes out 11/17/2026.

“The Graduates of Formost 891c” | Escape Pod

This was a big sale for my little writing habit. Escape Pod is a professional-level market that I’ve sent a lot of stories to (at various stages of writing competency).

Blooming is having trouble finding a job he likes, but Texas has fallen under machine rule. Being a slacker is effectively illegal. So they pack him onto a sentient spaceship and send him off to a colony planet as a middle-school teacher. Will disaster prevent Blooming from rising to the challenges and responsibilities of his new role?

“The Agentic Necklace” | Mythaxis Magazine A sentient necklace travels the arid lands of the southern continent on a terraformed world, seeking and eventually exercising some agency. Hence the title, which is not some AI-industry reference.

I’m really happy with this one. I got the prose where I wanted, and it really dwells in its ideas and themes. This is a story about anthropology. For over 20 years, I taught multiple sections of Anthro 101. Like many, I’m fascinated by how humans are weird in so many different ways. The part of my brain that enjoys anthropology had deconditioned from delivering the same info, same patter, same jokes, same slides year upon year. When I recently accidentally erased all my course materials —syllabuses, lecture notes, quizzes, and other course materials, all gone—I barely cared. If I ever teach again, I’ll be forced to write new material. Maybe data loss is like one of those ecologically cleansing forest fires. I did try to keep things fresh and post/anti colonial—usually I’d include at least one recent book that critiqued old-school anthropology. But in the first weeks of the course, I dipped into the “classic” texts and films. The basic pattern was white guy spending lots of time in non-Western locale, and documenting it. Not all bad, but also unacceptably monochromatic. I subverted anthro later, after I’d taught students about colonialism, ethnocentrism—what we needed to subvert. To discuss hunting and gathering, I showed bits of John Marshall’s The Hunters (1957), a film about four Ju/'hoansi men who hunt a giraffe in the Kalahari. Marshall didn’t shoot in sync sound in southern Africa in 1952-53, so he voiceovered his footage with explanations of his informants’ inner states and of their actions in an environment unfamiliar to viewers. Marshall’s voice becomes the voice of the story I wrote about a sentient necklace that is gifted among people who survive in an ecosystem much like the Kalahari. I purposely wrote it from a perspective that is neither ethnographer nor Indigenous but that of an object transacted. In other stories that I am trying to sell, we learn more about the terraformer that created this world.

“A Good Bridge” | Gavagai My first professional-level ($.08/word) sale! It’s about the Ben Franklin Bridge, which opened up 100 years ago this summer. It’s a Philly story. It’s about not bringing your bullshit into Philly.

I also published "The Green Workbook For Refugees From Earth" at Sci Phi Journal and "Artifacts of the Library on Shih Shen" at Manawaker Studio's Flash Fiction Podcast. These are shorter pieces from my world-building notebook that supported the creation of “The Agentic Necklace” and “The Oneiromantic Sheep”.

We Dream of Sunrise in our Monochrome City by Uchechukwu Nwaka | Translunar Travelers Lounge, Issue 14

An ancient war city that once moved across a now-ruined land, complete with reactor and creaky feeling public transit. That’s the setting—the story is about how your goals can get switched up without you quite realizing.

Madam Strzyga’s Pagan Pest Control by Katharine Tyndall | Adventitious, Issue 2 (April 2026)

Pre-modern problems require pre-modern expertise.

I Crave My Meat a Little Rare by Rajiv Moté | Flashpoint Science Fiction, Issue #2, 2026

This portrait of home life will feel familiar to some readers. Unlike the subject of a painting, the main character does change.

House of Honeyed Soil by Natalie Wollenweber | GigaNotoSaurus, April 1, 2026

A longer-form dark tale that I read just in time for World Goth Day. The setting, a small farm, is indeterminately tucked somewhere among the passage of decades and centuries. We hear of cars and ocean liners and things unseen in the farmhouse. The story dispenses old secrets and revelations at just the right moments to maintain interest all the way through.

Angel Down by Daniel Kraus is about a soldier’s mission, told in a single sentence and in a very close third-person, through the trenches, mud, rotting gums, and people’s exposed innards of WW1 trenches, to rescue a fallen angel in no-man’s land. Very much my thing, obviously a common sentiment.

The Faith of Beasts, James S.A. Corey. I plowed through 500+ pages and am already awaiting the next one. Some sketching of the end has already happened, the world building that takes us there is the draw for me. I’m down for everything by Corey. Whether voluminous series like The Expanse or standalone novellas like How It Unfolds (matters of the heart reiterated literally across countless millennia), they’re all solid.

The Tusks of Extinction, Ray Nayler. I’m hoping to write like Nayler when I reach my imago stage. Also, Where the Axe Is Buried was good.

Men in Love, Irvine Welsh. It’s another story about Spud, Renton, Begbie, and Sick Boy, somehow slotted into the span of years after Renton took off with the drug money and is consequently not speaking to the other characters. Not a necessary addition to the canon, but familiar and comfortable for sure.

Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds (audiobook). We live on the latest of many versions of Earth. Paleontologist Thomas Halliday covers half a billion or so years of Earth’s geological, climatic, and biological history using lots of sensory language to get popular audience buy-in. I found it compelling listening and good background for any SFF writer.

Same goes for Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive by Carl Zimmer.

How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History, Josephine Quinn. Look, there’s no such thing as “the West.” Quinn expands on that notion with a historical examination as expansive as the title suggests.