post 11: 2025 Awards Eligibility, End of Year Reflections

[Originally published on Substack: Dec 15, 2024]

Image: first slide of Awards Eligibility posts

In case you missed it: I recently posted Awards Eligibility announcements on Instagram and Bluesky for my two SFF-related publications in 2024: Loving Safoa (novella) and “Undrowned Histories” (essay). If you are an awards nominator or voter, I hope these titles will end up on your list.

Posting these announcements inspired me to reflect upon the past year, which has been characterized by delayed gratification.

I wrote the first draft of Loving Safoa when I was 24 years old, around the time I started my Ph.D. program, and I didn’t hold a physical copy of the novella in my hands until shortly after I turned 28. Publishing in its current, dominant form is a relatively slow crawl, both in the journey from drafting to publication and in the gravitation of readers to your work. During some weeks and months, it feels like the novella is hardly reaching people at all, and then there is a burst of appreciation that rescues me from despair. I believed Safoa and Cynthia’s story was exciting in 2021, and the same is true now… But have I sometimes been dubious about people’s readiness for a steamy black lesbian vampire novella written by a non-established author? Yes. Have I known that I might struggle with navigating the unspoken quid pro quo exchanges of this publishing landscape? Yes. Yet, I don’t want to be a writer who pre-limits herself to market expectations, or who contributes to the conflation of art with corporatism. There should be a variety of models for how authors present themselves; this makes for a more balanced ecosystem.

I try to have a watchful eye, which has allowed me to learn the limits of many people’s curiosities. Loving Safoa could be considered too ambitious — it could even be aggravating to people who want the comfort of knowing exactly what they’re getting into, genre-wise.

Something people may not realize about me, when they encounter one publication of mine or another, is that my interest in genre is promiscuous. I have more vampires in me (they’re very fun and metaphorical), but also robots, rebels, starlets, jezebels and otherworldly beings.

Various traumas and resulting sensitivities have made me a bit slower to submit my writing, which is fine, but I have been training myself to have more faith, and to allow emotional pain to roll off my back when it can. What am I so afraid of? Rejection is par for the course in a world with inconsistent values and oh so many contradictions. I have fought for most of the love I have, and that has kept me alive. We’ve gotta keep insisting on no less than a real cunty world.

— Liza