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How can it be winter already? Some years, the transition from one season to the next proceeds in a gentle, almost meditative fashion. The year graciously allows us plenty of time to change out our wardrobe, prepare our favorite holiday comfort foods, and adjust our circadian rhythms. (The less said about flipping on and off Daylight Savings Time, the better.) This year, however, we seemed to leapfrog all that gradual change, catapulting from sweaty summer into where's-my-sweater weather without so much as a fare-thee-well. In the whirlwind of a big convention, finishing up the manuscript and query materials for Many Teeth, and digging out warm clothing, I am aware of what an amazing community you all are for me. As Thanksgiving will soon be upon us, I want to express my appreciation for each and every one of you!

What's in this newsletter? World Fantasy Convention report Life and writing: Don't hurry up Cute cat pic 2026 World Fantasy Convention report It’s been a number of years since I attended a large convention. Pre-pandemic, I went to a number of such gatherings on the West Coast. This year, 2026, both World Fantasy (WFC) and World Science Fiction (WorldCon) conventions were held in California, my home state. As they occurred only a few months apart and it was clear I had the energy to attend only one of them, I chose WFC. Historically, it’s oriented more toward books—writers, publishers, booksellers, and of course—readers. WorldCon abounds with costumes and media tie-ins. Different fandoms, different energy. As in previous years, I was an author guest and was scheduled for a number of events. And, as in previous WFCs, I found the conversations as nourishing, inspiring, and in general worthwhile as any formal event. I should preface my idiosyncratic personal remarks by saying that the time leading up to the convention was highly stressful and I was often so exhausted that I found myself in tears. Nevertheless, I got myself organized, practiced my part of a group reading session, and made my way to Oakland. The drive (over 3 hours, most of it in congested traffic), followed by parking so impossible, I gave up and paid for valet parking, did not lend itself to a calm entrance. Once I’d checked in, hugged my roommates (with whom I’ve shared quarters at many other conventions), and decamped with them to a Chinese noodle house, I felt up to my first event: The Mass Autographing. Authors arrive early, grab a tent card and a place at a table, and wait for the hordes of fans who may or may not materialize. I found myself between two congenial colleagues: Elisabeth Waters, with whom I’ve worked for many years as editor/co-editor; and Brenda Cooper, whom I hadn’t yet met in person. Every once in a while, I’d spot someone in dire need of greetings and a hug. Beginning-of-convention gladness, especially in light of how many friends and fellow writers were not local. A fan came by with a stack of labels for Lisa and me to autograph for the many Darkover and Sword and Sorceress anthologies in his collection. I also discovered the need for a CliffsNotes answer to “How are you?” and settled on, “Writing away!” In the past, conventions have included room parties, many of them hosted by publishers or fan clubs. In recent years and especially since the pandemic, these have been few and far between. I didn’t see any signs for parties, nor was I invited personally, so I concluded there weren’t any. Since I can no longer stay up late and I was mindful of the risks of viral transmission in close gatherings, this was fine with me. The next morning began with breakfast with two dear friends, which in itself would have been worth the drive to Oakland, and my panel: Typing Uphill Both Ways… What’s the Trick? Veteran writers discuss navigating the opportunity and pitfalls inherent in traditional publishing, newer formats and platforms, social media, the loss of mass market paperbacks, and a dwindling midlist. They’ve seen it all through the years, but they’ve kept publishing despite these. With  Michael Kurland, Bruce McAllister, Sharon Shinn, and moderator Tim Melody Pratt.   To say we’ve seen it all is an understatement. With panelists having over 5 or 6 decades in the field, I (with my mere 45 years as a pro) felt like the baby on the panel. We talked about the changes we’ve seen over the years, from when you could earn a living by churning out a short story for the pulp markets every week, to the implosion of book distributors, the dwindling midlist, the rise of POD (Print on Demand) and ebooks, publishers gobbled up by multinational conglomerates, and the rising threat of AI. Hopeful trends include the ability to self-publish (as an “indie” author) and the emergence of small press publishers that put out some of the best, most innovative genre fiction. We all had stories to tell of disasters and disappointments, friends and colleagues that kept us going, and strategies like editing, teaching, or moving sideways into another genre (mystery, romance, screenplays). In one way or another, we had all “re-invented” our careers over the years. A recurring theme was the vital importance of community. Collectively, we exchange news and ideas, we imagine new forms of storytelling or re-invigorate old ones, and we laugh and cry and carry one another through difficult times.   The afternoon was akin to a water-slide, swooshing from one adventure to the next. On my way to (yet another Chinese) lunch with another long-time fellow author (and fellow martial artist), we got waylaid into sitting for portraits for a photography project, documenting today’s luminaries of the field. I returned in time for a tour of the Dealer’s Room and Art Show. The wares offered for sale have changed over time. Once, I could find T-shirts with dragons and cats, hand-made knives (also perfumes, stuffed mythical-animal toys, handmade lace, and many amazing artifacts, some of which involved real skulls). Also sellers of new and used books and jewelry. The jewelry was still there, along with a few booksellers, but most of the dealers were indie authors selling only their own books. Two excellent small press publishers, Tachyon and Fairwood attended the convention. Until it was time for:   READING: Treehouse Writers Group, with Chaz Brenchley, Nancy Jane Moore, Pat Murphy, and Madeleine Robins. Treehouse Writers formed at the beginning of the pandemic, when we were looking for virus-free ways to hang out together. Chaz and Pat became honorary members for the purpose of the reading, offering two different but equally delightful riffs on Sherlock Holmes. I got to sit back and listen to some truly awesome stories, a combination of works in progress and published work. I went last and, as everyone – participants and audience – looked tired, I kept mine to one short scene from the beginning of Collaborators, my Lambda Award Finalist novel. And betook myself to a solitary not-Chinese dinner. And fell into bed.   Because the next morning, I had an early check-out and gathering of a zoom-group of writers that has been a vital part of my community support system. The weekend left my heart full and my head buzzing with Ideas! Words! Images! My weekend concluded in grand style with lunch with fellow Treehouse denizen, after which we encountered a gaggle of friends (and a friendly hotelperson, who snapped this pic of us). L to R front: Kate Johnston, me, Sumiko Saulson; back: Karen and Chaz Brenchley, Nancy Jane Moore.   Don't Hurry Up   From the time we’re small children, it seems that someone is always urging us to hurry up, to not dawdle, to stop procrastinating, to keep “on target,” and to do things faster. We are supposed to race through our lives without paying attention to the wonders around us (except, of course, when we’re supposed to be observant and appreciative). Of course, what is wonderful to a child is all too often invisible to the harried parent or teacher who herself has deadlines and schedules to keep. Homework assignments are Important; watching snails is not.   When I began to write professionally, I found myself juggling motherhood, a day job career, and the inner-driven need to set down the stories in my head. Writing time was precious and all too scant, and I had much to learn about the craft. My initial style involved “pantsing” (writing “by the seat of your pants”) or, as I put it, “taking a flying leap off the edge of reality, ” and then revising, revising, revising. As a consequence of this and the limited, fractured time periods available to me, my stories progressed slowly. I remember meeting a certain published author at one of my first convention, who breezily talked about how he never revised, he sold his first draft novels, and he produced three or four of them every year. I cringed to think of my one or two short stories and maybe one novel draft in that same time period (keeping in mind that I needed three or four – or more! – revision drafts). Was this what professional writers did? I wondered. And how was I ever going to produce that much, that fast, and of that professional quality?   (As a slightly smirky footnote, I have no idea what happened to that writer. I haven’t seen the byline in decades, so maybe that strategy wasn’t so successful after all. Or the name might have been changed, as so often happens.)   To my great good fortune, I also encountered writers who had learned to listen to their own creative rhythms and understood that getting the story right was more important than getting it fast. These were not writers who use “I listen to my inner muse” as an excuse for not writing, or who polish endlessly and never submit their work. These were professional, published authors. Some of them sold many books and others only a few. Not all were genre writers, but all prized their craft. I met writers who considered a day successful if they got a single paragraph exactly the way they wanted it; others measured their daily productivity by hours spent or pages finished. They opened my eyes to many possibilities for measuring progress besides how fast I could turn out a manuscript.   I found that different stages of a story call for different speeds. I work best when I draft quickly from outline and then revise slowly. I give myself permission at all stages to take a break and think about a “stuck place” (whether that is a block in the sense of “I have no idea what comes next” or just a niggling feeling that something isn’t right). I go for a walk, I clean house, or I pick up the phone and chat with a friend about something utterly unrelated to writing. When I’m willing to do this, I end up in fewer dead ends, I need fewer subsequent drafts, and I’m more in touch with the internal fabric of the story. So much of the joy of writing is discovering new experiences, new points of view, stories told by characters who are not like us and who live in worlds not like our own.    All this has a great deal to do with observing and accepting my own creative rhythms, but also with patience. Patience loops the topic back to my opening, which is how we find our way back being fully present with what is unfolding at the present moment and at a pace too often at odds with the regimented, overcommitted, multi-tasking, hurried expectations around us (not to mention the financial pressures for a working writer to produce so many books a year). It’s all very well to recite slogans like, “Stop And Smell The Roses,” and quite another to shield ourselves from those expectations.  Adagio, not Presto.   Sweet Sonja, lost in dreams.

#BookReview: No welcome at the (spooky) B & B

 The Faraway Inn, by Sarah Beth Durst (Delacorte Press)

The Faraway Inn is a wonderful example of a story that is aimed at Young Adult readers but has much wider appeal. Yes, the viewpoint character, Calisa, is sixteen, but her situation and emotional growth are have universal appeal. Following an angst-ridden breakup with her boyfriend, she embarks upon a summer at her great-aunt’s B&B in rural Vermont. Instead of the idyllic summer-of-forgetting she expected, she finds a dilapidated, almost empty husk. one door after another is slammed in her face, sometimes literally and always without explanation. Auntie Zee is not only colossally grumpy and anti-welcoming but seems determined to send Calisa packing. Calisa, however, is anything but a helpless victim. She rolls up her sleeves, partners with Jack, the son of the (mysteriously absent) groundskeeper, and embarks upon a campaign of cleaning, tidying, and serving afternoon tea, complete with cake. Soon, she’s also investigating doors that lead to other worlds, when they don’t open capriciously to closets. Just as she gets a clue what is going on, the magical gates begin to fail…stranding Jack’s father in limbo.

Although this is a stand-alone unrelated to Durst’s “Spellshop” series, it shares many of the same elements: a young protagonist with agency, a complex system of magical worlds shaded with romance, danger, and longing.

[Reprint] Devastating Consequences of Dropping School Vaccine Requirements

 

Florida Department of Health considers dropping 4 school vaccine requirements – here’s what that could mean for kids

Florida’s Department of Health is considering ending the school requirement for vaccines against chickenpox. ArtistGNDphotography/E+ via Getty Images

Katrine L. Wallace, University of Illinois Chicago

The Florida Department of Health held a hearing in October 2026 on a proposal to remove four vaccine requirements for entry into school and childcare: Haemophilus influenzae type b, or Hib, chickenpox, pneumococcal and hepatitis B.

These vaccines entered use in the U.S. at different times from the early 1980s through 2000. Prior to that, there were millions of chickenpox cases and thousands of serious bacterial infections and preventable deaths among American children each year. Vaccination has dramatically reduced the toll of these diseases.

Many parents today grew up during the transition to widespread vaccination for these diseases and may never have witnessed the severe complications these vaccines help prevent. I’m an epidemiologist who studies vaccine-preventable illnesses and health communication, and I worry that perhaps the luxury of forgetting about these diseases could end up giving rise to a generation of children who aren’t vaccinated against them.

What Florida would be choosing

School vaccination requirements help communities establish herd immunity, which is when enough people are vaccinated to prevent a disease from easily spreading. When vaccination rates fall, infections can spread among susceptible children throughout the community, placing those who are too young to be fully vaccinated, as well as those who cannot develop adequate protection due to medical conditions, at greater risk.

Florida’s proposal would not eliminate these four vaccines, nor would ending a mandate mean that every family would stop using them. However, it would weaken one of the policies designed to maintain high vaccination coverage. If fewer children are vaccinated as a result, the risks will extend beyond the families making that choice.

The consequences could be devastating.

Hib: The bacterium that can cause meningitis

Before Hib vaccines became widely used in the late 1980s, pediatricians sometimes faced a terrifying emergency: an infant with fever, lethargy and a stiff neck. Testing of cerebrospinal fluid would reveal bacterial meningitis caused by Haemophilus influenzae type b, or Hib, an infection that could kill a child or leave lasting neurological damage.

Today, many doctors have never even seen a single case. The bacterium has not disappeared, but widespread vaccination has made serious Hib disease in young children far less common.

Before the vaccine, Hib was the leading cause of bacterial meningitis. In the early 1980s, there were 20,000 invasive Hib infections among American children under 5 years old, 12,000 of which were meningitis. Between 3% and 6% of those children died, and between 15% and 30% of the survivors were left deaf or with brain damage.

Hib infection did not manifest in dramatic outbreaks. Healthy young children carried it silently, and some, unpredictably, became seriously ill.

After the introduction of conjugate vaccines for Hib in the late 1980s, cases among young children declined by 99%. In 2023, the United States reported only 13 cases in children under 5. In 2026, that number is up to 28.

Chickenpox: The ‘harmless’ rite of passage

By the early 1990s, there were more than 4 million cases of chickenpox annually in the United States. Of those infected, 10,500 to 13,500 were hospitalized, and 100 to 150 died. More than 90% of cases and about 70% of hospitalizations occurred in children, as did roughly half of the deaths.

But even those who had manageable cases of childhood chickenpox are at risk for shingles later in life, which can lead to painful and sometimes permanent health complications.

Children are contagious before the rash appears, and each case has an incubation period of up to three weeks. A single infection could spread through a school or daycare in waves for a month or more. Since vaccination began in 1995, deaths from chickenpox in people under 20 years old have been virtually eliminated.

#BookReview: Beautiful prose isn't enough

 The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, by Shubnum Khan (Viking)

I wanted to like this book. I really did, and for the first 20% or so, I enjoyed it. The setting – a mouldering old house in Durban, South Africa – the widow and his teenaged daughter, Sana, whose way of experiencing the world is as richly lyrical as it is unusual, the other inhabitants of the house. Add to that the mystery of what happened in the house and why it’s haunted by a festering, evil djinn, and all these elements carried the opening.

Alas, it’s a high wire act to use setting and character as the forward momentum of a novel, no matter how vivid they may be in their own right. This is not to say that a novel cannot be focused on character or setting, only that the energy driving the story must arise from them, catapulting events into dramatic tension. Otherwise, the story drifts from one interesting or amusing incident to the next, dissipating engagement and curiosity about what’s going on and why.

This was my experience, although of course, other readers may have a different take on this book. It was always about to get going and then sinking back into stasis. Things that might have been charming crotchets, like the humorous friction between the house’s inhabitants, turned into irritations when it seemed that was all there was to the story. I never could figure out why Sana had such an unusual way of experiencing the world because her semi-hallucinatory state never varied. Without question, the prose is beautiful, filled with offbeat connections and unusual ways of interpreting reality.

For me, as a reader, however, “lyrically stunning” can go only so far in overcoming “lack of story tension.” The book went from always-getting-started to drifting to slog, in which I found myself looking for something else to do besides reading it.

As usual, your mileage may vary.

[Reprint] Are public executions true to American values?

 

In newly independent US, Americans debated whether public executions taught a lesson or just showed off the state’s power to destroy

A 1747 print of a public execution at the so-called Tyburn Tree, a gallows in London that served for hundreds of years as a site of hangings. William Hogarth

Maurizio Valsania, Università di Torino

The proposed livestream of Nidal Hasan’s execution by a U.S. military firing squad gives an old question a new audience. Hasan, an Army psychiatrist convicted by a military court of killing 13 people at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, is scheduled to be executed on Dec. 3, 2026.

Explaining the plan to make his death public, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that “people need to understand … there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

Whether the broadcast will proceed remains uncertain. But as a historian of the early American republic, I recognize a familiar expectation behind it: that watching someone die will teach a useful lesson. Americans at the republic’s founding debated that premise — and doubted what the lesson might be.

The power of government

On Aug. 17, 1797, New Yorkers gathered to watch John Young hang.

An English musician and music publisher struggling with debt, Young had shot and killed Robert Barwick, a deputy sheriff taking him into custody. Barwick left a widow and nine children.

Young’s conviction by a jury brought him to a scaffold surrounded by soldiers, before an immense crowd.

Governor John Jay, a leading Federalist who placed greater faith in firm government than in popular judgment, had authorized the military presence after the sheriff reported fears of a rescue. But Jay also wanted the execution to impress its witnesses with the power of the government carrying it out.

Writing to James Kent, New York City’s chief municipal legal officer, two days before the hanging, Jay stressed that the authority of law should prevail visibly. The occasion should be “particularly solemn and impressive,” he said. The “authority of the law should be seen to bear down (on) all opposition.”

Solemnity, however, proved difficult to arrange. The military escort played lively music as the procession made its way to the scaffold. One newspaper critic thought an uninformed passerby might mistake the spectacle for “the celebration of some Festival.”

Soldiers formed a square around the gallows. The crowd remained orderly. Young addressed a few words to the minister, sang a psalm “and with great composure pulled his cap over his face,” reported one newspaper. Then, before the assembled witnesses, he was hanged.

Loss of government’s dignity

Whatever the crowd’s reaction that day, the public execution had already become an argument about the nature of government.