I was all ready to walk around my next convention with a “4-time Aurora Award Loser” badge, but then…

 

I got a double-win instead?! Here is the official announcement.

• “Cthulhu on the Shores of Osaka” won Best Poem/Song
• “Blood and Desert Dreams” won Best Short Story

Huge thanks to the editors who published me over the years, the writing groups who asserted positive peer pressure, and the friends who believed in me even when I was thoroughly sick of my own writing.

You can watch a replay of the livestream here. My speeches are at 59:25 and 1:09:51. Warning: I used up my good jokes the first time around.

Oh, and I got a brief mention on CBC, which is just… wow.

“Cthulhu on the Shores of Osaka” – Winner of Best Poem/Song

I’ve threatened to write a Cthulhu takoyaki story for years. When I learned that Cthulhu was basically a giant octopus, my first thought was, “Ah, food!” Maybe, depending on where he washes ashore, people may not gaze upon him with awe or fear, or even with scientific reverence. They may well witness the one-and-only eldritch god (an endangered species if there ever was one) and decide he makes a good meal.

Takoyaki–fried octopus balls–is a Japanese street food that originated in Osaka. It’s enjoyed all over the world now, though name is bit misleading–most of the snack is the batter, with only a tiny tendril of octopus tentacle inside.

So why not turn a horrifying and unknowable deity into a snack ingredient, basically the side dish of a side dish? Thus was the birth of “Cthulhu on the Shores of Osaka.”

I wrote this poem in a single day as part of Toronto Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ annual one-shot anthology series (participants must write their pieces within the span of 24 hours, and the works are compiled in a book after). The editing mostly consisted of debating someone about the exact pH of stomach acid.

This one-shot writing challenge has spawned many of my works over the years; some stories I initially drafted during the challenge but choose not to include them in the one-shot anthologies, instead editing them past the 24-hour period and publishing the works elsewhere.

“Blood and Desert Dreams” – Winner of Best Short Story

Speaking of which, “Blood and Desert Dreams” was originally drafted during a one-shot writing challenge. I did get the story done in a day, but soon after I received an invitation from a previous editor to submit to his magazine.

I opted to not include “Blood and Desert Dreams” in the Legacy one-shot anthology, thinking it might be a good fit for the magazine that published me before. Alas, after heavy consideration, the editor… didn’t end up buying my story.

But Scott H. Andrews at Beneath Ceaseless Skies did! We worked through multiple rounds of editing to create the version before you today, which is quite different from what I had the night of the one-shot anthology. “Blood and Desert Dreams” was once even more ambiguous, if you can believe that. Scott respected my vision of the unreliable narrator and “unique” ending (trying to not spoil anything), but he found ways to make the concept clearer. I did not want to mould the ending into a singular entity that it wasn’t, but Scott’s ideas preserved my vision while also making it palatable.

When award and “year’s best” compilation season hit, I experienced mixed feelings. “Blood and Desert Dreams” was my favourite among the three stories I published last year, but should I really ask people to consider it for year’s best anthologies or awards? It is ambitious, sure, and very representative of my writing. But I kept having flashbacks to early reader and editor feedback, about how difficult it was to understand. Had Scott’s edits been enough to broaden the appeal? Could there even be a broad appeal to a story with “that” ending?

The story has now been selected for the Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction: Volume 3, and is the winner of an Aurora Award. I guess my doubts were unfounded.

What’s next? I’m still hard at work on my dark fantasy novel. Day job is still running interference (don’t get me wrong–I love my day job; it just consumes a lot of my time). I’ll be attending Word on the Street (Toronto) and Can*Con (Ottawa). And at some point, I will turn my gaze to that second short story collection, because the science fiction and urban fantasy also deserve their forever homes.

In the meantime: stay hydrated, watch this space for announcements, and don’t forget to devour all your cosmic horrors!