I’m the fiction judge for the Wisconsin Writer’s Association’s 2025 Jade Ring Contest. The fiction category is open to unpublished stories in English of up to 2000 words. There are also categories for poetry and non-fiction. You can find all the submission guidelines here.

Although I mostly write science fiction, I read and enjoy fiction of all kinds. As the guidelines say, though, the work should be complete and standalone.

I’ve judged contests in the past, so I know I’m going to enjoy this, and I’m hoping for a wide variety of stories. That’s what makes reading all the entries fun.

Here’s a little exercise to explore a character, possibly someone from a piece you’re working on.

Premise:

Your character is driving a car, waiting for the stoplight to change at a busy crossroads.

Your character looks in the rear-view mirror and sees a car speeding up the road behind them that will crash into them in three seconds.

What would this person think and do in those three seconds? Remember that stress slows down time, so there might be a whole lot of time.

The intent of this exercise is to get as deep into this person’s point of view as possible. How can you immerse the reader in this character’s feelings and reactions? Remember to be direct and to live out the story in the character’s head and body with all the emotional intensity and emotional range that you can.

What result did you get from this exercise? If you want, you can try it again with other characters from the same piece and see how they would differ.

How would you react?

The Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Paper airplanes began to be made only several years afterwards.

And yet, any child can make a paper airplane. The Chinese invented paper 2000 years ago and had kites. Birds have been flying since dinosaur times, and humanity has dreamed of flying since the stone age. Paper models of sailing ships, hot air balloons, and dirigibles were available before 1903. Japanese origami had already reached wonderful sophistication. Nothing was stopping anyone from making a paper airplane.

Except one thing: no one knew what an airplane looked like or how it would work. No one could imagine it. Orville and Wilbur had to develop an accurate understanding of how wing shape affected air pressure and created lift in order to make a real airplane, and by 1899 they had built intricate gliders and harnessed wind power. Their discoveries would eventually be transferred to a simplified three-dimensional paper model. The rest is history.

This leaves me sitting here staring at a sheet of paper, wondering what unprecedented things it could do, things that would delight any child, if we could only imagine them.

Alex Kingsley has interviewed me about the Semiosis trilogy for Interstellar Flight Magazine. You can read the interview here.

Alex asked: In Usurpation, there’s a pandemic. Was this pandemic inspired by our real-life pandemic? How did COVID-19 affect your portrayal?

I answered: In the 1980s, I was covering HIV as a journalist, and one day before a meeting, I was chatting with the Wisconsin state epidemiologist. He explained that while AIDs was awful — and as a gay man, he knew exactly how terrifying and destructive it was — a different new disease could be a lot worse. He described the many ways in which it could be easier to transmit, harder to detect, more resistant to treatment, and more deadly. COVID wasn’t my first pandemic, it wasn’t the worst, and it wasn’t at all inspiring.

I’ll be at the Sci-Fi & Fantasy Book Club at Linda Sokol Francis Public Library in Brookfield, Illinois, at 7 p.m. Wednesday, February 5. We’ll discuss the novel Dual Memory.

New participants are welcome!

More news: I translated the short story “Bodyhoppers” by Rocío Vega for the February 2025 issue of Clarkesworld Science Fiction & Fantasy Magazine. Read it here.

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The story I translated for Clarkesworld Magazine last year, “The Coffee Machine” by Celia Corral-Vázquez, is a finalist for Best Short Story of 2024. More information is here.