Catherynne M. Valente

Hello, everyone! Welp, if you follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon or X, you probably already know all this, but if you missed it...my work, of all and any kinds, has been severely curtailed by my child acquiring a movie-monster version of the flu that’s been going on for almost two weeks now. Tried sch

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book, mostly, but not entirely, for children, called The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. Rather a lot of people liked it. Over the years, that one book became five. Five, and two short stories. And then, in 2016...well. I don't have to tel

I know it's my job to be one of the people who Says Something About It. I know it's my job to be one of the people who says something comforting, or at least insightful, or at a minimum cathartic. I'll try soon. I promise. But I just don't have anything right now. I can't even look at the analysis,

The outstanding rewards for October are coming, I promise, I just am having a lot of physcial issues right now and also I can't think about anything but the election tomorrow so here is my brain at the moment...it's all I got. *** It’s almost over. One way or the other. I think I’ve aged ten years s

Well, that hurt. It says something about just how much pain I have been in for the last seven years or so, how high my baseline of “normal” became, that my yet-to-be-fixed left hand hurts more than the repaired right hand that got cut open palm to wrist and has been healing with zero pain management

It's a bit late for this but I was crumbling under a deadline, so...now for the most awkward post of the year! You have about a week left to get your Nebula nominations in, the Locus Recommended Reading List is out, then Hugos to follow that (god willing and the fraud don't rise) and World Fantasy a

IT'S DONE. The sequel to Space Opera, Space Oddity, is all finished but the copyedit. FINALLY. It took so long and so much of my soul, and a million upsetting things happened to make it take even longer and even more, but it's finally finished and I'm more or less happy with it (don't worry, I thoug

Twenty years ago today, January 4th, 2004, my first chapbook and its companion were published. My first anything was published. I was living in Japan, the wife of a naval officer (a biographical fact that always stuns people who have only known me as I am now), lonely and miserable as a candle in a

Hello my darlings. This week has been a roller coaster and I can't really talk about any of it but it's very high and very low. I apologize again for stumbling in my vain attempts to balance life and work and parenting on any level, and like Boxer, will work harder now that my schedule is a little l

So I looked up the etymology of the word pain the other day. I don't know if this is a TED Talk or the opening to a Letterkenny episode, but either way, I can feel a black turtleneck and discreet-but-not-really headset and/or a plaid flannel shirt and deeply unfortunate bangs spontaneously sprouting

Hello, everyone! (And an extra hello to many new people!) Here is the awkward embarrassing evergreen-ly weird and cringey post where I tell the internet what I had published last year that's eligible for various awards this year. If you nominate for these things, please consider giving this stuff a

Posted & cross-posted publicly, maybe be distributed freely anywhere with credit. I’m just so angry. It’s been boiling and bubbling (and toiling and troubling) for awhile now. Not just since a spoilt, sadistic emerald heir stole—and yes, I am using that word; I’m using it deliberately and with fury

Since I don't really have a proper blog anymore and my website is undergoing some updates, I decided I would put this bad boi here. This is like a blog, after all. As close as I think internet culture will ever get again. I know it's annoying, I know people can get weird about it, but to be honest,

Happy June, Laboratory supporters! I was asked to give the commencement address for the graduating class of 2017 at Kimberton Waldorf School outside Philadelphia. Here is what came bubbling out of the beakers. (The text of this speech, may be reproduced, with credit, for free.) Everything's Going To

Hello, everyone! Now comes the time when I explain why there is a political poem about a wombat just below this post. Yesterday, while discussing politics on Twitter, as seemingly everyone does all the time at the moment, I ended up in a pretty heated conversation with someone from Texas named Craig