The Suyiverse Report #4: 2022 award eligibility and year in re(ar)view
Welcome to the end of 2022! It’s that time of the year when I bring you the fourth “official situation report” I’ve put out since I became a career author (see previous reports). This post will do the usual: take stock of what I've created and published, what I've consumed and enjoyed, and what 2023 may bring forth. This is a humongous post, so I’ve placed handy links here for you to jump to the section of your choice. Here we go!
Awards | Highlights | What I enjoyed | Works-In-Process | State of the Self | What’s Next?
Works eligible for award consideration
I’ll start with this because it’s going to be short and I want to get it out of the way: I published one short story this year, a psychological horror original at Tor.com, titled CHOKE.
I wrote a companion piece in my newsletter to explain the story’s origin and influences. You may read the whole thing if you wish, but here’s the section I think most describes this story:
For days after, I kept thinking of racial microaggressions as the stealthy spearhead of the bigger monstrous force that is racism. Microaggressions as a consuming shadow that, with every little interaction you have with someone who embraces a racist system or ideology, sucks you in, tendril by tendril, and swallows you whole. It never appears overtly, but starts small—a comment about your name, about your mastery of English, about how “your people” [insert smarmy comment here], etc—and soon becomes a rivertide you’re swimming against, attempting to claw your way out of; a shadow that smothers you, pulls you under, tightens its fingers around your neck until you…
Choke.
A few months after I had these thoughts, I began to write a short story inspired by this experience. It featured a chorus of ancestral voices, a Jordan Peele aesthetic, and musings on the multifacetedness of language.
If you’re nominating for any of the mainstream SFF awards (see full directory of them), it would be an honour if you could consider CHOKE for your Best Short Story categories. I think it’s an important story for this day and age, and I would be glad for it to get more readers. Off the top of my head, a few of the awards CHOKE is eligible for include (but not limited to):
Shirley Jackson & Bram Stoker Awards (premier horror awards)
Nommo Awards (for best speculative fiction by an African)
Ignyte & Locus Awards (jury-decided, no nominations, but visibility helps!)
Nebulas & Hugos (the biggest SFF awards. CHOKE is already on the Nebula Reading list, so if you’re an SFWA member, please give it a thumbs-up!)
British Science Fiction Association (all it takes one nomination to get on the longlist, so if you’re a member, please consider this story!)
Etc. (again, see full directory).
Now on to the rest of the year!
Highlights
I did a bunch of author-related things this year, but some of the most important happenings were not author-related at all. Here’s a summary of a mix of both.
January to March
Signing at Chapters bookstore in Ottawa
This year, I had the biggest change of my lifetime: welcoming a new child into our family, the joys and trials of which I detailed in my last report.
In authorland, I had my first TV interview. I also launched the monthly guest feature in my After Five newsletter, to promote voices “from a historically underrepresented community or identity group in the writing, reading, publishing and SFF ecosystem.” Through the year, we featured 10 guests: Chovwe, Shingai, Tlotlo, Rafeeat, Akilah, Veronica, Chido, TJ, Tobi and Tariro.
April to June
In May, I launched a long-dreamt project of mine: The Literary Laddership for Emerging African Authors, or LLEAA. As I explained in my letter about why I did it and what I hope to achieve with it, “The Literary Laddership for Emerging African Authors aims to support, elevate and connect emerging fiction authors of Black and/or African descent, based primarily on the African continent and writing in English. Fellows will be offered a funded ($500 each) three-month digital residency, membership in a private community of practice, and continuous support through the publishing ecosystem.”
You can read more about the inaugural fellows, and you’ll be hearing directly from them soon!
July to September
On a panel during the writers festival in Moose Jaw
Launched the Stranger Things novel at Comic Con in San Diego, a most exhilarating experience. Right before, I was at a small Canadian prairie town called Moose Jaw for the Saskatchewan Festival of Words. Here are some notes from that trip.
October to December
After this, it was back-to-back appearances until the last month of the year. CanCon (where I was author Guest of Honour), AugurCon and Lolwe Classes (a virtual workshop I taught on worldbuilding) were the most involving.
In November, I participated in NaNoWriMo, and wrote some diaries (which were sadly only accessible to newsletter subscribers, another reason why you should subscribe!). Total words: 36,960, just sufficient for the middle-grade novel I planned for.
I was part of a first-of-its-kind Bengali translation of African speculative short stories, titled Tales from the Other Night. Here’s the very dope/badass cover above.
Lastly, in one of various changes to my newsletter this year, I launched a Discord channel for subscribers to have better and deeper conversations with subscribers. This letter has grown from a mere 600-ish subscribers at the beginning of the year to about 1,500 today (and I hope for us to grow to about 2,000 next year, so please tell your friends to subscribe!).
What I enjoyed
I consumed quite a lot of impressionable material this year, from long and short literature to audio stories to TV/film. Here’s what caught my eye:
Read
Books
Black Water Sister by Zen Cho (best novel I read this year, IMO)
The Water Outlaws by SL Huang (coming June 2023; official blurb to come)
The Surviving Sky by Kritika Rao (coming June 2023; see my official blurb)
The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias
White Horse by Erika T. Wurth
Wild Seed by Octavia Butler
The Inheritance of Orquidea Divinia by Zoraida Cordova
Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse
A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction by Benjamin Percy
Amari and the Night Brothers by B.B. Alston
A Snake Falls to Earth by Darcie Little Badger
Shorts
Fiction:
12 Things A Trini Should Know Before Travelling To A Back In Times Fete™ by R. S. A. Garcia
A Song of Violence by Bibi Osha
Agu Uno by Chibueze Ngeneagu
Master of Ceremonies by Frances Ogamba
Apolépisi: A De-Scaling by Suzan Palumbo
Nonfiction:
Listened
Fiction podcasts: Carrier, The Left Right Game
Nonfiction podcasts: Conspirituality, It’s a Continent, History of Africa
Music: The soundtrack to Disney’s Encanto, Johnny Drille × Teni’s remix of Baba Fryo’s Denge Pose
Others: Brown Noise (if you struggle with concentration and want something that sounds like sandpapered white noise)
Watched
I saw more TV this year than I have in a while. Blame kiddo care, which meant I ended up watching a lot of TV while doing another activity (washing and sterilizing bottles, trapped in a recliner with a sleeping child in my arms, etc, you catch the drift).
Best shows: ANDOR and SEVERANCE, hands-down. SEVERANCE really went there with the human relationship to work and trauma, and hyper-capitalist incursions into both. ANDOR demonstrates what Star Wars can be if it digs deeper than surface-level Disneyfied rebellions and shows the nitty-gritty tolls, sacrifices and funding demanded by a revolutionary cause, and how bringing about systemic change is much harder than we think.
Best Films: I saw PREY immediately after it came out, and though I’ve never seen any of the Predator films, this one stuck with me because of how well done it was. Another film that gripped me was Jordan Peele’s NOPE (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer? I don’t even need to know what the film’s about! They give A-rated performances every damn time). And everyone’s favourite: EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE, ALL AT ONCE. Stephanie Hsu as Jobu Tupaki is one of the strongest breakout performances I’ve ever seen.
Powerful/feel-good finds: YELLOWJACKETS was a revelation. A LEAGUE OF OUR OWN is the best kind of feel-good TV, even while dealing with heartbreak and tough subjects and characters. KEVIN CAN F*** HIMSELF is how to flip TV on its head. FLATBUSH MISDEMEANORS balances darkness and mad hilarity quite well. I didn’t think I’d find a buddy show like DETROITERS interesting, but it kinda caught on for me. I liked how the HEARTBREAK HIGH reboot was Skins meets Sex Education. THE FLATSHARE has a really solid pilot, and delivers in more ways than your average rom-com.
Old friends: STRANGER THINGS S4 (Chrissy wake up! I don’t like this!). DERRY GIRLS S3 (ugh, my favourite girls are off air forever!). ABBOTT ELEMENTARY S2 keeps serving the best jokes. BARRY S3 really came out with the twists, huh? INDUSTRY S2 was giving “everyone’s a villain”, lol. THE WHITE LOTUS S2 really clowned us all, characters and audience both (icymi, Daphne’s the real winner here). RESERVATION DOGS S2 pulled out all the stops (that Cheese episode, waaahh!). BETTER CALL SAUL S6: a perfect ending to a perfect show. ATLANTA S4: a wonky ending to a perfect show? LOS ESPOOKYS S2: How dare HBO cancel? What the fuck? WARRIOR NUN S2: How dare Netflix cancel? What the fuck? THE SEX LIVES OF COLLEGE GIRLS S2 was nice though unwieldy. STAR TREK, LOWER DECKS S3: lmao, that’s the tweet.
Flops: HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, RINGS OF POWER and WHEEL OF TIME. Seriously, I was never really quite moved by any of these shows despite watching them all religiously. I also ventured into TRUE BLOOD for the first time, and the way I noped out after season 1. What a garbage trash fire.
Played
Newbies: Horizon Zero Dawn: Forbidden West, Spiderman: Miles Morales, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
Oldies: PES 2023, Mortal Kombat
Works-In-Process
I worked on various projects during the year. Here's what I completed or am in the process of completing.
Book-length work
Warrior of the Wind (The Nameless Republic #2), late 2023
At long last, WOTW is now off my desk and in the publishing pipeline. Not off off—I still have various kinds of edits ahead (line edits, copy edits, first passes, proofreads, etc). But the biggest grunt work has been done, and now I get to begin work on affiliated stuff like cover art and endnotes and map updates and blurb/summary writing, etc.
Keep your eyes open, ears to the ground. In January, my team and I will be making some key announcements involving release dates and exclusive character art. What I can reveal at this point is that the book will hit shelves in the later part of the year, likely November.
It’s always tenuous work, preparing a book for publication. You’re never sure what you’re going to get, and how whatever you put out will be received. But I’m always excited to get it going. Here’s hoping you’ll be just as excited with the end product.
Antwan Fashek, TBD
Subscribers to my newsletter will be familiar with the name above, which is a part of the placeholder title for the middle-grade novel I worked on during NaNoWriMo. This was something I needed to get out of me, and I will return to it at various points through the course of the year. For now, I’m simply sitting with the story and making space for its most poignant energies to percolate.
Shorts
Most of the short work I wrote this year got published, except for one work in particular. It’s a short story written in the form of a student's book report, discussing an urban legend in a Nigerian boarding school. You might’ve seen variations of this form and/or style (e.g. Sofia Samatar’s “Walkdog”). With this story, however, I wanted a cultural touchstone for millennials who went to boarding schools in Nigeria, and the stories that came out of there, as well as the attendant challenges of displacement, misunderstanding and loneliness.
“Lady Koi-Koi: A Book Report” will be out from Apex Magazine sometime in 2023.
Others
Sometime in October, I had an exclusive interview and photoshoot with Locus Magazine, which will appear in a forthcoming print issue.
Stuff that didn’t work out
Everything I submitted this year got picked up, so that’s a yay for me! (In fairness, I didn’t submit much). Much of what didn’t work out this year were projects I had ideas about starting (e.g. a fiction podcast, haha) that simply didn’t take. I also declined a number of appearances (e.g. World Fantasy in NOLA) simply because I could not make time away from family and the kiddo.
State of the Self
Despite major events swallowing the year’s tail (like the World Cup—which I was mostly ambivalent toward, and more concerned about the horrendous labour practices and human rights issues in Qatar), I've found my comportment to have remained with events from much earlier in the year.
When Russia's invasion of Ukraine began in March, I began tracking an old Nigerian friend who went off to med school in Kharkiv years ago. We reconnected (and gladly, he was still alive, amidst the constant bombing of his city). For weeks, we exchanged messages, me stopping mid-task every now and then to send him a voice note or text of support, of hope. Me stopping to remember that even though he wasn’t injured or dead, he still would never be safe—not as a Black man physically present in a place where rules had gone out the window.
I remember the day he announced he was leaving Lagos, how much joy and congratulations abounded. "You are finally fleeing this hell hole of a country," we told him. And though we look back now and think how woeful that sounds in retrospect, it got me stopping to remember that our "safe" is often a function of everyone else's safe. We can't abscond from locking arms toward safety for us all—whether in Lagos, in Kharkiv, on Twitter or in a pandemic. Events that threaten our safeties will always continue to arise. It's how we respond that matters. Because no safety for one will often mean, eventually, no safety for many.
Thinking about safety, I've also been tracking the massive floods that swept over Nigeria and much of West Africa this rainy season, as well as the Atlantic ocean's incursions on the Lagos-Abidjan coastline. A lot of talk at CoP27 this year was about centering Africa in climate discourse. But you're unlikely to be surprised how much of it is just talk and little action. I’ve been sitting with the reality of where that leaves us—me and fellow Nigerian diasporans, as well as friends and family living back home—and what this means for us in the next many years. In fact, I wrote a book with musings on this, which I’ll talk about in the next section.
What's Next (for 2023 and 2024)?
Lost Ark Dreaming, 2024
In my last update, I mentioned that a standalone novella with the above title had gone out on submission to editors. Well, I’m pleased to report that it was purchased (by a publisher I can’t say yet) and will be released sometime in early 2024! Hurray!
This book is me going hard at the hyper-capitalist actions of governments and corporations that have decimated much of the West African coastline to the point where communities living on that strip will completely disappear before 2030. Coastal West-African cities will see much more flooding in the coming years. Fifty years of this, and even the countries themselves might be no more.
Lost Ark Dreaming attempts to unpack that future with a speculative, semi-fantastical bent. However, it’s not as dystopian as you’d think—I consider it more hopepunk, even. It’s also the most experimental thing I’ve written, jumping across forms (verse, reportage, omniscient beings rambling, etc). Prepare to be surprised!
Overall, this likely means that you’ll be getting multiple books from me in the next two years. At the moment, we’re working on a full, detailed announcement for early 2023, after which we’ll begin edits. Cover talks have already commenced. I’ll likely be refining this book for the rest of 2023, and then you’ll get to see it the year after.
The Nameless Republic Book #3, maybe 2024/2025?
What if I told you I’ve already begun drafting the final book of this series? Because I have, and you get to see a small excerpt in WOTW!
But all’s not done yet. My current outline’s still a bit too broad, and therefore will need expanding. The cast of characters has grown, and I’m yet to decide who survives from WOTW (not everyone does, lol) and which of the new additions matter. I’ll probably be drafting this for much of 2023, likely through December. Whether it gets to hit shelves in 2024 or 2025 will then be a publisher matter. Either way, I’m thrilled to be in the discovery throes of a new story again.
Yet Another Tie-in Novel, late 2023
In news surprising absolutely no one, I have signed on to write a [REDACTED] tie-in novel for [REDACTED]. This will bring my total of tie-in works to five, after Minecraft, Stranger Things, Black Panther and Mytek the Mighty. This, however, is for a property I’ve already written for prior, and is more of an adaptation with tangents than a new story overall.
Right now, I’m in the outlining stage. As with many tie-in projects, this will involve a bit of back-and-forth with the IP & publishing teams for a few months, after which I will then go into drafting, and afterward, rounds of revision. Watch out for future announcements!
Sauútiverse
Sauúti, described as an “African Inter-Planetary Worldbuilding Project” and “the first African Collaborative Fiction Universe” has been many years in the making. Wole Talabi, an author colleague and one of the frontrunners of this project, penned a piece in The Guardian on why we need this world, most of which I agree with.
All being said, I’ve been invited to work with other authors on stories within this world, and that’s something I hope to fulfill in the coming year(s). We’re going to make magic together.
Thank you for coming on this journey with me. As usual, if you’re ever unsure about where to find me, I’m most active at my newsletter and Instagram, and am @suyidavies at every social platform (though I’m barely ever there).
Wishing you a wonderful holiday season, and a happy new year in advance. Cheers!
— Suyi.
