This is a post about writing news. I thought you might like to know that my story “Pug,” which was originally published in Asimov’s, is going to be in Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy anthology for 2012. Here’s the cover and the table of contents.

“The Silver Wind” by Nina Allan
“Martian Heart” by John Barnes
“East of Furious” by Jonathan Carroll
“Late Bloomer” by Suzy McKee Charnas
“The Last Sophia” by C.S.E. Cooney
“Walking Stick Fires” by Alan DeNiro
“The Adakian Eagle” by Bradley Denton
“Rampion” by Alexandra Duncan
“And Weep Like Alexander” by Neil Gaiman
“Pug” by Theodora Goss
“Widows in the World” by Gavin Grant
“Ghostweight” by Yoon Ha Lee
“Choose Your Own Adventure” by Kat Howard
“Younger Women” by Karen Joy Fowler
“The Man Who Bridged the Mist” by Kij Johnson
“The Sighted Watchmaker” by Vylar Kaftan
“Mulberry Boys” by Margo Lanagan
“Canterbury Hollow” by Chris Lawson
“Some of Them Closer” by Marissa Lingen
“The Summer People” by Kelly Link
“The Choice” by Paul McAuley
“A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong” by K.J. Parker
“Woman Leaves Room” by Robert Reed
“My Chivalric Fiasco” by George Saunders
“Fields of Gold” by Rachel Swirsky
“The Smell of Orange Groves” by Lavie Tidhar
“The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland, for a Little While” by Catherynne M. Valente
“The Sandal-Bride” by Genevieve Valentine
“The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” by E. Lily Yu

I’m also going to have at least two new short stories coming out in 2012, as well as at least two reprints. I’ll tell you about those once I know when they’ll be coming out!

I was thinking about my writing today. When I teach writing, I tell my students to think about the central themes of their papers. I often ask them to make a list of words that capture those central themes. I don’t have a list of words for my stories – but I do have a few sentences that seem, to me, to capture what at least some of my stories are about. The stories that are, perhaps, most me – most the stories that come directly out of my understanding of the world. Here are the sentences:

There is a ground under your feet, even thought you feel as though you’re walking on air.

There is a meaning to it all, even though you don’t know what that meaning is.

Life is dangerous, but it can also be magical.

Now that I read over them again, it seems to me that they are fairy-tale sentences. Fairy tales, after all, teach lessons like those. And maybe that’s what I’m really writing: fairy tales, told as though they were stories. Pretending to be stories. I don’t know, but it’s at least an interesting provisional thought. (Someone, in a review I think, once said that I write fantasy as though it were realism. And I think that’s essentially right.)