World Fantasy Award 2023 Acceptance Speech for Novel

I’d written this speech twice and was about to write it again when my husband Carlos suggested I just do the Napoleon Dynamite dance for you instead.

*executes exactly two moves from the Napoleon Dynamite dance*

[What I didn’t plan, and what happened: my oak leaf crown flew off backward. But that’s okay: Sam J. Miller said it was a feature not a bug. And a good clown “sits in the mistake,” or some such phrase. So I just went with it.]

That’s as far as I got. Then I realized I didn’t have pockets. Also, the Napoleon Dynamite dance is harder than it looks.

[I had prepared two speeches for the alternate universes in which I won in either Collections or Novel, but we’re in this AU, so you get this one.]

I didn’t know, starting out, that writing what I thought was a light cartoonish NaNoWriMo satire about a protagonist in a fantasy novel who literally cannot use violence to solve any of the problems of a fantasy novel, would evolve, over the years—after many a workshop, and great beta readers, and awesome agent edits and awesome editor edits—into writing about a culture of glamorized violence, toxic family dynamics, a lifetime of bad pedagogy that needs to be re-assessed in maturity, found family, and an idea of death that even I, the author, might turn to for comfort in times of loss.

[What I didn’t plan, and what happened: I started crying at this point, but kept going, because what are you gonna do?]

I didn’t know, in all those years, over all those drafts, and all those near moments of giving up—except I’d already poured so much time into it—that my friend would be listening to the audiobook of Saint Death’s Daughter on her way to her sister’s funeral, or another friend would read it after losing her beloved pet, and another in her own year of grief. What I didn’t think about consciously, while writing, was that a book about the world’s friendliest necromancer, who so intensely loves and reveres her gentle god of death, might provide some peace and connection in a time of loss.

I did believe books could be holy. I just didn’t think my book could be. That it is had been, for some, makes me so grateful.

That’s my feeling, too, reading the works of my fellow nominees. Gratitude. That sense of holiness. Of deep music playing. Of pristine sentences building out bastions of beauty in my mindscape: new places to visit in the quiet, and be reverent for a while. There is a certain buoyancy and playfulness in great prose that is its own kind of holiness in our dark times.

My favorite line from the movie Charlotte Grey is: “There must be something to set against all this.”

I made this book, in part, as my “something to set against all this.” I didn’t make it—by any means—quickly (it took 12 years). I didn’t make it alone. I devoted a whole chapter of acknowledgements to all the people who helped me, and it’s practically longer than the book—which is saying something.

And I didn’t make this book in a vacuum of art. We are in a blazing age of SFF. The world is aglow with the work going on right now—every year more rich and wild and worthy of the world we are reflecting, the world we are warning against, and the world we are helping to envision. I am in awe of this age, and this symphony of voices, and I’m so glad to lift my voice with yours. Thank you.