My favourite short stories of 2025

The Memory Technician, Small Wonders

~1000 words (5 min)

In a cyberpunk city where some pay to extract their bad memories or sell their good memories to get by, a struggling memory technician encounters an unexpected customer who makes her believe in kindness again.

– featured in Charles Payseur’s Diabolical Plots, GigaNotoSaurus and Small Wonders: Reviews
– featured in Myna Chang’s Flash Roundup * March 2025

My favourite poems of 2025

Old Brooklyn Magic, Nightmare Magazine

An eerie portrait of the Brooklyn Bridge area, capturing both a feeling of wonder and unease—for any place with enough character and history can feel like it has an undercurrent of old magic that may ensnare you.

not tied down, Strange Horizons

As our devices lose their physical connections, we may feel we lose our own connections to the world.

A Taste of Clean Water, Small Wonders

The sentiment contained in a droplet of water in a post-climate disaster future that hopefully will never come to be.

More short stories

The Drowned, Apex Microfiction Contest, 1st place

Have You Eaten Yet?, Worlds of Possibility ($)
– featured in Alex Brown’s Must Read Short Speculative Fiction: February 2025

When the Sky Tumbled Down, Vast Chasm

If I Have Defects, Am I Defective?, Short Édition

Poured from the Stars, Saros SF

Calling a Starskipper, Abyss & Apex

More poems

Hotel for the Dead, Orion’s Belt

Uncertainty, Brilliant Poetry, 2025 contest finalist

Flighty, Kaleidotrope
– featured in Charles Payseur’s Baffling, Kaleidotrope, and Small Wonders: Reviews

Canary, Eye to the Telescope

Lost Cyberflora, Eye to the Telescope

Transmissions, The Sprawl Mag
– nominated for Best of the Net 2026

Icarus Ascended, NewMyths

what spirits need on lonely nights, Abyss & Apex

Dandelion of Creation, Merganser Magazine

Interpreters of Water, Utopia Science Fiction ($)

Beware the North, Star*Line ($)

Waystation, Dreams & Nightmares ($)

Contact me if you would like a review copy of any stories or poems not freely available above

Hello friends, I am a new speculative writer and poet from Toronto, and I’m excited to share my work with the world for the first time this year. Although I have a number of stories and poems published in 2024, here are my favourites that I hope you’ll consider:

Poetry

Eligible for the poetry categories of the Hugo, Rhysling, Ignyte, and Aurora awards

Traveling at Lightspeed is Easy, Returning to Earth is Hard
Small Wonders, October 2024

Capturing the aching loneliness of returning to find an unfamiliar home after the time-bending effects of traveling at lightspeed

Visions of Manhattan, Eye to the Telescope
– nominated for the Rhysling Award!

• A mixologist’s cocktails grants you glimpses of New York City’s bright futures and nostalgic pasts – a love letter of sorts to the city

Light of My Life, Astrolabe

• The entire arc of a love story told through wistful metaphors of light
• Nominated for Best Microfiction 2025

The Sail, Orion’s Belt

• A giant sail towers in the middle of a planet’s ocean and whispers to you promises of adventure

Astrometric Love, Heartlines Spec

• One star in an astrometric binary system is all but invisible to observers, so their partner shares how they see them

Planetary Almanac: Torus, Utopia Science Fiction

Stealing a Moment, Star*Line

A Rahokan’s Gem, Worlds of Possibility

Where Dragons Find Solace, Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores

A World in Her Tresses, The Fairy Tale Magazine

Short Stories

Eligible for the short story categories of the Hugo, BSFA, Ignyte, and Aurora awards

Everyone is Dying to Work Here
Fission #4, by the British Science Fiction Association

An office tour for a new hire reveals that their company’s tech research may have nefarious purposes, told from the satirical lens of the tour guide

The Halfling Tree, Solarpunk Magazine

City of Androids, Roads Less Travelled

Dandelion Diplomacy, Twenty-two Twenty-Eight

Contact me if you would like a review copy of anything not freely available

Community

Expectation: I thought writing would be be a solitary activity, translating concepts in my head to words on paper. And I’ve always liked living in my own head, so I was comfortable with that idea.

Reality: The speculative writing community has been more friendly, supportive, diverse, progressive, and awesome than I could have ever expected. As someone who had never met another writer until months after I started writing, I deeply appreciate being welcomed into the community—the talented and successful writers that generously offer their time and wisdom to newer writers like me, the editors that pour time into crafting wonderful publications with very little reward, the volunteers that set up spaces for us to build community, the friends I’ve made on this difficult but often rewarding journey. In a world where it feels harder and harder to make meaningful connections, all of this feels very special.

In some ways, my misconception also manifested itself in my writing. My early pieces focused on ideas and concepts, and I couldn’t understand why characters were important to a story. As I started to figure out what worked and didn’t work, I discovered that writing is not just about words on a page, it’s about people and relationships and experiences—and that’s proving to be true both in stories themselves and in my writing journey.

What I Write

Expectation: I originally set my sights on exclusively writing sci-fi novels.

Reality: Instead, I’ve been writing only short stories, and mainly flash fiction. Short form just makes it easier for me to iterate, get feedback, and improve quickly.

I branched out into fantasy, horror, and literary fiction, just to figure out what I might enjoy or might be good at. I’ve slowly settled into a mix of sci-fi and fantasy, which is a good reflection of what I like to read. And I still plan to continue with horror and literary when ideas in those spaces come to me.

To my delight, I also stumbled into poetry, and found I love writing it. I’ve written over 50 poems in just the last 6 months. And I’ve already had more success in getting my poetry published than my fiction.

I haven’t even started on a novel yet. Now that I have some solid publications and a better sense of what kind of writer I am, I think I might be ready to give it a shot again.

Success

Expectation: I’d be lying if I claimed success in publishing didn’t drive me and doesn’t continue to drive me. But I came in with no experience or aptitude in writing and no expectations—I wasn’t sure I would be able to write well enough to ever get published, to be honest.

Reality: It’s been incredibly encouraging that magazines that I admire have published dozens of my short stories and poems in my first year of writing anything of any kind.

And I don’t plan to stop here. I want to get nominated for awards, I want to publish short story collections and poetry collections and novels, I want to push myself as a writer as far as I can, in ways that I might not have even thought of yet.

Expectation: I thought that when your wrote a story good enough, you send it off and claim an acceptance somewhere. I didn’t expect so much rejection, especially on stories you consider your best work.

Reality: It turns out that a good story told well isn’t always good enough. The more competitive magazines and journals have acceptance rates of < 2%, so I wake up almost every day to a rejection.

I knew I had to work hard at writing and at writing better, but I never expected to spend so much time composing cover letters, figuring out which pieces are best-suited for which markets, formatting manuscripts to the preferences of editors, and monitoring and following up on submissions. That’s okay, because I never expected this to be easy after all.

Looking Forward

I’ve been trying to write as much as I can, to iterate and get better, but also so that I can send out work widely to as many open calls as possible. Now, I’d like to slow down and focus more on craft, on quality, on longer form, on writing something I’ll truly be proud of. Excited to see where the next year takes me.

After years of dancing with data, I can’t help but start with some numbers (word counts rounded to the nearest 500):

79,000 words written

• 68 stories, 34 poems, many of which are incomplete and discarded
• 149 submissions: 76 rejections, 11 acceptances, others still pending
• $126 earned

* My subjective personal assessment. “Potentially publishable” includes works that need a rewrite (though likely will never get it); “unpublishable” is a lost cause (but not a waste of time, because I learned in the process). 2023 involved lots of writing as practice.

Categorized based on the main genre. This tracks, since I aimed to write sci-fi and fantasy, dabbling in horror, slipstream, and literary only to test the waters.

I write a lot of dystopian stories. But very recently in 2024, I’ve been thinking about more uplifting stories, so perhaps this will change.

To celebrate about 2023

1. Rekindled my love of reading
2. Started writing!
3. First publication
4. First paid publication
5. First publication at pro rates
6. Learned how to properly submit works to journals
7. Sent 100 submissions
8. Started calling myself a writer
9. Met other writers for the first time
10. Joined writing communities

Discovering what I like to write

1. My very first attempt at writing was a fantasy novel, and I got 3000 words in before I thought: if it turns out unreadable, I will have sunk in so much effort for no return. I soon pivoted to writing flash fiction.
2. I attempted writing literary fiction, but soon realized I had no clue what literary fiction is. It may be a lost cause for me.
3. Although I originally had no intention of writing poetry, I discovered narrative poetry works for me.
4. I wrote a lot of drabbles and microfiction because it was fun. Fitting a story into a condensed format gave me the feeling of solving a puzzle.

My writing-related goals for 2024

1. 100 story submissions and 100 poetry submissions done!
2. Sell 10 works to paying markets done!
3. Sell a story at SFWA pro rates done!
4. Sell a poem in a market paying at least $25/poem done!
5. Write a first draft of a novel
6. Write better (as measured by compliments??)
7. Read more than I did in 2023 done!

Backstory

To understand why creative writing was such a leap for me, we begin with my childhood.

For as long as I can remember, I excelled at math, and, as early as second grade, I earned the label of “math whiz.” Throughout school, I was never able to shake this title, nor did I particularly want to, since it felt good to be recognized for something.

On the other hand, I never found success in creative pursuits. I played a few instruments, but in a rote and mechanical way, unable to grasp the musicality of it. I failed horribly at drawing and art, and not for lack of trying. No one encouraged me to do anything creative either, except for a brief comment from my 6th-grade English teacher, who liked one of my poems. At some point, I accepted that I was incapable of being creative.

Now, I did read copiously and I particularly enjoyed science fiction and fantasy—but my relationship with it was always on the consumption side. It never occurred to me to write, especially because English was invariably my weakest subject.

As I continued to university and then my career, I focused on economics, finance, data, and programming. I built a career on the basis on my finance and economics expertise, project management abilities, data analysis skills, and a drive to deliver high-quality work for clients.

What Changed

When I left my career, I went soul-searching, trying a number of new activities from ice skating to game development. Although I initially embedded myself in the development side of games, I worked with friends on projects that required us to take on multiple roles, so I explored more artistic endeavors such as UI design. On one project, I ended up writing some lore as backstory for the game, and enjoyed the process, despite my terrible writing quality.

With my free time, I started reading a lot again, and rediscovered my interest in sci-fi, both in books and on TV. The ultimate catalyst that pushed me to write is a bit embarrassing to admit: I was watching a particularly uninspired sci-fi movie one day and thought, if a writer could get this junk produced, maybe I should try writing too.

New Beginning

So around June 2023, I started writing speculative fiction for the first time, with absolutely no foundation (think middle-school-level writing ability). I soon realized it was much tougher than I had imagined, and kicked myself for looking down on that sci-fi movie script. However, I discovered that it was fun and rewarding, so I stuck with it.

With no training, no idea of what makes good writing, and no one in the industry to learn from, I was incredibly lucky to get a few works published in these few short months, which allowed me the hope of taking this more seriously. In particular, I am grateful for the support of Radon Journal and their community. I have a long journey ahead of me before I can write like the many authors I admire, but now I have faith it might be attainable with years of hard work.

And so we go.