Caroline M. Yoachim's Blog

Yesterday “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read” won the Ignyte Award for Outstanding Short Story!!  Congratulations to all the winners and finalists!

Tempting though it may be, I won’t do the whole post in columns.

As both a writer and as a reader, I love stories that really delve into ideas. How do we process the world around us, what are the limits of attention, which things might aliens do differently? I’ve written a lot of stories with the goal of evoking an emotion, but “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read” is the first story I’ve written that tries to evoke a specific cognition. I wanted to give readers at least the illusion of doing something that human brains don’t really do: read two things at once. My favorite reader feedback, which I had (with variations) from many people was “This completely broke my brain, but in a good way.”

A few thank yous that didn’t fit neatly into the two-column format above:

Thank you to my wonderful family for many years of love and encouragement. I’m also grateful to the Ignyte Awards admins for their work running the award, to the Ignyte jury for including my story in the nominations, and to everyone who read and voted.

Thank you all so much, this is my first time winning an award, and I can’t even begin to say how much it means to me.

I’ll be at Worldcon (in Seattle!) next week, come say hi! Here’s my schedule:

Thursday 8/14

1:00pm -2:00 pm – Fairwood Press table w/Tina Connolly

4:30pm – 5:30pm (Room 435-436) – Panel: Smile for the Camera!

Friday 8/15

5:00pm – 5:30pm (Room 429) – Reading: “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read”

Saturday 8/16

9:00am -10:00am (Room 443-444) – Panel: Alternate Cognitions

10:30am-11:30am (Garden Lounge, 3F) – Autographs

Sunday 8/17

9:00am – 10:00am (Room 427) – Table Talk (signup required)

 

New story day!!!“Unfinished Architectures of the Human-Fae War” is out in Uncanny Magazine, and I’m so excited to share it with you!Inspired by (among other things) bees, the Winchester Mystery House, and the architecture of Jeanne Gang…

Honored that my Lightspeed story “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read” is a Hugo Finalist!

This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration.

I wrote this story with the deliberate goal of making your brain do a thing that human brains really do not do. Give it a try and let me teach you a whole new way to read?

I’ve gotten a bit behind on website updates, but some exciting news from a couple weeks ago:

My Lightspeed Magazine story “Rock, Paper, Scissors, Love, Death” is the debut story of Wil Wheaton’s new podcast: It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton!! Go listen!

It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton

Absolutely delighted that my Lightspeed story “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read” is a Nebula Finalist!

If you missed the live announcement, there’s a video! SFWA had SAG-AFTRA members read excerpts from the fiction finalists, which is a great way to get a sample of things you missed. Special shout-out to Wolf Williams who read|read two things at once!

Also a huge thank you to John Joseph Adams and the entire team at Lightspeed Magazine for the tremendous amount of work that went into getting this almost-impossibly formatted story out into the world!

 

Catching up on reading for the year? I had three stories out in 2024.

This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration.

“We Will Teach You How To Read | We Will Teach You How To Read” is the most challenging story I’ve ever attempted, and I’m really proud of how it came out. My goal was to get the reader’s brain to do a thing that human brains do not actually do. If you read nothing else from me this year, I hope that you’ll give this one a look.

(If you prefer to listen to your fiction, there is also a lovely podcast version of the story, available by clicking the ‘Listen’ button on the main story page.)

Here’s my full list of 2024 publications:

“We Will Teach You How To Read | We Will Teach You How To Read” (Lightspeed, May 2024)

“Our Chatbots Said “I Love You,” Shall We Meet?” (Clarkesworld, June 2024)

“Picture Day” (A middle grade story; in Spider-Man: Stories from the Spider-Verse, October 2024)

 

I will be at Readercon! Want to find me? Here’s my schedule:

Friday, July 12

11:30am (Salon C) – Reading: Caroline M. Yoachim

2:00pm (Salon 3) –  Panel: Retroactive Problem Solving in SF

A lot of the more hopeful SF is written in worlds where the most urgent problems facing our society today have already been solved, and the characters face other, different problems. But by imagining futures where our current crises are of the past, are we missing out on an opportunity to blaze a real path into such futures? What does it mean to tell stories about solving our problems, rather than stories where the problems have already been solved?

4:00pm (Salon B) – Panel: How Psychology Can Inform SFF

How can knowledge of psychology inform the writing of SFF? Practitioners and authors will delve into the ways that modern-day psychology departs from Freud and Jung, and how they’ve used concepts from the field to deepen characterization or generate worldbuilding ideas. They will also discuss how to research psychology and how to avoid common pitfalls, including stereotypes and ableism.

Saturday, July 13

10:00am (Salon B) – Panel: Striking the Right Genre Balance

Almost every author considers how to satisfy readers’ expectations while also keeping them guessing with inventive plot, character, or settings that might be unusual for the genre. It’s a balance: tip too far toward the tried and true, and one risks reader (and author!) boredom; tip too far on the other side and the reader may feel that the writer has reneged on what they expect from a given genre. This panel will consider striking the right balance.

noon (Salon 6) – Autograph Session: Caroline M. Yoachim

3pm (Basalt) – Kaffeeklatsch: Caroline M. Yoachim

I have a new story out today in issue 213 of Clarkesworld Magazine!Our Chatbots Said “I Love You,” Shall We Meet?

Here at 123aiLOVEu, we take all the guesswork out of dating. With personalized chatbots trained on social media and chat histories, we put you in conversation with hundreds of potential matches . . . and you never have to say a thing!

I have a new story in issue 168 of Lightspeed, and I am so excited to share it with you! This is a story that I wrote with the deliberate goal of making your brain do a thing that human brains really do not do. Give it a try* and let me teach you a whole new way to read?

We Will Teach You How To Read | We Will Teach You How To Read

“This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration.”

In addition to the story, I also did an Author Spotlight interview with John Joseph Adams, where I talk about some of the inspirations for the story and the psychology behind it.

* One last note: because of the elaborate formatting, this story will work best read on a larger (e.g. tablet/laptop) screen rather than a phone.