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50_word_stories_feedThe Story of the Month is chosen from the Story of the Week winners announced from the past month.
The finalists for October were:
Back and Forth by Michelle Dinnick
Overdue & Outstanding Beauty by Bob Thurber
Waiting by Nick Di Carlo
Shared Loss by John Singh
My Mom by Sarah Flick
Full Potential by Emily Hall
The winner of the October 2025 Story of the Month is…
My Mom
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50_word_stories_feedIt did not dissolve nor fade to black. Instead: cut to a new wife. She harvests from the orchard I tended. Enjoys the eggs from the chicks I nurtured. And sleeps in the bed where we conceived our children. She lives the life we built from scratch. Run the titles.
Cath Swanston lives in Kelowna BC. She is mother to five humans, countless chickens, ducks, turkeys, dogs, and cats. What does a retired ranch manager with degrees in law and film do? Write, write, write.
adore
50_word_stories_feedCaroline moved into a cul-de-sac where every house was identical. No one answered the door. Her questions about the missing mail, the humming fences, the child waving from the attic were all met with silence.
One morning, beneath her doormat, she found a note in her own handwriting: Don’t ask.
AJ writes microfiction. She’s been published in VSS365 Anthology (Vol. 1), 50-Word Stories, Paragraph Planet, and 101 Words. She also loves cats, which is legally required for writers of her genre.
merriamwebster_feedMerriam-Webster's Word of the Day for November 17, 2025 is:
crucible • \KROO-suh-bul\ • noun
A crucible, in the word’s literal use, is a pot in which metals or other substances are heated to a very high temperature or melted. But crucible is more often encountered in figurative use referring to a difficult test or challenge, or to a place or situation that forces people to change or make difficult decisions.
// The bronze was heated to 2,100 degrees in the crucible and then poured into molds designed by the artist.
// Her latest novel follows two best friends in a fantastical, battle-ravaged kingdom who emerge from the crucible of war with opposing views and values on what should come next.
Examples:
“... the original film follows four married couples—close friends who reunite once a year for a weeklong vacation together. On the surface, the retreat is meant to help them relax and reconnect, but it quickly becomes a crucible for examining the cracks in their relationships.” — Matt Grobar, Deadline, 1 Oct. 2025
Did you know?
Unless you’re studying Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in school, it may not be crucial to learn the story behind crucible, but it can’t hurt! Crucible looks like it should be closely related to the Latin combining form cruc- (“cross”); however, unlike crucial, it isn’t. It was forged instead from the Medieval Latin crucibulum, a noun for an earthen pot used to melt metals, and in English it first referred to a vessel made of a very heat-resistant material (such as porcelain) used for melting a substance that requires a high degree of heat. It’s possible that the resemblance between cruc- and crucible encouraged people to start using crucible to mean “a severe trial,” as that sense is synonymous with one meaning of cross, but the idea of simmering in a literal crucible also sounds plenty severe. The newest sense of crucible (“a situation in which great changes take place,” as in “forged in the crucible of war”) recalls the fire and heat required to transform some solids into liquids.
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For Immediate Release
On November 16, 2025, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) was proud to announce the latest recipient of its Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award: N. K. Jemisin. Two other SFWA Grand Masters, Lois McMaster Bujold and Nicola Griffith, joined in a keynote presentation ahead of the announcement, which took place at SFWA’s first-ever Quasar conference: a fall online Nebula event.
The SFWA Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award recognizes “lifetime achievement in science fiction and/or fantasy.” It is named after author Damon Knight, SFWA’s founder and the organization’s 13th Grand Master. Initially, the Grand Master wasn’t given out every year, but from 1975 to 2025 much has changed in our field, including the consistency with which we award this prestigious post.
This year, our Grand Master enters a role previously held by Peter S. Beagle, Connie Willis, Nalo Hopkinson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Anne McCaffrey, Robin McKinley, Joe Haldeman, and other legends of genre fiction who have been granted this title.
N. K. Jemisin is a fantasy author and 2020 MacArthur Fellow whose fiction has been recognized with multiple Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. Most of her works have been optioned for television or film, and collectively her novels, including the Broken Earth trilogy, have sold over two million copies. Her speculative works range widely in theme, though with repeated motifs: resistance and oppression, loneliness and belonging, and Wouldn’t It Be Cool If This One Ridiculous Thing Happened.
As SFWA President Kate Ristau noted:
It is my joy and honor to celebrate NK Jemisin as our newest SFWA Grand Master. I cannot imagine a better Grand Master to solidify our next 60 years at SFWA.
At panels and conventions, craft talks and workshops, NK’s name already stands beside masters of fantasy like Tolkien and Le Guin. Her skill in world-building shifted the way many of us view setting. She truly brings her worlds to life. In Jemisin’s work, setting is a construct and a character that creates tension, influences character, and compels the plots forward. To put it simply, she is a master of the craft.
As a younger writer, I turned pages and felt the ground tremble beneath me in the Broken Earth Trilogy. As New York came to life in the Great Cities Series, I took a closer look at my own hometown—how we create, legislate, and imagine borders, and how the worlds we imagine could come to life beneath our feet.
We don’t write in a vacuum. We write in a world of complexity and trauma. Jemisin helps us hold a mirror up to our darkest fears and our deepest desires. We want to live in a better world, but if we don’t, what stories will we tell? How will we confront history and our possible futures with authenticity and possibility? Jemisin shows us that storytelling is not just an escape—it’s a powerful tool for engagement in our own reality. Through her work, she reminds us that speculative fiction can be both a space for resistance and a landscape for transformation.
I am proud to honor Jemisin for her invaluable contributions to the current state and the future life of speculative fiction. She is helping us build better worlds, imagine different futures, and fight for the world we want to live in right now.
Lois McMaster Bujold, SFWA’s 36th Grand Master, reflected on the role of this award in her work:
I did not altogether understand where the SFWA Grandmaster honor came from until I’d received one myself, and studied up, by which I identified it as “Oh, this is a career award.” If the meaning of any literary award is ultimately created by the works that have won it, looking at the list of my fellow Grand Masters put me in some very meaningful company indeed. It was enormously gratifying to be the recipient of 2020’s Damon Knight Grand Master Award, and it did feel like the culmination of a very long journey; no further ambition need apply.
Which put me, oddly, back where I’d started, with just me, my stories, and their readers. All the noisy brouhaha of marketing competition and promotion and publisher’s editorial needs dropping (thanks be) away, all the aspects of a career that were not writing becoming optional.
Our 41st Grand Master, Nicola Griffith, commented on how the work goes on after the award:
“The tagline of my first novel was Change or die. I believe that applies to art and life, and unless we want our work to stiffen, slow, and stop we ourselves must keep changing and growing.
The last sentence of my most recent short story is ‘She has arrived.’ She’s made a galaxy-spanning journey through time, space, and realities—astonishing, miraculous—an impossible achievement. But the achievement—the arrival, the triumph, the award—isn’t the point. It’s a marvel, an honour and a touchstone, but at heart it’s part of the continual journey.”
SFWA Executive Director Isis Asare is also delighted to welcome Jemisin into the accolade:
Jemisin’s 2018 Hugo Award acceptance speech starts with the words “It’s been a hard year, hasn’t it.” Those words feel profoundly relevant today. The writer continues on to say that she wrote the Broken Earth Trilogy to speak to the struggle and what it takes to live and thrive in a world that seems determined to break you. And what gets us through is family—blood and chosen—and community. That is the reason SFWA exists. Jemisin, and her masterful writing, reminds all of us that “the stars are ours”.
SFWA is now officially on the road to Chicago, which will be home to SFWA’s 61st Nebula Awards Conference in June 2026. Early bird pricing rises on January 1, 2026, but for now, would-be attendees can purchase regular weekend programming for $250 USD.
We hope to see you out next year at the Nebulas, to celebrate our latest Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master N. K. Jemisin and a whole host of other dynamic voices in science fiction, fantasy, and related genres.
The post Press Release – November 16, 2025 appeared first on SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.
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lois_mcmaster_bujold_feedelf_wizard posting in addmemerriamwebster_feedMerriam-Webster's Word of the Day for November 16, 2025 is:
writhe • \RYTHE\ • verb
To writhe is to twist one’s body from side to side. The word is often used when the body or a bodily part is twisting in pain.
// The injured player lay on the football field, writhing in pain.
// At the instruction of their teacher, the children rolled the fallen log aside to reveal worms and other small critters writhing in the soft earth.
Examples:
“The creatures named after writers are mostly bugs, which makes sense. There are a lot of those little guys writhing around, and I imagine most of them escaped our attention for long enough that science had to start reaching for new names. And a lot of them are wasps: Dante has two wasps named after him; Marx has two, Didion has one, Dickens has two, Zola has two, Thoreau has seven, and Shakespeare has three wasps and a bacterium. Nabokov has a lot of butterflies, naturally.” — James Folta, LitHub.com, 25 Aug. 2025
Did you know?
Writhe wound its way to us from the Old English verb wrīthan, meaning “to twist,” and that ancestral meaning lives on in the word’s current uses, most of which have to do with twists of one kind or another. Among the oldest of these uses is the meaning “to twist into coils or folds,” but in modern use writhing is more often about the physical contortions of one suffering from debilitating pain or attempting to remove oneself from a tight grasp (as, say, a snake from a hawk’s talons). The word is also not infrequently applied to the twisting bodies of dancers. The closest relation of writhe in modern English lacks any of the painful connotations often present in writhe: wreath comes from Old English writha, which shares an ancestor with wrīthan.
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