bad situation - incomplete escape - defensible position.abuse (parents) - abuse (partner) - mutual support.“Small Monsters” - E Lily Yu (Tor.com, Some of the Best of 2021 - one monster among many attempts to survive abuse and learn alternatives).trust - threat to trust - get away with it.equilibrium - threat to all aspects - keep balance.simple plan - complications - alternative solutions.“An Easy Job” - Carrie Vaughn (Tor.com, Some of the Best of 2021 - interstellar tough guys, shared memories, collecting experiences).the sweet - the bitter - the bittersweet.a gift - a presumption - a postponement.

wondrous discovery - hard lessons - protective retreat.

“ Masquerade Season” - ‘Pemi Aguda (Tor.com, Some of the Best of 2021 - the wonders that find one, duty, exploitation).

pursuit of perfection - threats to perfection - working with imperfection.

“The Lay of Lilyfinger” - GV Anderson (Tor.com, Some of the Best of 2021 - travelling musicians, apprenticeships, the long reach of old war).

Your mileage may vary, but I’d be fascinated to know what it is. This post is taken from a Twitter thread I used for mapping out the three-mood /gesture structures ( ) of stories (as they seem to me) as a way to read them.

Each dot point is one shape - one way of reading the shape of the story.

I find it more revelatory, intuitive and useful, both for reading stories and for writing them.

I like breaking short stories into progressions of three moods (rather than beginning-middle-end, etc).

See Story Shapes - Three-Mood Stories for background. It’s based on previous three-moods posts. And I’ll edit this with links to related posts from time to time. Feel free to ask for more detail/clarity. Story notes are in regular text, my thoughts are in bold, in case that makes it easier to skip around. It is extremely long, and I plan to extract sections of it into more concise posts in the future.

This post is a roughly tidied/slightly edited version of a Twitter thread I kept, tracking my January 2022 (and late December 2021) short story reading.

Masquerade Season by Pemi Aguda