Anyone who's run or worked a con knows that taking a year off can be detrimental to an event on multiple levels. Be it the staff's own money, the money of people who have already bought memberships, keeping the name and event active and relevant enough to hold interest... basically, cancelling sucks. But there's also really not been much of a choice this year.

It's been cool to see events working around this in different ways, from virtual events to smaller interactive panels scattered throughout the year. In the case of RavenCon, they're keeping themselves funded and active with a crowdfunding campaign and new short story anthology. And they've already reached their crowdfunding goal, but that shouldn't stop you from giving this book a look.

Corvid-19 sums itself up pretty well in its title. Besides the obvious pun, it's also literally what it say: a collection of 19 stories that, in some way, each involve a crow. As a previous guest of the event, and a planned guest for the 2020 convention before it was cancelled, I was one of the authors featured in the book.

The stories are all over the map in terms of genre and tone. We basically just had the one proviso of including a corvid. Mine, "Feather Fall," was written based on a lot of what I was feeling (and to be fair, still am feeling) during lockdown. In the story, a girl with no name and no memory finds herself at a café for wayward souls, in the middle of a city where time never seems to budge past twilight.

It's unclear why she's there and under what circumstances she'll be allowed to leave, but the girl discovers that there is a bridge to a different world, accessible via the feathers of the café's owner.

"Feather Fall" doesn't come from a specific idea in need of a home, but rather a series of images and moods I'd had floating around in my head while navigating days alone. With winter upon us, it feels even more appropriate to be talking about it. There's a lot of that same darkness going around, inside and outside. Poking at it usually feels like a bad idea. But sometimes to get past it, we need to step through it.

As much as I love dark imagery and horror and all those gruesome things, I like to write stories with at least some shred of optimism. I want to know that, if someone's found this story on their worst day, I've given them something to ease it a little — the way my favorite stories have done for me. "Feather Fall" touches on some of the darker parts of my own life, but I feel like it's ultimately a happy story.