Recommended Reading List of Short Stories 2018

This was a year that was improved so much by short fiction. Stories I could finish in the waiting room at the doctor's, or on the train ride to helping someone with their hardship. They fit into so many openings of life. And there were such strong developments in the field this year, especially the opening of Robot Dinosaurs, a magazine that brought frequently funny and uplifting stories to a field that too often neglects them.

If you want to keep up with short fiction, I strongly recommended following reviewers you trust, starting with A.C. Wise and Charles Payseur. I fell behind in reviewing short fiction this year, but never stopped reading.

So whether you're reading stories for awards, or reading to feel less alone in the universe, here are some things you shouldn't miss. These are more stories than can fit on any one ballot, but that's the fault of awards, not storytellers.

My 2018 Publications

It's been a busy year! Most of my writing time this year has gone into the hardest novel I've ever written, which was a heck of a climb, and left me a better writer than I've ever been before. 2018 is my first year having something published my Uncanny Magazine, the first year I had a story get featured on Boing Boing, and the first year an editor accepted my story *in person*. It makes me feel fortunate both to have such supportive markets, and to be working in a time when so many other inspiring writers are putting out work.

I have three stories eligible for awards in 2018, as well as two non-fiction pieces I'm particularly proud of.

Fiction

Tank!

(~900 words)

Diabolical Plots, June 1st

Free to read at this link.

A sapient tank tries to make friends at their first Sci Fi convention.

Buyers' Remorse and Seven Slain Cause 'Adorable' Robot Dinosaur Stock to Plummet Tuesday

(932 words)

Robot Dinosaurs, May 25th

Free to read at this link.

A small town newspaper chronicles how the perfect holiday gift backfired at a local retailer.

 

Fascism and Facsimiles

(~900 words)

Fireside Magazine, June

Free to read at this link.

Two henchpeople learn the hero they've always fought is colluding

with their employer, and they have a crisis of faith in evil.

Non-Fiction

The Stories Our Games Tell Us: Excellent Game Narratives of 2017

Uncanny Magazine, January

Free to read at this link.

On the wildly diverse kinds of stories and storytelling in modern games.
Includes Pyre, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, Night in the Woods,
Divinity Original Sin 2, Hollow Knight,
What Remains of Edith Finch, and NieR: Automata.

The Expendable Disabled Heroes of Marvel's Infinity War

Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction, September

Free to read at this link.

On the MCU's historic failure of writing people with disabilities
and how it culminated in exploitation throughout their most popular film.

I can't talk about upcoming 2019 publications yet, but have some announcements coming. Thanks to everyone for your support!

Bathroom Monologues Movie Awards 2017

It's almost March 2018, so of course we're all talking about the best movies of 2017. Naturally I disagree with some of the Oscar winners. More naturally, I don't understand what some of the categories mean. But nothing shall dissuade me from telling a democratic body of people who devote swaths of their lives to film that their mass conclusions were wrong. So here we go!

The Robbed Award

Going to the movie that got no play last year

and is just as good as whatever won Best Picture

FENCES

John's Publications in 2017

This was the best year of my publishing career, and I couldn't be more grateful to all the editors who've worked me with throughout it. I've already lined up a few exciting things for next year and promise to keep working as hard as I can. Despite my syndrome and depression trying their hardest, this was the best year of my publishing career. I sold more stories to pro markets, and was solicited for non-fiction more times than any other year. One of my old stories was even adapted as an Audible short! As a kid clinging to audiobooks for dear life at thirteen, I never imagined that would happen.

So I've rounded up all my publications this year in a handy guide below. Please let me know if anything particularly touched you, and as always, thank you for reading.


Fiction

"Under the Rubble" at Pseudopod, May 26

"A Silhouette Against Armageddon" at Fireside Magazine, August 1

"You Can Adapt to Anything" at Daily Science Fiction, September 15

"The First Stop is Always the Last" at Flash Fiction Online, December 1


Non-Fiction

Indie Videogames of 2017 in Glittership, Winter 2017 Issue

Evil is Not a Disability: 10 Cloverfield Lane, Donald Trump, and Don't Breathe at Fireside Magazine, June 15

BFFs in the Apocalypse at Uncanny Magazine's Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction Kickstarter, July 29


Reprints

"The Terrible" reprint at Flash Fiction Online in April

"Foreign Tongues" on Audible.com in February

The Halloween List: Attack of The The

It's my first week of Halloween movies and I'm already joyous. By pure coincidence, I watched all the movies beginning with "The" in a row. Today we're going back in time, to a dark forest in Japan, before stopping off in a doomed Korean fishing village. It's going to be a good time. Well, mostly.

The Final Girls (rentable on Amazon, iTunes, and Youtube for 2.99)

Imagine if Hot Tub Time Machine and Cabin in the Woods collided. The result is a punchy, funny Horror Comedy that has more heart than either of those two movies. It’s an unexpected delight that I’m still mulling over.

The Halloween List

It’s my favorite time of the year! The air smells of falling leaves, the forest grows beautiful in color, the sunsets are richer, and all the cool movies show up on TV. I love Halloween from Jack O’Lanterns and costumes and candy for kids, to haunted house tours and the uptick in macabre media.

In the spirit of the season, I’ve made a little list of movies I want to catch up on this October. Most are from the last few years, as I’ve missed so many. I’ll be blogging my thoughts on them as I go along, and I invite you all to join me. The current list is:

• The Final Girls
• The Forest
• The Wailing
• Southbound
• Pontypool
• Green Room
• He Never Died
• Train to Busan
• Flytrap
• Under the Skin
• It Follows
• Mind's Eye
• The Good Neighbor
• Under the Shadow
• The Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse
• Tremors (a rewatch, to share the glory with a friend)
• Don’t Breathe

While I’ll be doing thoughts-posts on 3-4 movies at a time, I want to devote a day to just Don’t Breathe. There’s so much to unpack, especially with the ableism it slams up against with its blind killer, and I am boiling over with thoughts.

I’ll be back Wednesday with thoughts on The Final Girls, The Forest, and The Wailing. For now: what are you reading and watching this October? And is there anything you’d recommend I add to my big list?

The Rarely Asked Questions of 2015

Chuck Allen asked: If I bought a John Wiswell lunch box (those cool metal ones like when I was young, not those cheap plastic or cloth kind they have today) what all would be included on the graphics?

I used to have the He-Man one of these! Mine will probably have the same number of swords on it. In fact, put Skeletor on there. Me high-fiving Skeletor, because that guy worked hard and clearly took flossing to the next level.

Grimlock. Wolverine and Jubilee (possibly riding Grimlock). A Rogue Knight and a Healer Slime from Dragon Quest (playing poker with Jubilee, who's still riding Grimlock). Beorn (losing that poker game). Lupin the 3rd, Jigen, and Goemon (stealing the pot from that poker game). Leland Gaunt sweeping the front stoop of his new shop, and Pyramid Head coming to greet him with gruesome baked goods.

What I'm saying is: my lunchbox is covered in copyright lawsuits.

Catherine Russell asked a literary three-parter: "What books do you read in your bathroom? Do you do a lot of reading there? How many books have you finished reading via 2 minute reading sessions in the throne room?"

a. Mostly short fiction and non-fiction, and comic books. Every October I stick a big Horror item in there, like the Walking Dead Compendium or Poe's Children. I've read a tremendous amount of manga in there.

b. Usually just a couple pages at a time. It's a sign of a great book like Max Gladstone's Full Fathom Five when I stick around to read an entire chapter. If it's something I'm profoundly into, like I was with Jo Walton's Among Others, I'll carry it back out with me to keep reading.

c. Probably about ten a year. Bathroom books double and bathtub books. Post-exercise soaking often benefits from a good story.

Elephant's Child asked, "If you could give one person (other than yourself) a super power what would it be? Who would get it, and why?"

Kneejerk reaction is to give Jimmy Carter the ability to rearrange matter. I trust both his moral compass and his ability to organize a community to make the most of it. Plus, who doesn't want to see a Magical Jimmy Carter? I guess maybe the Reagans?

Alex J. Cavanaugh asked: "What's the most illegal thing you've ever done? Did it involve jello or burning bags?"

I suffered a witch to live once.

Mary Garber asked, "If you could be instantly transported to anywhere on earth (and back, if you so desire) just once, where would you go, and for how long? Now, make it the solar system."

The trouble with teleporting is there's no safety application. If I visit the Marianas Trench, I'll drown before I get to wave at any neat fish. If I visit the Haribo factory, security will tackle me before I get to jump into a pile of gummy bears. And while I'd like to visit Borderlands Books, the woods of Washington, the streets of Moscow and Cork, those are all places it's feasible to go. Better to use teleportation on an impossible wish.

So my grim answer is that I'd wait until I was close to my likely death, and then teleport to the sun. Death would be instantaneous, which is why I'd only visit at that moment. But for a fraction of that instant I'd be privy to a raw experience of something earth has been eight minutes away from for evolution's entire run. All the warmth, all the brilliance that we try to photograph, or to reflect upon on cloudless days. I'm so used to pain that turning into fuel for the sky-god wouldn't deter me from making it my end. Turn me not to dust, but part of the brilliance that has inspired poets since they were only plants rhyming in pollen and chlorophyll.

I'd just have to live a full life before then. Maybe get a tan. I could use more sun.

Nadya Duke asked: "Who would win in a knife fight - Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton?"

That one's neck-and-neck. Literally, they might immediately knife each other in the neck because they were daft and cutting ladies. But Anthony has the reach and is just a little faster to turn on you if you've crossed her (just ask around the NSWA). Stanton's best chance is to tuck her chin, go for the intestines, and not tacitly oppose African American rights.

Carrie Bailey asked: "In case of the apocalypse, how do you think you'd define your life as worthwhile if you actually survived, but none of your friends did."

I've put more thought into this than is healthy, but it's also a sticking point in much of my fiction. Your direct loved ones are gone. That really sucks, right? But you can still strive to make the world a better place. Put out those demonic fires, plant whatever seeds were stored, collect and record history.

And it's likely there are other survivors who could use your help. It depends on the apocalypse. If it was killer robots, then even my sickly self can clean guns for the resistance soldiers. If it's plague, I can counsel people with grief, as survivor guilt is likely to be widespread.

Awful as desolation is, reducing the world to near-zero means you have to accomplish very little to have a significant practical effect. The four trees I plant may become a forest people rely on two hundred years after we kick the Fire Nation out.

The real world isn't so different. I'm a tiny part in a tremendous machine with so many things that could improve. I try to contribute to food banks, blood drives, and my beloved industry of fiction. But it is easier in our world where my friends are still alive. One imagines you're a lucky apocalypse survivor if you make new ones. Luckier still if one's a billy-bumbler.

Cassie Nichols asked: "What scent triggers a happy memory for you?"

When you open up a container of Country Time Lemonade Iced Tea Mix, and the powder particles get in your nose? It has both a scent and a nose-feel that reminds me strongly of the red dust at my childhood baseball diamonds. It brings back the heat of the day, the fun of playing with a few friends, and the orange dimming of the sky as afternoon waned. They really got me hooked on that drink. Product placement in my psyche.

And Cassie Nichols asked: "Would you spend a year as a dragon? If yes: How big a dragon would you be? What would you hoard? Where would you make your home? If no: Why not?"

Given one of my great fantasies is to become Smaug but not live life as a jackass, yes, I would like to be a dragon for a year. My first order of business will be to arrive at an NFL game and demand seating. When they claim I'm obese, I'll offer to buy two tickets. If they deny me entry, I'll ask what their favorite kaiju movie is.

I actually look forward to the legal ramifications. Do I have to file a flight plan with the FTA for my ride to work? Do I have to pay taxes on my bed of gold? How funny will it be when I eat the IRS and turn their building into my new den?

The power will be used for good (occasionally). Let some Make-A-Wish kids "slay" me. I can guest star on Game of Thrones to relieve the world of their terrible CGI for a year.

I'll very badly want to hoard books, but living an entity of fire, I may become the world's worst book-burner. That could make me less popular with Tor and Harper Collins than I want to be. Gradually I'll realize that you hoard precious metal because it metals but remains precious metal, whereas if you hoard iPhones, they bend in your pocket. I'll want to hoard hamburgers, but much as I love them, they don't keep for very long.

So at the end of things, I think I'll hoard recycling. Plastic and tin need melting for re-processing anyway. Cheap, and everyone wants to get rid of them anyway. They'll probably wash the damned glass bottles first before giving them to the dragon. Sort those plastics, people, or he'll eat you. For a year.

A New Challenger Appears! Alex Haist asked: "What is your favorite instance of bureaucratic drama?"

The West Wing is one of my favorite shows in television history. The scene when the power flickers and Bartlet is fed up with congress and tells the Speaker to shut the government down has stuck in my memory for quite some time.

The show created several memorable moments of unreal bureaucracy, like John Goodman taking over the White House, and both political parties being terrified the country will sympathize with the other.

It's something I wish Fantasy bureaucracies would do. We've had an awful lot of kings and not many interesting wrinkles of power. If Mervyn Peake had been more prolific, he probably would have come up with some great stuff there. Daniel Abraham is trying his damndest right now with nifty results.

Story Sold to Daily Science Fiction!

I'm happy to announce that I've sold "The Terrible" to Daily Science Fiction. It's my first sale to DSF, and will make my fourth debut in a market this year. I couldn't be happier with the story they took.

"The Terrible" is a short about a supervillain who's never paid proper attention to how his hero's weaknesses work, or why she keeps escaping and checking back in on him. He thinks he's her arch-nemesis. We all have things to learn.

A Pain in the Neck

A little update since the blog has been quiet during convention season. Both 4th Street and Readercon were delights, and I'm greatly looking forward to Otakon this Friday. But travel just got harder.

Five weeks ago I did something bad to my neck. I cannot remember a singular incident, but it was around then that I began experiencing persistent shooting pains down my neck, through my left shoulder, and down my left arm. It seemed like an exacerbation of problems I've had in my shoulder ever since a botched muscle biopsy in my teens. It feels a lot like something sticking your finger in an electrical outlet, at random, every couple of minutes.

About two weeks ago I had a hard exercise session, and really pushed my cardio. Recent meds have caused me to gain a lot of weight, and I wanted to push against it. Instead, something in my neck popped. That was the first time I couldn't feel my left arm anymore.

The arm regained feeling, and I never lost motor control. Since then the shooting pains have randomly started appearing in my right arm to compliment the left. These symmetrical pain is rare enough that I keep trying to pretend that was just one-- okay, just two-- maybe just three times, not a pattern.

I have a doctor's appointment in August, which is the earliest they could take me. But for now, it's a distraction and a worry.

And If I've randomly frowned or grimaced at you lately, please excuse me. I promise that you're not a pain in the neck.

#NaNoReMo - National Novel Reading Month

It's March, which means it's National Novel Reading Month. This is an annual tradition encouraging people to read the classic novels they've been putting off, because everybody has a few. As it is, I have a dozen on my shelf that I've owned for an embarrassingly long time. War and Peace is a personal shame of mine.

Readers define classics for themselves. A Tale of Two Cities and Peter Pan are part of the English canon, but Ian Fleming's James Bond novels are classics of Spy fiction. Ursula K. Leguin's A Wizard of Earthsea is a Speculative Fiction classic. If you perceive a book as a classic that you haven't gotten to yet, that's all that matters.

I've picked two books this year. The first is Alice Walker's The Color Purple, something I've heard about since high school but never sat down with. Walker has a reputation for confronting thorny issues of social hierarchy, and in The Color Purple, targets the life of a young woman in the South in the 1930's. Even the sample chapters ache with insight and historic weight.

It's a shame I overlooked this in school since History class gave me such a scant idea of African American experiences; for all I knew, they sprang into being around the Civil War, then disappeared until the Civil Rights movement. Over the years I picked up the general liberal sensitivity to issues without contextual understanding, and so avoided the enormous gaps in my knowledge. In that way, Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns and watching 12 Years a Slave were necessary kicks in the ass.

If I finish with reasonable time and keep up with other reading, then my second book will be Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. There's a certain hopscotch of cultures involved: I'm an American in 2015 preparing to read a German in 1922 writing his idea of an Indian's spiritual journey around 500 BCE. The filters are part of the appeal.

I bought my copy in 2007, and it's one of the four books I've owned the longest without reading. At my grandfather's funeral, my cousin Palmer said the book changed his life. Even if he's much younger and thus easier to change the life of, he's a smart guy, and I felt deeper shame for not giving the book a shot yet.


If you're going through a classic this month, please comment so I can add your blog, tumblr or Twitter to the master list!

Danielle La Paglia is reading J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan
Sonia Lal will be joining me for Alice Walker's The Color Purple
Ally Atherton will also be joining me for The Color Purple
Chuck Allen will be joining me for Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha
Helen Howell is reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
David G Shrock is also reading Frankenstein
Katherine Hajer is reading Jane Austen's Persuasion
Charles Ross Dillon is reading Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame 
Cindy Vaskova is reading Algernon Blackwood's The Willows
Dorothy Lang is reading Art Spiegelmann's Maus

Something Physical Books Can't Do

Debate can be such a wonderful waste of passion.

A couple months ago I discovered something physical books can't do. Yangsze Choo tweeted out that her debut novel, The Ghost Bride, was on sale for two bucks on the Kindle. Immediately I mentally scrolled through every conversation I'd had about the book, and through every person who'd seemed interested in its premise of a posthumous marriage being realized in Fantasy. Then, I started gifting copies to people. Two bucks per copy of a great novel, delivered instantly over thousands of miles, to people I held dear. It was something physical books have never offered.

Books Vs. eBooks is a wretched argument that won't actually sway consumer practices. People who grew up with physical books and enjoy the feel of pages and smell of paper won't find a substitute in e-readers. Meanwhile, kids growing up with tablets won't have the same attachment. Tablets and phones take less space, are more convenient for traveling, and have more functions than my doorstop copy of the Riverside Chaucer. Both forms have appeals, and the appeals differ between readers. Fighting between loyalists of the two forms is worse than futile, a miserable distraction from the love of reading, and of each other.

The afternoon of instantly gifting Ghost Bride was revelatory. I even signed up for a Barnes & Noble account just to gift a price-matched copy to a friend with a Nook. This was a beautiful new function I'd previously only experienced with digital videogames. Why? Because if a copy of State of Decay was 50% off on Steam, yes I'd want it, but I wouldn't buy it for myself. Meanwhile if a friend was going through a bad break-up and loved zombies? Yes, I'd be very likely to gift the game to him. That's the kind of impulse buyer I am. I don't grab the candy bar through the checkout line for myself, and I'm not alone.

It cemented itself into my heart when one friend IM'd me that she'd torn through the book. She was struggling with clinical depression and hadn't read any book to completion in a year. It was a loss for humanity, because until her problems, she was the absolute best kind of reader, enthusiastic to consume, discuss and share, with broad tastes and minimal cynicism. Health took that from her, and she was thousands of miles away, so I could never be there for her the way you'd want to be for a good friend.

And then, after finishing my two-dollar gift, she was sifting through the digital storefront for more things to read. Screw it, pun intended: her love of reading was reKindled.

I'll still browse bookstores. Yet eBooks appeal partially because my friends are global, and the neighborhood we chat in is the internet. Now I could tweet about my Ghost Bride buying kick, only to have Choo herself give me a personal message to relay my friend whose work she'd loved.

This is more exciting than Amazon's Paper White, or new screen tech that will mimic the texture of low grain paper as you swipe. This is a sharable future that appeals to me as not just a customer, nor as a reader, but as a friend. Cynically, it's a great way to get more money out of people like me. And I'll thank you for the privilege.

Submissions Are Open for Viable Paradise, OR, Why Leigh Wallace is My Gosh-Darned Hero

They teach you about symbolism, too.

While I was in the hospital, submissions opened for the Viable Paradise workshop. It's run by the incomparable James Macdonald and Debra Doyle, and attracts superstar staff-authors like Scott Lynch and Elizabeth Bear. If you're a beginning or emerging writer, you want to go to VP. It's held every October in Martha's Vineyard, a week in a cozy hotel space with a couple dozen other aspiring authors, and a host of professionals who critique your work and educate on the underpinnings of storytelling and the publishing industry. I learned more in one week at VP than any year of college. If you take your craft seriously, you could not ask for a better week.

But that's not why you want to go to Viable Paradise. There's something more.

Through shared interest and mutual support, some classmates came to feel like family. The workshop improved our game through insights and streamlining. In the year after my class, I sold my first pro-rate short story. Many classmates sold their first pro shorts, too, or pro flashes. One friend giddily explained to me that she was paid more for one anthology acceptance than everything she'd ever made in writing before.

That's not why you want to go to Viable Paradise, either.

If you fast-forwarded a year after VP17, you'd find that my body turned on me. Close friends, including some VP alums, were rightly scared for me. My health has always been poor, but over the course of nine months my body rejected the meds I'd always relied on, and then four new experimental courses of medication. The pain became so disorienting that my ability to multitask disappeared. I spent two hours writing symptoms on a piece of paper so I could read them at the doctor, because I was incapable of having a casual discussion about them. My ability to write, and finish stories, dwindled.

And if you care about writing, then this is why you want to go to Viable Paradise.

Because a month ago I was lost in the wilderness of illness, completely unable to edit my work anymore, despite having what I'm sure was the best short story I've ever written. It was a promising first draft, and became a phenomenal third draft, and in December I could tell it just needed its science rigorously checked. The story is about a sympathetic, even funny, protagonist with albinism, one attempt to counter the Evil Albino trope. And while I'd done a lot of legwork to depict albinism accurately, I could not check my own science further. Paragraphs felt insurmountable. The pain, and the brain-fog that chronic pain brings on, were winning. Having your best work just outside your grasp is purgatorial.

Leigh Wallace, one of my classmates from Viable Paradise, e-mailed me an offer. She'd check the science of the story for me. She'd read up on albinism and ocular disorders, and flag whatever I'd gotten wrong or left confusing. She'd point out my problems and then all I'd have to do was fix them.

She turned the story back over to me in days. The way she marked it up? It was so accessible that I corrected the entire story in a weekend. And it was a hard weekend on the health front, my friends. Leigh was my gosh-darned hero.

Now the story is out to markets, and I am on a sixth course of medication. At least for today, I'm thinking clearer and making the most of that clarity. I'm beta reading a classmate's novel.

That's why you want to go Viable Paradise. The greatest gift a workshop can give is supportive relationships with other smart writers who can have your back when your back gives out.

Submissions are open here. If you get in, congratulations! My advice is to spend half your time working hard at your craft, and the other half helping your classmates with theirs. That's the gift.

This Beautiful 2015 of Ours

Because I'm numerically attracted to things that end in 0's and 5's, I've been waiting a solid four years for 2015. A couple weeks in, and it looks outrageously promising. Come with me.

In 2015, one of the greatest short story writers I've ever had the privilege to read is releasing a new collection. Kelly Link's Get in Trouble is due out in February. It's the first book I've pre-ordered in years.

This month, Selma sees a wide release. Today, it was nominated for Best Picture in the Academy Awards. The social media response? The people who've seen it were angry it didn't get nominated for more things.

This summer, Mamoru Hosoda will release his new movie, The Boy and the Beast. It's not a romance, but instead looks like Hosoda's first film set in an urban environment, a crossover between the demon world and ours that leads to fuzzy bonding. Hosoda's previously created three incredible films: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Summer Wars, and The Wolf Children. With just those three movies, Hosoda became my favorite living director. No one has the combination of his eye and imagination.

Later this year, Playdead Studios will release INSIDE, their second game as a group. Their first is one of the few perfect videogames in existence: LIMBO. Playdead needed private funding to make LIMBO, and then managed to profit enough off of it to buy their independence from their corporate parent. And this year, they're giving us this:

This is also the year that Nero will release its second album. Their first, Welcome Reality, is the only real reason that I say I like Dubstep. Turn up your noses at Dubstep's alleged lack of art, but at the end of that album, after all the tech beats and heavy drops, Nero rearranged all the themes of all the major tracks into a 17-minute symphony.

It's telling of my psychology that I present optimism for a year through art. Art is what swirls up inside me where the more moral or political mammals are fueled by events. This does not dismiss the importance of events and progress, though 2015 is scheduled to be a good year. 

We have every reason to believe there will be a continuation of a drop in violent crime in the U.S. around the world.

In the U.S., even more states will recognize gay marriage.

Around the world, more people will access the internet than ever. By the sheer amount of possible connections, more people will talk to more people than ever before. Somebody who thinks they are alone in this world will find somebody who understands them.

On Monday, I have an appointment to see what we can do about my body rejecting medication so frequently in 2014. It would be quite the year for me if we find a remedy, but 2015 will be a good year even if I don't make it all the way through.

Don't Write This: Fiction in Danger Zones

Senility as wish fulfillment.

I've already written a full review of Jo Walton's My Real Children, but I want to talk about something not in my review, and in no review I've yet read. The novel follows Patricia Cowan as she suffers a peculiar senility, forgetting most of her life, and then seeming to recall two different lives in high detail. Late in the novel, we see how the onset of senility hits her in both lives, and in one her lover dies. Patricia immediately hopes her senility will make her forget the death happened. This excited me. 

For the last two years of his life, I called my grandfather every night to make sure he had at least a little daily contact with a family member. He hated living in an old folks home, and was very demented on top of that. Our nightly contact made him remember me more than the other grandchildren, though there were still calls when he mistook me for his son, friend, and on one night, his mother. Living that intensely with a disability can stifle the way you think about it. It's easier to default to a somber, anodyne mode, both in avoiding conflicts, and in taking your mind off of things. It takes a different mind to see something so painful and be creative with it.

In reading that paragraph of Walton's novel, I wasn't offended. It was enlivening to read someone subvert our default thoughts of dementia, and simultaneously, tap into those desires, because in moments of weakness we've all wanted to forget things. In the moment, I could only compare it to FX's Archer.

I'm probably the only person to parallel My Real Children and Archer, but one of Archer's great strengths is its anarchic sense of humor. People mistake the show as dark, but it features the lightest hearted graphic tiger mauling I've ever seen. The series uses the drug trade, asphyxia fetishes, eco-terrorism, homophobia and the Oedipal complex as fodder for amazing character humor. It is neither didactic nor cynical; it's creative enough with its deployment of highly flawed characters to avoid offense while depicting the people themselves as intensely offensive. This is great for some audiences (like me), but also stifles how others think about creativity in danger zones, making them think it has to be transgressive.

Archer is often transgressive, as is most comedy about touchy subjects, because that's the easy edge for a laugh. But take George Carlin's early performances of The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television. For the first six he's juvenile and profane – and then he hits "fuck." It's the beginning of life, he says, and yet it's something we use to hurt each other. Very rare for George Carlin, he isn't sure about his footing on a topic, and only has one joke, before saying he'll try to make a full bit out of it next year. He did, and the later versions have never been as interesting to me. That he's vulnerable and unsure about something so touchy, after being so flippant about the other touchy subjects is a haunting deviation.

As I've aged, I've become increasingly attracted to artists who can remain creative in danger zones. It seems either the hardest thing to do (plausible) or so risky to market that it's avoided (also plausible). Certainly if you botch your attempt at a new angle on pedophilia then you can offend a wide audience. But if you try, you might get John Ajvide Lindqvist's Let the Right One In, and that scene wherein the pedophile Hakan rents a child prostitute, but is then so disturbed by how the boy is treated that he tries to give him enough money to run away. This foreshadows the compassionate angle Lindqvist later casts over the vampire/familiar relationship. The compassion of a pedophile in an otherwise uncaring world was so unexpected that it gave me goosebumps, where most vampire stories give me boredom. 

A predator in need of companionship.

These deviations stir me up. In most art you can get a sense of how touchy subjects will be handled; Grimdark Fantasy will probably slouch into rape, and a children's cartoon will probably avoid or didactically instruct about disabilities. Predictable paths are not always wrong, and often writing from a place of reliable sensitivity can avoid opening wounds. But I don't accept the failure state of attempted creativity in a danger zone as loathsome. My general reaction is discomfort for an author who probably knows they screwed up on something meaningful. It reads like seeing someone fall when both of us thought they should have flown.

Maybe I'm so attracted to these because I haven't figured out their parameters yet. There's a strong attraction for some people mired in what we don't yet understand. But to remain flexible with in writing about topics as tender as senility and pedophilia is too much for most artists. It's why most won't touch it at all. That might be why the few that can do it, even for a paragraph are so precious.

Happy Birthday: In Defense of the Worst Year of My Adult Life

At the last hospital visit before my birthday, the nurse said I’d had a bad year. Nurses tend to be far more positive, so when she said that, it stirred me.  In the last couple months my mother, friends, fellow writers, and even acquaintances I didn’t know were following my story said this was a bad year for me. I don’t want to agree.

I turn 33 on Thursday. Last week I realized that will mean it’s been twenty years of this neuromuscular syndrome. For our anniversary, my body began rejecting medication, and the latest thing the doctor put me on only endows me with new and unwanted side-effects. Much of 2014 was waking up every two hours with muscle spasms, of being unable to think straight, and being so beat down I couldn’t even write anymore. Family begged me to take it easy on myself, to just take May easy. May slips so easily into June, especially when all you do is suffer.

Part of me knows I’ve done more than that. As my mind’s been bogged down by pain, I reach for oversimplifications more than I ever used to let myself. Depression is alleged to work like that. So I dwell:

The ideas we discard are not wasted

I've had this short story idea for over a month and have been gathering good lines, ideas and character moments. Today I finally had the strength to begin writing it. Five scenes in I realized two thirds of my existing material won't make it into the story. It wasn't a waste - it was a cocoon from which the fiction is emerging.

In related news: I'm writing again. I've written more in the last two weeks than in the previous two months. God willing, this short will be out to a market by the end of the month, and by then we'll be off to the races.

Waiting for God(zilla)

We're days away from the worldwide release of Godzilla. If you've read this blog for long then you know I cherish giant monsters. They're splendid metaphors for natural disasters and even more splendid excuses for giant fight scenes. I've been watching kaiju movies since elementary school and even today, at least once a year, will watch Cinemassacre's entire series retrospective on Godzilla. It's probably my favorite thing on Youtube for how unabashedly the narrator, who seemingly hates everything else, loves that series.

How do you hide this guy for an hour of film?

The hype cycle started early for this adaptation, and so we're getting different attempts for media attention now. Director Gareth Edwards explained to early journalist audiences that Godzilla wouldn't show up too much to build anticipation. He likened it to the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, who isn't on screen for that long.  

This worried me for a few reasons. Firstly, there are over twenty Godzilla movies. Even if you've missed all the shots of this Godzilla, we all pretty much know what he looks like. You can't surprise us the way Steven Spielberg did with Stan Winston's revolutionary puppets and CGI. 

And furthermore, as a teen I didn't run out of the cinema babbling about how cool it was that the movie hid the T-Rex for the first hour. The impression was that once the creature showed up, the movie had amazing payoffs for using it. You want your director to pitch how cool his ideas are for Godzilla when he throws off the cloak of shadow, not an emphasis on the cloak. As my friend Randall Nichols put it, Jurassic Park wasn't called "T-Rex." It was a feature of that movie, sure, but it wasn't what was promised on every poster, so they had more leeway. The second and third Jurassic Parks couldn't afford to be as coy.

Somehow, even with the questionable press and negative reviews showing up, I've calmed. Early reviews are trickling in, with critics going back and forth on there being too much of the humans (nooo), the humans being too uninteresting (a Godzilla fan has to swallow that), and the movie being too preoccupied with its titans (that's the God-damned point).

I've had the healthy realization that I don't need this movie to be great. Sure, I want it to be – I'm going to pay to see it. But I've watched the trailers so often that the collected runtime is greater than that of the average movie, and I've enjoyed them outside of a pure hype cycle. I've actually gotten a movie's worth of enjoyment already, which is a strange thing to realize, and if I were more Marxist, this consumerist positive-drip would scare me. Now in my thirties, I'm just grateful for entertainment where I can find it. This takes some of the edge off of fears of another American Godzilla screw-up.

Maybe they'll still enrage me by having the non-Watanabe, non-Cranston humans talk too much.

That lithe classic Godzilla.

By the way: for a laugh, read about Japanese fans fat-shaming our new thicker Godzilla.

By the way 2*: negative reviews and bad reviews are not the same thing.

Time Magazine has an example of a negative review here, taking a pick-axe to the film with some thought. 

Forbes has a bad review I won't bother linking; it has little to say and spends several paragraphs repeating itself. It even has some choice errors, like when some buggy algorithm links a stock quote to an actor's name: 

 

Which is what you get when you ask stock merchants for reviews of giant monster movies. The conflation of "negative" and "bad" reviews has occurred more as authors become more public about their consumption of reviews. It can be excruciating to read an angry review of your work, and I've been lucky that the few anthologies I've been in have had enthusiastic responses. That'll be fixed, though, when I start publishing these novels I'm working on. If I'm lucky enough to catch on, somebody will hate everything I like. That's the life of an author who makes it.

I'm already a little adjusted to having someone hate everything I like. I mean, I'm a Gigan fan.

 *or, By The Way Raids Again