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A HOLIDAY MIRACLE:

I TOOK A FEW DAYS OFF THIS MONTH
 
Happy Hogmanay! I hope this newsletter reaches you at that point during/after the holidays where you're looking for things to read, instead of seeing this email as a hassle or an intrusion. 

At the end of November I began writing for Book and Film Globe, and it's been a lot of fun, particularly working with Neal Pollack.

First, I wrote a thinkpiece about Mystery Science Theater 3000, which is my primary fandom, about the distinctions I see between the old MST and the new MST. Some MiSTies took issue with me saying the fans were mean to each other about the new season. But they were. Then, I wrote a book review (below) and a snarky piece about Ariana Grande's video for "Thank U, Next." More to come from me there - reviews, cultural criticism (sort of), and a particular white elephant of a piece that I can't wait to write and share with you. 

My voice and words appear on episode 7.2 of my friend Ryan's podcast, the Coolness Chronicles. If you search that name on your podcast app of choice, you'll find it. I'm in the last 10 minutes of the show, though of course I recommend the whole thing. My bit is about Zardoz. Naturally. 

I wrote a piece on Medium that I knew would be controversial, but after being pelted with unfriendly comments for it in an online writing group - supposedly a supportive environment - I lost my taste for promoting it. I'd been hoping it would do similar numbers as my Kavanaugh piece of earlier this fall, but so far, no. And yes, I'm aware there's irony (and potentially hypocrisy) in putting a piece about writing for free behind a paywall. But the more correct title for the piece is "Why I (Often) Write for Free." We all must pay to live. 

There is no Books I Hate this month. I figured that after 20 straight months of interviews, I can take a month off, particularly at a time when Entropy has a great deal of year-end content going up. On that note, my interview with Samantha Irby was the sixth most popular article on Entropy this year. Pretty sure that's due to her fame and not due to anything I did, except in that I asked her for an interview

Speaking of popularity, my op-ed on Melania Trump (some of which I wish I could retract, post-Jacketgate) was one of the ten most popular pieces on the Big Smoke this year. A mixed blessing. 

I said no to work several times this month. It was much harder than saying yes, and it required a lot more thought. That doesn't mean there are fewer book reviews out in the world, of course...
Recent Book Reviews:
  • For Brevity, We Can't Breathe by Jabari Asim. I really recommend this book, particularly to white intellectuals. I was reading it at the same time as Notes from No Man's Land, and if I hadn't promised to review the two books separately I'd've reviewed them together. Very interesting in tandem. 
     
  • For Locus, The Cloven by B. Catling, the third and final book in his Vorrh trilogy. I consider this one of the most important reviews I wrote this year. I'm proud to have called out totally improper colonialism, to shout out that this emperor (Catling's books have been blurbed by people like Terry Gilliam and Alan Moore) has no clothes. 
     
  • For the Los Angeles Review, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate by the unbearably smart Anne Boyer. Read it. The book, not necessarily the review. 
     
  • For Pleiades, a second three-minute book review of a second chapbook from PANK, You Could Stop It Here by Stacy Austin Egan. Terrific stories about girls and women. 
     
  • For Barrelhouse, We Can Save Us All by Adam Nemett. One of the biggest books I read this year, in terms of ambition and complexity. I can't recommend it wholeheartedly, but I can recommend it. Yet more proof that Unnamed is the most interesting mainstream-lit press in the country right now. 
     
  • For the Carolina Quarterly, Scribe by Alyson Hagy. It was terrific to work with CQ. Part of me wishes I'd landed the review in a bigger place, because the book was very lovely and I didn't hear about it much upon release, but CQ is a just-right home for it. Plus, the BBC gave it some love recently.  
     
  • For Book and Film Globe, Hollywood vs. the Author, a nonfiction anthology edited by Steven Jay Schwartz. Wish I'd had nicer things to say about it because of the circumstances under which I got the book, but alas, no. 
What I'm thinking about:
  • If you're not subscribed to Joanna C. Valente's newsletter, you probably should be. I'm trying to sort out whether my newsletter should do what theirs does: a peek in their head, rather than primarily news & promotion. But I feel like that's what the blog is for, the head-peeking. Still turning it over.  
     
  • This lengthy piece about Facebook and what it is and what it does. I don't think anyone has an easy relationship with social media, but mine is a rollercoaster. This piece made me want to turn it all off, but I can't, because I can't pay someone else to do promotion for me. It also made me wonder (all over again) how people my age live their lives without any involvement in social media. I have friends who do it, but how do they keep up with the life events, and daily personality microadjustments, of their friends and loved ones? That's valuable, intimate information. It's just a shame that it's all corrupted by profit and power. 
     
  • This phenomenal piece about women in contemporary film. It nudges up to the larger structural problems in Hollywood - that it's a copy of a copy of a Photoshop of real life, and that money and ease of digestion are higher priorities at this time than telling good stories and making good art - but usefully restricts itself to those problems related to women's representation. 
What I'm reading:
  • The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel. Eh. Padded out a lot, and less sympathetic to its subject than I'd hoped. 
     
  • I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You by Courtney Maum. Extremely funny, but cuts deep. Or maybe the other way around? I have a huge writer-crush on Maum. 
     
  • Ghostographs by Maria Romasco Moore. Hybrid work from Rose Metal Press = yay! 
Upcoming:
  • My New Year's resolutions - a yearly tradition on the blog.
     
  • More guest appearances on podcasts, I hope. (Hi, I'm available for guest appearances on podcasts.) 
     
  • A giveaway! Unfortunately, if you're already signed up for this newsletter, you aren't eligible. But you could game the system with a friend if you really want the prize (which is, shock! books). 
Recently on the Fictator:
  • Several weeks' worth of to-do lists. Or, more accurately, to-done lists. Including this one, which discusses a Twitter fit that actually helped me. 
     
  • A little disquisition on the pox of year-end best-of lists and subjectivity in book reviews. 
     
  • Entirely contradicting the above, a list of all the books I read this year, with the best ones highlighted.
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