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So I used to have a rant that I spouted off sometimes, about how much I hate the idea of having a "career."

Back in the day, I was lucky enough to have a day job that didn't eat my brain or wreck my nerves, so I could spend a lot of free time making art and being a flagrant weirdo. I became pretty dedicated to the notion of screwing around as a way of life — which, to be clear, was only possible because of the aforementioned day job.

My rant about careers went like this:

The whole notion of a career implies a chain of events, a causal link. In theory, you ought to be able to look back and say, "I did this job which went led to this job which led to this job, and along the way  I developed a set of skills that make me valuable." In other words, having a career requires all of your decisions to make sense in terms of a logical progression. And if you want to change things up, you need to start a whole new career — which is regarded as kind of a big step.

I've always dreamed of writing superhero comics. I love how colorful and earnestly weird they are, and how well they lend themselves to a mixture action and soap opera. So I've been utterly delighted to have the chance to do some writing for Marvel Comics lately!

Right now, I'm writing a miniseries called New Mutants: Lethal Legion. The first issue comes out March 8, but the deadline for comics retailers to order copies of that issue is on February 6 — coming up real soon. After Feb. 6, you'll still be able to order the comic book (and you'll be able to get it once it's out, of course.) But the next nine days are crucial to determining how many copies retailers decide to order, which directly affects whether the comic is seen as a success.

In other words, this is kind of a make or break deal for me. If a lot of people ask their local comics shop to get them this miniseries — or order it online — in the next week, then I'll get to write more of this stuff. So I thought I would tell you everything you need to know about this comic, with no spoilers. So below is an FAQ.

Lately I've been so grateful for Assigned Media (assignedmedia.org), a new outlet where journalist Evan Urquhart keeps track of transgender news, and provides a corrective to transphobic media coverage. To find out more about Assigned Media, I reached out to Evan, and here's what he told me.

What was your motivation for founding Assigned Media?

Hey, thanks for reading my newsletter! I don't charge any money to read Happy Dancing, but if you would like to support me, I would be super grateful if you could pre-order my upcoming Marvel miniseries New Mutants: Lethal Legion, and/or the third book of my YA space opera trilogy, Promises Stronger Than Darkness. Pre-ordering either of those things will help me keep creating and goofing around, and would mean more to me than I can possibly say.

Short fiction is once again in crisis. After an era when the Internet seemed to be helping a lot of short stories find a bigger audience, the same thing is now happening to short stories that are happening to a lot of other content: the invisible hand is raising a big middle finger. Among other things, Twitter is getting to be much less useful in helping to spread the word about short stories worth reading, and Amazon just announced that it's ending its Kindle subscription program from magazines, depriving magazine publishers of a pretty significant slice of income.

I love short stories, both as a writer and as a reader. But I've been on a short fiction hiatus for the past few years, purely because the money is usually not that great and a lot of short fiction seems to slip through the cracks without getting a lot much attention. And that was before the current claw back.

Note: You're reading the second half of this essay about singing in church choirs as an atheist... the first half came out last week, and you can scroll down to "archives" and read it. Also, while I'm telling you things, please pick up New Mutants issues 31-33 and pre-order Promises Stronger Than Heartbreak, the final book in my YA trilogy! Or else the anhedonists win!!!

During my time at Cambridge University, I sang in a few different chapel choirs. And around that same time, I got heavily involved in a local non-profit providing services to unhoused people, and also helped to run a student group to help the unhoused. In the intersection of those two things, I feel like I saw a lot of how religion shapes people's worldview, for good or for ill.

Like, a lot of the best volunteers helping to run a food distribution truck and night shelters for that homelessness nonprofit were deeply religious people, working tirelessly and giving everything they had to make people's lives better. I could see their faith in action as they worked by my side. On the other hand, I sat through endless board meetings where some self-professed Christians held everything up because they wanted to make sure we were only helping people who "deserved" our help, or people who were properly grateful. As if only the unhoused people who lived up to their personal morality, or who acted "nice," should have food or a place to sleep on a winter night. And at one point we were running a night shelter in a church building during a truly brutal winter, when we were informed that we would have to clear out immediately (in the middle of a really nasty cold snap) because the regular vicar was coming back from his sabbatical, and he'd be upset to see all this mess.

I was 10 or 11 years old the first time I wore a dress in public.

My parents had pushed me to join the choir at an Episcopalian cathedral in Hartford, Connecticut. Christ Church cathedral was pretty high church: we wore big purple cassocks with frilly white collars, and we were drilled on how to sit and stand, how to enter and exit, with just the right kind of beatific reverence. this was the beginning of a dozen or so years of me singing in church. Choirs, during which I learned a ton of European choral music by heart and gained a serious appreciation for the beauty of religious observance.

But this time, Hartford was both the richest place and the poorest place in the United States. It was known as" the insurance capital of the World," because every major insurance company was based there, and it had some incredibly wealthy suburbs. But it was also one of the top 10 poorest cities in the country, with a ton of people trapped in horrendous poverty. The Dean of the cathedral at the time was extremely passionate about bringing together these two halves of Hartford, which I could tell was not a very popular decision among some of the more well healed churchgoers, and was opposed pretty vocally by some of the other ministers.

But this meant that the choir I was singing in was incredibly diverse, and contained a lot of people from the wealthy suburbs as well as the projects, plus a few kids who came in from the countryside like me.( I rode to choir practice with the choirmaster, who lived out in the boonies near my parents place.). Growing up in rural Connecticut, I had never had Black friends before, and I ended up learning just as much about Black music as I did about Bach and Schütz.

the litmus test for any story: is it about what it’s about?

So many stories aren’t really about what they’re about at all: take Star Wars. I feel as though the Original Trilogy is really about whether Luke Skywalker will go the same way as his father. That’s what the climactic showdown comes down to and it’s the closest thing to a thematic through-line those films have. But this notion is largely buried in the first two and a half films of the trilogy, in part because George Lucas doesn’t know going in that Darth Vader is Luke’s dad.

Let’s address the bantha in the room: it’s probably true that Star Wars wouldn’t have been nearly as successful if it had done a better job of telling that story about Luke grappling with his father’s legacy and feeling tempted by the Dark Side. Of the three original films, the one that does the best job of portraying the complexity of the Force is The Empire Strikes Back — which also happens to be the least lucrative, box-office-wise.

Issue #32 of New Mutants comes out on Wednesday, and I'm super proud of this one. (Above is a sneak peek from the four preview pages Marvel just released, featuring artwork by Alberto J. Alburquerque, with colors by Carlos Lopez and lettering by Travis Lanham.) You can get New Mutants from your local comic book store, even if you didn't pre-order, and it's also available online. If you want to see more of Escapade, the trans superhero I co-created, please support this comic!

Anyway, to celebrate another appearance by Escapade, I thought I would talk about one of my favorite character types: the "naive trickster."

When we meet tricksters in stories, they're usually wise and experienced mentors, who know a lot of secrets. They play a trick on the hero(es), because they understand something about the world that the hero doesn't, and this is the best, or possibly most fun, way to make the hero understand.

Lately I keep thinking about an odd metric for thinking about prose fiction: the amount of stories per story.

I really like stories that have a lot of other, smaller stories embedded within them. A rich, layered world is often one where there are stories everywhere you look — and the same goes for a complex, interesting character. A really interesting story, often as not, is one that atomizes down into a bunch of smaller stories that feed into the main narrative.

This happens at different levels. Like, most novels and novellas will have subplots, which can intersect with the main plot but also have some "story-stuff" of their own. And the supporting cast in a story could have their own personal story arcs. I'm also super fond of novels that include short fables, tales or snippets of some narrative the main character is reading: a recent example that I adore is The Story of the Hundred Promises by Neil Cochrane, where Darragh the sailor reads two sets of stories in which the same enchanter is either a hero or a monster.

But when I think about "stories per story," I also think of something a bit more atomized. How many of the details in the story, how many of the touchstones, contain stories of their own? This is a matter of texture as well as realism.

Okay, I lied. Sort of.

This isn't going to be a think piece about the slow decomposition of the birb app, days after everyone else has already written theirs. Instead, it's gonna be a bunch of disconnected thoughts about the slow decomposition of the birb app. I promise they probably won't be thoughts you've already seen! Yay?

Twitter is picking a really shitty time to go to shit

I've been having a million different feelings about Twitter's herky-jerky tailspin, many of which others have already expressed better than I could.

Two things happened around the same time recently. Marvel displayed a greater willingness to make fun of itself than ever before, with the robot K.E.V.I.N., in the brilliant She-Hulk first-season finale, which felt kind of like a flex: we're successful enough to mock our own storytelling formulas. And meanwhile, the new owners of Warner Brothers Discovery announced they were hunting for a Kevin of their own (who might or might not be robotic.) There's never been anything in Hollywood quite like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has been just ridonkulously profitable — so you can see why the owners of DC Entertainment want their own version.

Full disclosure: I'm currently writing a comic for Marvel, New Mutants, and have done a fair amount of work for Disney in general.

A lot of other entertainment companies have already tried, and mostly failed, to create their own "cinematic universes," including stuff like the Hasbro Cinematic Universe, and the Universal Monsters, and so on. For a while there, properties that had nothing to do with superheroes were still getting shunted into shared universes. DC first tried to create a shared universe around their 2011 Green Lantern film, and then tried again with the DCEU, starting with 2013's Man of Steel — but some of their most successful films of the past few years (e.g. Joker and The Batman) do not take place in the DCEU, unless the multiverse gets extremely multi. So now DC is ramping up to try again: call it Phase Three, I guess.

Listening to Funkadelic is one of the most worthwhile things you can do with your life — which makes it utterly tragic that at a certain point, you're bound to run out of Funkadelic albums to listen to. Sure, once you've listened to the fourteen official Funkadelic albums, there are some odds and ends you can hunt down. The four other original vocalists released a Funkadelic album called Connections & Disconnections without George Clinton in 1980-ish. And there's a live album from 1971, plus a collection of outtakes called Toys. And a recently-released early-1970s offshoot called U.S. Music with Funkadelic. But that's still only like eighteen albums.

What do you listen to when you've just RUN OUT OF FUNKADELIC? (Besides starting over from the very beginning, of course.)

Worry not. I've got you covered — here's a list of P-Funk side projects you can listen to if you've listened to every Funkadelic album a hundred times, and you're craving something new.

In the summer of 1985, my mom had a fellowship at Oxford University, so we packed and moved to a rental place in the U.K. I'd lived in Britain before, including when my mom was in grad school, but I'd never spent much time in Oxford before, and it was a great town to wander around while my parents were off doing professor stuff. My memories of that summer are soundtracked entirely by David Bowie's Let's Dance album, which I had on cassette tape and listened to endlessly, along with my usual diet of Prince and P-Funk. 

Somehow I found a group of Oxford Doctor Who fans, who were all much older, probably in their twenties, and didn't mind an American kid hanging about and borrowing their VHS tapes of Colin Baker's first season (which hadn't hit American TV yet.) They made me ninth-generation copies of the audio from missing stories like "The Massacre" and "Evil of the Daleks", and I listened to those whenever I took a break from Bowie. These fans also let me know that a Who convention was happening in Brighton that summer: Panopticon V, organized by the Doctor Who Appreciation Society. I begged my parents to let me go, and they arranged to visit some family friends who lived in Brighton at the time so I could spend my days there.

This was the greatest convention I've ever gone to, or ever will, and my first real experience of the wonder of fandom. I recently found an envelope full of blurry photographs I took there, in a box of stuff my mom made me remove from my childhood home. I shall inflict a small sampling of those photos on you all here.

I swear this newsletter is not turning into a Star Trek blog or anything, but Star Trek has been on my mind quite a bit lately, for various reasons. And this is a mini-rant about something I keep seeing lately.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has indeed been a delight, a breath of fresh air, and a much needed dose of optimism and old-school Star Trek fun, during a challenging time. But over and over, people can't seem to praise Strange New Worlds without disdaining Star Trek: Discovery the show that Strange New Worlds spun off from. I feel like this is a daily occurrence lately.

And I just want to say: knock it off.

We did it, everybody! We totally got rid of the word "woman!" Nobody is ever allowed to use that word again*. (Okay, I just used it a moment ago, but that was the last time. From now on, the "w" word is completely excised from our collective vocabulary, on pain of exfiltration**. I just heard that DC Comics is renaming its iconic superhero "Wonder Person," which seems like a decent start.

But why stop there? Here are some other words we should absolutely use the full might of the Trans Army to get rid of:

1) Hinge. I mean, it rhymes with "cringe." Also, if you draw it out, it sort of sounds like a door creaking open: hiiiiiinnnnge. It's too close to onomatopoeia, and (just so you know) onomatopoeia is inherently transphobic. Words should not sound like the thing they describe, it's just offensive. From now on, you must only use the term "portal fulcrum." It rolls off the tongue, try it!

Ever since Legacies finished its run on The CW, I've been thinking a lot about what I would like to see next from the Vampire Diaries universe. The Vampire Diaries and its two spin-offs, The Originals and Legacies, ran for a cumulative seventeen seasons on the CW, beating even Supernatural in terms of longevity. (Of course, the upcoming Supernatural prequel series may end up redressing the balance.) The CW seems to be done with this world for now — but there's already talk of another show in this universe, and I'm assuming HBO Max could eventually provide a home for more vampirrific content.

The popularity of these shows makes another outing feel almost inevitable, the only question being how soon. So what would I personally like to see from this universe?

I've been sort of noodling on this question, thinking a lot about corners of the TVD franchise that never fully got explored. There's the world of vampire hunters (though a show about hunters could end up being a little too similar to Supernatural or maybe First Kill, which I haven't watched yet.) It's been a long time since we've seen a group like TVD's "The Travelers," who use magic in a way that is drastically different from what we see from the witches in these shows. I don't think I'm the first person to say this, but I would love to see a show about Klaus's sister Freya and her partner Keelin raising a child together. I also would happily watch a hundred episodes of Marcel doing pretty much anything.

Marvel Voices: Pride #1 (the 2022 pride issue) came out last Wednesday. I was meaning to write a newsletter to celebrate, but I was traveling to Arizona for the American Booksellers Association gathering at the time, and then there was a ton of horrendous news. And then actual Pride happened here in San Francisco, including the Trans March. So here it is Monday already, and I'm finally doing a newsletter about this comic that came out last Wednesday!

The good news is, Marvel's pride issue should still be at your local comic book shop — it'll be on the "new releases" shelf today and tomorrow, and then on Wednesday it'll get moved to some other shelf. (Most comics shops I've visited have a display for last week's releases too.) You can ask the lovely person behind the counter to grab a copy for you, and if they sold out of their copies, they can still order it for you.

So Marvel Voices: Pride contains a TON of great stories by some of my favorite creators working today, and the last (and longest) story is the introduction of the trans superhero character I co-created: Shela Sexton, aka Escapade. Plus her dapper best friend Morgan, and their pet flying turtle, Hibbert. I already wrote a whole newsletter all about Shela, and everything you need to know about her — just check out the archives on Buttondown. Long story short: Shela is a trans girl who teams up with her best friend Morgan to rob evil jerks, using gadgets and cleverness. They call themselves supervillains, but they only want to help people and be nice to everyone, except for jerks.

Warning: Minor spoilers for this comic ahead...

A spectre is haunting pop culture — an adorable and friendly, but slightly messed-up creature that beckons us into a world of kindness and surrealism. 

Welcome to sweetweird, the storytelling trend that's been quietly taking the universe by storm. Everywhere you look, there are stories that feature lovable characters and a focus on supportive chosen family, set against worlds that are, shall we say, somewhat tarnished and bizarre. Where weirdness has frequently been paired with misanthropy and nastiness, "sweetweird" stories can be incredibly strange, and yet lovely.

And here's where I should admit that sweetweird isn't actually a formal movement, and nobody except for me has been using that term. I wrote in my recent writing advice book Never Say You Can't Survive that I'm burned out on "grimdark" storytelling that revels in nastiness and extreme violence, and instead I'm ready for "sweetweird." And ever since then, I've been meaning to write more about what I mean by "sweetweird," and why I think it's a thing that needs a name. 

I wrote this newsletter last week and tried to send it out on Thurs or Fri. Not sure what happened, but apparently it got eaten? In any case, here it is now!

Ever since Ncuti Gatwa was named as the latest star of Doctor Who, I've been watching compilation videos of Gatwa's performance in the Netflix series Sex Education and getting more and more convinced that Gatwa will bring a whole new, much-needed energy to Who.

Gatwa has an immediate star quality, absolutely owning the screen in a way that feels immaculately GIFable. I've become enthralled by his manic turn as Sex Education's Eric, a young queer person dealing with crushes, budding sexuality and friendship, along with homophobia. I can't help imagining Gatwa bringing the same infectious, twinkling energy to the role of the Doctor. And most of all, I can tell that he's going to have loads of fun with the part — and we need heroes who are having fun, now more than ever.

Now it can be told!!!! I have co-created a brand new superhero for Marvel Comics (along with her best friend!) Meet Shela Sexton, aka Escapade. She's trans, and she's also a mutant. We'll meet her in the Marvel Voices Pride 2022 issue, and then see more of her in New Mutants this fall.

Shela is a thief and a trickster, who uses gadgets to pull off her heists. She doesn't like to rely on her mutant power, for reasons that will become obvious once you've read the story. She identifies as a supervillain — but a supervillain who only helps people. In the image above, she is flying across the ocean using her flying gloves and boots! Her amazing costume was designed by Eisner-nominated artists Ro Stein and Ted Brandt (Crowded), with colors by the wonderful Tamra Bonvillain. Editor Sarah Brunstad suggested the jumpsuit, and assistant editor Anita Okoye came up with the name Escapade.

One thing that was very important to me in co-creating this character: being a mutant is not a metaphor for being trans, and vice versa. These are just two aspects of her identity that sometimes intersect. Also: neither of those things defines her! She is a complete person!

I recently rewatched the two pilots for the original Star Trek, in preparation for the beginning of Strange New Worlds, the latest Trek show starring Captain Christopher Pike and the pre-Kirk crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise. And wow, I want to talk about Gary Mitchell.

The second Trek pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," Is a massive improvement over the extremely clunky original pilot, "The Cage," in every respect—except for one. Creator Gene Roddenberry was forced to get rid of Number One, the smart, resourceful, impassive second-in-command played by Roddenberry's future wife, Majel Barrett. But in general, they got it right the second time.

William Shatner is a massive improvement over Jeffrey Hunter—and Kirk actually enjoys being captain, whereas Pike only wants to complain about how much he hates his job.The worst character in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" is introduced as if he's going to be a series regular: Gary Mitchell, Kirk's old friend from the academy who we are told has been serving alongside Kirk on the Enterprise for a few years.

1) As I might have mentioned before, I took a year off before college and went to Beijing to teach English and study Mandarin. I spent several months living with the family of a Chinese philosophy professor, some of whose grad students had gone to the United States to study with my own father, and I was able to cover most of my room and board from the money I was getting paid as a teacher. (I was a terrible teacher, because I was seventeen years old. If any of my former students are reading this, I'm sorry.) When my time in Beijing was up, I traveled a bit, going to Shanghai and then Guangzhou via train.

The train journey from Shanghai to Guangzhou was around 36 hours or so. (This was before they put in the new "bullet trains," which I understand are much faster.) And there were a few classes of ticket: sleeper, soft seat, and hard seat.

Because I was trying to live within my means, and because you kind of needed to have connections to get one of the better tickets, I ended up getting a "hard seat" ticket. Which meant... I was sitting upright, on a kind of rigid bench, with people squished in next to me on all sides, for a couple of days and one night. I had all of my earthly possessions with me, in two big duffel bags, and I was paranoid about keeping track of them, plus it was way too uncomfortable to sleep anyway. I just sat there, half-awake, watching the Chinese countryside roll past, until I got to Guangzhou where I found a cheap place to stay and just crashed out. I was the only non-Chinese person on the train, and people stared at me a bit, but also were super friendly and helped me to figure out the ropes.

I keep procrastinating on writing another newsletter — partly because of writing deadlines and book promo and touring and all of that. But also, it's a bit harder to motivate myself to put a lot of energy into writing something that is probably going to end up in your spam folder, or maybe your promotions folder. Which means that a lot of you won't even know this essay exists, much less read it.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the phenomenon that I call "assumed bad faith," in which we build elaborate systems to prevent a minority of bad actors from overwhelming us — and end up massively constraining all other interactions as a result.

Case in point: When the pandemic started, I was helping to organize a lot of literary events over Zoom, to cope with to help raise money for local independent bookstores in the Bay area. We were immediately confronted with the problem of Zoom bombing, in which somebody shows up and harasses everybody either with messages or inappropriate talking, or by displaying something inappropriate in the background of their screen. 

The way our #welovebookstores project handled this dilemma was by having a designated moderator for every event, and by muting all participants, except for the featured guests. And we never had any problems, thank goodness. But I guess the problem of Zoom bombings kept getting worse, and I've found over the last year that most of the events I've been doing don't allow the audience to be visible at all. I've gotten used to being on Zoom, Crowdcast or some other platform, and not knowing how big the audience is, who's in the audience, or how they're feeling about this conversation. To be honest, it often feels as though I'm speaking into the void.

Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak comes out tomorrow, and it's the first sequel I've ever written. And what I learned from writing it is that — drum roll please — sequels are hard.

The failure mode for a sequel is, "The same ride again, but bigger and higher stakes." Which... can get old really fast. I always felt like a good sequel should be an amazing surprise, giving you something new that builds on everything you might have loved about the previous installment. There's a reason why The Empire Strikes Back and The Wrath of Khan regularly top people's lists of movie sequels, for example.

I've thought a lot over the years about what makes a good sequel, and here are some things I decided:

Two weeks from today, my young adult novel Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak comes out. This is the second book in the Unstoppable trilogy, and I'm so excited to share it with the world. It's full of palace intrigue, spy missions, artists venturing beyond the universe—and most of all, queer chosen family being kind to each other. 

I can already tell that there are going to be a lot of days coming up when I'll feel weird about talking up my novel, because something horrible is happening in the world. I do not need to trivialize this at all — it genuinely feels selfish and petty to bang a drum about my goofy space fantasy in the midst of so many horrifying disasters and abusive schemes. All of the horsemen of the apocalypse are riding as hard as they can right now, and it really feels like nothing else matters.

In any case, I kind of have no choice but to promote this book as much as I can. My publisher spend a lot of money printing it and trying to get the word out, and I'm proud of the years I spent writing it and refining it. Turns out space palaces are actually really hard to build — who knew? You only get one chance to launch a book, most of the time, and you have to make as much noise as you can leading up to the pub date. In today's algorithm-saturated world, you have to do ten times as much promo to get one-tenth the effect.

Izzy Wasserstein is a powerhouse writer who has been putting out some incredible short stories lately. And now, at last, she has a whole book of her short fiction from Neon Hemlock Press: All the Hometowns You Can't Stay Away From. This book comes out on July 12, and Neon Hemlock is launching a pre-order campaign TODAY on IndieGogo, as part of the 2022 Neon Hemlock Novellas Series. Here's what Neon Hemlock is telling us about Izzy's book:

This debut short story collection from Izzy Wasserstein contains multitudes: ne’er-do-wells and orphans, investigators and revolutionaries, diplomats and doctoral students. Wasserstein's stories dig fingers into the meaty parts of grief, the catalysts of change, and the pain points of community.

I'm so thrilled and honored to feature a short essay by Izzy about her debut collection, AND to reveal the cover to this book, exclusively here at Happy Dancing!

1) I increasingly think it's not helpful to say of someone, "They have been canceled." The passive phrasing of "has been canceled" feels very Orwellian. Pro tip: when people insist on using a passive phrase, it usually means that somebody is trying to evade responsibility for their actions. The phrasing I prefer is, "They have disgraced themself." This clarifies what has occurred, and has a nice active verb.

2) Other kids started calling me a faggot in elementary school, and this carried on all the way through middle school. Some of my earliest memories are of hearing homophobic insults directed at me in the school hallway — which somehow both went over my head and hit me squarely in the gut. This went on for years and years. At a certain point in (I think) eighth grade, I started making homophobic remarks too, about nobody in particular — maybe so I wouldn't be so much of a target myself, or because I had internalized that this was how we were supposed to behave. I pantomimed having a limp wrist and talked about fairies. I parroted jokes about buttsex that I barely understood. By the time I got to high school, I had fully internalized that making anti-gay jokes was part of being a kid in late twentieth century America, even as I was also increasingly aware, in the chilly midnight of my id, that I had a truckload of feelings that I was scared to even try to make sense of.

We often throw around terms like "internalized homophobia" or "internalized transphobia", without necessarily inquiring deeply into the question of how these things become internalized. We marinate in shitty messages about ourselves, and about other people whose bodies, or culture, or behavior, fail to conform to a highly specific image enshrined in mainstream culture.

3) Sometime in early 2017, I started to feel really bad about myself, specifically as a trans woman. Feelings that I thought I had long since put to rest started coming back: I was disgusting, I was ugly, I was unworthy. I started to have nagging feelings of shame about the flamboyant queer life that I had spent years crafting and celebrating. I realized after a while that being bombarded with so many hateful messages in the media, and especially the political sphere, was having an effect on me. These icktastic feelings got worse during the pandemic, both because there was more popular fearmongering and because I wasn't getting to spend time with my community.

Hey, my young adult sequel Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak is available to pre-order! Also, I'm going to be talking about my first YA book, Victories Greater Than Death, at the SF Public Library (and on Zoom) on Feb. 24. Please join us!

Pretty much every 1970s James Bond movie begins with a ridonkulous set piece where Bond is chased by sharks, but Bond fashions the shark fins into a makeshift hang-glider so he can soar over a volcano full of SPECTRE agents, etc. etc. That scene is always followed by the cheesestastic credits, in which naked ladies dance around giant guns while Carly Simon or Lulu belts out another song about how every woman adores a fascist. And so on and so on.

But after the opening credits, there's usually a scene where Bond is called into M's office for his latest assignment. And it goes something like this:

Hi! I'm sorry I haven't sent out a newsletter in the past month or so -- I've been frantically trying to finish the third book of my young adult trilogy. And now that the book is finished, thank the Hosts of Misadventure, I'm frantically trying to revise it and fix it up before I have to hand it in. Incidentally, the official name of the trilogy that begins with Victories Greater Than Death is the Unstoppable series, but I've started to refer to it as Victories, Dreams and Promises.

Anyway, today is the release date for the paperback of Victories Greater Than Death, which means that you can now jump on board this trilogy for less than $10! You can find this paperback wherever you get your books, but here are links to Indiebound, Bookshop.org, Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The sequel, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, is coming April 5, and you can preorder it from all the places.

To celebrate the paperback launch, I thought I would share a document that I gave to Tor Teen back when I first sold the project to them, detailing the backstory of my fictional galaxy. (There are no real spoilers for Victories here, FYI.)

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe. I published three books in 2021 (I know!). There's my young adult space fantasy Victories Greater Than Death, and Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times By Making Up Stories, a writing advice book for scary dark times. And my first full-length short story collection, Even Greater Mistakes, featuring tales that won the Hugo, Sturgeon and Locus Awards. Also, check out the podcast I co-host, Our Opinions Are Correct.

If you have a limited media budget and you can only afford to subscribe to one or two things, you should make them journalistic outlets.

I personally give my money to the Washington Post, Mother Jones, 48 Hills, and a few other outlets. (I also do have paid subscriptions to a few newsletters written by authors I admire, but I think of them more as being like Patreon subscriptions. And I'm in a financial position where I can afford to pay for both newspapers/magazines and also some other creators.) Right now is a crucial moment for real journalism, and we desperately need to strengthen it for our own sakes.

I hope it's not too late to do a "2021 in review" post! This was a really intense year, for various reasons. I published three (!!!) books, and also got to witness the debut of a television show that I had worked on for the better part of a year.

This year really changed how I think about being an author and putting books out into the world. The last time I put out a book, in 2019, I went on a big tour and visited a ton of bookstores all over the country, and also appeared in person at conventions, book conferences and other live events. It was a lot of early morning flights and random encounters, but on the plus side I got to hang out with lots of bookstore people, not to mention fellow readers and writers. In 2021, for obvious reasons, I did a lot more zoom events, podcasts, and TikToks.

I felt like in some ways, the emphasis on virtual stuff stripped book promo down to its barest essence: I was a talking head, speaking about my books to an audience. Nobody could wander up to me afterward and chat to me about their own writing. I couldn't pull together a group of random people to go out for ice cream. It felt as though the demarcation between "author" and "audience" was getting a bit more impermeable and solid, and I found that I really missed finding opportunities to just be book-lovers together. Thanks to the whole "zoom bombing" phenomenon, a lot of virtual events now have an entirely invisible audience, whose cameras are off by default, which makes things safer but less companionable. It felt like a very 2021 trade-off. Put another way: I've always tried to push back against this notion that authors should have a personal "brand," because we're people, not toothpaste. But I found in 2021 that marketing a book mostly over the internet, by necessity, forces you to think of yourself in terms of branding a bit more.

I apologize if the above sounds like I'm complaining -- I've mostly had a really fun time doing silly videos and getting to chat with some of my favorite people on zoom and other video platforms. But I'm very glad to be going to a few in-person events again, including Writers With Drinks, because I've found that one of the main perks of being an author, for me, is just having one-on-one interactions with friends and strangers who love some of the same things I do.

1) They attempted to form a multilateral commission to explore forming a united front against this feeling, with a mixture of economic sanctions and covert military engagement, aimed at isolating and destabilizing this feeling. The coalition fell apart after this feeling made a sweetheart deal with some of the key parties.

2) They posted on social media about this feeling, and even got a hashtag trending (#fuckthisfeeling) but the virality was short-lived.

3) They tricked this feeling into signing an end user agreement that called for binding arbitration in the event of any disputes and then recruited a close friend to pretend to be a neutral arbitrator. Arbitration dragged on for ages but then became bogged down in defining terms.

Welcome to my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe. I have a bunch of books and I co-host a podcast. A week from Saturday, on Dec. 11, I'm hosting an in-person literary event, Writers With Drinks, featuring Tongo Eisen-Martin, Brontez Purnell, Shruti Swamy, Cat Rambo and Stephen van Dyck. Please please please spread the word and RSVP!

I don't want to blow your mind, but you are living in a shared universe right now. Your story and mine, along with countless others, coexist in a single reality, intersecting in unpredictable ways. That makes the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and other shared universes like, it way more realistic than anything Raymond Carver or Virginia Woolf ever wrote. Plus shared universes are super fun, as anyone who grew up reading superhero comics knew all along.

And yet! Shared universes are tough to pull off, and they sometimes come out of the oven kinda burnt on one side and gooey on the other. Nobody wants a half-burned, half-gooey universe! So here are some HOT TAKES on shared universes...

1) Traditional media hierarchies make a shared universe inherently less cool

It's finally here! Dreams Bigger than Heartbreak, the second book in my young adult trilogy, is finally available to request on Netgalley. If you read it, please do post a review in all the places where reviews are posted --- it makes a huge awesome difference. (Side note: We decided to call the trilogy that begins with Victories Greater Than Death the Unstoppable trilogy, but i've started thinking of it in my own head as Victories, Dreams and Promises, after the three individual book titles. And yeah, the third title is subject to change, and not announced yet.) Oh, and because someone asked me online, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak is available to pre-order as well. And pre-orders are basically the greatest way to support an author, and the final evolution of a book nerd's beast form.

Anyway, I was realizing that I've never written an essay laying out how I created the supporting cast in Victories Greater Than Death and its sequels, though I've talked about it here and there. And this is a pretty interesting story—both as an origin story for these characters that I've come to love and as an exercise in showing how I sometimes make things way more challenging and complicated than they need to be. (Which I think is part of being a writer? We never take the straight path.)

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe. My first full-length short story collection, Even Greater Mistakes, is out today! It features some tales that won the Hugo, Sturgeon and Locus Awards. You can get it in any place that's not trapped in a time bubble where they constantly relive the same day in 1927. I also published two other books in 2021: my young adult space fantasy Victories Greater Than Death, and Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times By Making Up Stories. Also, check out the podcast I co-host, Our Opinions Are Correct.

1) I was a baby, and my parents had just gotten home from the store, with me in the car with them. They left me in the car while they unloaded all the bags of stuff from the trunk from the back of our brand new hatchback. While they were moving all their bags inside, the parking brake slipped and the station wagon rolled backwards down the steep grade of our driveway. The car picked up speed as it rolled about a quarter mile down to the road below, and then finally collided with a mailbox across the street. My parents later said that they were sure I would have been killed on impact, if they had not invested in what was then a fairly new technology: car seats.

I didn't know about this for years. But when I was nine or ten, I was in the car with my dad and we drove past someone who was driving with their baby perched on their lap in the driver's seat. My father --- who never lost his temper, especially at strangers --- became red-faced with anger that anyone would endanger a child this way. It was some time after that I learned that a car seat had saved my life.

2) My mom was doing graduate school in the UK, so my father took a mostly unpaid sabbatical and we moved the entire family there for a couple years or so. There was a ginormous lake near where we were living, and one day we went swimming there. This is one of my earliest memories: bobbing around happily in the water until some force grabbed a hold of my leg and swept me under the surface. I barely knew what was happening until it was too far gone: some undercurrent, some greedy lake spirit, had grabbed hold of me and was pulling me farther and deeper. My mother realized just in time that my head was no longer bobbing above the surface, and jumped in the lake. The next thing I knew, she was grabbing me and lifting me out of the water, then towing me back to dry land. My parents were freaked out, but I remember being sort of amused by the whole thing. There was a TV show and book series at the time called Lizzie Dripping, and I just kept repeating, I'm Lizzie Dripping, I'm Lizzie Dripping, as I trailed water all the way home.

One of my long-time dreams is about to come true next week. I'm about to have a real, proper collection of my best short stories, out from a major publisher. There's finally going to be a book that represents me and my writing, in all of their inappropriateness.

When I say "long-term dream," I'm talking like twenty years.

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe. I have two books coming out soon: on August 17, I’m publishing . And in November, I’m publishing , including tales that won the Hugo, Sturgeon and Locus Awards. Also, check out the podcast I co-host, .

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe. I have two books coming out soon: on August 17, I’m publishing Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times By Making Up Stories. And in November, I’m publishing , including tales that won the Hugo, Sturgeon and Locus Awards. Also, check out the podcast I co-host, .

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe. I have two books coming out soon: on August 17, I’m publishing Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times By Making Up Stories. It’s a writing-advice manual for the scary moment we’re living through. And in November, I’m publishing , including tales that won the Hugo, Sturgeon and Locus Awards. Also, check out the podcast I co-host, .

Hey everybody! My young adult space fantasy novel is just $2.99 in all of the ebook formats right now, which means it’s a great time to get it for the teen (or adult) in your life. To celebrate, I wanted to share a scene from the end of the book — very minor spoilers ahead — which got cut purely for length reasons.

Thank you for checking out my newsletter! You can read the archives and subscribe. I have two books coming out soon: on August 17, I’m publishing Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times By Making Up Stories. It’s a writing-advice manual for the moment we’re living through, full of advice on being creative when the world is actually on fire. And then in November, I’m publishing , including tales that won the Hugo, Sturgeon and Locus Awards. Also, check out the podcast I co-host, .

There are a bunch of reasons I’m over-the-moon excited about The Suicide Squad, including the stacked cast and the hilarious trailers. And I’m always here for James Gunn. But one of the main reasons why I cannot wait for the latest outing of Task Force X is the way Gunn has gone out of his way to acknowledge the legacy of John Ostrander, one of my all-time favorite comics creators. Ostrander has a cameo in the film (as featured in the trailers), and Gunn has given him shout-outs whenever he’s been interviewed.

Marvel finally gave the trickster god Loki his own TV show, but with a major twist: there’s more than one Loki. In addition to Tom Hiddleston’s charmingly slippery version, we’ve met a lady Loki, named Sylvie. Plus an older Loki played by Richard E. Grant, a child Loki, and… an alligator Loki? If one Loki was entertaining, how much better is it to watch a whole crowd of them?

Welcome to the hottest trend in geek entertainment: watching beloved characters meet other versions of themselves. Ben Affleck’s Batman is set to appear in The Flash alongside Michael Keaton’s incarnation. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse won an Academy Award for throwing a party and inviting a host of spider-people. And that’s just scratching the surface: more than ever, our heroes are discovering new ways to be their own best friends (or, in some cases, frenemies.)