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If you've been reading a lot of coverage of the Streaming Wars [TM] lately, you've probably been hearing about the problem of "churn." Churn, we're told, is a major issue for streaming services, and it's something they're trying to get rid of. But... I'd actually call churn a good thing, and a reasonable way of subscribing to these services.

"Churn" is how the streamers refer to people subscribing for a short time — possibly just a month or two — and then canceling. Even though streaming services claim to hate this behavior, they've been encouraging it in a bunch of ways. And I actually think that "churn" is good for streamers, because it encourages customers to shop around and try all of the services.

As a customer, I feel like there are two ways to approach streaming services right now. Either you sign up for a year in advance, to lock in a discount, or you pay for a month at a time and cancel as soon as you've watched all the shows and movies you were excited to check out. Often, when I sign up for a month of a streaming service, I'll cancel right away, to ensure the payment doesn't auto-renew without me affirmatively deciding to pay for another month.

Basically, there are more streaming services than I can afford to subscribe to right now. And they all have wonderful shows that I want to check out — so the only way to sample all of their content is to bounce from one to the next, subscribing for a month at a time. (Currently there are two streaming services where I've paid for a full year up front.)

Here's another half-baked essay about revision — since I'm in the middle of revising a novel right now! (If you missed it, last week's essay was also all about the joys of revising fiction.)

I feel as if a big part of revision is going from the general to the specific. My first drafts, at least, always include a lot of details that are kind of fuzzy. Sometimes, a piece of information changes every time it comes up, because I haven't made up my mind yet what the actual real version is, and I'm just hedging my bets. Sometimes there's a highly specific piece of backstory, front story or side story, but it's just really a placeholder — a supporting character is a stock character, or someone's job is merely a sitcom job that doesn't feel like a real employment situation. And sometimes, things are just left so vague that they could be anything, or there's no information whatsoever.

So when I revise, I try to nail things down more. On one level, this is just a process of deciding on stuff. Where did this character grow up? Who were their parents? What kind of job do they have, and what specifically does the job ask of them? And so on.

Revising a work of fiction is pure agony. This is one of the main tenets of the writer credo (or maybe just a huge meme among writers.) And yeah, it definitely sucks a lot of the time.

But I'm in the middle of revising my next adult novel, which I've vowed to deliver in June -- wish me luck! -- and I found that revision can actually be kind of exhilarating at times. Because instead of thinking of the revision process as fixing my garbage draft, I've started to think of it as unwrapping a series of presents that I wrapped for myself before.

Part of what makes something a garbage draft is that everything feels a little bit provisional. The characters are a little unformed, the plot doesn't exactly flow smoothly, and there's a lot of stuff missing. It's easy to think of a first draft as a series of IOUs that you wrote to the story.

But this is where I've been finding it helpful to think of it as a set of presents to unwrap, instead. Take those scenes that feel so half-baked or sketchy, for example: there's a really good scene in there somewhere, and you just have to find it. Usually -- definitely not always -- the weak version of the scene contains plenty of seeds, or clues to help you find the better version.

Here's an incredibly crappy fable: Once there was a young person of great distinction who wore the most scintillating pair of kaleidoscopic pants. We'll call them Beb.

Beb would walk through the town, wearing their kaleidoscopic pants that refracted in every color, and friendly townspeople would call out to Beb that they were looking good and that their pants were bringing some much needed color to the town.

But every day, Beb needed to walk through a walled garden to get to school or work (or wherever it was they went each day.) Inside the garden were a gang of bullies, who would jeer and laugh and her insults at Beb for having such outrageous rainbow-making pants. Sometimes the bullies would even threaten violence and mention that they knew where Beb lived.

Hey, everyone. I'm reupping a piece I wrote for Star Wars Day back in 2021, because I figure most of y'all never saw it. I hope the Force is treating you right today!

It's Star Wars Day for another few hours! I know, I'm super late, and everybody else already shot a womp rat, or whatever you do to celebrate this holiday, this morning. But I love Star Wars, and I've had plenty of weird thoughts about it lately. So in the spirit of my earlier post of hot takes about Batman, here are 10 hot takes about Star Wars...

It's been a few weeks since Promises Stronger Than Darkness came out, and I have been so chuffed about the response to this one so far. I've never written a sequel before, much less a whole trilogy, and I'm so stoked that folks seem to feel like I've landed the plane here.

I'm v. sorry I skipped doing a newsletter last week, and I haven't gotten around to doing one this week either. It's for a good reason: I'm in the home stretch on finishing my next adult novel! I need to get it to my editor in May or June at the latest, so the pressure is kinda on here.

So I hope you'll forgive me if this week, I just tell you about how lovely everyone has been about Promises, plus a chance to come see me this Saturday if you're in Portland, OR.

And... yeah. People have been totally lovely about this trilogy-capper. I even saw a rave review earlier today on Instagram from someone who hadn't read the first two books, which blows my mind.

Science fiction is full of miraculous technology. You've got instantaneous teleportation across great distances, time travel, faster-than-light starships, cryogenic suspension that lasts centuries, and so on. But one of the most fascinating science fiction tropes is the universal translator. (Or, in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Babel fish.)

On one level, the universal translator seems like no big deal. After all, Google can now translate dozens of different languages into English with reasonable accuracy, though it does struggle sometimes. And of course, most of the stories we love simply wouldn't work without a universal translator, because characters would have to spend months — or years — learning a new language, every time they traveled someplace new. That would make Star Trek and Doctor Who a lot less fun.

But at the same time, the notion of instantaneous, flawless translation feels very aspirational. In order to get better at writing Elza, a Brazilian travesti, in my young adult Unstoppable trilogy, I learned to speak and write Portuguese pretty fluently, and it was a huge struggle. So many irregular verbs! Not to mention the overcomplicated conjugations, and all the accents. (Turns out learning a language is harder as you get older; who knew?) Along the way, I learned firsthand that there are serious limits to any kind of automated translation we have now. Google sometimes fails to grapple with the idioms, culturally specific terms, slangy abbreviations, and random stuff that Brazilian Portuguese has. Not to mention false cognates — in our weekly Portuguese lessons over Zoom, my teacher Hailey has become accustomed to saying "No, that's a false cognate" at least once per session.

This experience left me feeling as though it's a lot easier to convince yourself that you understand everything that people are saying than it is to actually understand. Come to think of it, that's kind of true even if everyone is speaking English.

Hello everyone!

My novel Promises Stronger Than Darkness comes out tomorrow. It's the last, and I think the most fun, volume in my young adult trilogy that began with Victories Greater Than Death. The fate of the whole dang galaxy hangs in the balance, and the hero we were all counting on, Tina, is gone. It's going to get intense! There are battles and feels and secrets and tough choices and singing monkey robots.

You can still order a copy of Promises Stronger Than Darkness from your local bookstore, or Bookshop.org, or if you get it from Folio Books at any time, I will sign and personalize with a doodle of a cat doing the job of your choice. Folio will also donate to the wonderful Transgender Gender-variant and Intersex Justice Project, and I will match their donations.

There's just one week left before the release of Promises Stronger Than Darkness, the final book in my young adult trilogy, which I've been calling "Victories, Dreams and Promises."

To help get y'all up to speed, I thought I would do a rundown of the story so far, with everything you need to know before reading the third book.

Note: There will be spoilers. You probably shouldn't read any further, unless you've read the first two books of the trilogy, or you're one of those people who doesn't care about spoilers. In the latter case, I hope I do a good enough job of summarizing these hella-complicated plots that you'll feel motivated to check out the books if you haven't already.

All images below by Ines Możdżyńska.

There's one common term that I was pretty careful not to use in my writing advice book, Never Say You Can't Survive: "agency." As in, "characters in a story should have agency."

Because, as I explain the one time I mention this term:

The concept of “agency” is very culturally loaded, and rooted in a lot of Eurocentric cis male notions of “rugged individualism.”

Of course, in the very next sentence, I do go on to say that as a general rule, if it's a story about searching for the magic bidet of the Elf King, the protagonist might need to spend some time looking for that bidet. (Though, hang on: I would read the heck out of a story about the one person who refuses to join in the collective magic-bidet-hunt. Somebody please write this!)

Some amazing folks, led by author Sim Kern, are launching a Trans Rights Readathon starting today, to raise money for trans organizations. I meant to tweet out a list of books by trans/non-binary authors that I recommend, but the past couple weeks have been extra challenging due to a family crisis and a bunch of other stuff. (Don't worry, it's all fine.) Want to know more about the Trans Rights Readathon? See here.

Before I get into it, a couple pieces of housekeeping. First, I'm not going to provide links to buy each of these books. Sorry. In general, you can find all these at Indiebound, Bookshop.org or your local bookstore.

Also, I apologize in advance if I leave your favorite book, or your book. This list is by no means exhaustive, and I'm bound to leave out some books that I love — as well as books that I would love, if I could get around to reading them. I feel like this list could be twice as long.

So let's get into it!

I've written countless articles and essays about trans people over the past twenty or so years, including some recent ones in Teen Vogue, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post. But lately, I keep thinking about the first time I ever wrote about the politics and meaning of transness.

From roughly 1999 to 2002, I was on the editorial staff of Anything That Moves, a magazine for bisexual folks, which also did a surprisingly decent job writing about politics, gentrification, transphobia, fatphobia, racism and other issues that affected a lot of communities that intersected and overlapped with the bi community. It's kind of forgotten now, but ATM was a hugely important magazine that was sold in every Borders, Barnes & Noble and Tower Records in the United States, along with tons of indie stores.

Anyway, as the news editor of ATM, I got asked to write an article about a controversy that was rocking the trans community. I'm going to summarize the twenty-year-old facts the best I can:

1) GenderPAC (Gender Public Advocacy Coalition) was an organization, founded in 1995, that advocated for equality for gender-nonconforming folks.

I've heard prose authors say stuff like, "I wish I could just write comics. You just have to write some dialogue and sketch out some action, and the artist does everything else."

Needless to say, this has not been my experience of writing comics. I found comics to be a really challenging medium so far, and I wanted to share a little bit of what I've learned. All of the images in this post are from New Mutants: Lethal Legion #1, which comes out on Wednesday. You can get it at your local comic book shop or online, and your support means I get to keep writing comics! (Art by Enid Balám and Elisabetta D'Amico, colors by Matt Milla, lettering by Travis Lanham, editor Sarah Brunstad, assistant editor Anita Okoye.)

So I started writing comics in earnest after I'd already been writing for television, which is another visual medium. But I still found that comics scripts have their own unique challenges, to do with the fact that there is an artist (or artists) who is/are interpreting your work, and you have to work closely with the art team to make sure your story is legible and entertaining.

1. The Federation is most interesting when it has an ideological foil.

The original Star Trek pitted Captain Kirk against fake gods, rogue Starfleet officers, and sadistic computers, but the show was often concerned with a Cold War-style rivalry between the Federation and two warlike powers, the Klingons and the Romulans. The Federation seldom needed to demonstrate its own peace-loving, liberal values — it just needed to appear in contrast with civilizations that were bent on domination and conquest. Similarly, Star Trek: The Next Generation was never so vital as when its ethos of individualism and self-improvement was in contrast with the collectivist, anti-individualist Borg. (An earlier attempt to give the TNG-era Federation an ideological foil, the hyper-capitalist Ferengi, basically fizzled.) In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the Federation's light touch when it came to matters of religion and self-determination (vis-a-vis the Bajorans) stood in contrast to the coercive theocracy of the Dominion. People often try to find a "bad guy" in Trek, like Khan for example — but these shows and movies usually work best when there's an ideological struggle against another civilization or organization. Count me among those who really enjoyed the struggle against the Emerald Chain in Star Trek: Discovery, and was sad to see them dispatched so easily.

2. If Phase II had made it to air, that might have been the end of Trek.

In case you've been living under some kind of magical rock, there's a new Harry Potter tie-in video game out now, called Hogwarts Legacy.

I honestly wasn't going to comments on this game at all, because others have already spoken up with way more eloquence and insight than I could ever muster. This review from Wired gives a pretty good rundown of how disappointing the game actually is, even if you don't care that some of the money from the game will go to notorious transphobe J.K. Rowling. And over at Assigned Media, Evan Urquhart has a great response to the notion that a few minor, highly ambiguous gestures towards trans inclusion in the game make it okay after all. And I'm still proud of this episode of Our Opinions Are Correct where we talked to Harry Potter superfan Cecilia Tan.

But a newspaper asked me to pitch them an op-ed about this game and Rowling, and one of the angles they were interested in hearing about was "separating the art from the artist." That's a topic I do have a lot of thoughts about, so I threw together a pretty detailed outline for an op-ed. The newspaper ended up wanting to go in a different direction, which is something that happens — so I'm going to share my thoughts with you here instead.

As you know, the art and the artist are easily separated. You just pull at the top right corner and tug gently, and the artist just sort of peels away from the art, leaving the art sticky and ready to adhere to whatever surface you desire.

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.