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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.)

The other day, I was tweeting about my upcoming book of writing advice, Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories. And I described the book as being a mixture of writing advice, personal essay… and self-help book. I’d never thought about Never Say this way before, but as soon as I wrote that, it made total sense. Because there’s a huge overlap between helping people to be creative in the midst of horribilitude, and helping people to cope with life in general.

We are once again debating whether trans women are really women, becuase it’s a day ending in shrieks and blood-spattered mirrors and cries of damnation. What a delight, to be constantly having this same debate, to be forever encountering new patinas of rot on the same old rotten arguments.

We trans women live for this — or rather, we do this so that we may be allowed to continue living. Same difference, right?

One of the main arguments that’s often brought up to establish some fundamental, essential difference between trans women and our cis counterparts is that trans women were not socialized female as children. And thus, we missed out on all of the experiences of patriarchy and misogyny that cis women have internalized. Sure, you could argue that trans women have our own horrible experiences of abuse and mistreatment, often from a young age, that have left us traumatized at the knobbly hands of patriarchy.

But there’s no denying that all cis women have had certain important, unique experiences — regardless of culture, class, ability status, or other circumstances — that no trans woman has ever undergone:

Last week, everybody on the internet was freaking out about this Variety article on superhero TV shows — purely because Harley Quinn producer Justin Halpern said that season three of the HBO Max animated show was supposed to feature “Batman going down on Catwoman,” but this had to be cut because DC Comics said that this might hurt toy sales. Which is, indeed, ridiculous.

So sorry I’ve been so slow about posting newsletters lately — I’m hoping to put out a bunch in the next week or so, and then keep cranking ‘em out regularly. Usually I try to include shout-outs in every newsletter to stuff I’ve loved lately, but now I have a huge backlog of things to shout out. So here’s a special newsletter with just all the things I’ve adored recently.

Plan B, directed by Natalie Morales

reminds me of , another movie I loved — but I actually like (pictured above) even better. It’s the story of a teenage girl named Sunny, who has sex for the first time at a party that she throws and is told at her neighborhood drugstore that she can’t obtain the “morning after” pill, aka Plan B, because the pharmacist has moral objections. This launches one of your classic road trip adventures with Sunny and her best friend, Lupe.

Below is a somewhat revised version of a Twitter thread I posted a couple months ago. I was on a panel the other day and was citing some of the points I made here, and realized that my old thread is pretty inaccessible at this point, because of the way Twitter works. I’ve added a bit more stuff and links to some recent articles on related topics.

Ever had a story that you were dying to write, for years and years? And then you finally had an opportunity to write it, and… you couldn’t make it work at all. This happened to me a while back.

Back in the mid-2000s, I was writing a series of first-person short stories about queer and trans communities in San Francisco, many of which had a slight autobiographical element. Most of those stories took place in the present (which is now the past), but a few took place in the near-ish future, including a San Francisco that is being threatened with flooding and otherwise ravaged by climate change. (Though back in like 2005, I wasn’t thinking about wildfires yet.) And I wanted to end that story cycle with a story that took place further in the future, when San Francisco has become an archipelago, with most of the current city underwater.

I thought about that “drowned San Francisco” story for a long time, but never quite got around to writing it. And meanwhile, I abandoned that story cycle at some point, for a bunch of reasons. (Including that my writing had progressed a lot since I wrote most of the stories and it would have been a huge boondoggle to get them up to a good standard. I’d still love to do something with those pieces at some point.)

Marvel has announced approximately five billion TV shows, including long-awaited live-action incarnations of Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk. But there’s still one vitally important Marvel superhero who doesn’t have her own show: Doreen Green, aka Squirrel Girl. This is a terrible oversight that must be corrected immediately. A Squirrel Girl TV show could run for several seasons without even beginning to access the full potential of Marvel’s greatest hero, and her wonderful supporting cast.

True, Marvel tried to get a TV show, featuring Squirrel Girl, off the ground in 2017. But do we really want to see Doreen Green sharing the spotlight with… Speedball? (I thought he was called Penance now, probably because he fights crime by waving penants around? And they say things like “GO COUGARS” or something. You can do a lot of damage with a vigorously penant!) Anyway, I’m sure the show would have been great, especially if it was similar to Freeform’s show, but I would really way rather have a proper show. And anyone who has read the long-running series by Ryan North and Erica Henderson will probably agree with me. I want Squirrel Girl to have her own supporting cast, including Nancy Whitehead and Koi Boy, not so much Speedball or Pennants or whatever.

The other day I tweeted something about literary fiction that caused some, er, spirited discussion. People started asking me to define “literary fiction,” which is kind of a “know it when it you see it” thing. And people were also bringing up the ridiculousness of the ongoing division between “litfic” and science fiction and fantasy, which gets more absurd all the time — especially now that so much of what’s published as literary fiction these days contains fantastical, futuristic or post-apocalyptic elements.

In the fifth episode of the wonderful sitcom Rutherford Falls, Nathan and Regan help to judge people’s projects in their local History Fair, and end up getting sucked into a huge debate over whether you can separate the art from the artist. Can we still like the movies from that director who turned out to be a creep, or the books written by that dude who said something offensive? Are we still allowed to listen to music made by (alleged) abusers?

This is the kind of discussion I hear, or witness, constantly of late. So many of our favorite creators have turned out to be kind of gross and awful, making it hard to keep liking their stuff. And whenever this comes up, I can’t help thinking about Samuel Johnson, the famous eighteenth century critic, dictionarian and busybody.

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 , here are 10 hot takes about …

Lately I’ve been having, or witnessing, the same conversations again and again with fellow trans folk: people confess that they feel like imposters, or like they’re not properly trans, or like their feelings of transness are not valid. Call it trans imposter syndrome.

This is one reason —because it’s easy to doubt whether you’re “really” trans, or whether you “deserve” to call yourself trans. And in real life, there is no such thing as a Trans Card that will confirm or ratify your transness — you just have to trust your feelings, like Obi-Wan says.

Like many other booksellers, Margaret (not her real name) was forced to shut down her store a year ago. When she reopened, she mostly sold books online, allowing customers to come by and pick them up. But when the number of new covid-19 cases in her area started to decline, she decided to let in one household at a time for in-store browsing—and within two weeks, she had contracted covid-19.

This past year has been an unprecedented challenge for physical bookstores, which have had to find ways to keep their relationship with their communities alive during social distancing and lockdowns. It’s a heartbreaking paradox: more people than ever have been reading, and publishers reported record profits in 2020, but bookstores have . To survive, owners and staff have had to come up with new answers to the old question: What makes a great bookstore? But also: when things that seemed central to the bookselling experience, like browsing and hand-selling, become impossible, what’s left?

Image: Ted Eytan/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0

I was privileged to be able to write about the horrendous new wave of legislation that aims to punish trans kids in . For months now, I’ve been watching this latest coordinated assault with a growing sense of horror at the sheer malevolence of this drummed-up panic about kids and young adults who are just trying to live their own lives. The question I started the article with is: what kinds of conversations could we be having about trans kids if we weren’t having to spend all our time arguing against this legislative abuse and all of the misinformation behind it?

Back in 2019, in the before times, I was lucky enough to be guest of honor at Wiscon, the world’s first feminist science fiction convention, alongside the incredible G. Willow Wilson. I wore a vintage red brocadey dress (see pic below, with Annalee), and gave a guest-of-honor speech that I worked on for about a year. That guest-of-honor speech has been living on my old website, which is about to go away, and it also feels like it speaks to a lot of the same issues as last week’s newsletter, in a way that feels interesting to me. So I’m reprinting it below.