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Welcome to the 2022 Q1 Hype Train

Me, six weeks ago: I'm going to write a newsletter of 2022 books that I'm greedily awaiting. Me, on Tuesday: Oh shit, the first of those books is already released. Oh shit, that's a lot of books. Maybe I'll split the list in half. Maybe I'll split it in quarters.

So: here are the books I'm excited for in the first four months of 2022.

I had a long and very melancholy post written, but nobody needs to be subjected to me trying to find meaning in the fact that I've been suffering from vertigo for a month and a half. (Sometimes, my writer brain is insufferable, even to myself.) We're a week from the winter solstice here in the northern hemisphere, which means that

So here's some slapdash bullet-point positivity instead, a list of things that have made what's been kind of a sucky year into one I could suffer through.

• Buying clothes that actually fit and investing heavily in pants with elastic waistbands, which did actual wonders for my overall mood?

• Mainstream media handwringing over The Great Resignation juxtaposed with glorious shitposts from r/Antiwork

• #Striketober and #Strikesgiving.

• Finally going on HRT...and 4 months in, seeing almost no changes from the low dose I was initially prescribed. I mean, the common side effects at this level are facial hair (which I had covered already, thank you Mediterranean heritage) and some fat redistribution/muscle growth (I was already uncle-shaped). We'll see what happens, I guess?

• Texis by Sleigh Bells. According to Spotify, I'm in their top 0.1% of listeners, and this because their music is the soundtrack of Burned and Buried.

• Tentatively wading into reading more romance. Standout books this year were KJ Charles's Will Darling Adventures, Morgan Rogers' Honeygirl, and Rebekah Witherspoon's Treasure. I've got books by Cat Sebastian, Alyssa Cole, and Courtney Milan on my radar for future reading, but am VERY open to recommendations for other queer romance authors.

• Untentatively wading into more queer horror with David Demchuk's Red X, Eric LaRocca's The Strange Thing We Become and Other Dark Tales, Wendy Wagner's The Secret Skin, and Sam J. Miller's The Blade Between. 2021 books that I missed but am hoping to catch up on are Queen of Teeth and Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy by Hailey Piper, LaRocca's Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, S.T. Gibson's Dowry of Blood, and Lee Mandelo's Summer Sons.

• I got into a SEVERE reading funk for most of the year, and discovered the magic of audio books. Listening to Cara Gee narrate Stephen Graham Jones's My Heart Is a Chainsaw was a revelation. I've got Darcie Little Badger's Elatsoe (performed by Kinsale Hueston) and P. Djèlí Clark's Ring Shout (performed by Channie Wait) queued up next.

• Seeing DEFEKT go out into the world. A weird little book, but definitely one I'm proud of.

• Seeing "The Bad Dad Redemption Arc Needs to Die" get published at Uncanny Magazine, which has long been one of my bucket list magazines.

• Teaching, even if I don't feel like I did as well by my students as I usually do. 2021 was hard, and returning to in-person teaching was somehow even harder than switching everything to online. But seeing my students try new things or get excited about their own or their classmates' work remains immensely rewarding.

I'm working on a list of 2022 books that I'm hype for (THERE ARE SO MANY), but will probably wait until after Christmas. If you are going to WorldCon this week, I will be there starting (oh god) TOMORROW. You can find my full schedule here on Twitter or, if you're logged in, on the DisCon site. Hope to see you there, either virtually or at a safe distance in-person!

And one that I'm sure some clever author will steal for their re-imagining of CS Lewis's The Great Divorce. Instead of a rainy town as purgatory, it's a rainy office two months after all employees were forced back after working from home. They've changed everything to an open floor plan with no set work areas. There's not a vaccine mandate, but the shared kitchen and snacks are off-limits though, "for hygiene." There are 3-hour mandatory meetings every Friday, until some manager hears rumors of unionizing, and then there are 4-hour mandatory "town halls." Instead of a bus driven by Jesus up to the foothills of Heaven, it's a bus to a mandatory company retreat driven by a butch lesbian named Leroy. Nobody's actually sure who planned the retreat; they all got the email on the same day, signed by different HR managers who don't seem to exist.

Okay, maybe I'll write that book. It would fit nicely into the LitenVerse.

As a millennial who lived through the dot-com bubble and the great recession and then the Covid-19 depression, I've been reading tales of the Great Resignation with -- like most of us -- immeasurable amounts of schadenfreude. I don't know anyone in my generation that didn't bounce from terrible job to terrible job their entire working lives; that hasn't dealt with abusive bosses and customers, harassment, wage theft, blatant racism, passive-aggression, or the weird flip-flopping between "we're like a family!" to "I don't care that your father died or your child is running a fever, I need you to come in on your day off." Out of my own long, lengthy, and weird resume that spans two decades, I have only enjoyed...maybe three of those? And only felt valued at one. (And it's the one I'm at--fully remote, flexible hours, pays well, company culture of trust and chill, and my boss sent me flowers for my wedding. I'm never leaving.)

So, funny story: back in late April, I threw out the two months of work I’d done on Burned and Buried and pretty much started over.

I’d been making progress on the new draft, but I was frustrated with it. It felt like the story was somehow becoming LESS mine as I rewrote it. More boring, more conservative, less surprising, less layered. There had always been aspects of the original draft that didn’t work, and the solutions were all paper thin and not fit for a publication. I could tell there was a good story in it, but I didn’t have the skill to fix them; just paper over them and misdirect attention elsewhere.

(A writing mentor once commented that my writing style is generally so clean that it’s easy to not notice how I use it to cover over structural issues, and WHEW. I felt that one in my bone marrow.)

Hello and happy spring, friends! May and June are shaping up to be busy for me, so here’s a quick rundown of where you can find me over the next couple weeks.

First off: you will NOT find me anywhere until after May 15th. That’s because I’m getting MARRIED ON ZOOM to my beloved, Nibedita Sen, in the telepresence of many friends and family members and also our cat. I am including one (1) photo of our engagement/pre-wedding shoot for posterity, and so we can all scream about how amazing Nibs looks.

I’m still buried deep in novel rewrites and wedding planning, so no essays or reviews are forthcoming for now. Instead, this is just a quick round-up of links of queer and trans books that are making me excited this month.

I’ve been hearing amazing things about Zeyn Joukhadar’s The Thirty Names of Night. It’s been nominated for a Lambda and won a Stonewall Book Award from the ALA. I picked up a copy yesterday at Book Culture (an indie chain here in NYC) and read the first fifteen or so pages in a sort of humming trance; the prose has a dreamy, golden-hour quality to it, with a narrator whose senses seem to be honed with grief.

You all know I’m trans, right? I put it front and center on all of my bios: “Nino Cipri is a queer and trans/nonbinary writer,” followed by several examples of how to use the singular they/them/their in sentences. I write about trans, queer, and nonbinary characters and communities. Presumably the people that like my books ALSO like this integral facet of them?

So it’s weird to see my book positively promoted in venues that also decide to assign me a gender and pronoun (apparently at random, too, since it’s about 50/50 whether they use he or she) or address me as a name I stopped using five years ago. Other weird things: assumptions about my history or my personal trauma or my family relationships; wanting my opinion about old transphobic stories that I haven’t bother to read and probably never will; public discussions about what to use for me; personal guidance on how to deal with trans loved ones, coworkers, strangers, etc.

It is finally SPRING here in NYC, which means a dizzying back-and-forth between beautiful, bright, warm days that you long to spend sprawled out in a park with an open picnic basket, and gloomy rainy weeks where you leave the house only with enormous reluctance and resentment.

Is this an accurate description of the weather? Is this a metaphor for my mental state? Probably both.

Updates

PERSONAL NEWS, BOTH SMALLISH AND BIGGISH, BECAUSE IT SURE HAS BEEN A WEEK.

Fanfic is my ultimate comfort read-slash-coping mechanism, and my relationship to it is not always super healthy. Where I used to read fanfic to participate in fan communities, when I’m depressed, I consume it for the quick hit of dopamine it delivers—like doomscrolling on Twitter, but with more smooching. It’s a functional bellwether for my stress levels and overall mood. Do I have more than fourteen tabs of it open on any given device? Am I losing sleep because I opened AO3 at midnight? Can I remember any details of the 100,000+ words of fanfic I read this week? When my reading habits are the equivalent of channel-surfing at 2 AM purely so I don’t have to be alone with my thoughts, things are probably not great. This is not the fault of fanfic, but of my own depression.

So I always celebrate when I’m able to start reading for pleasure instead of compulsion. I will never, ever, ever write a take that denigrates fanfic, but I’m extremely happy that I’m able to read other things again.

Favorite recent stories

I was a theater kid all through high school and college. For a long time, a career in theater was the end goal, though the role I imagined for myself changed constantly; playwright, director, performer, light board operator, stage manager. I wanted to do everything, and so I did: acted, danced, worked as a puppeteer, wrote and directed plays, aimed spotlights, ran sound and light boards, constructed scenery and props, ushered people to their seats, ordered people around over headsets that were older than I was.

Once I was out of school, the reality of working in the industry quickly outpaced my love for it: low pay and bad conditions for non-unionized theaters, high competition, rampant sexism (especially on the tech side), and all the interpersonal drama that theater people are known for. I realized that the jobs I could get with my experience and limited network paid worse than a job as a barista, so I did that instead and never really looked back.

But I never stopped loving live performance. I dropped a one-week grocery budget on tickets to and twice that to see . I’ve seen in a tiny grange hall in rural Vermont, puppet troupes in barns and elementary school gyms, one-woman shows in drag bars, revivals of Grand Guignol one-act horrorshows in haunted forests. I once watched the actual worst-ever one-act with a drunken crowd at the Abbie Hoffman Died For Our Sins Festival in Chicago. It included a bisexual love triangle, a hip-hop peptalk from a Black homeless character, and a recorder solo. I think it was supposed to be a musical homage to Midsummer Night’s Dream? It was a lot.

This is cross-posted from my Patreon, so apologies if you are seeing this twice! I generally try to keep the two separate, but this seemed relevant to the vibe of COOL STORY, BRO.

News first, because I actually have news to share!

• made the ! Anyone can vote in the poll, so if feeling moved, you can scroll to the bottom of the linked page and vote for your 2020 favorites.

There’s a particular image in my head that I’ve been trying to work into a story since May. Nibs and I moved to into an apartment in NYC in May, an odd little C-shaped pre-war place in Queens. Our front door stares at another door, which also is to our apartment—a weird closed loop. Maybe it’s a safety regulation? Or maybe this was originally two apartments? All I know is that my front door’s peephole looks directly at the door to my bedroom, and I have a creeping horror of one day looking and seeing the door—which stands only a couple feet from where I sleep at night—standing ajar.

1) First, I'm fine. Nibs and I are back in Vermont, and probably will be for a while. It's weird, after spending so much time traveling, to be really, viscerally stuck in place for a while, but I'm coping. Mud season (a real thing here) is slowly giving way to spring. The frogs in my mom's pond are kicking up a racket, the maple sap trucks have stopped tearing up the dirt road, and garlic and lily are starting to shoot up from the garden. It all helps to distract from the anxiety that's continuously gnawing on my brain. 

2) I'm teaching a horror writing workshop to benefit Argo Bookshop on Thursday, 4/9, from 7-9 EST. It's $20 to participate, but I asked them to save a couple spots for folks that can't afford that. 

3) Publishing announced that YAY. 

Hey all! I’m going to be over on r/books in a bit to chat about whatever you want.

Come say hi and ask me weird questions!

Happy Friday, friends. Most of us are approaching weeks 2 or 3 in isolation at this point, and I’m curious. What are you reading, watching, and listening to in order to get through this? Comment below because I NEED RECOMMENDATIONS.

Among other things, I’ve been mainlining a very goofy, very tender anime. Cool points if you can name the anime from without reverse image-searching.

This tab has been sitting open on my laptop for the past ten days or so. I don’t really need to say why, right? Most of us have been watching world events unfold in unfathomable geometries to here and now: a weird, unimaginable, simultaneously over- and underwhelming present.

This week is bad for a lot of people, for a lot of reasons. I have about 95% of a newsletter written about the amazing plotting in The Wicked and the Divine. It’s great. I quote Aristotle AND Emily Nussbaum, along with two or three academics because I went overboard on my research (again). I was planning on posting it tonight, but honestly: would anyone read it? Getting into the nitty-gritty of what constitutes tragic irony isn’t the greatest distraction from the news.

I’ve seen a lot of folks mentioning amazing books that feel eerily prescient ( and ) or examine how societal infrastructures bend or break under the pressures of pandemics. Ling Ma’s comes to mind, and Nisi Shawl just wrote an excellent roundup of such stories for , which happens to include a short review of my novella , along with a delightfully scathing review of using teleconferencing technology to listen in on a panel, which Shawl describes as “suboptimal; they [fellow panelists] sounded as if they were talking through the anuses of dead frogs.”

Quick reminder: if you like my thoughts about the nature of stories, you might also like my fiction. You can buy my short story collection Homesick or preorder my novella Finna .

(Hi! It’s been a while! November was consumed by doing a book tour for Homesick, and December was a necessary recovery month. But I’m back now, and will try to be writing regularly here again.)

The first half of 2019 was a year of lukewarm genre films for me. Some of these films I only saw out of a sense of completionist duty (Avengers: Endgame, It 2), friends’ excitement , nostalgia for source material or because I assumed it would deliver two hours of cathartic destruction -- which, in my opinion, was ruined by the annoying human family drama; ether give me a less trite subplot or give me more death-via-kaiju). 

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for me, and it’s about to get busier. This week I’ll be reading at Rhizome in Washington DC and paneling at the Baltimore Book Fest, followed by shenanigans in Seattle, New York, and the Midwest. Sadly, this means my Halloween activities are curtailed by travel and deadlines. 

If you, like me, lack the time for seances, graveyard tours, or trick or treating, this curated list is for you: some of my favorite short horror (and horror-adjacent) films, all of them under thirty minutes.

Actually Creepy and/or Disturbing

I’m taking a quick break from writing about narratives this week to instead talk about the business side of writing. I saw the following thread literally minutes after tweeting out about upcoming events I’d be doing next month to support my debut story collection, Homesick.

I don’t know if I can tell you how profoundly Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark affected me as a kid.

I don’t just mean that it scared the pants off me or gave me nightmares (though it did both). The stories in the series—folklore collected over decades and adapted for young audiences—are some of the most effective short-form horror I’ve ever read. They’re weird, incisive, and surreal, with twists that are far creepier than M. Night Shyamalan could aspire to. It inspired my friends and I to start creating our own scary stories, sharing them after lights-out or testing them on playgrounds.

And then there’s the art.

So last week, I posed this question on Twitter:

Stories about doubles and dopplegängers abound. My first encounter with them was probably Stephen King’s The Dark Half, which follows in a long line of stories about cisgender men struggling against their own divided psyche. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde set the mold for Anglophone literature that focused on the supposed duality of man, featuring protagonists struggling to overcome his darker natures. Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Wizard of Earthsea takes a slightly more Jungian approach, with a man who unites facets of his splintered self.

It’s September, which means it’s basically October, which means I have license to dive face-first into my first and foremost love: high-key creepy narratives.

In my (utterly biased) opinion, the narrative structures of horror stories are intertwined with the genre’s function, far more so than in other genres (except maybe comedy). The purpose of horror is to evoke feelings of terror, horror, revulsion, and empathy. Postmodern and contemporary horror, especially experimental narratives, bends and breaks narrative structures and audience expectation to add an extra level of oh god WHAT NO.

Really excellent horror doesn’t stay on the screen or the page, after all. It doesn’t allow the audience the safety of the fourth wall, of feeling removed from what’s happening. Horror in any media shakes the audience’s faith in their reality. It makes us aware of everything the shadows might conceal, and forces us to confront them head on. Authors, developers, artists, and filmmakers have created a multitude of different tactics to discomfit their audiences in new and unexpected ways. I barely need an excuse to nerd out about them for a while.

I wrote last week about the Bread and Puppet Theater, a radical puppet theater based out of Glover, Vermont. This week, I want to examine one of their stories a little closer.

I first saw “King Story” (also called “The Great Warrior”) performed in 2009 when I was part of Bread and Puppet’s apprentice program, and it has stuck with me ever since. This short, ~15 minute play is one of Bread and Puppet’s oldest and most enduring works. I found from 1968 that includes a script and pictures of the Great Warrior; the picture below is from 2013, as is the video.

Back in 2009--although it makes me die a little to remember that was ten whole-ass years ago--I spent a summer working as an apprentice puppeteer to the Bread and Puppet Theater. Bread and Puppet was a familiar presence throughout my youth in Vermont; my mom took me to one of their massive circuses in the nineties, and I attended their shows semi-regularly in my teens. Besides their performances--which went from a three-day festival to smaller weekly ones--they were also a presence at summer parades around the state. They were easy to spot, with massive, papier-mâché puppets and stilt-dancers in tattered finery. They had a profound impact on the way I think about stories, art, political theater, and creativity.

So I write fiction, mostly. But I started out writing (awful) poetry and (less awful) screenplays. I’ve written comics, essays, plays, rabble-rousing emails, op-eds, reviews, fanfic, and I’m a big nerd about stories in all kinds of media and genres, so much that I spent most of the scant free time in my MFA reading analyses and theory about narratives and how they’re structured across genres and media.

We live in a world of stories. What can a short story writer learn from analyzing the structures of, for example, a long-running shonen anime? Or a mixed media art installation? How do we understand the narrative beats of a fight scene? What makes a narrative “experimental”? Can you literally read a room, or a building, or a street? I don’t know! But I want to find out.

I am emphatically not an expert

This newsletter is an excuse to assign myself monthly homework. I keep finding stories in strange places, and want to figure out what makes them tick. If you’re up for learning with me, come and join the study group. It’ll be fun.