This is going to be hasty — I have an utterly broken memory of what actually existed in 2021. It’s curiously difficult to pinpoint this year as a year, to find its walls, to see its ceiling and its floor, to know what exists in this temporal room, this time-based structure. Because I barely acknowledge it as a structure at all. It is, in fact, more like a free-floating miasma.

Still, something happened in this sinister vapor. Let me try to suss out the stuff I liked this year.

Pop culture stuff, I mean. Media. CONTENT. Mmm. Chewy, granular content.

Again, this is by no means comprehensive or exhaustive. It’s just some stuff I really liked this year. If it’s not on this list, I may still have liked it — even loved it! — and forgot it existed in 2021, or forgot it existed at all, because that’s just how my brain is faring these days.

Albums:

Indigo de Souza, Any Shape You Take

illuminati hotties, Let Me Do One More

Hus KingPin, Portishus

Halsey, If I Can’t Have Love I Want Power

TMBG, Book

CHVRCHES, Screen Violence

Deap Vally, Marriage

Bo Burnham, Inside

Olivia Rodrigo, Sour

Or, for some good songs: Jenny Lewis, “Puppy and a Truck;” Margo Price, “Red Temple Prayer;” Japanese Breakfast, “Be Sweet;” Jack White, “Taking Me Back;” Moon Taxi, “The Beginning;” K. Flay, “Four Letter Words”

TV:

Only Murders In The Building, Ted Lasso, Hacks, Sex Lives of College Girls, CentaurWorld, White Lotus, did I mention Only Murders In The Building??, I Think You Should Leave, What We Do In The Shadows, Mare of Easttown, Midnight Mass, Reservation Dogs, Arcane, Owl House, Kid Cosmic, Maya and the Three

Movies:

Watched… surprisingly few actual movies this year, so let’s see how this goes?

Matrix: Resurrections (my initial review was me scratching my head, but I’ve revisited it and it has stuck with me more than I expected), The Mitchells Vs The Machines, Dune, Lost Daughter, The Green Knight, The Night House, Summer of Soul, Suicide Squad, is Bo Burnham’s Inside a movie or a show or what I dunno whatever just put it on all the lists, The Harder They Fall

Games:

It’s basic, but Halo: Infinite is deeply satisfying; Deathloop; Psychonauts 2; the new Outer Wilds expansion; Townscaper; Mass Effect: Legendary Edition which I know isn’t really a 2021 game but shut up; I really want to play Inscryption and Wildermyth but I don’t have a PC

Special shout-out to Root, by Leder Games, which is a truly delightful boardgame

Books:

God, this one is really hard, because a lot of stuff I read is from years outside 2021 — including coming out in 2022?

Catriona Ward’s Last House on Needless Street; Sarah Gailey’s The Echo Wife; Razorblade Tears, SA Cosby; Cassandra Khaw’s The All-Consuming World and Nothing but Blackened Teeth; Premee Mohamed’s Annual Migration of Clouds; Hummingbird Salamander, Jeff VanderMeer; Apples of North America, Tom Burford; Annalee Newitz’s Four Lost Cities; Amanda Montell’s Cultish; Samira Ahmed’s Amira & Hamza; Cina Pelayo’s Children of Chicago; Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke by Eric LaRocca, Chistopher Mims’ Arriving Today

Right now I’m reading and loving David Perry and Matthew Gabriele’s The Bright Ages.

Plus I’ve read some really great stuff coming out in 2022: Alex Segura’s Secret Identity; Delilah S. Dawson’s The Violence; Kiersten White’s Hide; Alma Katsu’s The Fervor; Rob Hart’s Paradox Hotel

I know I’m missing things! I’m sure of it. Brain like a sieve in a year of fog.

BUT, hey, this gives you some stuff.

Also I wrote books this year, which may or may not have been any good at all:

You Can Do Anything, Magic Skeleton (with Natalie Metzger!)

The Book of Accidents

Dust & Grim

If you liked any of those, a review somewhere would be gosh darn delightful.

KAY BYE

(You should of course feel free to share your own Favorite Things in the comments.)

I… thought maybe this year was going to be different. Upfront, let me say I don’t think this year was all bad, per se. Certainly it wasn’t as bad as 2020, though that is a thing I have to remind myself of constantly, because 2021 certainly feels like it’s a real piece of shit on par with the last real piece of shit. Then again, this year was not the start of a global pandemic where everyone was quarantining their mail and bleaching their vegetables and washing their hands to raw nubs, all under the (not-so) vigilant gaze of the Traitor-in-Chief, Mister Big Lie Himself. I mean sure, the insurrection was this fucking year, somehow, inexplicably, and sure, this was the year of Delta and now, Omicron, not to mention a cascading series of climate change emergencies —

I dunno, maybe 2021 was just as fucking bad. Who knows.

Point is, this felt like the Year Of Almost. Like, 2020 sucked moist open ass, and we all hoped inevitably for a better 2021. Which, I think, we got, but it it was better in the way that getting shot in the leg is better than getting shot in the head. It’s still not amazing. It’s just, everytime I thought we were almost to a better place, a better thing, then… we didn’t quite get there. Almost!

We stayed in Almost.

We knew Almost intimately.

We lived in the fucking Almost.

I entered this year thinking, okay, we got a new president, that’s great, whew. But then there was an insurrection (seriously? the insurrection was this year?? are we sure about that?), and then there was Manchin and Sinema, and then Joe Biden has been a good president but not a great president — a paper plate pressed over a sucking chest wound.

I entered the year thinking, great, I’ve got three goddamn books out this year, and surely I’ll get to tour for at least one of them — by which I mean, go out into the world, not simply live yet again trapped in the digital interstices of Fucking Zoom again. But then, nope, that didn’t happen. I remained, as most of us did, in our Zoom Prisons. The digital Phantom Zone. Pressing our faces against the prismatic dimensional glass as we all floated away from one another.

I entered the year thinking we at least understood this pandemic and sure, it’d still keep on going, but we’d have some control over it and then, haaahahhaaheaayeaaaaah not so much. We thought the vaccines were what we needed, and they were, but only in part. We figured people would slowly get on board with that whole Science and Medicine thing, but then you had jabronis eating horse-dewormer and trying to suck out the vaccine with snakebite kits. I know people who had COVID, who had it badly, and who still won’t get the vaccine. What the fuck? What is wrong with you? There were always people and will always be people who have scrambled eggs for brains, but it definitely feels like the GOO-BRAIN ratio has gone way, way up.

I entered the year thinking, well, at least we can spend time outside, and that’s true, but then there were also two rounds of tornadoes here in Pennsylvania — first time, one hit a half-mile north of my house, and another hit a half-mile south; second time, a tornado had a little jaunt through my sister’s backyard. So “outside” became a little bit more treacherous, didn’t it?

It was one thing after the other.

There was a really sweet spot in May and June where the clouds parted, the sun started to shine and I thought, here it is, here’s the moment where it’s all going to turn around. The numbers looked good. COVID was fading. A lot of us had our shots. We were venturing out of our caves to enjoy the sunlight. Then the clouds went the other way again like the stage curtain closing on that Spider-Man Musical, and Delta rocked up on us. And just as we got boosters and got our kids vaccinated, here comes Motherfucking Omicron.

It feels like, hey, here’s the good news: we are no longer sinking in quicksand. And yet bad news, we’re still somehow in quicksand? What the shit?

It’s not a great feeling. Like I said: paper plate pressed onto a sucking chest wound. It’s better than nothing. But that doesn’t mean it’s enough.

God, this is fucking depressing, isn’t it? I don’t mean it to be! It’s not hopeless. Things are better now than they were, and with some effort on our part, it could get even better still. And I really do think that 2021 was better than 2020, if… uhh, marginally so. I’ve definitely clawed back some parts of normal life. (And some people in this country never left normal life at all, eating weekly at Applebee’s even as their lungs filled up with fluid! Sorry. Depressing again. Mea culpa.) It’s fine. It’s fine.

Everything is PERFECTLY FUCKING FINE.

I guess maybe I’ll focus on the personal stuff. Yes, let’s do that.

Personally, it was a year with many nice things in it.

I had three books out, which you can buy at the links below because I am not above trying to pay my mortgage and feed my child:

You Can Do Anything, Magic Skeleton (with Natalie Metzger!)

The Book of Accidents

Dust & Grim

This is after 2020, where I had 0 (zero) books out in the world, so three in relatively short order was a big shift. I think they were successful. The first was always a bit of an odd release, so I never expected it to hit huge, but I’m glad that TBOA and D&G hit a lot of year-end lists and people’s favorites — and I don’t know how well D&G has sold, but I can say with authority that TBOA has done very well, and I’m pretty thrilled with where it’s at and the attention it has been getting.

I had a hard time writing in 2020, but with 2021, I came roaring back, writing and finishing the sequel to Wanderers, called Wayward, coming out in August 2022 (preorder here).

My family is good. Kiddo was in school for this new school year. None of us got COVID (er, yet). We’re all vaxxed. My wife and I are boosted. We see more people, go more places, but carefully, smartly. Creeping about like little mice who don’t wanna get eaten by the owl.

Things happened? We existed? It’s all a blur.

Normally I’d go through and tell you about all the STUFF what I read and watched and played this year but I’ve tried to keep you up to date on that as I go, so I’m not gonna rehash here. And I barely remember what came out this year, anyway. (Plus, half the books I read are gonna be 2022 releases.)

It’s fine.

It’s fine.

What will 2022 bring?

HaaahahahahahaaahaaaaAAAAAAAAHHHH I mean, uhh, I have no idea. I have plans for two in-person book tours that at present are utterly uncertain.

Wayward comes out, and I’m hoping people like that. I’m editing it now. It maybe doesn’t suck.

I’ve got one book to write, maybe two, and potentially a comic? More on that when I can say.

I’ve mostly stopped trying to guess at what will happen for me personally, and I’m definitely letting life just be a river that I’m floating upon — if a rock gets in my way, I’ll try to paddle my ass around it, but at this point any map I attempt to construct is outdated the moment I finish it, so I’m just going with the flow and will respond to the bends and dips and sudden rapids accordingly. This is probably a bad plan. But it’s the week between Christmas and the New Year, so I hope you’ll forgive me this floating in the void sensibility. We’re all merely hovering this week and that weightlessness has perhaps infected my overall attitude.

I hope for a better world in 2022. I think we’ll get one, but no promises.

And in that, I don’t think we can just go with the flow — to get that world, we need to fight the flow and fight for the world we want. (Just not this week. This week is cookies and naps.)

Hope you’re doing well.

Hope this year wasn’t all bad.

And hope the year ahead is better.

Claim joy for yourself. Make art. Be weird.

See you on the other side of 2021.

(Flickr is giving me fits, so I’m gonna sequester my Favorite Photos of the Year to a separate post. KEEP YER GRAPES PEELED.)

I think that art and story are products of a conversation, perhaps many conversations. Sometimes it’s the result of a conversation between the artist and their audience. Other times it’s can be a culmination of the conversation that the artist has between their own experiences and their own influences — and in both of these cases, artist and audience, or experience and influence, it’s a kind of battle between self and anti-self, which now that I’ve said that out loud is clearly a sign I’ve already crawled up my own ass with this very pretentious argument.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let’s talk about The Matrix: Resurrections.

The Short and Sweet

If you want the brevity review, without any kind of spoiler, it’s this: I did not always love The Matrix: Resurrections, even as I loved many things about it. The script is strong. The worldbuilding is wonderful. The emotional core is throbbing. It cuts away from a lot of the squirrelly academic philosophical claptrap that mired the two previous sequels, shedding them for something that is ultimately less about mind and more about heart. Feeling over fact.

It’s also got action scenes that feel airless and disconnected from their stakes, has an over-abundance of shiny-sheen CGI, and is unusually style-free and sexless — it projects a Silicon Valley version of Sexy, an imagined video game product of it divorced of Actual Sex, creating a PG-13 movie that is mysteriously R-Rated. Some of this is, I expect, on purpose, but it is occasionally jarring for a Matrix film to feel wholesomely generic in its design and style. (Exception to this: Neo-Morpheus, who wears some of the sexiest, baddest-ass shit. And Bugs’ sunglasses. I want those.)

Still, I’m thinking about it even now.

I keep thinking about it.

I keep wanting to talk about it.

Which is not nothing. And that leads me to:

The Value Of Being Interesting

The best thing I can say about this film is that it’s interesting.

This sounds like a low bar, but I assure you, it’s not. When I say that word, I mean interesting in italics — it’s interesting, I say, my eyes squinting a bit as I focus on the middle-distance. It also sounds like it could be a back-handed compliment, or a way to say I actually hated it without upsetting anyone, but that’s also not true, not at all.

What it is, is this: most Big Films these days don’t bring a lot of emotional or intellectual umami — that is to say, to me, they’re missing complexity and depth, lacking a measure of thoughtfulness that is reflected in art that allows itself to be a bit messy, a bit complex. It’s far more fascinating to have a story willing to be contradictory, to have a vision but to challenge that vision, and that’s definitely on the menu here. And that’s wonderful —

Because it isn’t always on the menu.

The 800-lb Hulk in the room here is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has essentially become the cinematic water we’re all swimming in. I delighted in, for instance, Shang-Chi, and don’t brook anybody their love of that movie. It had some of the greatest fight scenes in Marvel movies. It was a blast. (It also, like too many movies, has a floppy third act predestined by its own format.) When I turned it off, I also didn’t really think much about it. It was like a fancy fuckin’ marshmallow. I ate it. I enjoyed it. I’d eat it again. But it was puffy, happy sweetness and not much else.

But Resurrections… you know, there’s some puffy, happy sweetness in there, but it’s also weirder, gnarlier, not as easy to get your hands around. It’s willing to be complicated. I don’t mean to suggest that you’re going to find something here on par with The Lost Daughter or The Power of the Dog in terms of that emotional and narrative chewiness, but I just mean, this isn’t your standard blockbuster franchise film. It’ll give you some marshmallows, but it’s also got some texture there I didn’t expect to find. And part of that texture is watching a franchise, and a filmmaker, grapple with the legacy of that franchise. Part of that texture is in the conversation the art is having.

The Conversation Of Which I Speak

As I said at the fore, the conversation a story has — both before it ever reaches an audience and then, the one it has after — is really interesting to me. I sit down to write and I inevitably feel like that story is the conversation had between all the things I’ve experienced and all the other stories I’ve subsumed. I’m not unique in this. I think this is standard operating procedure, even for writers who refuse to believe it. I think some writers probably try not to have that conversation, and try to escape it, and I believe those writers are creating art that is worse for that rejection.

Films can be a little trickier, TV too, because they’re not the product of a single voice. Again I hesitate to cleave to too much haughty pinky-out nose-in-air pretentiousness, but we don’t have as much authorial (“auteur”) presence in film and TV as maybe I’d like. That’s not always the worst thing, and some of the strength of film and television is that, in the right circumstances, the agitation of smart creative voices working in chorus can make some fantastic storytelling. But there’s also the reality that such chorus is only as strong as its shittiest voice, so someone can fuck up the whole song by screaming a series of off-notes before falling off the stage, drunk.

Franchises end up trapped by this because they’re often shepherded forward not by voices but by companies. This is very basic, droll bullshit, and a softball of a critique, I know, but you get story-by-committee that is crafted out of formula and geared toward brand — that’s not to say you can’t get some truly interesting stories out of that process. You can. We have. We will again. But you also end up with a whole lot of narrative vapor-lock.

Franchises get so big, so insular, that they end up having conversations only with themselves. It’s the ants-in-a-death-spiral circuit. A big franchise chases itself, round-and-round, getting bigger and bigger but never really changing its shape. It’s just a larger circle, a bloating loop.

And in this particular era, where we have franchises that have been around for 20, 30, 40 years, the pattern is becoming well-established. They want to keep a franchise going, but don’t just want to continue it straightaway, but also don’t want to reboot it, so you get something that is half-ass reboot, and half-ass continuation. You get a non-committal story that says, “Well, we need the OLD CHARACTERS to come back for the OLD AUDIENCE, but the KIDS TODAY don’t wanna watch the OLD CHARACTERS hobble their way around, so we need NEW CHARACTERS TOO, but also, that story that worked the first time worked again, so let’s bring back THE DEATH STAR ZUUL MICHAEL MYERS SPIDER-VILLAINS so we can lean on all that old stuff, and we’ll shake up the puzzle pieces a little and then, ta-da, movie made, pattern affirmed, back up the money truck.”

It’s not that this is all bad, or creates only poor art, but it’s getting a little predictable. “Oh hey the kids are going to find the ancient mcguffin and then a new evil rises but it’s actually the same evil we saw before and then at the end the old character, who we’ll call Indiana Venkmanwalker, shows up (maybe CGIed if the actor is dead) and nostalgia swells with the music and ta-da they beat the new-old evil with the power of narrative sentimentality and a cool new weapon.” It’s fine. Sometimes I’m a sucker for it. I’m only human. No harm no foul if you are, too.

But ennnh.

Ennnh.

Enh?

There are a few movies that break this.

Mad Max: Fury Road gives zero fucks if you know anything about Mad Max and isn’t going to bring back the Old Actor or an Old Story and is just going to do what its own protagonists do, which is hard-charge forward through the oil-soaked nuclear sand because fuck you, that’s why. Witness.

Into the Spider-Verse remixed the Spider-Man formula so much and so well that it truly felt like a new thing — it felt more like art that was having that conversation between experience and influence, and because it used characters we’d never really seen before on a screen, it didn’t worry so much about everything else. And all the references were incidental, more curious than critical to understand. (I’ve not seen Far From Home, to be clear, so I have zero idea how this plays there. No spoilers on that, if you please.)

And then you have The Matrix: Resurrections.

It too, is in conversation with itself as a franchise, but you can also feel it in conversation with itself as a story, as a filmmaker, as actors. It wants to both grapple with its own impact and try to leave it behind. It’s self-referential in ways that are both cheeky and profound. Yes, it’s still kind of doing the pattern of TROT OUT THE OLD CHARACTERS, BRING IN THE NEW ONES, THE BAD THING IS BACK BUT WITH A TWIST, GO. But it also seems to know it. And wants to fuck with that — and you — a little bit in the process.

The result is a story that becomes altogether more thoughtful and emotional than I expected. The first movie amped me up. The second and third left me cold — I like parts of them a lot, love some other parts, but they really fell in love with ideas more than story. This new one, though, feels smaller. More intimate, more personal. You could do away with the fight scenes entirely (and should, because again, they mostly don’t work). It has things to say about the internet, and society, and itself.

It doesn’t always work. But when it does, it really does. And I admire something that reaches past the formula, climbing up and over the walls of its own franchise, to try to do something different and more… peculiar. This is that. It’s worth seeing just to experience that. I’ll be thinking about it a lot.

The Spoilery Bits

This is just disjointed stuff I liked or maybe didn’t like about the movie.

It will contain spoilers. Stop reading now if, well, you don’t want those.

I liked the synthesis of machines and people, and think that’s part of the synthesis of the conversation this movie is trying to have.

Niobe? WTF. Okay? I guess? Sure?

Swarm mode, bots, a society willing to believe things based on feeling? Incisive stuff, if a little quickly-handled. Just the same, I dig it.

Neo is mostly a tourist in this movie. Turns out, that’s for Reasons, I suppose, but sometimes it felt like he was mostly shuttled from one place to another. He did not have, at any point, the urgency of a character like, say, John Wick. Again, this is on purpose, but still. I did really, really appreciate a man at odds with his own reality, feeling trapped in it, locked into it, while seeing beyond it and feeling the madness of being so out-of-sync. As a human and an artist. This rang really true, given our current Pandemic Reality, which itself feels like a modal we can’t escape.

I also like that Keanu is a little looser, loopier in this. He’s more… well, Keanu.

Fuck yeah, Trinity. God Carrie Anne Moss is great.

Neil Patrick Harris owns again.

Groff, too, nails it, though he sometimes leaned into a Smith-like cadence, but then by the end of the movie seems to have forgotten it.

I’ve had some people ask me about the queerness or transness of this film, and I am 100% sure I am not the person to be deciding that. I am glad for Lana Wachowski and her vision, is what I can say.

They all wear sunglasses and it’s really obvious and I think that’s the movie literally making fun of itself, which both works and also feels clumsy.

I cannot stress enough how much the action scenes left me bored. Punches didn’t feel like punches, bullets felt like… I dunno, spitballs, it all felt weightness both narratively and in its impact. The fights in the first film are impactful, visceral, and this has really lost that. On the one hand, it showed me you can do a Matrix movie without any of the fight scenes, but also, the first three films are often predicated on having the DNA of Kung Fu movies, and this… did not, so it felt jarring.

JFC that Merovingian scene, one of the more irritating characters from the sequels shows up again? And is also annoying? And his exiles look like they’re from Spielberg’s Hook. Another huge fight scene that felt random and more like an obstacle in the narrative rather than something with necessity and urgency behind it. Obligatory. Almost an uncanny valley version of a fight scene.

Fuck yeah, Neo-Morpheus. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, baby. Those suits! Those suits.

David Mitchell, Lana Wachowski, and Aleksander Hemon created a helluva script.

Anyway.

That’s it.

YMMV.

Merry happy holidays. Buy my books or I die.

Detective John Dark’s daughter has been missing for two years. In his frantic and unfruitful search for her two years ago, John Dark overreached and was reprimanded and demoted.

Now suddenly back into the homicide department, Dark is put on a chilling case – a man who killed his wife in their locked house and then dressed the body up to resemble a deer, but claims to remember none of it. A few days later an impossibly similar case crops up connecting the suspects to a prep school and a thirty year old missing persons’ case.

Just as he is getting back into his old groove, a new lead in his daughter’s disappearance pops up and threatens to derail his career again.

Time is running out and John Dark needs to solve the case before more people are killed, and while there is still hope to find his daughter.

In the style of True Detective and Silence of the Lambs, WHITESANDS is a thrilling supernatural crime novel.

It’s true what they say. Writing is all in the revisions

In its first draft, Whitesands was a different book. The main character, Detective John Dark, wasn’t even in it. In the third draft, the book was set up with intervening chapters of John Dark being interviewed because of a thing that happens late in the book. It broke the timeline and slowed the pace so I took them out in the fourth draft.

The fifth draft, which I wrote SEVEN years after the first one, was written in one week in Exeter in the U.K., when I was invited to be a Writer-in-Residence. The final draft came after a thorough wringing of edits. It is what is out now and only mildly resembles the first draft.

But the first draft got the train on the rails, and the magic happened in the revisions.

I also learned there that, as much as I thought the opposite, I am indeed a pantser and not a plotter.

Don’t be afraid to let your influences show

A lot of writers avoid being too influenced by other books as they write, so they will read only non-fiction while they work or, as I learned Catriona Ward (author of the fantastic Last House on Needless Street) does, will read nothing at all. This is done so not as to be overly influenced.

I, however, positively wallow in my influences. I positively roll around in the prose and the structure of other books as I write. I actively try to use work I admire as a sieve through which I write.

In the case of Whitesands, my copy of The Silence of the Lambs was always within reach. The way Thomas Harris starts his chapters, the way he shows us the villain not through hints but by giving them the stage in long dedicated chapters. The pure depths of dread and bleakness.

I would read Raymond Chandler and try to emulate the feeling of his prose and the style of Mr. Dickens.

Seek critique and love the lessons

This is absolutely the best way to improve your writing. As I worked my way up into being a writer I knew that I had to learn how to write. There are, in my opinion, two ways to do this and you have to do them both at the same time; read books considered classics (or at least very good) and get your writing read and critiqued.

There will be a tendency at first to explain the critiques you are getting to the reader “Oh, yeah, I wrote it that way to keep people guessing.” or “That, they were in the house already. Most people are going to get it, I don’t need to fix it.”

You need to listen and remember that the work is not you. The points reviewers have for you are points readers will trip over as well. Fix them and learn from them, as painful as it may be.

Oh, and read more Dickens.

The details don’t matter if the story is there

There are parts of Whitesands that are pure police procedural. Only, I do not really know anything about the procedures of a police investigation except for what I’ve seen on TV.

However, the police procedural is like in Seven – it’s what we imagine a police investigation is like. I let the story take the front seat and made up any details that seemed to matter. Of all the people who have read Whitesands, only one person has mentioned it.
It helps that this is not a police procedural story at heart, like Seven. There’s a story being told that just happens to have detectives as main characters. Don’t worry if you are writing a space opera and don’t know how the gravity tech actually works. If the story is exciting it won’t matter.

Raymond Chandler himself completely forgot about a dead character in his first book.

Writing a book takes a loooooong time. Be patient.

I wrote the first words of Whitesands waaaaaay back in 2009. I started and realized that I did not, in fact, know how to write, much less how to put together a novel. So I tried writing short stories, took a few lessons and started reading with purpose and discipline. I read Dickens because writers are supposed to, and then I realized why – every single fucking book by Dickens is a masterclass in characterization, prose and structure. I read Joseph Conrad (great prose, dull pacing and structure), Hemingway (prose again), Shirley Jackson (wow) and Chandler, Carver, Shakespeare… I learned to write. I then took another shot at Whitesands and another and edited and re-wrote and pitched to agents (unsuccessfully) and then to publishers (successfully). It took just about ten years from idea to publication. And it was totally worth it.

Johann Thorsson is an Icelandic writer who enjoys cold drinks, puppies, pizza, a warm meal after a hard day’s work and books. His work has appeared in numerous publications in both Icelandic and English. Whitesands is his first novel

Johann Thorsson: Twitter | Website

Whitesands: Kindle | Paperback | Goodreads

About two months ago, I saw that Julia Rios and Meg Frank were looking to turn over the leadership of Mermaids Monthly to a new team. No experience required, they said!

I have no experience running a publishing business, so naturally I applied immediately. I assure you no one was more shocked than I when Julia and Meg chose me and my incoming co-publisher, Noelle Singh–also brand new to publishing–to take charge.

Meg and Julia generously donated a ton of their time to letting us shadow them as they put together the November and December issues, patiently answering questions, and yes, helping us plan the Kickstarter campaign (happening now! Go check it out!)

These are the things I’ve learned in the process of training to be a publisher while also planning and running a Kickstarter campaign (not dissimilar activities, it turns out!)

1. Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for What You Want

Running a publishing business, even on the cheap, is not cheap. But we all thought it was important to A) pay staff as fairly as possible for their work and B) pay fair rates for writers, artists, and creators who contribute to Mermaids Monthly. We pay 10 cents per word for stories and while that doesn’t sound like a lot, it’s amazing how quickly it adds up. (Math! Who knew?!?)

Art licensed for a cover is $150. A piece of interior art is $50. Then let’s say we have three stories we love, for a total of 10,000 words. That kind of felt like the minimum amount of content we’d like to shoot for, and that meant we had to plan on $1200 per issue, times twelve, just for the content. Plus, building in money for sensitivity readers, alt text writers, editorial and production staff… We’d love to pay a stipend to first readers as well (and that’s a stretch goal!)

So do I wake up in a cold sweat at 4am some mornings agonizing over asking for $33,000? Sure I do. But making art is work, and creators deserve to be paid. Remembering that last part helps make it easier to ask people to pitch in day in and day out. In our opinion, it would be worse to ask for a smaller amount that wouldn’t allow us to pay our contributors what they deserve than to not fund at all. 

2. There Will Be High Tides and Low Tides

A Kickstarter is like a force of nature that you feel like you’re just surfing on, not controlling. It ebbs and flows. It’s hard to accept that it’s not something you can actually do a lot about. You just have to learn how to point the ship forward, stay steady, and try not to freak out.

One of the things that really helped us was planning for the low tides. Before we launched, we created a calendar of talking points so that it would be easier to keep posting when tired of the campaign or life in general. It’s hard to keep talking about one thing for 40 days straight, let alone during the holiday season! Some days we see more progress than others… and you know what, you just gotta roll with the tide and keep doing your best.

Or so I tell myself!

3. Folders Folders Folders Shared Folders

This is such a boring lesson in some ways but I cannot stress how extremely critical it is. We use shared folders for both Kickstarter planning and for publishing business.

When you first start planning a Kickstarter campaign, you’re all excited! You have so many ideas! You start collecting them and writing them on the digital equivalent of scraps of paper all over your desk! And ESPECIALLY if you’re co-ordinating with an international team–we have team members on the US East and West coast, in the Philippines, and in Lebanon–pretty soon those digital scraps are scattered every which way and you start forgetting about the awesome ideas that you had because you’re so busy moving on to the next on.

FOLDERS, people. Folders saved us. I know, it’s absurd, really, that it took us a few weeks to get used to it. You see, we use Slack, too, so we’d often brainstorm in real time in the Slack, which is really fun! And great! Because we’d get ideas! But then someone has to, you know, actually copy down those ideas, throw them up in a Google doc, and *make sure that doc is available to collaborators* (a critical point that is often overlooked by people. And by people I mean me.)

I started a folder called Kickstarter Year Two. In it, we threw in everything related to the Kickstarter planning–timelines, blog post ideas, contributor bios, cute graphics we wanted to use–and then we arranged them into some sort of order. Once we knew that everything was in there, it became way easier to say “Hey, who had that copy for the blog post? Oh, there it is–in the folder called Blog Post Copy!”

Easy peasy. Or is it??

More than simply HAVING folders, the team has to understand and agree on the foldering conventions, or else you have three folders labeled “January 2022” and documents languishing in some forgotten place that you thought you shared with the team but actually didn’t!

A lesson I learned is that while Google Drive is really convenient in a lot of ways, it does come with some drawbacks. First, as I mentioned above, it can easily spiral out of control to a thousand shared docs with no organization, making it really hard to find anything unless you remember exactly what you called it. Second, not everyone on the team was super comfortable with using the Google docs interface, and on mobile, it can really be a pain. And third, keeping track of access and permissions can be a little tricky, too.

So folders, yes; but everyone being on the same page about how they’re organized and what’s in them, also very much a resounding yes.

4. People Connect to Mermaids in Myriad Surprising and Moving Ways

I started the publishing journey with Mermaids Monthly because my feelings about mermaids have evolved in the last year, thanks largely to reading the publication. Way back in January of 2020, I thought of mermaids as cool, interesting creatures depicted in many different stories about humans’ deep and complicated connections to oceans and rivers and lakes all around the world.

As I immersed myself in the magazine, I saw so many reflections of how people understood mermaids. L.D. Lewis’s searing story in the January 2021 issue, From Witch to Queen to God, reimagines the sea witch Ursula as a powerful warrior against colonialism and slavery. The fantastic comic Andromeda by Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos and Seth Martel blends sci-fi and mythology together for a cosmic fairy tale in the February 2021 issue. The darkly horrific and yet triumphant story, How to Eat a Mermaid by K. Garcia Ley reminded me of legends (in Japan and elsewhere, and also explored in Vonda McIntyre’s novel, The Sun and the Moon) that eating mermaid flesh grants immortality.

It’s been an exhilarating journey for me, mildly interested in mermaids at the start of 2020, to running a magazine all about mermaids. Now, I see that mermaids are a complex reflection of humanity itself: how we are the other sometimes, how we feel like we don’t belong sometimes, how we, too, plunge into the unknown depths, and how we nevertheless survive.

I can’t wait to see more expressions of what mermaids and mermaid lore mean to other creators!

5. Kindness To Each Other Is Maybe the Most Important Thing

Running a Kickstarter is stressful. It is hard. It feel so weird asking for so much money, and if you’re anything like me, you can easily spiral into a whirlpool of self-doubt and self-recrimination (“What were you thinking, asking for so much?”).

And everyone working on the Kickstarter is a volunteer – we don’t get paid unless the campaign funds, and even then, there is no back pay. We’re all doing it on our own time in between work and school and family commitments and exercise and, you know, eating and sleeping and all those vital functions. Not to mention this is a holiday season with lots going on. So it’s pretty easy for someone to slip up, or forget to do something, or do something less well than it should have been done. I’m raising my hand here as someone who has definitely screwed up in the course of this campaign.

And so, I think, it’s natural to experience frustration with each other (and in general, of course.) With yourself, too. But the antidote to that is easy, actually. It’s to be kind. It’s to remember that we’re all human and trying to do our best, and we’re all united in that we WANT this campaign to succeed and we WANT to be able to publish amazing mermaid stories and poems and art throughout 2022! So, it goes a long way if we can recognize when someone is doing hard work; when we can thank them for their contributions; when we can be cheerful and positive towards each other by remembering that we’re all on the same team.

And the same goes for publishing! We’ve built in stipends for all the staff, but to be honest, the actual work it takes to run a small press is way more, in practice, than what the stipend covers, and we’re learning that. There’s still a lot of labor that we do because we care and we love what we’re working on. I would love to work on changing that, because ultimately this system of volunteers in publishing impacts accessibility and depends on relative privilege–that some of us have the time to, essentially, donate. But until we can upend the system and capitalism, we can recognize in each other that we are donating time as part of a community effort to nurture and build a thing we value.

The Mermaids Monthly Kickstarter campaign is live now, collecting funds for Year Two of the Mermaids Monthly voyage.

Bio: Miyuki Jane Pinckard writes stories about robots and magic. She’s always been afraid of the ocean but remains a big fan of mermaids and sea-creatures. Find her online at www.miyukijane.com and on Twitter and Instagram as @miyukijane.