TIME HAS SUCCESSFULLY PASSED, I say, though I don’t find nearly as much evidence of that as I’d like. My wife compared Pandemic Time to defragging your hard drive — the relevant data bits are fewer, and so they get juggled together to free up space, which makes time and memory collapse and crumble in really weird, off-putting ways.

I definitely exist, mentally, in this strange in-between zone. It is, I expect, purely the nature of the pandemic that has caused this — I am increasingly aware that the pandemic made us all Definitely Not Okay, and that there are a great many tremors and temblors rolling deep beneath the surface that we are only peripherally aware of (but are pretending not to feel at all). Lots of little micro-fractures and fissures forming that we don’t notice or are assured will be fine, just fine, don’t worry about it, the bridge is still up, keep driving over it, don’t worry about falling into the river below.

It’s been weird in that sense, as 2022 definitely felt like the year we were all collectively going to decide THIS PANDEMIC IS OVER, even though it is plainly not. And when I say “we all,” note that I don’t necessarily mean you and me, I only mean that collectively, shit has been forced into normal. The square peg had its corners sheared off with a chainsaw so it could fit in the circle fucking hole, geometry be damned. This isn’t our fault, necessarily. The leadership isn’t there. The messaging isn’t there. The CDC is a clown orgy, these days.

And of course, there’s Twitter. The wheels have been coming off Twitter for a few years now, though we’ve all dutifully done the work of jury-rigging up new wheels and tank treads and ice skates to keep that thing upright and moving. But then Musk came along and, I dunno, musked all over it, and now it’s swiftly degrading. I don’t need to reiterate alla that — I covered it here in THE BIRD SITE IS FUCKED. But, y’know, TERFs and antisemitism and anti-vax and welcoming Nazis back and and and, the whole thing is set to go up in flames like your average Tesla. Never mind the fact that the site was hacked, had 400 million accounts exposed, and also, the damn thing doesn’t even work that well. For all the people who lamented how unstable and unsafe Hive is or was, Twitter doesn’t have much room to talk. It’s janky shit right now.

And that to me is maybe the ultimate theme, if you will, of 2022 —

It’s janky.

Total jankiness.

Welcome to Janktown, Population All Of Us.

It’s janky, hinky, wonky-ass business. Airlines (looking at you, Southwest) and inflation and people attacking power substations and god publishing is fucking weird right now and oh there’s still a pandemic even though we’re pretending there’s not — I’m just saying, does it feel to anyone else like the seams aren’t lining up anymore? That we’ve lost symmetry? The edges are fraying, the paint is chipping off, there’s a sound in the engine we can’t quite identify, kind of a tink tink tink, a thwup thwup, maybe a belt is loose, maybe a mouse is dead in there and the gears and flywheels are passing its body around? Janky-ass vibes, all the way down. Not broken, necessarily. But breaking. That’s not to say shit won’t get fixed, or that it’s unfixable. It just sense the vibration in my bones: the gentle hum of entropy, of chaos settling into the marrow.

It’s fine.

I’m probably just imagining it.

Pay no attention to the TREMBLING CICADA-SHRIEK VOID behind the curtain.

To be clear, it’s not all bad. As much as things feel janky, sometimes it also feels like maybe some stuff is starting to get glued back together. The election was way better than we thought it was going to be. Progress is happening. I have… I don’t want to say optimism in that regard, but a general sense that it’ll all come together eventually. And that even in the turbulence and the cascading failures we’ll be all right. But I do think it means the turbulence and the cascading chaos isn’t… done yet. Not by a country mile. So, we hold tight and link arms and stand against the tide and help each other where we can, right?

Anyway.

Me, personally, 2022 was… good? I say hesitantly? I try to note every year that I’m a pretty lucky ducky, a very fortunate soul shoed with the iron of privilege and as such, I am fairly well taken care of. I had a book out, Wayward, and I think people liked it? I hope people continue to buy it and like it? (Consider this my not-so-subtle nudge to please review the book if you’re willing and able.) My middle grade novel, Dust & Grim, came out in paperback and… somehow hit the New York Times’ bestseller list? That’s pretty wild and I’m very geeked about it. D&G also landed on the Lone Star list in Texas, which — woo hoo!

Like I said, you can feel… publishing going through some things, though. Not just PRH losing the S&S bid, not just the Harper-Collions union strike (keep up with the union here, and solidarity to the striking workers who deserve to be paid a living wage), but — I dunno that it’s any one thing? Paper shortages, bookstore sales dropping, just a general sense of not knowing what works and what doesn’t. It’s definitely problematic that one of the primary vectors of BOOK LOVE, Twitter, is violently shitting the bed, leaving an authorial community without stable ground, without as much access to a readership, without (perhaps even more importantly) access to an author community. It wasn’t always perfect and it was often messy, but it was essential, and it’s really just not there like it was before. If at all.

And I think for so long publishers have kind of leaned on authors to have these (vigorous air-quotes) PLATFORMS and BRANDS and those things both really require social media to implement — never mind the fact it also requires authors to be the architects of something in which they are largely inexpert and that, arguably, this is something publishers should be there to handle or at the very least coach you on. (Some are far better at this than others, lemme tell ya.) And even when they’re not relying on authors to do it, I think publishers have still been leaning — understandably — on social media and the internet at large to convey that necessary BOOK LOVE, but that all seems to be crumbling. And it’s possible it was never really as useful as thought to be. Traditional legacy media still seems to actually work at generating buzz and selling books, but fewer and fewer of those outlets exist, and the ones that do — well, they don’t have as much space dedicated to BOOKS anymore, which fucking sucks.

And, I suspect the pandemic damaged a lot of institutional knowledge.

So, authors and publishers and by proxy readers are in this interstitial space. It’s not that there’s not a lot of good books out there. There are. It’s a great time for books. (A great time for horror, actually, if I’m being honest.) But the pipelines and wires with which we connect books to readers are fewer now, and tangled in general, and so I think there’s this great rebalancing going on. We don’t yet understand what comes out of all of this and how it’ll work. Which is not a fun time to go through, because… it’s uncertain and it’s janky and once again we return to the core problem of 2022: AMBIENT JANKINESS.

Anyway. Back to me, because, I dunno, this is my blog and I’m selfish.

Things are good. My books are doing fine. I earned out Wanderers and Book of Accidents in this past year, which is big. And I earned them out internationally, too, across a handful of countries, so I thank readers for that.

Family is good. Dogs are good. (Though our one dog became so plagued by her FART GHOSTS it started to impact her quality of life, and so we put her HAUNTED BUTT on Prozac and… well, that really helped, to be honest.)

And into 2023 we go.

What do I have going on in 2023?

Well.

There’s this.

A proper cover will come in the new year, but for now, may my hasty Photoshop suffice: BLACK RIVER ORCHARD is my new horror novel, coming out in September of 2023 from Del Rey Books. A very bad apple comes to town, and those who eat it are not the same as they were before. It’s all about small-town horror, troubled American history, ingrained wealth, folk horror cults, violent ego, all that good fun stuff. Plus, y’know, APPLES. Apples apples apples. You can pre-order now, I think, from most sites, though I’ll note that first out of the gate was Gibson’s in Concord (and I ordered a book from them recently and got it lickety-quick), so you can pre-order from them if you so desire. You can also pre-order from my local store, Doylestown Bookshop, to get signed and personalized.

I’m just finishing up edits on that book right now, so yay for that.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a spooky MG I wanna write, and also have another horror novel for Del Rey to write and turn in (codename: STAIRCASE, coming ~2024). For those who want to ask, “Will there be more Dust & Grim?” my answer to you is, I hope so, but there’s no current deal, only a couple pitches. I honestly like to hope that after a NYT list hit and the Lone Star list, they’d want more, but so far the publisher hasn’t committed — if you wanna ping LBYR on Twitter and tell them you or your kids would like to read more, you’re certainly welcome to!

Finally, I’m going to… Spain??

Yep, in July 2023, I’ll be at Celsius 232 (with Alma Katsu, too!) in Aviles, Spain, which should be super awesome. I speak… approximately none of the language, so I’ve got some work to do there, but they will of course have translators to make my guttural Pennsyltucky tongue sound like poetry.

ANYWAY.

I’m sure there’s more, but my brain is as janky as the world.

So, to close this post (and this blog) out for the year 2022, here are some of my favorite photos I’ve taken in the last 12 months —

All right that’s probably enough.

HAPPY NEW YEAR, NERDS

*waves*

*turns into a pillar of salt*

I have a theory as to why people kept going back to see the first Avatar in the theaters, and it has nothing to do with the beautiful CGI world or the powerful 3D effects. It has everything to do with simply trying to remember the thing you just spent a lot of money and time to see.

I mean, that’s the joke, right? The first movie was one of the biggest movies of all time, and yet left very little imprint on our pop culture consciousness. We don’t meme it. We don’t talk about it. We don’t think much about it. We can’t remember the character’s names. And so, I’m wondering now, did we return to the theater again and again just to try to recall it? To seek out some effect, some memory, some imprint upon us, because surely such a movie would offer that? Were we cuckoo bananapants? Did the movie even exist? Was it really just a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing?

What I’m trying to say is, I saw Avatar 2: The Next One, and I don’t really have any feelings about it.

I spent three-plus hours in a theater.

I saw a movie.

A movie happened in front of my eyes.

Then I left the movie and now I have almost no feeling about it. Very little impression at all beyond the knowledge that I saw it and it exists. Probably.

Maybe this is just a pandemic effect. Hell, maybe I’m just depressed. But I got into the car with my son and wife and usually, we go see a movie (rarer now because, well, pandemic) and we talk about it on the drive home. That’s part of the great thing about seeing movies with other people: the conversation after.

But this talk? It umm, it wasn’t deep.

Son: “I liked it.”

Wife: “Yeah, it was good.”

Me: “It was certainly pretty in parts.”

And then…

A kind of collective sigh as we sought for more to say but there was no more to say, and so little more was said. We talked about other things.

Still, even now, I’m like, what the fuck. That movie was three fucking hours. More than that. And it cost, what, a hundred billion dollars to make. Surely, surely there’s more to say about it.

In trying to gather my thoughts, though, I’m less Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters certain that his sculpted pile of mashed potatoes means something and instead I’m increasingly aware this unsculpted pile of mashed potatoes means absolutely nothing at all and carries with it no cultural cachet or narrative meaning beyond the plop of pale starch it was, and is, and shall be.

That’s Avatar. A pale plop of narrative starch. Delicious, in its way. Satisfying in its moment. But beyond that, did I get anything more? I am full, but only temporarily. It was calories. I ate them. It is done now.

And yet! AND YET. And yet I try, again flailing for meaning, for memory, for something, for anything. So here are some impressions, some crumbs of thought brushed off the counter and into my cupped hand.

The frame rate change is super weird and doesn’t work.

For those who don’t know, it goes from (I think, I’m not going to look this up) 48 frames per second to 24 frames per second. We are used to 24 frames per second in films and it ostensibly clicks with our brain as it tricks our monkey minds into feeling more authentic, because it’s how our brains interpolate visual data. Or something. I dunno. So 48 is *does some quick math on cool calculator watch* twice the standard frame rate.

Put differently, you know how the very first thing you do when you get a new TV is find MOTION SMOOTHING and hit it with the heel of your shoe until it turns off and never can turn on again, and when you go over your elderly parents’ house and they have that shit still on you find yourself irrationally angry at them even though it’s not their fault, this is how the stupid TV showed up in their house? Yeah, James Cameron turns it back on for this movie. He undid all our hard collective work and said MOTION SMOOTHING IS THE WAY OF THE FUTURE.

Except, he then added as a caveat, I MEAN, SOMETIMES, I GUESS, because the movie never commits to this fully. I do not know how much of the movie is in this format, but I’d guess about… 50% of it. It switches back and forth, often multiple times in a single scene or sequence. Back and forth it flips and you never ever get settled into one frame rate. What that means is, you experience this jarring flip between:

“This looks like the slickest video game cutscene ever”

To

“Wait now this looks weird, like Claymation.”

Because it goes from eerily smooth to half that, which looks jerky, hitching, erratic. To clarify, this switch makes normal filmmaking at 24 frames-per-second look wrong somehow.

And the result is, neither looks “normal” for the movie because one minute it’s one thing, the next it’s another, and it keeps flip-flopping.

And for me this didn’t allow me to ever lose myself in the story. It constantly made my brain re-adjust to the visuals, so every few minutes I was forced to reacclimatize myself and willfully think about that acclimation.

There are times when it breaks through and that hyper-smooth filmmaking approaches actual beauty. But it doesn’t last for long and you ultimately realize none of this is real anyway and all of this is a big tech demo.

A thin, thin narrative gravy.

There’s the (approximated, paraphrased) saying of, “Trying to fit a 100-pound pig in a 10-pound bucket,” meaning a thing is overstuffed, crammed in, trying to do too much. Avatar 2 does not have this problem.

It has the opposite problem. There is a little baby piglet inside a cauldron. It is bleating. Its bleats echo in the hollow iron. The piglet is sad.

Cameron has crafted a huge storytelling container — a three-hour tour, so to speak — of Pandora. And he brings very little story to fit in it. The story is… fine. It’s there. Things happen, but when you chart the broad strokes, you can count them on the fingers of one hand. And the narrow strokes, the smaller character arcs, there aren’t many. They’re usually two-beat arcs. “This character is THIS, and now they’re THIS, the end.” Some have one only one beat. A narrative arc that is less an arc and more a single blip on a radar screen: ping.

When you chart out the story, it doesn’t even make sense in its entirety. In revisiting the story with my wife, I was like, “Wait, why did they do that again? Why did they go there?” And the response is mostly a shrug. “Because the movie wanted them to?” Which is probably a pretty accurate answer.

A lack of stickiness?

Some books, shows, movies — they’re sticky. Meaning, they stick to us. Good or bad or whatever, they live with us and it’s the thing that makes us care about them. We remember certain parts, certain characters, the way it made us feel. And I think the first film suffers in a way from a lack of that stickiness. Nothing really gets under your skin or buries itself in your mind — for good or ill, it just doesn’t resonate deeply. That’s okay, I guess, sometimes things are that way.

I think the sequel is even less sticky than the first one. When later my family talked about the movie more, we tried to discuss it — as one does — by using character names. And we had almost none of them. We remembered Jake Sully and Neytiri. We remembered the tiniest child. And the rest… no idea. I just looked them up now and without the CGI blue goat cat fish people faces to go with them, I couldn’t tell you who they were. I mean this with all seriousness: I have no memory of their names. Or the names of locations. Or any of it. It just slid off me, a fried egg from a non-stick pan. And I try to think, maybe this is just me, maybe this is the pandemic, certainly my brain has felt weird since all of this began — but I think back to movies this year I did like and I find them to have had a pretty sticky factor. I remember scenes and names and lines of movies for the most part. But this one I’m like, “The older brother. Wait, was he the younger brother? And the girl. The one who is Sigourney Weaver Junior for some reason. And the village elder. Him. That guy. No no the other one. And the bad guy, you know, the guy from Don’t Breathe, yeah, Commander Cumsack or whatever they call him. Colonel Quiddich? No. QUARICH. Right right right.”

It’s made all the worse that this movie is clearly a setup for the next 47 of these. Stuff happens but leaves little impact. And this movie undoes the larger Pandora-global effects of the first film without exploring what that even means. I dunno. It’s a movie. It happened. It was fine? It was fine.

This does not sound like a winning endorsement, Wendig.

Well, see, here’s the thing. I really like James Cameron and even when I don’t like a movie of his, I still appreciate the work that went into it. And some of his movies are some of my favorite movies.

This movie was made with an impeccable attention to detail and craft. I don’t know that it adds up to much, but it has some moments of genuine beauty and emotion. Maybe not as many as the movie intends, but they’re there. (The space whale storyline is proabably the one that stays with me. I remember the space whales, I remember the one’s name, even. Payakan! I might be spelling that wrong! But that’s the name!)

So, people ask, should I see it? Should I not see it?

My answer is —

If you’re intending to see it ever, then seeing it in the theater with the full 3D frame-rate big sound big screen IMAX or RPX thing — that’s the way to see it. Probably the only way. Maybe it’s better without all that dressing, but this is, I believe, Cameron’s intended way for you to see it, so if you’re going to see this movie one way or another, then you might as well skip out on a mortgage payment or two and take your family to check it out.

If you genuinely do not care, and I don’t blame you if you don’t?

Don’t go.

It’s fine? It’s fine. It’s perfectly fine. It’s a movie that exists and you will not be harmed by it (insert some conversation here about the problematic nature of this movie and how it even more than the first one appears to be co-opting specific indigenous cultures and though it’s certainly not my place to make assertions please note there is a boycott of the movie which is worth reading about here). It’s even quite pretty. It’s fine. It exists. It’s fine.

Anyway. I have a number of plot holes and spoilers I could talk about, but I honestly don’t know that I can muster the interest in understanding them, or even asking them in the first place? Suffice to say a number of things didn’t really make sense for me, but that’s probably not the point of the movie anyway, so it really doesn’t matter. If you’re one of those people who goes onto YouTube and enjoys watching like, video game graphic engine tech demos for Unreal Engine 9, then this is your movie. Enjoy the goat cat fish people movie.

Also buy my book Wayward or I die in the abyss. I hope it’s good. You might like it. I hope it’s quite sticky, narratively speaking, and even if it’s not, I covered it in strawberry jam so it is definitely actually sticky. Okay thank you goodbye.

It is, I think, the sensation of a phantom limb: it itches, the limb that doesn’t exist anymore, and so I want to scratch it even though nothing will ever satisfy or resolve that sensation. It’s like how I sometimes want to call one of my parents even though moments later I am reminded, “That’s right, they’re both dead.” This is Twitter for me at this point. It’s a severed limb, a dead place, a broken tooth, and yet the old urge to poke at it remains present. So I go over there, even though I’m mostly gone from it, and I rubberneck — and oh boy, there’s always something to rubberneck. Twitter right now is a live camera feed watching a highway in an ice storm — you tune in and watch car crash after car crash, the constant shriek of metal, the spinning out of vehicles, carfires burning effulgent in the whiteout blizzard, and when you get a clear moment, when you squint, you realize every last one of those burning cars is a fucking Tesla.

I don’t need to regale the entire stretch of the Musky Reign so far, but the short and sweet is, a billionaire narcissist with skin thinner than shaved prosciutto stretched precariously over a honeydew melon is, nearly every hour of every day, cocainedly shoving more and more of Twitter into the shit-tubes. He’s re-platforming Nazis. He’s de-platforming journalists. He’s replying to every Arkham Asylum villain as if they’re serious pundits and thinkers. He’s winking at Q-Anon. And that’s just in the last few fucking days.

It isn’t going great.

It’s also hella glitchy. And bots are having a field day. I’ve gotten promoted tweets from accounts that are clearly faking real businesses — I saw on from a Dr. Marty’s Pet Food that had 1 follower, and was pretending to sell the dog food but leading you to a janky, insecure link that was absolutely not the website of that company, nor was it from the Twitter account of that company. Not that blue-checks even matter anymore, because you can buy one for a back alley handjob. Plus, Twitter is forcing me to see Tesla tweets and Musk tweets — I don’t get them as promoted tweets. I get them just in my feed, as if I follow those accounts, which I most certainly do not. Hell, I blocked Musk — and mysteriously, he’s unblocked, now. What fun.

Twitter is no longer working as intended. Maybe it’s working as intended for him, though even there, I’m dubious. (His tantrum last night in Twitter Spaces — before he swiftly deleted all of Twitter Spaces — is telling.)

Like Tesla stock, and arguably like the cars themselves, he’s crashing and burning the whole thing. Maybe on purpose. I dunno. Probably to some degree on purpose, though I don’t know that he knows he’s crashing it and letting it burn. Part of me thinks he’s simply following his egomaniacal urges and trying to apply autocratic control over any space online that has ever been mean to him. A user suggested he buy Substack to control the “narrative layer” of the Internet, and he said he was open to the idea, because really, that’s what he wants. He wants to control the flow of information, and will make lots of lofty proclamations about free speech and both sides and wank-wank-wank, but really he just wants to make sure you’re not being mean to him or telling people where his plane has flown recently. It is deeply pathetic. We should expect his $99 NFT collection in short order.

And all of this would be fun to watch if he weren’t also using it to shield himself in a ring of Neo-Nazis and insurrectionists and *-gater types. He’s invited every Wormtongue in the digital kingdom to whisper in his ear, and he’s listening. And he’s using it to elevate antisemitism, transphobia, crusades against his enemies, and so on. Which means the longer we stay there, the more we are also helping to elevate it, because at the end of the day, Twitter is a platform that relies on advertising. And advertising will be propped up by numbers, and those numbers are not just about users, but about user engagement. So, if we’re over there engaging wildly and wantonly, over time that’s going to give cover to advertisers to come back. And it’ll be difficult to say to, f’rex, Apple, “Hey, are you sure you want your advertising next to all this bigotry?” while also tweeting from the very stage that is centering that bigotry. All our tweets are advertising, in a sense, and so one wonders if it’s really fair to ask advertisers to stop using the site if we cannot commit to the same.

As noted before, I understand the impulse to think you can somehow claim Twitter is “ours” and rah-rah-rah, we will defend our communities and fight Musk on the digital beaches, but they’re his digital beaches, your tweets are his tweets, he has the whole thing. It’s a private company and he mostly likes that you’re mad because it creates engagement. And engagement makes money.

I don’t begrudge folks for not leaving. As noted, I’m still technically there, and I don’t intend to delete. We have communities there, and for artists and authors and such, it’s a place we’ve long used to try to peddle the weird things we’ve made, and losing that is a very serious loss. So, there’s no harm or foul in continuing to be there, but I do think we are at the point you need to vigorously be planning your escape vector and eyeing that Eject Button. I’ll continue to RT anti-Muskian stuff because, fuck that fucking guy. I’ll continue to try to use the site as a loose and shallow vector for promotion and signal boosting other good books and such. But beyond that I’m not going to use it to provide quote-unquote CONTENT. I’m not looking for virality or deep thoughts and I’m not gonna post photos or anything anymore. My usage there continues to dwindle and I hope you see you all elsewhere in the grand cyber-veldt.

(Failing all else, maybe I’ll just buy a phone line and start a BBS. Start that sweet, sweet SysOp life once more, baby. Woo! Retro! Lo-fi internet!)

Hive Social is back up, apparently resolving some janky security issues. I do not vouch for it or its security, but I’ll use it because, I dunno, I have to try something and for all its jank, I still like it. (Note, it’s app only, no desktop. Requires a new update to use.)

I’m at Post, too, @chuckwendig there. (Desktop only, no app.)

Of course, Instagram, @chuck_wendig.

Mastodon, sure, I’m there riding the elephant, @chuckwendig at mastodon dot social, link here.

Exodus and exile continues.

See you on the spiderwebs, frandos.

If you are at all like me, time means nothing anymore. The pandemic has broken any and all sense of temporal flow I once had. My wife likens it to defragging a hard drive — the pandemic was such an erratic time that our brains defragged, moving all the relevant chunks together and largely ignoring the chunks where either nothing happened or where it contains stuff we wanna forget, which frees up a lot of space. Great, except? That space is a void of slippery timelessness.

So, trying to remember THINGS THAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR IN PARTICULAR is tough. Especially when it comes to remembering what I liked, read, listened to, and the like. Triply so when it comes to thinking about books that I read, because I also read a lot of books that aren’t out yet, or read 2022 releases in 2021, and as such, wires get crossed.

Meaning, I’m going to miss some stuff here. And I apologize for that.

BUT!

Still.

I saw stuff, I read stuff, I heard stuff, and a lot of stuff was good, so I figure I’ll make the valiant-if-completely-destined-to-fail effort to put some of that stuff in front of you.

Here, then, is a short, non-comprehensive, non-exhaustive list of COOL STUFF.

Books

aka, THE MOST IMPORTANT SECTION BECAUSE BOOKS ARE GOOD

I don’t read as much as I used to, in part because I don’t have the time, and my eyes get tired, and I also read a lot slower than I used to. Which lets me savor work more but also, just not read as much, which sucks a bit.

Still.

Here are some of the very cool books I read and liked this year.

Books

HIDE, Kiersten White (tense thriller, twisted American fable, true fave here)

MAYBE WE’LL MAKE IT, Margo Price (music memoir, anybody creative should read this, all about the love of the things you make and do)

THE VIOLENCE, Delilah S. Dawson (holy shit what the fuck, this book is a whole damn journey, don’t be turned away by the pandemic side of it)

THE PALLBEARER’S CLUB, Paul Tremblay (softer touch Tremblay, sweeter and funnier but he’s still gonna stick that knife in because Paul is a monster)

THE DEVIL TAKES YOU HOME, Gabino Iglesias (let’s just call this what it is: a real bolt-cutter of a book, it’ll gut you, IYKYK)

AN IMMENSE WORLD, Ed Yong (one of our greatest science writers, will make you really appreciate the animal world and why we need to protect it)

GHOST EATERS, Clay McLeod Chapman (my highest compliment is that it reminds me of playing World of Darkness games, and this vibes like a truly legendary Wraith: the Oblivion or Geist game)

THE FERVOR, Alma Katsu (haunting historical horror, written with elegant prose and heartbreaking vibes)

NO GODS FOR DROWNING, Hailey Piper (horror noir fantasy all rolled up in one, vibed kinda like ARCANE on Netflix a little but definitely bloodier, good stuff)

THE TREES GREW BECAUSE I BLED THERE, Eric LaRocca (I wrote the intro to this, suffice to say this is body horror that slides between your ribs)

THE HOLLOW KIND, Andy Davidson (creeping crawling roots-and-shoots mom-and-son-move-into-old-family-house story, goes places you don’t expect)

MARY, Nat Cassidy (spooky serial killery middle-age ladyey stuff, prose pops and the hook sinks in right from the first page)

THE CLACKITY, Lora Senf (middle grade, more serial killery fun, but also monstrous and creepy and really shows how far you can push MG horror)

BURNING QUESTIONS, Margaret Atwood (I mean, c’mon)

THE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF APPLES IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA, Daniel Bussey (yes I bought a seven-volume apple encyclopedia, you shut your goddamn mouth and don’t judge me)

Also a lot of books that came out in 2021 or before like Mallory O’Meara’s fantastic GIRL DRINKS or Christopher Mims’ ARRIVING TODAY or Matt Siegel’s SECRET HISTORY OF FOOD. Plus I blurbed stuff that isn’t coming out until 2023 like Grady Hendrix’s horror-humor-heart trifecta of HOW TO SELL A HAUNTED HOUSE or the classic-feeling horror of Chris Goldens ALL HALLOW’S EVE or Eric LaRocca’s debut novel or Jaime Green’s non-fict THE POSSIBILITY OF LIFE. And again I’m sure there’s shit-tons of stuff I’m missing.

Finally, I just started WHITE HORSE by Erika Wurth, and so far it’s a thumb’s UP.

[EDITED TO ADD: Not sure how I forgot Catriona Ward’s SUNDIAL — I think I read it in 2021, which may explain it. But also, time is meaningless. It’s exceptional — twisted, with an emphasis on the twist. I loved NEEDLESS STREET but thought SUNDIAL was even better, and it really blew me away.]

Movies

Everything Everywhere All At Once, Nope, X, The Adam Project, Confess Fletch, Top Gun Maverick, Barbarian, Emily the Criminal, Prey, Black Phone, Hellraiser

TV Shows

White Lotus, Severance, Andor, What We Do In The Shadows, Yellowjackets, Peacemaker, Bad Sisters, Reboot, Stranger Things

(I’m behind on some great shows, too, like Better Call Saul, Abbot Elementary, Russian Doll, Reservation Dogs)

Music

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Cool It Down

Metric, Formentera

K. Flay, Inside Voices / Outside Voices

The Linda Lindas, Growing Up

Oceanator, Nothing’s Ever Fine

Mitski, Laurel Hell

Alice Merton, S I D E S

Winnetka Bowling League, Pulp EP

Jack White, Entering Heaven Alive

Games

Inscryption (PS5), Stray, Cult of the Lamb, Vampire Survivors, Elden Ring, Beacon Pines, Goat Simulator 3, and also I got a Steam Deck and damn if that isn’t a pretty nifty device.

ANYWAY!

Thassit.

What did you like this year? Drop in the comments, recommend something. Anything! Across these categories or… like, literally anything, I don’t care, go hog-wild, get crazy, YOU ARE BOUND BY NO MORTAL LAW

So, as noted in an earlier post, I just didn’t have time to put together a gift guide for 2022, but then friend and author and possible hallucination Melissa F. Olson was like HELL NO YOU AREN’T GETTING AWAY THAT EASY, WENDIG, and I was like, whoa, aggressive, Melissa, also how did you get in my pantry? And she was like HERE IS A GIFT GUIDE YOU WILL POST THIS OR I WILL TAKE OFF YOUR OTHER THUMB, and I like that thumb? So I’m posting this. Please take her seriously. Even if she’s a hallucination, she’s very dangerous!

***

Hello, friends, I’m Melissa F. Olson, urban fantasy author and longtime blah blah blah you can read my bio at the end, let’s get to the presents.

So you need a last-minute gift for the writer in your life…or, you ARE the writer in your life, and you don’t know what to put on your wish list, and you’re a little tired of receiving decent pens and a bunch of those fancy notebooks that you’ll never actually write in because they seem way too pretty to fill with the spidery dregs of the inside of your skull. Relatable!

I, a longtime devotee of Chuck’s annual Gifts For Writers List, am here to help. As your new, only slightly unhinged personal shopper, let me present some last-minute items you can still get in time for Christmas:

Bath Crayons

Ooh, it seems weird right off the bat, but hear me out: Writers famously get ideas when it’s very inconvenient to write them down: while driving, in the shower, when we’re just about to fall asleep, etc (Chuck, insert something sciency about the brain relaxing here, okay, I can’t be bothered to Google). Now, you CAN buy fancy waterproof paper and pens that go in the shower, but it’s way more fun to spend $6 on bath crayons. Use the shower walls to jot down ideas, inspirational quotes, to-do list, whatever, and when you’re ready you can erase it with your hand and a little water.

(Bonus: when I’m on deadline, I often use my crayon to make a note of the day I last washed my hair, because Deadline Melissa is sloppy as hell.)

Hand Helpers

Let’s take care of our tools, shall we? No, not the brain, there are drugs for that; I’m talking about your hands. Chuck loves to recommend fancy-pants pens…and I admit, I absolutely love the Baron Fig Squire, which I first learned about on his 2019 gift list. But if you write a lot, or if, like me, you have issues with arthritis or other hand problems, putting a grip on that sucker is a life-saver (well, it’s a hand-saver, but we’re writers who bring actual imaginary WORLDS to LIFE, so by the transitive property of–you know what, you get it).

I like having this squishy purple thingy on my Squire, but there are dozens of options available for the pen of your choice. Perhaps you can make a little sample set (a “flight of grips,” if you will) for your writer to try out. It’s a nice way to show that you care about them and their ability to grip things going forward. You can also just buy the Super Big Fat Pen, which comes on a lanyard, although it’s not the delightful rollerball experience of a refillable pen. Warning: Do not let the Big Fat Pen fall into the hands of toddlers. They will LOVE that grip and your walls will not love you.

Here’s another great way to take care of hands: Chuck has mentioned fingerless gloves AND fun book clothing before, but it took me, the next generation apprentice Sith gift list writer, to bring together this thought masterpiece: the Storiarts fingerless gloves. Unlike CHUCK’S recommendation, these gloves are made from a lightweight, jersey-type material, so they keep your hands warm from freezing cold laptop metal without overheating or getting in the way of the ole typity-type. Plus they come with actual words from any number of great works of literature, so you can glance down if you feel you’re getting a little too full of yourself. (I’ve got Dracula, but I’ve been eyeing Frankenstein so I can run around wearing one of each.) Storiarts also has, I don’t know, scarves and blankets and shit, but the gloves are the coolest product.

On-the-Go Aids

Writers are often a nomadic workforce: those of us who can’t afford swanky work sheds tend to set up shop at libraries, coffee shops, cafes, etc, like pale, lonely word-nerds questing for social recognition and/or working in the car while we wait around to pick up children. I bought this Sonic Standing Pen Case several years ago, and I love it so much, I want it buried with me when I die (just kidding–we’re going to be cremated together). It’s a pencil bag that you can unzip and flip open to stand up as a pencil cup. When you’re done working, or you need to pack up and sprint to the Starbucks bathroom, just flip and zip and throw it in your laptop bag.

Another great on-the-go helper is a decent lap desk. The one I use is a little pricy at $55, but I’ve had it for over two years and it looks fresh out of the box, despite floating around my chaos habitat being used as a fast food tray, child art creator, pillow fight shield, etc. I bring it with me on long car trips (in which I am NOT driving) and curl up with it on the couch when I don’t feel like sitting at my desk. Actually, as I’m reading this back I realize that the lap desk and I may have a Relationship, and you know what, I’m okay with that.

CHUCK SAYS I GET TO SNEAK-PLUG MY BOOKS HERE

so please try one, or all, they’re delicious and — this is true — ZERO calories what a deal.

[okay as the person who runs this website I should probably also not-so-sneakily plug MY books like okay fine Damn Fine Story is probably good for writers and also there’s Wayward so that’s fun, or you could preorder my new writing book, Gentle Writing Advice, out in June, or there’s always Dust & Grim for the kids because hey kids apparently like Christmas too — cdw]

Cool-ass Lanyards

You know what us writers like to do? We convene. We convene like NOBODY’s business, at writing conferences, conventions, expos, etc. Our man Chuck convenes fairly constantly.  And when we convene, we usually have to wear badges on a lanyard around our necks –which means it’s the one thing everyone at the con has, and everyone else sees. Instead of using the crappy free lanyard that comes with convention registration, your writer could be using a cool-ass lanyard that will help them build confidence and start conversations while they strut the convention floor. Get them something that celebrates their favorite fandom, identifies them as a book nerd, or allows them to literally rappel out of a bad panel if needed. There might not be time before Christmas, but for extra gift-giving bonus points, you could even get lanyards printed with the name of their book or website.

For example, here is a picture of Chuck and me. One of us is wearing a boring freebie lanyard, and one of us got a rad lanyard printed with a bunch of her book covers. I ask you, who’s the greater success, really?

The Organised Writer by Antony Johnston

Chuck often recommends “craft books,” aka books that can help you write better, but I want to switch it up with this great volume on setting up your writing space, time, and business, written by the author of novels, comic books, and video games. (You can tell Antony is very smart and British because he spells “organized” with an “s” and just FLAUNTS it.) This book is chock-full of practical advice like how to organize paper files, run a project calendar, clear your mind before working, and so on. If you feel like your whole writing life is a slapdash attempt to peck a few words into a laptop while dashing around your house being chased by obligation to the tune of the Benny Hill theme song, this is the book to help you work that shit out.

And remember to hydrate

Chuck always goes on about coffee (too gross) and chocolate (too obvious), but you know what writers need even more universally? More water, preferably from an absolutely bitchin’ water bottle. Writers essentially have two modes: sitting at a desk all day or running around a reading/convention all day, and in both cases we definitely won’t drink enough water. If you really want to help and support your family writer, try getting them a great water bottle they can use for hot coffee OR cold water (I recommend Tervis or Hydroflask), plus a few writer-themed vinyl stickers and a bottle of Mio (Personal favorite is orange vanilla). It’s a great way to keep us alive so we can finish that next chapter.

***

Melissa F. Olson is the author of sixteen books in the Old World universe, the PI mystery The Big Keep, and numerous short stories and novellas, including the Nightshades trilogy for Tor.com. Her journalism and academic work has been published in The International Journal of Comic Art, the compilation Images of the Modern Vampire, Litreactor.com, and Tor.com, among other places.

Melissa has been a writing teacher, English professor, and TEDx presenter, but she now divides her time between writing, editing and attending the occasional convention, where she speaks about issues related to genre, feminism, disability, and parenting. Read more about her work and life at MelissaFOlson.com.

Let’s just put it out there and up front — earlier, I was glad to play around with AI art, but that has ended. I have no intention at present of mucking around with AI art, signal-boosting it, or supporting it. I had a subscription to Midjourney, and I canceled it.

Now, to rewind a little —

I think AI art is pretty cool.

I know, I know — I just said, but I won’t support it, and that’s true.

But I think it’s neat, in a general sense. It’s like, we can make COMPUTER ROBOT GHOSTS do all kinds of cool things for us — they can tell us the weather, show us how to get to the mall, I can yell at my car to turn on the heat and it’ll totally do it, Gmail can already predict the response I’m going to make and start to prep it for me. The robot ghosts are cool. So, the ability to say, HEY ROBOT GHOST, SHOW ME WEREWOLF PIKACHU USING A NEW POKEMON MOVE CALLED “CORUSCATING ELECTRIC ANUS” ON A KAIJU VERSION OF JERRY SEINFELD and then somehow it sorta does it, well, I don’t hate that.

Now, admittedly, when I started mucking about with AI art in the long-times-ago epoch of, mmm, six months ago, what it produced was often fiddly and hilarious and straight-up fucking weird. It would still have eyeballs in places where there shouldn’t be. Some guy’s face might look like a smear of paint, and his hand would have sixteen fingers. You might squint and see Sophia from the Golden Girls mysteriously hiding in the wallpaper. It felt a bit like you watching a robot dream. Like you were privy to the growth of its creative mind.

(It’s a lie, of course. There’s no robot dreaming; that is a romantic, anthropomorphic notion.)

But it didn’t take long for the results to get… good. Real good. Freaky good. You plug in something and what returns is a foursquare array of nearly exactly what you asked for, in a variety of art styles and modes. Which, one might argue, is quite the point of this whole affair, and I suppose it is, though I’ll also note for my mileage it also kinda defeats if not the point, than rather, the delight of having a robot puke up something just super fucking weird instead of precisely what you asked for. We were training the robot well. And it was learning fast.

And now, you see the so-called AI art everywhere, and you also see those who are mad at so-called AI art everywhere. And the latter category is often artists. Not always! But often enough.

As such, I’m going to side with the artists.

(Spoiler: you should always side with the artists.)

I’ll talk about why in a moment, though I will note here there is, of course, a nuanced discussion to be had here. I don’t think people using AI art are like, Cyber Hitlers or anything. I used it quite well looking for inspiration for my Evil Apples book (which has a title and I’ll soon tell you what it is, I promise), and it… actually worked, and given how many iterations it took to get that inspiration, I could not have easily paid an artist for that essentially throwaway act. I’ve seen some trans friends say that they like how some of the AI profile art makes them look and feel, and that’s pretty wonderful. I have artist friends who use it and like it and find it valuable — it is a tool to them, not a curse. Technology also tends to expedite tasks while also leaving human workers behind in ways that are sometimes good and sometimes bad and most often somewhere in the middle — the ability to have language translated for us is pretty useful in a broadly human sense, even as it puts actual translators out of work. And finally, I think we as people seize on beautiful things and weird things and odd memes, and AI art allows us to do all of that, allowing us to play and explore and just be inspired in weird ways. And connect with each other as we do so.

But, but, but.

But.

BUT.

I’m still saying, let’s cool it on the AI art.

And here’s why.

1. First, just watch Charlotte’s video here. It covers a lot of things I’d say, except smarter and cooler because she is smarter and cooler than I am.

2. It is demoralizing for young artists. Trust me when I tell you, it’s hard to muster the interest in making new art when you can poke a computer to do it for you with a sentence or three. Yes, there remains value in art for art’s sake, but I think if you were a young artist viewing a future in Making Art, this is definitely going to give you pause. Again, I know this because I’ve seen this exact feeling emerge. Now, once more, I know there is nuance to all of this — I’m sure professional photographers winced when every jabroni got a digital camera and could take 40,000 photos in a weekend. I’ve no doubt that musicians of a certain age felt like I DON’T LIKE THAT THESE YOUNG KIDS TODAY CAN JUST TAP BUTTONS AND MAKE SOME BEEP-BOOP MUSIC ON THEIR SYNTHESCISSORS. But I also note that AI art isn’t that. Digital photography is still photography. Electronic music is still music. AI art… well, this leads me to the next point.

3. No, this doesn’t make you an artist and I’m seeing way too many defenders of AI art take this line. Some stay back at the line of, “I’m now an art director, art-directing a robot,” which, ennnh. Okay? But some march full on ahead and are saying, hey, I’m an artist now too. Which… nnnghhhh, are you? I admit, this gives me a pit in my stomach because I don’t like telling people what art is or is not and what makes an artist. That kind of gatekeeping curdles my milk more than a little. Still, as someone who has used Midjourney and other AI art makers, I sure don’t think of myself as an artist. If anything, I was just a writer jamming ideas into a techbro’s art engine. I didn’t feel like an artist. I sure wouldn’t call myself an artist having used Midjourney. I guess if I was using it to generate images that I then sketched or manipulated, that counts — but to do that, I’d still have to feed the beast, and therein lies part of the problem.

4. Feeding the beast means feeding an engine that feeds techbros and not artists. That’s the heart of the problem, really. Artists are like dinosaurs getting mulched into oil to fuel this thing. And you can see it when the AI art reproduces material with artifacts of signatures and watermarks. It’s clearly harvesting pre-existing art. It’s not dreaming up new art. It’s using their art, human art, and nobody is getting compensated, nobody is getting their due for being the literal seed-bed for this entire thing. The only people compensated are tech people. The people who make the engine. They’re the ones glad to press the oil out of the artists to run the machine.

5. No, this isn’t the same thing as “being inspired by artists.” That’s one of the lines of argument that doesn’t well with me. “It’s not copying artists, it’s being inspired by them, same as a person would be.” Except it’s not that, and you know it’s not that. We’ve fallen for the same anthropomorphic bullshit I spewed above about this being some PRECIOUS ROBOT DREAMING, and AWWW SEE THE ART-BOT IS INSPIRED BY YOU, but that’s not what it is. It’s not sentient. It’s not alive. It’s not a person making artistic decisions. It’s software operating on algorithmic decisions driven by, again, engines of tech, not creatures of art. “But it’s just like Andy Warhol!” No it’s jolly well fucking not. And you know that. You know Andy Warhol was a person who, like him or not, made decisions about what images he used, how he would subvert them, how that would put the work in front of other humans. He was a human making human art from corporate material in order to affect other humans.

6. And of course some people are choosing this as a battleground to litigate the problems with our current copyright system. Look, we’re all out here making choices and sometimes those choices are choices that benefit our urges and interests rather than helping out the greater good, right? From water bottles to Spotify to this or that, we are morally compromised daily because it is difficult to get a clean 100% record on Best Human Practices. But there’s a special kind of person who then justifies their choices with a lot of bluster about how REALLY they’re actually doing the RIGHT THING — “I voted for Jill Stein because something-something third-parties.” And you’re seeing it now with this AI art thing. “Well, copyright in America is poisonous and we have to Defeat Capitalism and really artists should be paid a Universal Basic Income,” and yeah, okay, good point, except that’s not a thing right now and this certainly won’t make it a thing. Yes, copyright has its problems, but that doesn’t mean you should hand it over to a tech company to do with as they see fit. Yes, capitalism is fraught and fucked up but paying an AI art subscription isn’t you throwing a Molotov cocktail through a bank window. Artists are already people on the fringes and they deserve to be paid for their efforts. They deserve to eat. To pay rent. To buy cool things. Hell, I’d much rather an artist get rich than Tech Bro #483, okay?

7. There is an adjacency (is that a word? too late) to NFT/crypto culture that I find… off-putting. There’s an NFT publishing company which, I’ll be honest, seems super fucking scammy to me, and most of their Very Special Super Rare Non-Fungible Book Cover Tokens are… just random AI art. Ennh. Ugh. Yuck.

8. Finally, the biggest reason of all: because more artists are asking us to leave AI art behind. I dunno. I’m not an artist. So Imma listen to them when I can.

So, anyway, them’s my thoughts. I suspect (or at least, hope) this AI art thing burns out. I think we should share actual human art. No, I don’t think you’re Il Monstre for using AI art. I think artists should be compensated. It’s the holidays, buy their prints, commission them to do something cool, whatever. We humans are why the human experience matters. Side with WONDERFUL MEATBAG ARTISTS, not TECH BRO MAGPIES. Okay? Okay.

(And yes, I recognize they’re coming for writers, too. Our off-ramp is a few miles down the road yet, but the car is speeding up, not slowing down.)

And speaking of writers —

Hey, Wayward is out if you want a cool GIFTY BOOK THING for folks. (And curiously, it’s a book that has a lot of thoughts about artificial intelligence!)

Cut off date for ordering signed, personalized books of mine from Doylestown Bookshop is, I believe, end of day 12/12, so hop to it if that’s what you want.

And if you liked it, please talk about it, yell about it, shake people and demand they buy it, that sort of thing. Word-of-mouth is the most vital resource we have, and in this era of fracturing social media, it counts double, even triple.

I’m currently dialed back on Twitter (and locked down too), so I may not see stuff over there quickly, and if you’d care to share this there, that’s a-okay by me. (Twitter: another one of those questionable things these days. I’ve more thinking to do about that place, but for now, I’m busy with book edits and will take the break until after the holidays.)

Also, finally, for those looking to see me at the Bethlehem/Easton B&N this weekend — we’re going to reschedule it. Lot of illness going around (including in our own house), so feels like it’s best to maybe kick that can to after the holidays. Look for a rescheduling of that event into Jan or Feb!